Known unknowns

An actor involved in one of these super-injunction thingummybobs has – according to The Sun, at least – confessed all to his wife. Which strikes me as odd, because the man’s identity, along with that of the footballer and the other actor and the comedian and the chef, has been all over the web, and has even made it into mainstream media, albeit in the form of terribly coy, nose-tapping innuendo. If his spouse didn’t at least suspect that something was up, surely one of her friends must have twigged. I don’t want to kick her when she’s down, but she must be a terribly incurious woman.

You see, the whole point of these injunctions is not to stop people knowing about the moral mishaps of the rich and famous: it’s to stop the *wrong* people knowing. And this is something that goes way back. The Abdication Crisis of 1936 gripped the attention of the British masses once it became public, but the upper classes had known all about Edward’s unsuitable girlfriend for some time, and had been happy to gossip about the constitutional ramifications, provided the hoi-polloi didn’t know what was going on. Such information might create havoc, weaken their moral fibre, don’t you know?

I first got came to understand this social distinction in the world of celebrity tittle tattle in the early 1990s, at about the time it was beginning to fall apart. I’d started my first proper job, in a legal publishing company, which meant that I was for the first time operating in close proximity to people who knew where the bodies were buried. I got wind of Paddy Ashdown’s tarnished halo some time before The Sun splashed it, and also heard some startling rumours about a couple of then-Cabinet ministers. These were pretty analogue days, so the tales were literally word-of-mouth. But I was standing by the fax machine when the Camillagate transcripts came over from Australia. Technology had done away with the social apartheid of gossip, to extent that even after the injunctors have joined Andrew Marr in realising the sheer daftness of their position, they will be remembered not for illicit shagging, but for using their wealth and status to hush up said shagging, which looks far, far worse.

Camilla herself was doubtless embarrassed by the publication of her phone messages, but she realised she could do little about it. So she backed off, bided her time, and is now the Duchess of Cornwall. And she’s making speeches lauding the freedom of the press. Maybe one day [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] will do the same.

White suit man

I was offered some work the other day; it would have involved covering a forthcoming election in Asia, which sounds terribly exciting, all very Graham Greene, sipping a whisky and soda while waiting for a sweaty man who smokes cheroots and is found stabbed to death on the bidet of my hotel room at the end of Chapter 7. Proper foreign correspondent stuff; and bear it mind I spend much of time in an eco-system where foreign correspondents are at the top of the pyramid, and everybody wants a little of their raffish glamour to rub off on them (which is why most outlets of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club are packed with people who write press releases for exhaust pipe manufacturers, while the foreign correspondents themselves are out corresponding).

Except that rather than the chance of being a proper fo-co and reporting coolly and objectively (with just a dash of the aforementioned raffishness) about the election, the task proffered to me was to write a blog that would be favourable to the incumbent who – according to his Wikipedia page at least – is something of a dodgy geezer. The offer, I should stress, came not from a conventional news organisation, but a ‘strategic communication’ company, which should have alerted me. Rather than spend several days weighing up the ethical ins and outs of the thing, I just said no thanks within minutes.

But why exactly did I turn it down? Well, the fact that the guy for whom I would have been shilling is of dubious probity certainly entered into it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean my motives were entirely pure and selfless. I’ve been watching all the people who’ve done business with Gaddafi over years furiously trying to rewrite history, and none of them comes out of the mess looking good. So maybe it’s not that I didn’t want to help a crook; just that I didn’t want it widely known that I was helping a crook. My biggest fear was getting found out. Complicity is bad; embarrassment is worse.

I could, of course, have gone in on the pretext of doing the job, and then blown the whistle on the whole story, thus provoking anguished think pieces on the dangerous grey area between journalism and political PR and perhaps a sarky footnote in Private Eye. But the person who asked me to do it is an old friend, so he’d have suffered for my high-minded subterfuge. Moreover, whereas my moral courage ebbs and flows, my physical bravery is a tiny, stagnant puddle. While the guns and grenades and catapults were tearing big holes in Bangkok last year, I was at home in the suburbs, drinking tea and following the whole thing on Twitter. If I’d taken the job, I might have been duffed up, or worse. I’ve read The Last King of Scotland, you know; these things never end well.

But really, at the heart of it is the fact that I’m very bad at lying, at pretending, especially at feigning enthusiasm. (On the other hand, today of all days, maybe I’m making up all of the above, even the bit about the bidet, like Annie Rhiannon does when she pretends to go to Tibet and America and Wales.)

Window of opportunity

The best period to find work as an editor occurs within a very specific time frame in the twilight of a culture: after the point at which most people have stopped knowing how to write, but before the point at which nobody really cares any more. When the barbarians are at the gate, but they haven’t yet found the flowerpot under which you hide the key.

Tip of the tongue

One of the odder things to have happened to me in the last few years is that I’ve been reinvented as a food critic. I deliberately use the passive voice there: I never made a conscious decision to become a food critic; it wasn’t that I discarded the tired, caterpillary things I’d been doing before, and retired to a chrysalid state with copies of Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything and AA Gill’s Table Talk, only to emerge three weeks later as a sarcastic butterfly with a tongue dipped in wasabi. No, it was all rather more banal: a friend asked me to take over some editorial work on a restaurant guide after some personal differences had hastened the exit of the previous incumbent; and then I did a few of the reviews themselves, because there was a looming deadline; and before you could consume a waffer-thin mint, CNN had decided that I was a “writer and food critic” and suddenly people were inviting me to oyster tastings and giving me free cheesecake and well, that was that.

I’d always liked food, and like anyone, I can offer a list of Proustian rememberings that transcend mere taste: sardines on toast while watching Doctor Who; disappearing strawberry tart and budget-sapping lobster on family holidays to France; chilli dogs in Montreal and warm pretzels outside Penn Station; a sushi breakfast at Tsukiji market. But I’d never really felt so passionately about the subject that  I thought my opinions might be of interest to anyone else.

And then I realised that the food wasn’t entirely the point, and that for most of my adult (if you can call it that) life, I’d been a critic of something or other. At university, I spent three years pressing my thumb into books to see how ripe they were; later on I swirled music around in my mouth before spitting it back into the face of readers, when, of course, I wasn’t biting into of universities to check that they’d been cooked al dente. I had, without quite realising, devoted my existence to an analysis of exactly how many levels something worked on. Indeed, this blog was originally conceived as a vehicle for my supercilious pokings of books and music and film and art and other stuff that could probably have been done better if they’d only asked my opinion in the first place.

But now isn’t a great time to be a critic. No, that’s not entirely true. It’s rather a good time to be a critic, and very easy to put your criticism in a place where someone might want to read it. But it’s a bloody lousy time to be a critic if you want lots of people to pay attention to what you say, and take it seriously and allow it to affect their own behaviours. Even more so if you want someone to pay you for your efforts. Many professional critics have taken to grumbling about the fact that their privileged position is apparently under threat from the massed ranks of bloggers and Amazon reviewers. I don’t share their paranoia, but neither do I believe that one opinion on a book/song/restaurant is equally as valid as another. And obviously everyone is entitled to express an opinion. I just think that critics should be judged on merit, rather than on the basis of the particular platform from which they hurl their opinions. There are thousands of food bloggers, for example, the best of whom are undoubtedly far better than some of the bloated hacks who might pontificate over the profiteroles in the mainstream media. But for far too many, the model of a restaurant review is “WE WENT TO [RESTAURANT X] AND AFTER WE WERE SHOWN TO OUR TABLE I HAD THIS [INSERT PHOTO] AND IT WAS NICE AND SHE HAD THIS [INSERT PHOTO] AND IT WAS SORT OF OK AND THEN FOR MAINS WE HAD...” until you want to eat your own eyes rather than read another bloody word.

I have thought – and have said so — that what distinguishes decent critics, whether bloggers or paid journalists or poncy dilettantes in art galleries is their knowledge of the subject matter. And that’s still part of the deal. But then I came upon this passage from The Gourmet, the first novel by Muriel Barbery (better known for The Elegance of the Hedgehog). As France’s greatest food critic lies dying, his reminiscences and those of his family and acquaintances (he appears to have few friends) intertwine. His daughter remembers a ghastly holiday in Greece, when he made her eat the fried, honey-drenched pastries called loukoumades:

‘Do you like them?’ he asked, in his grating voice.
Panic and disorientation. Next to me Jean was breathing quietly. I forced myself.
‘Yes,’ I muttered timidly.
‘Why?’ he pursued, his tone increasingly dry, but I could see that in the depth of his eyes, which were actually inspecting me for the first time in years, there was a new spark, something I had never seen, like a little speck of cautious anticipation and hope, inconeceivable, harrowing and paralysing, because for so long I had been accustomed to his not expecting a thing from me.
‘Because it’s good?’ I ventured, hunching my shoulders.
I had lost.

Criticism requires more than opinion: it needs argument, analysis, elucidation. If a few soi-disant critics realised they were expected to go somewhere beyond “because it’s good” or “it was sort of OK” then maybe they’d be taken more seriously.

Please hold, your life is important to us

I’m suffering yet more post-natal regrets about the Noughties book: now I realise that I didn’t give nearly enough space to the works of Douglas Coupland. I’ve already discussed the fact that several of his books have a tendency to degenerate into loosely connected strings of one-liners, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe this simply reflects the direction in which culture and society is developing; as the interminable Big Brother retrospectives have proved, our attention spans today can’t even cope with the Warholian 900 seconds.

In Coupland’s most recent novel, Generation A, one of the main characters is a Sri Lankan call centre worker called Harj, who defines his own professional identity as

...a chunk of disgraced meat at the end of a phone line, forced by the global economy to discuss colour samples and waffle-knit jerseys with people who wish they were dead.

which would have been useful in my deliciously fleeting contribution to the BBC2 show History of Now, in which I discussed the ersatz Englands being constructed right now in the cubicles of Bangalore. And Harj also encapsulates the Noughties interface of capitalism and celebrity culture with his prank commerce site:

For $4.99 you could visit my site and download one hour of household silence from rooms belonging to a range of celebrities, all of whom promised to donate their royalties to charity. There was Mick Jagger (London; metropolitan), Garth Brooks (rural; some jet noise in the background), Cameron Diaz (Miami; sunny, sexy, flirty)) and so forth. For cachet, I threw in household silences from the Tribeca lofts of underworld rock survivor Lou Reed and motherly experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Biba Kopf? Who’s she?

Regrets, I’ve had plenty, and I don’t mind mentioning them. At inordinate length, to anyone who’s buying.

According to a profoundly unscientific straw poll on Twitter and Facebook, these are just some of the pseudonyms I could have chosen if I’d really wanted to be a highly successful music journalist: Dirk Nastie; Glen Thrips; Rick Ord; (Tim?) Phutmon; Ace Ventura; Jeff Senstarship; Tim Shaar Footy; Tim Shaar True; Tommi Fanto; Tom Fantomi; Tad Foot-Tapper; Mitch Carper. Thanks to all who contributed to the experience. At last, I know where I went wrong in my life.

Actually the real reason I never became a successful music journalist was that I was always trying to write stuff like this, but never quite pulling it off:

Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination that just keeps giving. Perhaps the novel/hallucination ends when Ballard himself is the most followed character on Facebook, his brain radiating astounding time-bending realities at the centre of the new post-internet universe where the numerous and multiplying levels of our existence interact. For reasons that help the writing of this column, the soundtrack to this novel/hallucination would be best supplied by Prince, himself currently mucking around with reality and his possible mysterious connection to it in ways that mix up the Ballardian with splashes of obsessive Gaga narcissism, madcap McLuhan theorising, larky Russell Brand lunacy and teasing Dylan masking.

Capitalist piglet

A lasting memory from my days at university – one of the few actually connected with my studies – was a tutorial about William Blake which gradually turned into a discussion of the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. Our tutor, a man who died far too soon, elucidated Blake’s notions of Innocence and Experience in terms of Christopher Robin’s attempt to explain his own Going Away to his friend Pooh:

“I’m not going to do nothing anymore.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Which had quite a resonance for a bunch of fresh-faced 18-year-olds, many grappling for the first time with overdrafts and washing machines, but not quite yet in the real world. At least we were still allowed to do nothing. We were studying English after all.

Many miles and years from the 100 Aker Wood, I happen upon a piece about the bloody iPad. The schtick is that the author, Peter Bregman, wants to give his back because “any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.” And that’s the problem:

But something – more than just sleep, though that’s critical too – is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.
Boredom.
Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

The funny thing is, Bregman isn’t some eternal student, a balding soixante-huitard who still deploys Christopher Robin and Blake and Alice and Syd Barrett and The Wind In The Willows and The Magic Roundabout in an effort to destabilise the military-industrial complex and justify the fact that he never irons his trousers. He’s writing for the Harvard Business Review, for crying out loud. This is work he’s talking about. So the next time your boss catches you staring into the middle distance when you’re meant to be doing something even less interesting, just tell her that you’re brainstorming with yourself, and she can run that one up the flagpole and see who plays Poohsticks with it.

Triumph and disaster

Still thinking about Malcolm McLaren’s ideas of heroic failure. Is the glory determined by the status of that which was attempted, but not attained? There’s still a faint patina of cool adhering to those (including Nick Hornby and Sebastian Faulks, if I remember correctly) who responded in vain to the NME’s “hip young gunslingers” ad; the jobs went, of course, to these two lovely creatures:


A decade and a half later, I responded to a superficially similar call-out, and auditioned to be a presenter on The Word. In this case, Katie Puckrik got the gig, while the also-rans included Davina McCall and that bloke from Teenage Health Freak. Oh yeah, and me. Somehow, I reckon McLaren would have perceived our failure to be a tad less heroic.

The difference engine

About 10 years ago, I thought I had a fabulous job. To be more precise, the job I thought I had was fabulous. I thought I was in charge of the content and production of a book, one that had been part of my childhood, one that people recognised from Manila to Montevideo. But I’d been misinformed. Certain people in the know started reminding me that I was in fact the custodian of what they called A Brand, and A Global One at that.

Under normal circumstances, I might have been able to smudge over the distinction between the two, dismissing it as little more than a question of emphasis. But my arrival in the plush chair coincided with my reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo, which argued (among other things) that the dominance of The Brand was a vicious con trick, a way to persuade the gullible to pay a premium for something that essentially doesn’t exist. I could paint the end of that particular gig as some sort of fairy story, with myself painted as the kid pointing out that Capitalism’s New Clothes are pretty threadbare. In truth, it was more messy, personal and boring than that. But the whole experience left me with a pretty cynical attitude to branding and advertising and marketing and all their attendant infernal disciplines.

So Stephen Bayley’s jeremiad about the Chinese takeover of Volvo leaves me rather cold. His argument is that the shift in ownership is unfeasible because Volvos offer a sort of quiddity of Swedishness, all aquavit and Wallander. The brand may be the same, he says, but what it communicates is lost, even if the cars remain entirely the same. Now, there are probably many good reasons why the move might be a bad one, including workers’ rights and environmental concerns. But even Bayley admits that his autophilia is an “often irrational affection”; does it really matter to the consumer where his or her car comes from, provided the wheels don’t fall off?

At least, amidst all this geo-economic turbulence, the notion of a Chinese Volvo might wake consumers from their dream; what Bayley calls “a diaspora of patiently acquired brand value” might encourage us to look more at the product, less at the packaging. Which is something Naomi Klein probably didn’t foresee when she was sowing the seeds of my professional destruction; The Brand, having done the dirty work of globalisation, is dismissed as casually as any wage slave, with no thank yous.

Putting yourself about

Well, the year’s half done, and it’s customary at times like this to start beating yourself up and griping about all the New Year resolutions you haven’t kept and how you just haven’t achieved anything so far and how life is slipping away and it’s like a record and you’re edging towards the play-out groove and the record seems to be speeding up 33-45-78 and you still haven’t worked out what the tune is.

Well, bollocks to that. I’ve done rather a lot so far this year. And there’s more to come. So there.

But what I haven’t done, for several years, is a job. I mean, a proper, salaried, where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years, office party, annual evaluation job job. I sort of miss it. Maybe I should have another go. Except that I’m crap at selling myself (or anything else, for that matter), so I’m rather in awe of people like this:


(by xkcd)

A modest fall

Trump on Kane, by Errol Morris, via Noel Sharkbloke.

Next week, Alan Sugar discusses Ingmar Bergman.

Theirs’ know buisness...

The most dispiriting moments in editorial work come when you’ve just spent a couple of hours ploughing through some turgid prose, attempting to suck some sense out the mangled syntax and comedy typos and unintentional non sequiturs and the only thing that stops you from putting a foot or some other extremity through the monitor (apart from the money) is the awareness that the writer does not have English as a first language and when you remember that, it’s really a pretty good effort, and then you happen to glance at the byline for the first time and you realise, no, actually he does notionally have English as a first language and that’s when you just want to curl up in the corner and whimper.

404 = P45

As the economic indicators get so gloomy that Survivors starts to look like a documentary, global capitalism is having to find stylish and innovative methods of making people redundant. I discovered the other night that one major Asian newspaper is so terrified by the notion that spurned employees might deploy editorial depth-charges, the IT department is told who's for the chop before the victims themselves find out. The first indication that you're on the scrapheap isn't an ominous summons to the boss's office, or even the appearance of a security guard with a cardboard box; your computer just freezes, leaving you gazing at a glassy microcosm of what your own life has suddenly become.

But how do they get rid of the IT guys?

...makes the tart grow fonder

A few days ago, I was sampling lots of nice food for free and wondering whether 'restaurant reviewer' should be added to my list of the only jobs that are really worth doing.

One of the dishes was an orange and absinthe sorbet, which led to a discussion with the nice restaurant PR lady about la fée verte and its various cultural connotations. She knew that the stuff had been banned in many European countries for much of the 20th century, and that Kylie Minogue had played its spectral manifestation in Moulin Rouge; but not, apparently, that its renaissance in Britain was partly due to the efforts of someone who'd once been the drummer in The Jesus and Mary Chain.

And we talked about 1915, the year in which France prohibited the production of absinthe, and the resulting invention of pastis; literally a pastiche of absinthe, a half-hearted impersonation, a fuzzy photocopy of the real thing. And it was only then that I realised that a drink such as Pernod was, for much of its existence, a perfect simulacrum; a copy of something that didn't exist.

But I didn't say anything; I refrained from pontificating about Baudrillard and Deleuze and The Matrix to someone who really just wanted me to write nice things about her restaurant. Maybe I don't need to see Baudrillard in everything, like someone finding the name of God in an aubergine; maybe, as with my bubblewrap moment, it's a sign that I'm finally joining the human race. Although I still shared it with you, I suppose. Maybe that's different.

We moved on to the paprika-smoked Ahi tuna, and jolly nice it was too.