OLYMPIANS 2012

This was Blair's dream: a war hero's
welcome for himself, miles of minions
genuflecting everywhere. Drake
triumphing in the Solent summer.

Cameron is cooler. The crop fields
whisper to him as he stalks the city
framing parades, jubilees, pastoral pride --
but sport is too modern, too hopeful.

A charmed man from Chingford smiles
a sucrose smile. Bombs ricochet in
the East End of the pea-soup planet
and the victors graze in a vaporous sky.

STRAY THOUGHTS ON THE LATE-CAPITALIST GOTHIC REVIVAL

The pictures of the Hogwarts CGI models are interesting:

 

Weird that this supposed to be a conflation of Durham Cathedral and Alnwick Castle. I can see the Durham Cathedral part but mostly it's just wildly exaggerated fantasy gothic (as you might expect, I suppose).

There definitely seems to be something timely about this return to the gothic. What's worrying though is the absence of any underpinning Puginian/Ruskinian ethos.

This is culture as consumer pastoralism, a solipsistic fantasy artificially inseminated in the mechanised laboratory of late-capitalism.

LET THEM EAT CUPCAKES REDUX

Joe Kennedy weighs in with a brilliant new critique of English terroir.

It’s now all too common to see novels, collections of poetry, and exhibitions being praised or dismissed in terms not dissimilar to those used to discuss a dining experience.  

TENDER

Feverish, I jived and heaved through the night,
Blood on the nub and raw backbone, sleek sweat
And flesh flowering, pins and needles, neat
And nipping minnows, burrowing bird flight,
Jumbled Gulliver, Lilliputian fight
On the battlefield bed and me the meat,
Boxed beneath the ocean and the sinking streets,
Head housing hives of bees, crabs, crooked light.

Lull, largo. Morning gathers in the gaps.
Calm collapsing the cushions, policing pace,
Ringing out the real, the solid-soil sounds
And soothing muffled song of tuned-down taps.
Roundel of relief, and the furrowed face
Of my dad as he wiped my brow and wounds.

KICKING THE CAN DOWN THE ROAD

Nigh-on unbelievable garden variety conservatism in The Guardian today:

People are fatalistic. Once they get used to the initial shock and fear of hard times, it seems, they hunker down and find that life, generally, carries on tolerably well.

My guess is that life carries on tolerably better for salaried Guardian journalists than it does for the 12% unemployed in the north-east. Perhaps this sort of thing isn't so surprising, but the vast self-centredness and anti-reformism of the liberal establishment is really fucking me off right now.

Looking forward to reading Stephen Harper's book on the subject, which should thankfully be arriving any day now.

BLEAK HOUSE

Been reading a spot of Dickens this month (along with the entire rest of the country/world) and it kinda shows stylistically in these two short posts: satire and sentiment.

By the way is anyone else irritated by the supreme lack of focus on Dickens as radical critic in all this birthday fuss? Seems symptomatic of the rather counter-revolutionary start to 2012.

AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN COLLABORATIVE RAGE

In which Tom and Dave rail intelligently against the dystopian Saints and Scroungers.

DAFT AS A BRUSH

I finally got round to reviewing that book about Gazza by Ian Hamilton.

While we're on the subject, here's a sonnet I wrote about the great man a while back.

WAY TO GO

The imminent death of the guitar now being something of a meme, check out the salient (and hilarious) bit around 40secs into the 2nd part of the Pitchfork Flaming Lips docu.

THE POP BAND AS A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS

Simon Reynolds makes an interesting point about the non-existence of a generation gap in contemporary culture.

... the only actual generational rebellion is to have zero interest in music, or minimal investment in music (opting not to see it as anything more than background enhancement to other activities, a tool for socialisation/decor for life, certainly not any kind of grand project or zone for identity formation / emancipation ...

My guess is that many young people actually learn this view of music as "decor for life" from aging, economically comfortable elder family members who have long since exchanged an "investment in music" for an investment in a 4-bedroom pile in Surrey.

In a substantially privatised culture, the ability to act independently in one's youth via a collective social apparatus is no longer possible, and the economy becomes anchored by the principle of inheritance. Hence the nu-folkers, an emphasis on tradition, record collection rock, etc. Pop music becomes a sort of bourgeois heirloom. It's not that the children of the baby boomers (and their successors) are rebelling against their parents' ethos of music-as-emancipation; rather, the view that has become institutionalised by the affluent, no-longer-radical members of this older generation is that music is just another means of capital accumulation. And it's the sons and daughters of this demographic that are breaking through to success and visibility because they're merely continuing the family business, as it were.

Hence the terrifying aptness of Mumford and Sons. (And obviously there's all the other bete-noires: FATM, Lily Allen, Laura Marling, all children of wealthy and influential parents, often counter-culture apostates. It's all in the book so sorry if I'm repeating mesel').

Depressingly (here's me thinking the faux-folkers had run out of gas) the 2012 installment arrived in yesterday's Guardian in the form of the Staveley-Taylors:

Note the first exchange in the interview: family and the home is now the starting point of musical meaning.

So what would the real modernist rebellion look like? As with a lot of these things, it's not a case of an enterprising individual somehow breaking out of this context to come up with something new: innovation will only take hold on a sizable scale when the whole culture is reorganised along fairer lines.

Also, I reckon those parents who did genuinely stick to a counter-culture philosophy and didn't sell-out are passing on a more meaningful "legacy" to their kids. It's just that these people tend not to be wealthy enough to be able to give their offspring the sort of leg-up that is necessary to make it in the music industry these days.