fah diddly qua quaaargh!

I’m writing about Adam and the Ants all week, at Hendrik’s excellent One Week One Band tumblr — a pleasure and an honour. I won’t quite say this is really actually what I became a music-writer to undertake, delayed by 30 years, except surely this is what I became a music-writer to undertake, and I only had to wait 30 years to find a way.

decline of the western (2)

(rough notes on oaters, watched when tired and in need of semi-brainless distraction while re-decorating my flat, and written up at speed without checking except dates and such in hardy on cowboys…)

And “decline” perhaps not so much, this time: as it’s four westerns from just three years, 1959-62, and what’s more interesting I think is the variation, at what afterwards proves to be the downslope of the highest peak — though of course no one quite knows this yet. Television has swallowed up the last of the serials, as well as the oater indies (=Republic Pictures): the qualities that came from mass unpoliced repro have vanished. Plus the Civil Rights Act is beginning to make racial Othering work quite unexpectedly, at least for a while. And for a half a generation, a significant proportion of young white men stop looking at the way older men are in their own families and thinking, “I want to be that”…

ipsos custodies

Of course It helps no one to say that — as a child watching pop on telly — I always found him cold-eyed and creepy.

I was brought up not to mock strange people — not to point at them in the street or to gang up tease them at school. The only two fights I ever got in I was defending the weird kid against the popular bully — even though I wasn’t really friends with the former (no one was) and on the whole got on fine with the latter. (I was also rubbish at fighting, so these interventions weren’t exactly of consequence…)

But in this instance I think this completely fritzed with my antennae. Continue reading “ipsos custodies”

platonism and anger management

Entirely unsurprisingly, the word ‘troll’ now has a politicised range of meanings—all the way from anonymous internet bully to subtly provocative dialectician, with a fractally wriggly continuum linking these extremes—and the comment this is a response to (a) made it reasonably clear which meaning one s/he had in mind* and thus (b) deserved a better (or at least more self-aware) answer than “By using the word X you can only be saying Y about me and I know myself well enough to say this is false.” Of course dsquared was trolling here — and it’s not as if Farrell is historically that good at identifying the motivations of the people he deems trolls by his own over-simplified (which is to say self-exculpatory) definition. The revealed fact of the faultline is an indication that people on both sides are uneasily (=angrily) aware that they too exist within contradiction: “just a lot less so than those OTHER deluded clowns,” the more twerpish partisans on both sides are busy telling themselves.

*And yes, s/he later disappointingly backed away from a good strong usage…

huh-JEMM-uh-ni

Is there not a point — of acclaim, respect, mainstream success, [stupid word alert] “influence” and simply being paid lots to do what you enjoy doing — where self-awareness should kick in, as you find yourself unleashing this take-down term at others? Own your power: you are not the embattled nobody you imagine.

(Am looking at self somewhat here, not that I use this specific word very often.)

(But not just at self…)

I have measured out my life in unclicked threads

Which is likely to depress me more: a Guardian debate between a scientist and a philosopher, or a Crooked Timber thread on Westerns and John Hughes?

(Truly you can hunt for them yourselves and please keep the answers from me…)