quote of the week
The message should go out from this country loud and clear that we are a tolerant country and we will not tolerate racism in any way.
Tony Blair's spokesman re the Big Brother ruckus. Media Guardian Jan 17th.
'i'm just going to channel'
I'm having a week of trying to like music that's not hip-hop. Didn't plan it that way, but that's how it's turned out. In the form of 2 gigs. Richard Swift (lovely) and We Are Scientists.
And We are Scientists' Keith gets quote of the month (at least). These boys have some of the best twixt song banter in the game. So by the time I'd shut up about crap indie boy bands and started listening to them I was loving them. Keith was talking about New Rave after someone threw a glow stick at him. Giving up on ever trying to understand what New Rave really is he plumped for pocketing it and deciding to 'just channel'.
'Channel' is used a lot in fashion writing (Heidi Klum effortlessly channelling Grace Kelly. But it's much better in the mouth of preppy California bands.
Oh, and they get encore of the year with their earth shattering version of Boys II Men's End of the Road. True emotion flying everywhere down in Brixton for those long lost soulsters. (The drummer even did the whiney talking bit.)
truly great first line
I don't want to be a product of my environment, I want the environment to be a product of me. (The Departed)
life is elsewhere
Just finished this book. Not Kundera's best, in my couldn't-be-humbler opinion. But as a superfan, they're all beautiful. Not least for passages like these, that make you think about words in new ways.
'Tenderness comes into being at the moment when life gives a person a sudden kick and propels him to the threshold of adulthood. He anxiously realises all the advantages of childhood which he had not appreciated as a child.
'Tenderness is a fear of maturity.
'It is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that we would treat others as children.
'Tenderness is also fear of the physical consequences of love. It is an attempt to take love out of the realm of maturity (in which it is binding, treacherous, full of responsibility and physicality), and to consider a woman as a child.'
I don't really agree with it. But I love the fact that it's controversial. And surprising. And that for every person, you have a slightly (sometimes drastically) different version of what a word means.
mc hammer lives on
Courtesy of Polly at Bloom.
'of course we don't flip-flop'
KRS One still takes my breath away.
I am going to make a (weak) point relating hip hop to the rest of the stuff on here soon, promise. But while I'm at it, one more clip, which proves hip-hop live is a beautiful thing. Just that hardly anyone does it properly now.
wanted: rock pools
And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.
JOHN BETJEMAN
We thought we'd go back to Cornwall before now, and I'm pining for it a bit.
henry james
I call a person rich when he can meet the requirements of his imagination.
HENRY JAMES (Ralph, in Portrait of a Lady)
My favourite book of all time. I decided to have a holiday of re-reading favourites instead of buying the latest Zadie malarkey. And I ended up poring over this again in wonder for the whole week. It's incredible.
The film was a bit rubbish, as I remember but I like the photo. Sort of corresponds with the Isabel in my head.
john northam
Along the ridge we raced together,
slicing through the wind and weather.
What a colt to ride - amazing!
As we started on our run
it was just like suns were blazing.
Eagles, brown-backed every one,
hung in the space between us there
and the way-down watery reaches,
specks of dust upon the air.
Ice-floes grind at every quarter
of the shore-line, but no rumbling;
only wisps of vapour whirled
like they were dancing - sang and swirled,
set the eye and ear a-fumbling.
PEER GYNT, HENRIK IBSEN Translation John Northam, Scandinavian University Press
Quote of the day is for my grandfather, who died two years ago this week. He was an Ibsen scholar celebrated in Norway and beyond for capturing the poetry, humour and wisdom of Ibsen's verse in his translations. A feat he managed I think, by using all these qualities, which he himself had in abundance. I miss him.
trusting richard pryor
It's easy to love somebody. Shit, sit with them a little bit and talk to them a while.
RICHARD PRYOR
I was introduced to this comic goliath a year or so ago when I had my brains splatted all over the wall by the seminal Live in Concert performance that people still call the best of all time. For good reason.
More and more though I've been thinking how much a such a masterful puppeteer of our emotions can teach us. There's something about the nature of our reaction to people like Richard Pryor that's pure gold dust, and I'm thinking it's a matter of trust.
With all comedy, you need to trust the comedian before you can enjoy the show. Sometimes they have more weighing against them than others - be it your prejudices or more objective/universal concerns. Richard had the fact that he was 'edgy', the fact that he was a Comedian, the fact that it was a dated recording. The fact that I'd already heard it was 'the best standup of all time'. The edgy comedy needed to be funny for more than just edginess, and the humour needed to outweigh the risque in order for it to be genuinely funny rather than just shocking or 'in bad taste', or stupid. Once he's gained trust, you delight in the edginess - you want him to push the boundary as far as possible, revelling even as you squirm, because the humour is the overriding factor - the altruistic good; the master which everything else serves. Discomfort, embarrassment, tragedy, insight, pathos, everything contrives to enrich and strengthen the humour.
Once you do give your trust to the performer, anything goes. You're on his side - he's won you. And then he's free. Like a salesman, the first part must be the hardest. Establishing your credentials, setting out your stall. Persuading, cajoling, enticing, convincing. After this he must recognise the moment when he's won people - know it enough to enjoy it but also exploit it. To develop it further and go in for the kill.
Richard Pryor thanks his audience effusively, and profusely, right after his own introductory skit. For nothing, really. He's buttering us up. Making us feel special, like we've personally hired him for the night.
The very 'fact' of being a comedian; calling yourself one and inviting people to come and pay to watch you is another weight on the seesaw of bias. Or merely having enough of a reputation for us to sit down and watch and expect to be amused and at the least entertained. Once a comedian has won his audience, they'll laugh at almost anything he says. Once the audience has fallen for his mannerisms, they ache for them in the next gag and all its permutations. And they love the repetition, the meandering stories that refer back on themselves, tying in with previous ones and weaving in and out common threads of concern like variations on a theme, building all the time.
But all this is the easy part once people are on side: the audience are sceptics until convinced. And laughter is the hardest, truest proof of all. Better than tears, better than professed reaction ('oh I found it so moving'). Even if you want someone to make you laugh you can't fake it. And an audience that's studying every joke, inspecting its feel, testing out its edginess to see if it's acceptable, is hard to please.
By the end of the tape I was in love with Richard Pryor. I thought I could tell that he was the kind of man I'd have loved in person - who I could respect. And I'm particularly unfair on this ground: to really, truly feel happy with a comedian I have to believe they're the kind of person I'd be friends with. I can't know he/she's a shit and still laugh happily along. So Richard Pryor can use slurs and curses that in anyone else's mouth I might object to. But the difference between an intelligent, humane man cursing and an ignorant, cruel one doing the same is immeasurable in effect. And for me that's the beauty and point of humour: humanity. (And in this, tragedy, empathy, joy, understanding, altruism, anger, pain, love, absurdity, frailty, compassion).
He can call women bitches in one breath and then crush you with his empathy for the woman's 'lot'. He can laugh with us about how his grandmother made him walk to the tree to fetch the switch with which she would beat him until the welts glared; how his father would threaten to run him over (like these were all the most normal things - no blame, no anger) and a half-hour later declare with casual disdain how his kids could never be beaten as he'd make damn sure they weren't fucked up. The story of him shooting his own car - a funny and terrifying and monstrous and heartbreaking story - to stop his wife leaving him becomes something we relate to as if it were the same as us losing our glasses round the house (goddarnit!).
And you're left with a sense of being touched by genius. By someone who understands things more beautifully and better than you.
So I was going to develop this into some kind of idea relevant to advertising like some ruthless plannermapgie hybrid but that'll have to be another day as I've run out of steam.
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