The Demonisation of Christ-complex Brown

So Chris Brown has joined some little rapper dude for a duet in which the former decides to sprinkle a little light contempt on all of his non-famous listeners for being inept losers who ‘wait their turn’ while he – being the assertive woman-beating, rent-a-sneer rapper-type-singer-thing that he is – proceeds to ascend so stratospherically high that he “can’t even see down” – which must be annoying for him, because from all the way up their he can’t be sure whether or not his contemptuous spit has connected with our stupid unfamous faces. Hence why, I suppose, he’s teamed up with some little rapper dude, who can presumably see down pretty easily, since he’s only about four feet high.

But though Brown might be taller than a child, he can still spend an entire music video frowning with the same intensity of wounded petulance as could even the most spoilt of spoilt six year olds. When not doing this, he jumps around hyper-actively like someone who’s just had a cattle prod thrust up his arse and been asked to make the consequent electrified spasms look as much like dancing as possible. It becomes apparent that Brown is not a happy chappy: in fact, this uppity malcontent is singing this song to show us here haters that though he might have blithely beat up a woman he’s still better than all of us losers because he can, like, sing songs and shit. But singing songs isn’t enough for old Christ-complex Brown. No: he’s tired of being reminded of his wife-beating wankerdom by us nobodies. Christ-complex Brown raps that “I’d be lying if I say it aint get to me, but I’m a champion, a legend, HISTORY”. Fittingly, this last word is contorted by effects to sound demonic – maybe the producer subtly trying to tell Brown that to claim oneself as a champion, a legend and an integral part of history all within the same breath makes one sound a little bit like a man possessed by the evil spirit of Narcissistic Delusion.

Red Ed and the Royals

Ed Milliband has expressed his disgust to Andrew Marr at the idea that trade unions might strike during the Royal Wedding; it's 'wrong', says Red Ed.

Yeah, wouldn't it just make you to sick to see lots of silly little people with their silly little problems disrupting the joy of a nation united behind the loving union of a prince and his beaming bride? I can hardly stand the mere thought that these uppity oiks might have the temerity to think about their own lives on a day when their country's most noble bloodline is condescending to unite with the middle-class daughter of a humble millionaire.

So thank God we now know where Red Ed stands, because there were times when – what with his redness and all – I thought he might, you know, place a higher value on the rights of people than on regal pomp.

So, ruling classes: the message is don't worry. The party of labour does not value its base over the ceremonial idiocies of a constitutional monarchy.

Seriously???

Are there really people – troubled, damaged, confused people – who want to wear JLS condoms? Where are these men who desire to have their most intimate acts endorsed by four preening, prancing, Nintendo Wii-hawking, X-Factor-bots? Who is it that wants the space between foreplay and fucking to be filled with the vision of those four soul-deficents staring back at you with the bovine vacancy standard to all singers anointed by Simon Cowell?

Still, at least something's no longer up for debate. JLS are a bunch of dickheads.

Andrew Marr: The Cuddly Inquisition

Andrew Marr isn't an interviewer; he's a political masseuse. The pain he offers politicians is good, cathartic pain: nothing but an opportunity for David Cameron or Tony Blair to practice their earnest face after being asked 'difficult' questions. When talking about the Tory plans to 'reform' the NHS – i.e. open it up to the market – Marr put it to David Cameron that many people oppose this, and then asked this stunner of a question: 'Are you completely confident that this is the right thing to do?'

You can image how David Cameron squirmed. He must have thought: Better not let this question trip me up; someone might later prove that my facts are wrong or... OH WAIT! Confidence? You mean that subjective, unmeasurable quality? Yeah, sure, why not? Tons of confidence, Andrew. No worries. Same time next week, yeah?

That isn't journalism. I could personally be 'completely confident' that if I jumped off the top of my building a portal would open up beneath me and take me to Disney Land. Confidence doesn't make something a good idea, and it certainly isn't the thing we should be interrogating about someone like David Cameron. I doubt a lack of confidence will ever be an issue with him, and that in itself is what will need challenging as he attempts to ram through unpopular policies.

This lack of interrogative rigour is, of course, the reason that Marr gets all the high profile politicians, and Marr himself knows this full well. There's a great interview between him and Chomsky when Chomsky tells Marr that he's actually upholding the very systems of power he pretends to challenge in his interviews, because the challenges always remain within the script sanctioned by power. If the challenges had deviated from the script, Marr would have got nowhere in journalism.

And look where Marr is now... He really took Chomsky's words on board; but not in the way Chomsky probably would have liked.

Jack Straw vs Pakistan

Watching the disintegration of New Labour as they flounder around unguided in opposition would be funny if it wasn't leaving the Con-Dems so depressingly unchallenged in their prescription of neoliberal shock treatment for the nation. While Ed Milliband fails to assert leadership, John Prescott – once a member of the party who I thought had some kind of left-wing integrity – has not only joined the House of Lords (and therefore gone back on his earlier statements about not doing so) but is now hawking car insurance to the plebs. Well, I hope you get a nice new swimming pool out of the big juicy cheque they give you, John. And who knows? Maybe the chlorine will eventually wash off that lingering feeling of dirtiness that comes with the advert-whore territory.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw is indulging in casual racism, claiming that Pakistani men have a predilection towards grooming and raping white women. Well, I supposed that now Pakistan is succumbing to extremism in the face of dire economic instability (with the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer) we had better start vilifying them all with nasty national stereotypes hadn't we, Jack? Because the West will have to bomb this extremism out of them, and if we don't dehumanise them then we might have to think about the morality of those American predator drones which have been pretty much indiscriminately killing civilians there in the name of a War on Terror which New Labour supported. But who cares, if they're all rapists-in-waiting anyway, huh?

Straw claims the this fondness for rape derives from sexual repression:

"These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits... So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls...who they think are easy meat"

Yet most cases of sexual assault are committed by white men; so from whence comes their predation, Jack?

I think it's pertinent that Straw mentions Pakistani culture in particular, rather than Islam in general, as being responsible for this rape inclination . We will likely see a lot more of this in regard to Pakistan as it becomes more and more hostile to the West. We will hear a lot about their Islamic contempt for secular values, or sexual freedom; what we won't hear about is their contempt for the capitalist system which has made an economic elite of the unpopular secular government and condemned everyone else to impoverished insecurity. Nor will we hear about the immense 'collateral damage ' resulting from the American bombing of supposed terrorist hotspots, and of how this iddy biddy bit of mass murder just might radicalise those family members who survive the attacks, and further jaundice their perceptions of the 'secular values' which are linked so indelibly in their minds to the predator drones hovering, silent and sinister, above their homes, and the capitalism which has rendered them surplus people in their own land.

Californication as Counter-Culture

A new series of Californication starts soon, which happens to be my guiltiest of guilty pleasures; I just don’t know what it is that keeps me coming back to it, because it’s frankly awful. Perhaps it’s that it retains at least a modicum of faith in the possibility of reading and writing still having some kind of counter-cultural relevance. But the fact that this is the case – that this programme, which is at heart a reactionary, puerile and anti-intellectual show, is the only thing on offer in the mainstream for at least some kind of literate counter-cultural figure, is seriously depressing.

Right, so let’s take the protagonist Hank Moody. He’s a writer and, apparently, a rebel. This rebellion takes the form of insouciant substance abuse and the perpetual fucking-of-anything-that-moves. So far so jealous. But there is also something deeply depressing about Hank. He embodies a bankrupt fantasy of a counter-cultural figure; what he provides is nothing but a rude antagonism towards some social niceties like manners, or not fucking other people’s wives. Although Hank would likely claim to loath ‘the man’ or ‘the system’ or whatever, he in reality does nothing which might be seen as subversive towards these things.

Take this scenario for instance: Hank is talking to his agent/friend about his days, years ago, of working at Blockbusters, a job which has obvious corporate connotations which do not sit well with Hank’s counter-cultural ego. But the rebel-writer redeems himself in this scenario by claiming he used the job as an opportunity to splice pornography into children’s films. This evidently sticks it to the man; but what exactly is this American counter-cultural obsession with displaying pornography to children? Because it’s not just Hank: one of the acts of rebellion in Fight Club was splicing pornography into children’s films, a form of rebellion which that movie ends up implicitly endorsing while rejecting the possibility of a meaningful confrontation with the systems of financial capitalism (see my entry below). But is the premature initiation of children to sexually explicit imagery really the horizon of rebellion now?

In a way, this is rather apt. Considering that we are living through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression yet no political party in the mainstream is seriously talking about an alternative to the extreme form of neoliberal (i.e. unfettered) capitalism which precipitated it – never mind talking about an alternative to capitalism itself – it seems that in terms of rebellious ideas we’re still quite a few sans-culottes short of a revolution. This kind of ideological stagnation has been with us since communism fell and capitalism proclaimed its triumph at the End of History; politics supposedly became ‘post-ideological’ and turned towards dealing with rights for minorities and the like, as well as the continuing liberalisation of society’s attitude towards sex and sexual preference. Within this terrain, where a lack of real political choice is compensated for by the freedom to buy things and have sex with anyone you like, is it any wonder that a trope of rebellion has become exposing children to pornography – with the sexualisation of children being the final taboo, that which you are still not free to do? Paedophilia creates such regular storms of controversy in the media that it does seem to function as a point of grisly obsession, perhaps born of the recognition that this is the grim logical endpoint of a culture which allows almost unmitigated freedom of choice in the sexual arena but none in the political. People are quick to blame sexual repression for the abuses committed by priest on children – but what about mass political repression? What might that do to a society?

Thus it is proven that capitalism creates paedophiles... Bring on the revolution!

Raphael's Tapestries

There are many reasons to begrudge the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain this month. The fact that he looks like a conspiring alien hiding inside a badly fitting man-suit immediately disinclines me towards him, although there is a strange mixture of melancholy and mania in his heavy-lidded eyes which I find disturbingly hypnotic. More disturbing, of course, is his implication in the world-wide Catholic conspiracy to cover up endemic child abuse within the church. But it’s not all doom and gloom you know! For the pope comes bearing gifts: the Raphael tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Peter and Paul, which usually hang from the walls of the Sistine Chapel, have been loaned to the V&A museum to be displayed, for the first time, alongside the artist’s original cartoons, and their delivery to Britain has been timed to coincide with the pope’s visit. But it gets better: the exhibition is free.

And yet the news left me underwhelmed. After all, the cartoons are always on display; as for the tapestries – well, I just can’t get excited about tapestries. Whereas paintings (with a little help from restoration work) seem to age gracefully, their faded hues conferring distinction, like flecks of grey hair on handsome man, tapestries don’t seems to age so much as wither away. There is something wan and tubercular about their paling threads, their once-bright colours succumbing to consumption, too bright still to be considered – as the faded monochrome of an ageing sketch might be – as spectral, they linger in their not-quite-brightness like an etiolated star, the white dwarf of many a country house. Or perhaps I read too much into chromatic decline...

But free is free, and Raphael is Raphael, and certainly if these tapestries are ever going to be actually enjoyed by the public then it will be here in this exhibition at the V&A rather than in the Sistine Chapel, in the hallowed ground of which the phenomenology of viewership is one of fatigued touristic ennui. For before seeing Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel you inevitably wander through the Vatican’s superabundance of treasures, carried along with the tide of tourists until you’re numbed into a plodding passive state by aesthetic overload and the incessant dazzling flash of cameras. Eventually you’re spat out into the chapel itself to stand shoulder-to shoulder, cheek-by-jowl with the gawping hordes, everyone craning their necks upwards in agonised admiration of Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling – which, for all its familiarity, for all the expectation and the mad rush and crush of visitors (up to 20,000 in a day!), still fails to disappoint. But as for the tapestries? Only the determined push and shove their way around the outskirts of the chapel to take a peek at where they hang from the walls; only the superhuman are then able to actually take their time appreciating them!

Yet when these tapestries were first made they were considered more precious than Michelangelo’s ceiling. To look at them now, I personally find it difficult to discern this past lustre of theirs. And this is why old tapestries in general fail to excite me: they constitute an unsatisfying lack – an imagine-what-once-was that is somehow devoid of the sublimity which that imagining achieves in the case of architectural ruins. However, for this reason seeing these tapestries next to the cartoons is gratifying, since the paintings (faded though they are) allow one to reconstruct what it was that Raphael was aiming for. But still I found myself more drawn towards the small preliminary sketches of the apostolic scenes than I did the woven wall hangings... The appeal of tapestries apparently eludes me still.