I was crossing Torstrasse about an hour ago, round midnight, and I thought I saw Johnny Massacre coming across the road towards me, wearing a big green gansey. I was mildly but very pleasantly surprised. Always a joy to meet Johnny. As he got closer, I was about to say hello, and then,
A) I realised it wasn't Johnny, and
B) I remembered that Johnny was dead.
The last time I saw him, if you can call it seeing him, he was being lowered into the ground in a coffin in Longford in 2003. Ming the Merciless (Johnny's great friend Luke Flanagan) gave a speech at the graveside, a good speech. And then Ming the Merciless urged us all to give Johnny Massacre (born John Doran, and only 27 when he died, in a car crash), the parting gift he would have most appreciated - a huge round of applause. We did, oh we did.
(Mike Casey had filmed Johnny's street show in 2002, and put this tribute together after Johnny's death.)
Update on 2009-06-29 01:42 by Julian Gough
Allan Cavanagh (who comments below, hi Allan!) has posted his own memories of Johnny Massacre's funeral here on Caricatures Ireland, his blog. There's a lovely moment with Johnny's mother, a mighty, mighty woman...
I have just heard that Pat Kavanagh died this morning. This is really shocking news. She was my first literary agent, and without her help I might not have been able to survive as a writer. When she signed me up as a client, I was living on less than the dole, and was very close to the end of my tether. She believed in me, she found me an audience, and when we did part it was amicably, for the best of reasons, and with regret, I think, on both sides. We had kept in loose but friendly contact, and I had been vaguely looking forward to having lunch with her in London again, some time... And now, damn, too late, too late.
She was a truly extraordinary woman, and will be hugely missed by so many people. Her husband, Julian Barnes, must feel cut in half. They were one of the great couples of our era of equality. It was an immense pleasure to see them together.
Her charisma filled the room, she was electric. This is hard to take in...
(James Wood teaching in Harvard, shortly before being kicked in the knee from behind)
My short essay on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Prospect, under the title The Rest is Silence.
The first two responses I received were both from James Wood, one of the three finest literary critics of the age (and currently top book bloke at the New Yorker). His first email started, “You have a lot of gall…”
I couldn’t really disagree. I took a wild swipe at him out of nowhere, late in the article. This is partly the result of the extreme overcompression that all my essays undergo as I write them. I try to jam about a book’s worth of ideas into the single page available, and so a long, nuanced sequence of subtle, gossamer-delicate thoughts gets reduced to a blow from a brick in a sock.
Though I do disagree with some of James Wood’s notions, I don’t disagree nearly as strongly as is implied by my rude and unfair sentence. (In fact, having reread it, I’m thinking of writing a letter to Prospect complaining about myself.)
(James Wood’s second email, an hour later, was a fine, dignified and reasonable restatement of his position on David Foster Wallace. Such a civilised response to being mugged reflects very well on the man. I look forward to arguing with him properly sometime. If he’ll ever speak to me again.)
The pro-guns, pro-liberty blog The Smallest Minority has suggested that a line from my piece ("If it has an off-button, it is not oppression"), should be put on T-shirts. A splendid idea.
And over on Prospect’s First Drafts blog, I am accused of fascism, and told to hang myself.
As ever, I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.
I've spent the last few days writing a piece on David Foster Wallace for Prospect magazine. It should be out next week, in their October issue. I'm happy with the piece. "Happy" has a fairly specialised meaning in this case, one writers will understand: I was depressed and anxious writing it, as I tried to understand, empathise with, and explain, a depressed and anxious writer who'd just killed himself. But I was also exhilarated and, yeah, happy, because the piece turned out the way I'd hoped it would: it expressed crisply and well some things I'd been vaguely thinking, loosely feeling. So I felt much better after it. Well, writing is weird. It fixes broken things. And the process is not sentimental.
The credit for that last photo of David Foster Wallace, by the way (and the two I'm using to illustrate this post): It was taken by Steve Rhodes, at a reading organised by the San Franciso independent bookshop, Booksmith, held at All Saints Church in 2006.
Out of interest, I googled, and found a couple of accounts of that reading on literary blogs. One of them is by a blogger trying to interview David Foster Wallace after the reading, even though Wallace has clearly and repeatedly said to the guy, before and after the reading, through his agent, his publicist, and face to face, that he is uncomfortable with that and would prefer not to. The guy keeps asking... it's just excruciating.
The other is by a blogger who fancies David Foster Wallace something rotten, though she has never met him. She dresses up for the reading (slit skirt, best bra, because "you never know"). And then she slags him off in her blog after the reading, ostensibly because she asked him a question and found his answer tedious. (Though she's really slagging him, you get the feeling, because he didn't look up from the lectern half way through the reading, recognise how special she was, throw his book aside, rush up to her, kneel, and propose).
Both bloggers can see the world very intensely from their own point of view, but they can't see how they must be coming across to Wallace at all. They don't seem aware that, though this moment is new and unique and important to them, for him it is yet another in a long series of almost identically unpleasant encounters with needy strangers. It's totally understandable (God, I have done worse), but the lack of empathy, on both sides, is also totally heartbreaking. They know his soul, because they've read his book (which is just his soul in code), and so they feel he is their soulmate. But he doesn't know their soul, because he hasn't read their book, and so he feels assaulted.
And both these people are obviously very nice, otherwise sensitive people, trying to make a real connection to someone they admire enormously, and the harder they try the more they fail, and now he’s dead and they never connected and it’s all intensely sad.
If you've never heard of him or read his stuff, nothing to see here, move on. But on the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain. You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives.
Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist.
I liked some of his stuff very much. The last of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in his short story collection called, ah, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is extraordinarily moving, effective, and technically tricksy. It is, I think, one of the greatest short stories of the past couple of decades. In it, Wallace tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far, far away, but they don't, they pull it closer. The story is post-modern and emotionally direct at the same time, and that's really hard to do. It is magnificent and you should read it.
But mostly I disagreed with David Foster Wallace, with his attitude to his style (comedy) and his content ( America). I had just finished writing a long essay about comedy and the American novel when I heard of his death. So the last thing I wrote about him while he was alive was negative, which seems very sad now, today, because the only reason I included him was because I thought he was important, and good, but could be even better.
What I would have liked was a long conversation with him, a few emails over a few months perhaps, wrestling with the big, fun, important stuff that nobody off our tiny asteroid cares about.
And now that won't happen. I thought about not printing my recent thoughts on David Foster Wallace, because they aren't positive, and it seems so mean to say something harsh about a guy who has just tied something around his neck to cut off the air to his brain because being conscious has come to hurt too much.
But he's dead, it won't hurt him. And if there is truth in it, then better to say it.
The essay is several thousand words long, I'll spare you. But this is the bit that mentions David Foster Wallace. Bear in mind that for every vice I mention here, he had a bigger virtue. He cared, he tried, he died. We can't do more than that.
"Meanwhile, much American writing is still comic. But something has gone terribly wrong with it.
Potentially great comic writers like George Saundersand David Foster Wallace use comedy as their weapon of choice. But they have been unplugged from electric, living America by lives spent inside the university, first learning, then teaching. (The immensely influential George Saunders is a tremendously talented writer who, at 49, has never left school, and never written a novel.) Disconnected, they have, like so many academics, become obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic.
Thus they spend much of their time attacking forms of language of which they disapprove (advertising, television, military jargon, corporate PR) This is literary criticism disguised as literature. These are grenade attacks on a theme park. Frequently, and disturbingly, they put this dead language in the mouths of aggressively outlined “ordinary Americans” foolish figures without college degrees and therefore without self-awareness. Bums. Thus they end up mocking those below them, not those above. The gun is pointed in the wrong direction. Shooting at the bums, they have become the Establishment.
In the absence of suffering, in the absence of a subject, American literary novelists again and again waste their power attacking America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop-culture. They attack it with the energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that pop culture (bad TV, bad movies, ads, bad pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating whimpering billion dollar cur. It has to be chosen in order to be consumed: so it flashes its tits and laughs at your jokes and replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, empty, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes."
Well, at the last, he found a moment that was unironic and authentic.
I wish he hadn't feared America so much. But then again, if we were able to ask him, he would probably say America killed him.
The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.
I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).
The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."
I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.
He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.
I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.
Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.
I just made one of the world's shortest movies. Fourteen seconds, one shot. It's called Flesh Frame, and it's a brief and oblique tribute to J. G. Ballard. Filmed on one of the earliest camera-phones, if it were any lower-fi, it would be a single blinking pixel.
I won't tell you anything else about the movie, because its only function is to evoke a mood (or, in English, give you a feeling). And nothing wrecks a mood-film like an explanation of what you tried to do and exactly how you did it.
I'll tell you a little about Ballard, though. (Some of you will know all this already: fair play to you. Go get an icecream and I'll see you later.)
J. G. Ballard is one of the few great British writers of the past century.
You could also call him one of the most original and radical British visual artists of the past century. His "novels" are often a series of astonishing images, hypnotically encoded in words.
He spent much of his childhood interned (along with his parents) by the Imperial Japanese Army, in a Shanghai prisoner camp.
After Ballard's wife died (very suddenly and very young), he wrote much of his most extreme fiction in short bursts at the kitchen table, between sandwich-making and soccer practice, while bringing up three children.
The resulting classic of modern headwrecker fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for Juno & Juliet, which they loved. When Doubleday rejected my follow-up, Jude, with horror - they particularly hated Level 3 - I knew I'd finally achieved something really exceptional.)
Three years later he wrote Crash, a novel about sex and car crashes that is still sending ripples through the culture. (The shudders of orgasm? Or death?) Finally published in 1973, in print ever since, and about as influential as a novel can be, the initial reader's report to his UK publisher was "This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH."
He is now seventy seven, and his prostate cancer has spread to his ribs and spine. He will be dead soon, and I would recommend that you read some of his work immediately, so that you can thank him by postcard while he is still alive. (He doesn't really do email or computers.) J.G. Ballard, Shepperton, England would probably get through to him at this stage. (Or just write care of his publisher: J. G. Ballard, c/o Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, England).
If you don't know where to begin (I don't blame you, he's written a lot of stuff), I'll give you a quick guided tour of my favourites...
Feck it, I'll include links to Amazon while I'm at it, and if you buy one they'll slip me a shiny thruppenny bit. (Well, thirty or forty pence probably.)
A warning: Don't start with Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, unless you're feeling well hard. They will do serious damage to your head. (Either you will throw the book across the room, or the book will throw you across the room.) Work up to them.(Yes, I know some of you ARE well hard. Fair enough, OK, go for it.)
A lovely place to start, if you're feeling at all delicate, would be with the short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort full of cloud-sculptors and singing orchids. (One of his gentlest books, it is one of his own favourites.)
His most accessible and successful book was the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story of an English boy's childhood in a Japanese prison camp. (Filmed later by Spielberg, yes. And, as with all Spielberg films, it would be a pretty good movie if you could remove the final 25 minutes of slush, in which Spielberg keeps trying to end it happily, against the grain of the story. Spielberg's strangely desperate attempts to end, to leave Ballard's dream without being changed by it, grow ever more conventional and sentimental, with each botched ending damaging the film more and more... it's fascinating to watch. As with Saving Private Ryan years later, Spielberg starts by telling us something true, and hard to bear, and then spends the rest of the film denying and rejecting that truth ever more hysterically, walling it off behind comforting clichés. Oooh, I could write a book...)
The followup to Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, is a dreamy, wildly sensual classic.
The Crystal World is one of his early disaster trilogy, full of Max Ernst imagery. Crocodiles and jungle plants slowly turn to crystal. The world is dying beautifully. A man sails upriver, upriver, into the heart of lightness.
From his urban collapse period, Concrete Island is Robinson Crusoe on a huge traffic island, surrounded by lane after lane after lane of roaring cars. A man crashes there, and can't get off the island. Or doesn't want to. And then he finds a footprint... (I pay comic tribute to this in Jude: Level 2, when Jude spends weeks walking to London up the middle of a motorway's central reservation.)
The Unlimited Dream Company brings a dreamlike, William Blake, visionary end-of-the-world to the English suburbs. Banyan trees burst up through the pavement in front of the supermarket. People, after a difficult day at work, learn to fly, and are soon copulating with birds, high over Shepperton. Nobody seems to mind. (Anthony Burgess picked this as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.)
And if you'd prefer something a little closer to a thriller, or detective fiction, there's Cocaine Nights. A death in a gated community. When all darkness and danger have been pushed outside the gates... is life still liveable, inside, as the sunshine bounces off the white concrete?
Those are my pick of the novels, but his short stories are among the best ever written. There's the Complete Short Stories (too heavy to hold in hardback, but sensible broken up into two volumes in the paperback.) The original collections... well they're all good (and mostly out of print), but I remember The Terminal Beach, in this edition, very fondly.
They'll hold you for now.
Seriously, pick one. Buy it. Read it. If you love it, tell him. He won't live forever.
A last warning: the reason J. G. Ballard doesn't sell like John Grisham is that Ballard's books knock you off balance and disturb you, annoy you. The language can be eerily flat. You can start to feel strange. Go with it. Get past it. It's worth it.
OK, the great Norman Mailer, who died earlier this month: his best book, if you are a teenage boy, is Why Are We In Vietnam? (I would have put it on the list anyway, even if he hadn't just died.)
I had my notebook with me over the weekend (I was away from my computer), and I wrote so many notes on Why Are We In Vietnam? that it would take me another week to type them up and turn them into something that made sense. It was more a long essay than a blog entry.
But Ariel is waiting for his next book, and I can't make him wait another week. So here goes... Inna blog styleeee, fukktup, no gramma...
Norman Mailer wrote Why Are We In Vietnam? around the time I was still in the womb. It came out in 1967 and it was red-hot relevant to the big American dilemma: why the fuck are we in Vietnam?
What is it about? Well in some ways it's a shaggy dog story, or a shaggy bear story, or a shaggy war story... And that story is pretty simple: DJ and his friend, two Texan teenage boys, go on a hunting trip to Alaska with their rich fathers. They shoot animals, and they walk in the forests. DJ tells the tale in a supercharged Texas-turboblast of language.
But it's about what it's not about. And it's not about what it's about.
The title does half the work of the book, because it changes the meaning of every sentence that follows. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. But DJ and his friend have been drafted, and are going to Vietnam after this last trip with their fathers.
Mailer has knowledge of war (he fought in the Pacific in World War Two): DJ has not. But DJ will soon have Mailer's knowledge and the gap between character and author, so soon to be closed, crackles with literary electricity. The knowledge wants to discharge.: DJ wants to know, and Mailer wants him to know. Soon the trees, the animals, the guns are trying to tell him... The book contains some of the best ever descriptions of animals, plants, trees and soil (of the world without man in it). And then man comes into it...
The book is full of sex, shit and death, and of words invoking sex shit and death even when the subject is something else. Sex shit and death are the three-in-one God of this book, and it is best to hear these words as the (almost religious) speaking-in-tongues of a possessed young man, rather than as casual and meaningless obscenities. They are not casual and they are not meaningless (though they are often obscene, if the Latin root of obscene is ob caenum, "from filth").
A book in which rich Americans shoot animals from helicopters is obviously about 1960s Vietnam in a fairly direct way. But that is not the most important aspect of the book.
This book is not a history book. This book is prophecy, and thus timeless. You could slot it into the Bible as the Book of DJ, and it would fit in fine. To give the book its original force, and to totally refresh it, just scratch or paint out the word "Vietnam" on the cover, and scrawl in the word "Iraq", if you're American or British, "Chechnya" if you're Russian, "Tibet" if you're Chinese, "Palestine" if you're Israeli, "Congo" if you're from practically any of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's neighbours, "Darfur" if you're from Sudan, "Somalia" if you're from Ethiopia...
No really, do it. Make a physical mark. Damage the book. Make it yours.
It is not a clean and tidy book. It is not a nice, easy book. It is not a post-feminist book. It is not a left-liberal book. It's not even a "good" book, in a lot of ways (though it might be a great book). It doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. A lot of recent readers have problems with that, as they do with Norman Mailer generally. But you cannot apply health and safety legislation to a shaman. The chicken has to really die (because you're going to really die). The blood has to splatter everywhere (because your atoms, too, will be scattered, and your pattern lost). Norman Mailer's art is messy because life is messy because death is messy.
OK that's it. That's all I can think of right now. Over to you.
That quote is from (as many of you will know, and many more won't) the 1984 hit single "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken", by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. (Lloyd Cole, back when he found it impossibly easy, before he realised it's impossibly hard.) It was good advice. As a very young man, I read Norman Mailer. I even, years later, got a new tailor. (Chris, of Favourbrook, Jermyn Street.)
Well, Norman Mailer, Great American Novelist, died last week, and a generation of pop lyricists who were as influenced by novels as songs are looking even more thoughtful than usual. There's a lot to think about. Norman Mailer cannot be solved. Norman Mailer cannot be neatly summed up. His vices were his virtues and his virtues were his vices and his bark was worse than his bite but his bite was worse than his bark and his love was hateful and his hate was lovely, and oh didn't you just want to punch him and kiss him, Lloyd?
He was incredibly famous for a very long time, but he isn't really, now. (He will be again, after the traditional post-death, decade-long dip. And when he is famous again, it will be for radically different things, dug out of his most forgotten books.)
I saw him read in Amsterdam a few years ago, at the Crossing Border Festival, where I was also reading. He was great. Frail, slightly deaf, tiny, walking slowly with two sticks, white hair standing up all over his electric head. He read a self-deprecating piece from Advertisements For Myself, and answered questions with wit and charm.
When goaded to (verbally) attack Tom Wolfe (who'd recently (verbally) savaged him), Mailer refused. "I think I'm the greatest writer in America. And there's maybe twenty more think the same. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only twenty elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." (That quote is half from memory, and half from a Guardian interview of around the same time where he said almost the same thing in almost the same words... you can't do as much promotional work as Mailer did and not recycle some of the best lines.)
I wanted to go up to him onstage afterwards, and tell him something. But he was immediately surrounded by dozens of admirers from the audience, his tiny figure vanishing behind the seven-foot tall Dutch, and the seven-foot wide Americans. And I thought, he's got enough to deal with. And I'd be doing it mainly for me, not for him. Doing it to have my Mailer story. And he must have heard all this stuff so often... No, just because it's important to me doesn't mean I've the right to inflict it on him. So I didn't go up.
But if I had gone up I would have said something like...
When I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, I was reading The Naked and the Dead, in Tipperary. And I got to a scene where one of the American soldiers on patrol finds the corpse of a Japanese soldier lying in the sun, and stares at the body. And as I read the scene, and reread it, I realised that I was going to die. That my death was inevitable, and unavoidable. The knowledge was immense, direct, entirely untheoretical. It wasn't intellectual knowledge, it was physical. (I'd known before, obviously, that I would one day die, but I hadn't felt it, it wasn't real knowledge.)
And I put the book down. And for the next couple of weeks I thought about nothing else, I hardly spoke. I examined this new knowledge from every angle, I thought about the implications, I tried to work out how I should live, now that I knew that I was going to die. I was very depressed for most of that couple of weeks. And then I came to terms with it, and worked my way past it, and incorporated the knowledge into my life, and decided how I would try to live. And how I lived was better than how I'd lived before. More satisfying. More my own. And I was pretty happy, pretty much permanently, ever after.
Something like that.
So, Norman Mailer gave me death. And I will always be grateful.
Well, this time, although I'm still saying it mainly for me, at least I'm not bothering him...
The splendid Tony Wilson, former head of Factory Records, died on August 10th, aged 57. The death of the man who gave the world Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays, and who built the Haçienda, has been attributed to complications arising from kidney cancer.
Nonsense.
I blame Tony Wilson's sadly early demise on the sequence of ferocious blows to the head he received from my friends Gareth Allen (the artist) and Phil "The Punk" Rose (the photographer), during a Toasted Heretic gig in the Powerhaüs in London around 1990. (Tony Wilson and some heavy friends were checking us out, after Factory's A&R chief at the time, the extraordinarily nice Phil Saxe, had praised us highly.)
Sadly, only one photo survives from that night (and it's here). Phil and Gareth, to add a little class to the evening, mingled with the crowd while wearing Roman togas (made from the curtains of their flat in Walthamstow), and fed the crowd grapes. When the grapes ran out, Gareth and Phil began to bang Tony Wilson on the head with a Charles and Di Royal Wedding full-colour souvenir teatray, tastefully adapted by Gareth with felt tip pens so that Charles and Di had swastikas for eyes. (Was a young Bobby Gillespie in the audience and taking thoughtful notes for these Primal Scream lyrics? We shall never know...)
It started out as a quite friendly tapping, and Tony was nervously amused. But soon the Romans were beating Tony Wilson like a gong, putting many dents in the tea tray, bringing him to his knees, while Wilson's extremely heavy minders looked on in tremendous confusion, unsure if this was part of the show, which was already a bit out of hand. (Maybe "out of hand" isn't quite the term. While I was singing "Lost and Found", a girl plunged a hand down the crotch of my skintight pink jumpsuit, and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything else. One of those awkward social moments, where you both hesitate, neither party quite sure what the etiquette is. I kept singing, though my voice may have briefly risen an octave.)
It ended, as did many Toasted Heretic gigs, in confusion.
We did not sign to Factory Records.
Later Gareth, while attempting to mount a bronze lion, fell into a fountain in Trafalgar Square and split his head open. Gareth and Phil wandered off, in their togas, in search of a hospital. We carried the drums and amps back to their place, and wondered would we see them again.
At dawn, Gareth, his soaked and bloodstained toga long lost, arrived home triumphant, having travelled barefoot across London wearing a backless hospital gown which revealed his bum. Protected only by his Virtue, and by Phil in a toga.
Ah yes, in those days we made our own entertainment. So anyway, Gareth and Phil murdered Tony Wilson. A long-forgotten fragment of Royal Wedding Tea-Tray must have shifted a fatal millimetre.
This blog is turning into an obituary column. Interesting.
Anyway, Jean Baudrillard, the French explorer of hyper-reality, died yesterday (Tuesday March 6th, 2007), in Paris, France, aged 77. He'd been ill for ages.
Jean Baudrillard, like many Frenchmen, was a poet pretending to be a scientist.
There are two main theories of Baudrillard:
One is that he was a great and original thinker who described the modern world as it really is.
The other is that he was a tremendous French bullshitter, high on his own supply, using words which he failed to define, in a style that imitated science without understanding it, and whose work made no sense.
Both theories are correct.
Jean Baudrillard is famous for:
1) Inspiring the makers of The Matrix films. Baudrillard later said they didn't understand his ideas at all.
2) Writing the essay "The Gulf War did not take place". (Almost all criticism of which has been written by people who have not read the original essay, thus proving quite a few of his points about the nature of reality, in an age saturated with far too much information to process. And yes, I have read it.).
As I have no opinions or beliefs, I neither endorse nor reject him, nor any of his ideas, nor indeed any of my own comments on his ideas, as laid out above. But he was a big influence on Jude, and it's a pity he'll never read it now.
Well, Arthur Schlesinger, the great liberal American historian, has died. Heart attack in a restaurant at the age of 89, not a bad way to go. If you are interested, here's a proper, old-fashioned, sprawling, comprehensive, New York Times obituary.
And if you're only a little bit interested, here's a bite-sized chunk from it:
'In 1949, Mr. Schlesinger solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism with his book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.” Inspired by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he argued that pragmatic, reform-minded liberalism, limited in scope, was the best that man could hope for politically.
“Problems will always torment us,” he wrote, “because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution."'
Under the JFK administration , one of his jobs was to take Jackie Kennedy to the movies. What a great life.
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
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, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for 