The banality of relationships

"I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk

Your head rush, fly like Egyptian musk

Aww shit, Wu-Tang Clan spark the wicks, and

However I master the trick just like Nixon

Causin' terror, quick damage your whole era

Hardrocks is locked the fuck up or found shot

P.L.O. style, hazardous 'cause I wreck this

Dangerous, I blow spots like Waco, Texas"

- Ghostface Killah on the Wu-Tang Clan song Bring Da Ruckus

More than once I've pondered whether noticing (and pointing out) a resemblance between two things is banal.

Rappers for whom everything is like something else are one example (although don't get me wrong: I think Wu-Tang are great), but there are also critics who attack someone for resembling something:

"[Michael] Gove sort-of looks like a fucking balloon animal or something doesn't he, he has that kind-of eerie air to him."

- The comedian Frankie Boyle talking about a British politician

I've also been guilty of it myself, as with this post juxtaposing paintings by Tiepolo and Mondrian.

But it turns out there are far fewer ways of relating two different concepts than I'd realised. According to the philosopher David Hume, there are just three: resemblance, contiguity in time or space, and cause or effect.

It's worth reiterating that, I think: there are only three different ways in which any two ideas or thoughts can be connected.

(Steven Pinker, in whose book The Sense of Style I learned the above, says linguists have identified about a dozen different kinds of connection, but that the extra nine or so are essentially just subdivisions of Hume's trio.)

So if I'm a rapper trying to inject some colour into my rhymes, I've only got three options.

Likewise, if I'm a critic examining something, I can only introduce ideas not inherent to the thing itself in one of three ways (unless I want my writing to be disjointed and incomprehensible; not so much of a problem with rap, admittedly).

Hell, even if I'm just making small talk with someone at work or in a bar, there are only three things I can do to keep my words from drying up, without abruptly changing the subject.

Suddenly I feel so much better about my shitness at chit chat: it's not only that I lack imagination, it's also that there are so few courses of action anyone can resort to!

Quite why society hasn't yet invented and embraced a device for generating topics of conversation at random, I don't know. Maybe that can be my gift to the world...

"I don't really know anything about cactuses ... Or the Spanish flu ... Or temperance ... Ah look, a flamingo! Did you know that science can't yet explain why flamingos stand on one leg? We do however know that they're pink because they eat algae ..."

Book Review: Pour Me, AA Gill, 2015

Pour Me is short as memoirs go: just 241 pages. In part that's because, as Gill says early on in it, the alcoholism from which he suffered in his twenties meant that "there was no film in the camera" for those years, and that earlier memories were also dissolved: "childhood, school, holidays, friends ... all seemed to be faded and incomplete".

Incomplete, but not erased entirely: Pour Me does cover some of Gill's childhood, as well as the time between when he managed to stop drinking, aged 30, and when he wrote the book, 30 years later.

Stopping drinking saved Gill's life, and after "thousands of hours of learning the wrong thing" - art, cooking, gardening, bartending - he finally "failed into journalism", becoming one of the best-known food and TV critics in the country.

So I'll borrow a description of journalism that Gill says he liked - "journalism is what will be grasped at once" - and come to the point: Gill was a fantastic and endearing writer, and he had an interesting life. What more can you ask from a memoir?

He could be brilliant, as perhaps best demonstrated by the section on the speech he gave to a room full of dyslexic schoolchildren (he himself was dyslexic), telling them that the English language was theirs to manipulate no matter what their school might tell them about their abilities. This echoed two transformative elements in his own life: the moment when he came upon his English teacher literally tearing apart books to show them who was boss, and a crucifixion painting that particularly moved him with its depiction of human suffering, which was made in the period of the Lutheran reformation.

He was also enviably insightful - something he attributed to his artistic training ("It made me look, as opposed to merely see"). Consider for example this, from page 2: "I wonder what the rest of nature makes of a lawn? Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy, effortfully polite, sober." Or this, on famine (he wasn't just a critic), a subject that sadly is timely again: "It isn't staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you".

His turns of phrase were up there with the best of them, and he was funny, and he was empathetic, having experienced loneliness and sickness and desperation by the gallon.

I'm using the past tense, because Gill died in December 2016, a year or two after Pour Me was published. Could that be another reason why the book is so short? I'm not sure: it wasn't clear to me whether he'd received his diagnosis of terminal cancer before the book was finished.

I suspect not, because I suspect he'd have carried on writing it until the end if he'd known it was coming, just as he did with his articles, the last of which was about his experience of dying on the NHS. But then the book is so dense with insight and tales told only in snatches that it could easily have been four times the size, and the final paragraphs are filled with finality: "I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might."

Perhaps those tales are told only in snatches here because they have already been told elsewhere - in Gill's journalism, a compendium of which is due to be published this year. I'll certainly be buying that too, so maybe I'll let you know.

Book review - Vade Mecum, Richard Skinner (2015)

A vade mecum, the final few lines of Vade Mecum tell us, is a "guide or handbook, kept close at all times and used for instruction". I wouldn't go as far as keeping VM with me at all times, but I did take it away with me on a long weekend, and I do intend to keep it within handy reach for a while now that I'm back home, even though I've finished it. Why? Well, the main thing it has going for it is that it's a slim but dense source of things that sound interesting and that I want to check out...

This will be easiest for music, in this age of Spotify: there's a 12-page essay on dub as a musical style, for example - the longest entry in the book - and I want to listen to pretty much every musician and track mentioned in it.

Then there's the entry that consists solely of a list of moments / aspects from films, without any explanation of what they have in common. They're obviously bits Skinner likes / attributes something to, but why / what? Some explanation would have been nice actually, but you get the gist: the films are worth seeing.

I love collections of criticism and comment that span different media, and VM is a worthy addition to the likes of Adair's Surfing the Zeitgeist and Hitchen's Arguably. It's not quite on the same level, but it's a denser source of promising trails to follow, and well worth keeping close to hand for that reason alone.

Book review: Fear of Music, David Stubbs, Zero Books, 2009

Best read with Spotify or similar to hand.

Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.

The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.

Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).

The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.

Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more  to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.

Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes (see the glasses in the photo above).

The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.

I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.

However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.

Book review: Simulations, Jean Baudrillard, 1983

I bought Simulations mainly for its amazing lurid tech-noir cover:

And it's good that I wasn't so bothered about the contents, because the contents are about 80% gibberish, e.g.:

"Everywhere the disposition of force and forcing yield to dispositions of ambiance, with operationalization of the notions of need, perception, desire, etc. Generalized ecology, mystique of the "niche" and of the context, milieu-simulation right up to"Centres of Esthetic and Cultural Re-animation" foreseen in the VIIth plan (why not?) and Centre of Sexual Leisure, constructed in the form of a breast, that will offer a "superior euphoria due to a pulsating ambiance..."