PS

‎70s Bowie is Opening Ceremony, 80s Bowie is Closing Ceremony. All putatively/aspirationally socialist pop ever is Opening Ceremony, all unabashedly consumerist and passive pop ever is Closing Ceremony. The distinctions have been there for decades, of course; we just haven't had such a universally-understandable distinction until now.

Robin Carmody on Facebook. Broadly true I think.

SOME BLESSED HOPE

You get older and the roar starts
the quiet flourishes
you wonder where the crowd went.

A cause to canvas for?
I wake up in the morning.
It takes me hours to focus

but when I manage it
I hum dully, rigged
with a sort of ease, mindful

of the Galilean orbits
the way the sun splinters
tracks in the nightly snow.

CARTOONS

The land is a well-kept secret. From the row of houses lining the main road of the village the fields tumble greenly down to the river and then shoot back up to the top of the valley - a wide, world-shunning vista. Plantations of pines clumped against dry stone walls. Moors on the periphery, pillars of smoke in the distance. The train track follows the curve of the river as it severs the dale's green swathe gently in two, winding through the old station empty since they stopped digging limestone decades ago. Quarries hide in the woods on the hillsides, their last-hewn stones wound round with grass; conifers and craters where men once crowded to work.

A long, blank summer. I buried myself in the car panel warehouse, working 8 til 7, endless weeks, raw calves, hauling sumps, windscreens, bonnets. Black Monday mornings wilting in the sunless heat, pocketing small change, pointlessly stoic. Bowman, the village cartoon, fat cigar-smoking capitalist, would wander down from his boss's layer, a tumoured warren: conservatories, protuberances, a gothic folly of the eighties. When he stooped behind us the air greyed over with greed, magnetised our last filaments of strength, his charcoal laugh the true sound of a century in which the old villainy is occulted but stoked, unabated.

At break time we sat in the corner of an oil-grimed hut. Jordan's breasts smiled at us from a faded poster, a sun-worn diptych of the nineties. Those men hated that job, but they sat there for each other, trying to make jokes ring, finding ways to overlap, mostly agreeing. It was here that I saw paradise for the first time: in the arrangement of people, hatred of the residual cartoons, the proximity of minds. I think about the warehouse every day, though I rarely go back to the village, and some say it doesn't exist.

LE FOOT: BLOGS

For those who haven't already seen it, there's a fantastic new Euro 2012 blog called Straight Off the Beach featuring contributions from a number of pacey word-wingers.

My fave post so far is Joe Kennedy's look at the tendency of modern punditry to "read between the lines before actually reading the lines themselves". Coverage of the modern game does seem to have reached a point of absurdist over-analysis, with stats, tactical imaging, etc. I mean Masri's goal last night was just a pretty fucking good shot wasn't it? As such I found the the sight of Gareth Southgate getting his fibre-optic visualisation in a twist about the poor defending pretty risible. Seems like another symptom of bogus technocratic rationalism, capitalist realism, whatever.

Oh and don't forget that South Africa 2010 veteran Minus the Shooting is also producing some pretty snazzy stuff!

(BANK?) HOLIDAY READING: EAGLETON, HOLLINGHURST, DELLER

I'm editing the Oxonian Review right now, and wanted to give y'all heads up that we've just published a particularly competent issue, of which the highlights are as follows:

• A rather timely and detailed interview with Notorious Marxist and close-reading advocate Terry Eagleton.
• Another lengthy interview, with Greatest Living English Prose Stylist, Alan Hollinghurst.
• A review of the superb recent Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward. A good anti-Jubilee tonic, this one.

Enjoy!

COUNTER-FACTUAL BRITPOP

Managed to set down most of me thoughts about the Stone Roses reunion in a piece for The Quietus.

In the original draft normative radicalism was italicised: it's the keystone of the argument.

Somewhere change is
afoot. By the banks
of a flooding river
tracksuit girls
huddle and mutter,
through the gutters
of stadiums, Dundee,
Dalkey, basement tapes,
car parks black
with siren squall,
a turquoise landscape
by the Roman Wall,
bedrooms, banlieues,
everything strays into the
light at least once.

"ABSOLUTELY PLEASANT": NAMING AND SHAMING PRIYA ELAN, MATTHEW HORTON, BEN HEWITT

Sublimely spot-on close readings of contemporary music journalism by Neil Kulkarni.

In fact, I can see a lot of potential in dissections of this kind: they belie the notion that the technocrats are technically proficient.

An elitist culture is necessarily an intellectually impoverished one.

Some of those quotations have to be repeated, they're so godawful:

Coming on like a twin of ‘Live Forever’, Noel Gallagher’s no-nonsense lyrics, a typically bolshy delivery from “our kid” and a guitar riff which sweetly echoed George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ added up to the very first Oasis classic.

Trip hop progenitor ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ is really a slick piece of hip-hop soul blessed with Shara Nelson’s broken bawl and some muted beats and cowbells from 3-D, Mushroom and Daddy G. It came out under the more politically sensitive band name of Massive during the first Gulf War and ensured the collective remained the urban sophisticate’s artist of choice for the next decade.

This last one definitely the best:

As it stood, it was an absolutely pleasant slice of indie pop dreaminess.

JOEY BARTON, NEO-DADAIST

I don't wish to comment on Joey Barton's latest piece of performance art, but I continue to be intrigued by his portrayal in the mainstream press. This today from The Guardian's Five Things We Learned From the Premier League This Weekend:

For all that he has tried to reinvent his image this season and make himself the poster boy for fascinated intellectuals with little interest in football – mainly by showcasing an in-depth knowledge of where the CTRL C and V keys are on a keyboard – this was Barton at his worst: vicious, thoughtless and selfish.

Interesting, this, given that, as I believe Jon Bon Jovi once put it: "THE VAST MAJORITY OF BRITISH JOURNALISM ADOPTS EXACTLY THIS NAKEDLY ERSATZ APPROACH TO THE USE OF LITERARY QUOTATION".

But seriously, if you don't believe me, check out something like this, from the New Statesman. In my experience, this is what most reviews in these sorts of publications (TLS, Guardian, LRB, etc) look like. You begin a piece by parachuting in some quotation/anecdote from somewhere or other as a way of showing off erudition and wide-reading. Okay, you could defend this on postmodern grounds (all writing is quotation blah blah), or by arguing that alluding to others shows a certain scholarly deference, but more often than not the contemporary habit is much closer to a wider culture of casual namedropping and the gossipy, celebrity-ish adoration of Great Men and Women. Merely adopting this stylistic tic is a sort of class password, a shibboleth of sophistication, a fast-track to the inner circles of court.

As such, isn't Joey Barton actually doing something quite interesting, quite revealing, in recognising that this simple methodology is a shortcut to power and influence in the modern mediascape? See also his fawnish Twitter exchanges with Piers Morgan and Alan Sugar (ie. the most repellent, reptilian Great Men in the postmodern universe). Why is Barton any different from those journalists who wheel out risible morsels of Philip Larkin's un-poetry for the umpteenth time in articles about the sixties? Why are his quotations of Smiths lyrics a topic of condescension and ridicule, while J.K. Rowling/David Cameron/Boris Johnson have adopted exactly the same point of reference as a way of shoring up the intellectual/moderately-radical-in-youth side of their PR bios?

Why are Barton's displays of erudition automatically dismissed as fake opportunism? Might I take the opportunity, by way of an answer, to reintroduce an old-fashioned phrase that is unfortunately becoming increasingly apposite in all kinds of contexts right now: class prejudice.

Not saying Barton isn't a tool, of course. I just think it's important we try to ascertain exactly what kind of tool.

TRU DAT

All writers think that the world has reached its nadir, its low point … in fact this age will be lamented just like the last – that’s the paradox. What you can say about the world is that … it’s getting infinitely less innocent all the time. It’s been to so many parties, it’s been on so many dates, had so many fights, got its handbag stolen so many times … the accumulation is what makes the world seem that it’s worse always, because it’s never been through so much as it’s been through today …

- Martin Amis