Love is for people in libraries who wear cardigans and stiff knee-length skirts. Love songs are for sweetly unaffected vocals and twirling Motown strings. And looking seriously into a camera and banging a tambourine is about the loveliest thing a person can do. I want that swan brooch, too.
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in April 2009 …
Drowning in a sea of tits and anal tears
Maxim has shut down, less than a month after the closure of Arena. Back in early March, Brian Schofield (Arena contributing editor) made this analysis of the problems for men’s magazines, putting the slump down to the frantic imitation of the tits-and-goals mens’ weeklies: “joining the younger lads’ titles in a suicide charge into grubby oblivion, to be munched up by the new weekly grot-mags Nuts and Zoo – and, of course, by the simple fact that exposed breasts are quite easy to find for free on the internet.” (My newsagent keeps Nuts and Zoo on the top shelf with the authentic stroke mags, and everyone knows how well they’re doing.)
On the Media Show this week, Condé Nast’s UK managing director Nicholas Coleridge kicked the weak content of the mens’ glossies into tiny little bits:
In the end there were six articles that appeared in the lads’ magazines. This was the formula. You had softporn pictures. You had ‘Highstreet Honeys’, which was when people sent in pictures of their girlfriends, and in fact it was rather early user-generated copy that appeared in the magazines. And what I always think of as ‘Sharks And Nazis’, which were articles about deep-sea fishing – there were an incredible number of them – and articles that had a Nazi connection. A little bit of sport, and medical abnormalities – a tremendous number of pictures of medical abnormalities appeared in the lads’ magazines. And I think people simply felt, ‘god, I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this.’ [...] I think in the end, they were rather bad magazines.
It’s worth remembering that Condé Nast has just invested in the UK launch of Wired – which, while not exactly a mens’ mag, is a magazine with a largely male readership (I’d guess) and, importantly, a heavy commitment to original features – so Coleridge’s faith in content is all over his business strategy. In the same segment of the Media Show, James Brown claimed that lack of diversity had murderered the mens’ market, but a lot of the homgeneity was self-inflicted: publishers assumed that whatever was popular was the same as what their readers wanted, without preserving the qualities that originally made people love the magazine (at one time, I used to read FHM mostly because they had a killer caption writer who hid something funny on every page). Just because it’s what the people want doesn’t mean it’s what your audience wants.
Ohdeared
Newswipe, episode 3 on iPlayer (until 15 April 2009)
This one felt a little looser and less urgent than the first two: maybe the madness of Fox News is too astonishing on its own to leave room for the sharp analysis Brooker built up around citizen journalism and rolling news. Even so, Brooker gives the smartest take on how the news is put together and consumed, and this week the end-of-the-half-hour highlight was an Adam Curtis short film.
It reprises several themes from Curtis’ previous documentaries about the problems inherent in using television journalism as a way of interpreting the world. Audiences and journalists have deserted the disection of complex political and social issues because that’s, well, a bit dull – and embraced instead an emotive interpretation, championing innocent and heroic individuals in the face of monolithic and impersonal ‘systems’. By Curtis’s reckoning, this trope was born in the 1960s counterculture, came of age in the 80s with Live Aid, flourished in the 90s as a replacement for the east-vs-west certainties of the Cold War, and then foundered painfully on the complexities of the Rwandan genocide:
This simple battle between good and evil couldn’t last. But it finally cracked back where is first began, in Africa. In 1994 the Hutus massacred millions of Tutsis in Rwanda. In the wake of the massacre, millions of refugees flooded into the Cogo. Western aid workers and television crews also flooded in, to help the ‘innocent’ victims. But they soon discovered that many of them weren’t innocent at all – they were the ‘evil’ Hutus who killed millions of the Tutsis.
Then, the Tutsis invaded the camps to get their revenge. But instead of behaving like good victims, they too carried out terrible massacres, and a horrific war began in which four-and-a-half million people died, and everyone was evil – even the children.
And that had a terrible effect on television news. Because when there weren’t any good or innocent people to support any longer, the kind of news reporting invented in the 90s made no sense. Because the news had given up reporting them as political struggles, it meant there was now no way to understand why these terrible events were happening, and instead, political conflicts around the world – from Darfur to Gaza – were now portrayed to us as simple illustrations of the mindless cruelty of the human race about which nothing could be done and to which the only response is to say, “oh dear”.
Obviously, this is a rangy thesis to carry off in six-and-a-bit minutes. Curtis manages it because, well, he’s Adam Curtis and no one turns out a well-constructed video essay like he does – and because the broad generalisation feels broadly right. Political causes that can’t be explained with three brightly coloured arrows don’t make it onto the television, and the consequently rootless portrayal of struggle and suffering doesn’t inspire any sense that systems can be altered or lives saved: what’s left is a grisly parade of disasters and no idea of what to do about them.
Watching
If you haven’t already seen it, that’s the video of riot police beating Ian Tomlinson to the ground shortly before he died of a heart attack. It looks like a baton-happy and unprovoked assault, and if the brutality in the recording isn’t alarming enough on its own, the early omissions of the Met statement (which didn’t mention that he’d already had contact with riot police) are pretty troubling.
But the widely-watched recordings (first from the Guardian, then from Channel 4 News) seem to have forced the police to change their line rapidly: the Channel 4 report particularly, with its insistence on identifying characteristics of the policeman involved in the assault (left handed, partial view of face), may have precipitated the officer’s coming forward.
This is surveillance technology working as a check on state force. Usually, privacy debates settle into two futile positions: you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide, vs I don’t want anyone spying on me. Obviously, these are worthless statements: everyone‘s got something they’d prefer not to have hauled over in public, and nobody can do anything to hold back the innovations that allow this to happen. If something exists, and people want it enough, it won’t be legislated out of existence.
What can be controlled, possibly, is the way the technology is used. While I was was skimming the tweets, I followed a link from @Z303 to this old, old (1996) Wired feature by David Brin. The author imagines two possible futures – both with extensive surveillance technology, one where CCTV is used exclusively by police to monitor and control the behaviour of citizens, and one where monitoring devices are democratised so anyone can check on anyone:
Here, a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there, a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by the city hall fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child has wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest his neutral professionalism lapse.
The transparent society doesn’t feel like a comfortable place to live yet, but if the reporting of Ian Tomlinson goes on to encourage a full and open inquiry into the assault and the practice of “kettling“, then maybe it’s a safer place.
I blame the software
The PCC is a pretty scary institution. “Nothing makes editors scream louder than when they know a complaint is going to go to a formal adjudication”, says outgoing PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer: “I tell you, this really concentrates the mind – to be named and shamed in their own newspaper.” So, when the PCC tells a newspaper to do something – like, say, removing an excessively intrusive and graphic story from their website – you’d expect the terrified publication to comply.
Well, obviously that didn’t happen. But I bet the PCC has got some eyewatering punishments in place for those recidivists who fail to comply. I bet they fine the hell out of anyone who’s guilty of that sort of thing. So, I emailed to find out and this is the PCC’s description how the case proceeded:
The Daily Telegraph piece was initially removed when the Commission investigated the matter. It reappeared due to a software error and has now – following our contact with the paper – been removed once more.
Software errors do happen, and maybe that really is how the Telegraph‘s article came to be available on the internet even though the PCC requested that it be removed. But if I was an editor in the process of withdrawing something potentially harmful from circulation, I’d probably try pretty hard to ensure it was permanently erased: partly from wanting to repair the original error, and partly because I’d expect an extraordinary bollocking if I didn’t comply. Apparently, that didn’t come into the Telegraph‘s thinking – reasonably enough, it seems, because the PCC aren’t going to do anything about it.
Paperhouse at the picturehouse: Scanners
Fiction about technology mostly means wide-eyed reflections on things that happened five minutes ago and the way that whatever it is will absolutely change everything utterly forever. The stylish kitsch of the Matrix movies and the noxious ‘look at my sexy new laptop’ toss of the absurd Jeanette Winterson are equally pointless if you’re interested in anything apart from the capacity of the simple to be perpetually surprised (alright, and some amazing running and fighting, which Winterson obviously can’t offer because she is far too busy writing important and novel-ish things).
David Cronenberg (whose Scanners I watched again this weekend, and whose films have owned me ever since a late-night showing of Videodrome made a trembling wreck of me) never embarrasses himself like this because he always treats technology as something that’s entirely human and as morally neutral as muscle. The recordings and broadcasts of Videodrome are terrifying, but the technology itself isn’t malevolent – it’s the information it conveys, and the willingness of the consumer to absorb it, that produces the horror. Medicine and machinery are fleshy things in the Cronenberg world, always a part of what we are rather than a chilly external force. In Scanners, when a psychic hacks into a computer network using the phone wire and his brain, it doesn’t feel like a hokey pre-internet moment: it’s just the summation of the idea that telecommunications are a society’s nervous system.
A lot of Cronenberg’s success is down to his crisp materialism. When the doctor character guides a newly-discovered scanner through his first deliberate psychic attack, he explains that this is not mind reading, “it’s nervous system to nervous system.” If you don’t romanticise humans, you can’t exaggerate the momentousness of a change in them. The conflict in the story is between two groups who are morally identical: a private security firm which wants to exploit the scanners as weapons, and a biochemistry lab which fronts for a terrorist scanner underground. These aren’t goodies or baddies, they’re just offering different kinds of exploitation and exactly enough tension to play through the ideas and facilitate a massive, brainblasting showdown.
Realitied
Newswipe, episode 2 on iPlayer (until 8 April 2009)
This week, Charlie Brooker found something interesting to say about a topic I’d given up: I was as sad about Jade Goody as I would be about anyone I was peripherally aware of going through something agonisingly tragic, I wasn’t perplexed by the coverage (she invited it, it sold), and while it made me a bit uncomfortable, it didn’t send me into giddy horrors at the unimaginable depravity of everyone else.
Brooker, obviously, goes a bit better than my dillentante blogging:
Throughout the depressing blanket coverage, Jade was repeatedly referred to as a “star of reality TV”, which she was – although it’s more accurate to say she was a star of reality TV and news. After all, in her final weeks, taken accumulatively, she made far more appearances on the front pages and in news broadcasts than on her Living TV specials. [...] In the end, Jade Goody died on the biggest reality show going: not Big Brother or some Living TV special, but the news. After all, with its jaunty titles and its easy hate figures, its selective storytelling and its stupid viewer votes, it’s a hairsbreadth from being a multi-platform I’m A Celebrity spin-off.
Brooker’s always been sharp on the idea that reality TV viewers (including him) are responding to the editing and not the actual people. But the with factual TV adopting the narrative and editorial structures of reality TV’s semi-fiction, viewers respond to real events – like the death of a young mother-of-two – as if they were the fabrications of the editing suite. Which they sort of are.
A story like the Jade one is a grotesque feedback loop: the editors follow the story because they presume the readers are interested, the publicity drives interest and becomes a story in itself, and viewers and readers respond with extremes of emotion, from vomitously sympathetic to gorily inhumane, while interest in analysis or investigation is driven out by the perpetual gush of feeling. And that’s how the news gets made.
Paperhouse reads: Liver
Liver‘s subtitle is “A fictional organ with an anatomy of four lobes” – because it’s a collection of four short stories all set in the same fictional universe. Between the gory physicality of that summary and its literary precision, Will Self gives a perfect biopsy of his style. Funny, bleak, grotesque, dispassionate: Self’s liver is a bilious organ.
I started reading Self when he was doing the cult books segment for Mark Radcliffe’s graveyard shift show on Radio 1: every few weeks, he’d show up and laud a work of fiction, and a bit later I’d borrow it from the library and add it to my store of teenage pretension. I read Lolita, Perfume and Kafka on Self’s recommendation. I also read Self’s Quantity Theory, Grey Area and Cock And Bull, really enjoying the mixture of dismal sex and absurdist satire. But then Tough Tough Toys… was a bit disappointing, and the columns in the Indy felt laboured and drab, and I let Self drift out of the circle of things in which I was interested. Look, I was 18, barely out of Point Horror and working my way through the best books ever written. It’s almost completely not my fault that I totally underrated Self.
I even managed to miss this happening. But I’ve started to catch up now, and Liver is a decent place to start. All of the extended short stories take place in the same fictional universe, with characters moving between as connecting tissue, although each narrative is essentially self-enclosed. And, more jarringly, each one twists distinctively out of realist-satirical mode and into another genre of its own: Greek mythology, supernatural interventions, sci-fi. The lobes of the book are separate but related, forming a whole from which any part could be lost without changing the function of the book (apart, obviously, from the function of being like a liver).
And it’s also about livers, and the abuses the organs are put to by human appetites. Scabrous about consumption and acute about addiction and desire, there’s a striking lack of compassion despite all the close observation. Sometimes – especially with the characters who stick around across more than one section – this feels almost too hard to take. It’s not the dreadful things Self does to his characters that you mind: it’s that he can’t say anything nice about them while he’s acting as their tormentor.
But the mysanthropy’s the only thing you can see coming. I’ve never read a fiction narrated by a chorus of microbes before. Nor have you (I imagine), and Self throws out these unexpected inventions with the ease of someone who can make this shit up with some to spare. And he can write, too: not just slinging together a few well-constructed sentences, but rolling out perfected phrases by the pageful. His language is excessive and his vocabulary ripe, but it’s controlled excess – the abundant swears have a well-timed precision, and the moments where he throws in one deliberate cliché too many are rare enough to be tolerable.
