QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST? David Byrne at Edinburgh Playhouse

I was delighted and excited to pick up a late resale ticket on the day of this concert from the 'Who is the Sky' tour. That spoof Madison Avenue voice, a shock of white hair and the Norman Bates mien and 74 year old David Byrne was on stage at the Edinburgh Playhouse 50 miles from where he was born! A photographic tableau vivant behind him and surrounded by no less than twelve musicians and dancers, like Byrne himself, all sporting orange jump suits, and gyrating groovily across the space. It was a pot pourri mishmash of the Playschool Teletubbies, old Benetton ads, that Jaguar advert that almost finished the company off and the inside of Doc Brown’s head from Back to the Future. It all felt very modern with no drum kits, just four percussionists wearing their electronic drums on their hips on shoulder straps. Byrne fades in and out of a stage choreography which he has described as 'democratised' because it makes prominent at different times other musicians. He treats us to his trademark, appealingly Wordsworthian, childhood wonder and his Gregor Samsa-like bafflement on encountering that human condition thing. And, as you’d expect, musicianship of the highest order and highest discipline was a delight. The classic songs that I knew, And She was, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, The Road to Nowhere and Psycho Killers were all performed with a tight swagger and arresting visual interplay between the onstage complement and the video backdrop. I'll just mention, and you will be staggered, Dear Reader, that, completely unexpectedly for an American Rock musician living in New York, Byrne felt moved to communicate his political credentials to us! Imagine my wonderment! The word FASCISM was given a prominent namecheck in connection with footage of Italians singing to each other from balconies on Liberation Day during Covid (there were a strange number of references to the Covid era). David explained for us that the liberation was from Fascism that happened in Italy don’tchaknow? He told us that showing kindness and love is the most punk thing you can do at the moment and the way to ‘resist.’ There followed footage of clumsy ICE myrmidons clutching vainly at a wacky young fellow on a strange bike-like contraption running their gauntlet and getting away. We cheered. Oh how we cheered! Then he asked us to guess which member of the band had a degree in Astrophysics and took delight in inviting a black female to step forward and give us a twirl. We also learnt that four members of the roadie crew were home-schooled but were marvellous anyway. And, finally, a hoarding reading ‘MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN!’ was projected. Which brings us back to the Teletubbies mentality and the infantile packaging. Did I discover that, appealing as the music is, it is really the juvenilia of a 75 year old man who is still producing it and that this was the answer to Qu’est-ce que c’est? that I hadn’t realised until now? Perhaps I'm being too harsh on an extremely talented artist...

Managed to catch a wee video of Psycho Killers. I thought this stuff was the dog’s bollocks when it came out.

The Glittering Prizes - Review

In ‘Alien’ human beings are horrifically subjected to the life cycle of another species in the same way as some wasps paralyse their prey so that they can act as hosts and nourishment for their larvae. In the film the humans are kept alive in a living death as part of a pulsating larder. In recent years the same has been done to BBC Drama. Still nominally alive and on our screens it is no longer an end in itself having been subjected to the requirements of social engineering and political activism. Watching the 1976 BBC series, ‘The Glittering Prizes’, free on Forgotten British Television on Youtube one understands the heights from which BBC Drama has fallen. Lord Oi Oi  invited me to re-watch a series I watched first time round as a 17 year old and to write a review. So here goes. 

I remember being rather dazzled by the often coruscating wit of the piece while being confused by much of the content. I hope I now have a better grasp on the latter. It seems to me that the series was often brilliant. It was a sociological and politico-historical record of the age it depicts. Rewatching it now I realise that much of it  also approximates to televised two-handers of taut Scandinavian drama proportions. This is especially true of Episode 3 where Adam Morris interviews Stephen Taylor (played by Eric Porter), an Oswald Moseley facsimile, who has been frothingly washed up on the shore by the tide of the Second World War like our own Ezra Pound.  In Episode 4, a brash and successful Australian from their Cambridge days (are there hints of Clive James?) exposes a prig who has needlessly subjected his family to penury by working in a rural Reform school for pious and high-minded reasons. This has real psychological and moral depth and the complexity and subtlety of the relation between the two men is very satisfying.

The series is flawed by certain contradictions though. The author, Frederick Raphael, was born in Chicago to well-off Jewish parents. The British father’s job with Shell Oil brought Raphael to Putney when he was seven just before the War. The boy was educated to a high degree at Charterhouse and Cambridge. It is fairly obvious that the series is a working out of autobiographical issues to do with Raphael’s Jewishness and the Cambridge milieu he swam in. Adam Morris, excellently portrayed by Tom Conti is his alter ego. The wit is Cambridge razor sharp but erring on the side of being over self-regarding. It seems there is nothing you can’t be ironic about and this fact becomes one of the problems Raphael struggles with; where is real seriousness located? Does real seriousness exist? Is it embarrassing to believe that it does? As an atheist Jew in an observant family in the swinging 60s how do  Adam and Raphael (presumably in the same predicament) address the issue of their Jewishness?  

These two problems come together at the beginning of Episode 6 where the wit is so sharp it cuts itself. Morris, now a successful author, addresses the small audience of some kind of Jewish society. He radiates heartless anti-Zionist contempt towards the audience, even to an elderly Auschwitz survivor, criticising them for their selfishness in demanding a homeland for post-Holocaust Jews while not demanding a homeland for Gypsies who also suffered in the Holocaust. The audience sensibly argues that the Jews have an ancient history in Israel and a religious culture while Gypsies do not. One could point out to Adam something that he seems to overlook, that Gypsies, by definition, are travellers without a homeland; a strange thing for one so clever to overlook. Then, later in the same, final, episode we discover that Adam carries around a photo of a Jewish schoolboy in school uniform with his hands up as he is being herded by Nazi soldiers. Suddenly seriousness intrudes and the constantly scathing and subverting ‘wit’ evaporates.

 

I think the problem was that Raphael was too 20th century and this made him conflicted. The wit is a simulacrum of the fierce adherence of the 20th century to a fashionably absurdist (Modernist?) outlook that undermines simple things or feels guilty about them; a clever, distancing wryness about them must not be abandoned. In spite of this his success, his happy marriage and his pleasing bourgeois life-style overwhelm him in the end and he has to embrace the lovely simplicity of it all. In spite of himself and his guilt in doing so, he is compelled to look on creation and say that it is good, even in reverse in condemning the Holocaust without reserve and exhibiting an allegiance to his lineage. He accepts his Glittering Prizes no longer able to be ironic about them, distance them or subvert them. He has overcome his guilt about his ‘privilege.’

As a footnote one has to say something about the treatment of women in the series. Raphael comes across as still being a 16 year old boy obsessed with hooters and apparently unaware that a person is attached to them. We constantly get the boys’ locker-room perspective on the matter. A Sociology lecturer casually tells a female student, mid-seminar, that her nipples are excellent before continuing to discuss time and motion studies while the student in question doesn’t bat a mascara’d eyelid. A brilliant academic, now turned alcoholic considers the lack of her cup-size a problem of greater proportion than her unfaithful husband and attempts to strip off in public. We even have a protest led by another female student who goes full topless for us. Women are completely sexually compliant and un-protesting (in spite of that protest!) as they might be in a 16 year old’s fantasy. It’s very seventies in this respect.

Pensées

Rationalist Law originating in the Enlightenment human mind has been made the Prime mover of reality rather than something that responds to reality. It has usurped creation. This is why our ability to govern is paralysed; it is hog-tied in Gordian knots of human thought. 

The opposition are at war with any cast of mind that believes it belongs somewhere or has an identity even though such things are required to frame the parameters of the human mind. 

Rationalist technocracy cannot allow common sense reality because it posits an alternate reality, one that only exists on a circuit board.

Technocratic Alienation

One of the glories of the Metaphysical poets was the association of their sensibilities. Eliot lamented a dissociation that he detected occurring after their reign in the literary world in the 17th century. This disassociation can perhaps be explained by the division between the rational and mathematical side of our nature from the rest of it - the aesthetic, the emotional, the ethical - caused by Descartes. All of the latter were in some sense demoted by the prioritisation of reason and even Maths as the sole detector and mediator of truth on which reliable knowledge could be founded (it is interesting that this heralded the period of philosophical alienation where we were dislocated from the physical, ‘noumenal’ world unable to prove that it exists). A dislocation was created in our nature between the human and the scientific side which alienated us from ourselves. We still still see this dislocation in our relationship with technology which can often demote or reduce the human in an insulting way. “The computer says no." Winston Churchill said we want scientists on tap not on top. He was Boris Johnson's hero but, in spite of this, Boris abdicated his over-arching humanity and wider vision than the purely scientific one in favour of the rule of scientists during the pandemic.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s take on Blake’s ‘Newton’ outside the Scottish National Gallery

The Triumph of Determinism

Does the direct real-time feed from a Labour  focus group on "what went well" to the nano-bots that were injected into his bloodstream mean that what we are looking at when we watch Keir Starmer is an actual AI Embodiment of a focus group speaking its words to us like a body-snatched replicant? Is this a horror story worse than Frankenstein or Alien in that all traces of a human consciousness have been replaced by circuitry without our knowledge? Is he just human reduced to mouthpiece for the data that streams through him - "5000 extra appointments in the NHS, the highest rate of growth in the G7...."? Is the real Starmer experiencing the horror of being one of Bacon’s Screaming Popes? After he is deposed will he, waking in a rest home in the Surrey countryside, need to be rehabilitated by being taught how to be a human again?

Human AI

I watched the interview on the 6 o’clock News last night where Chris Mason asked Keir Starmer for his reaction to the fact that he is the least respected PM in history. Starmer’s style in his response (and the style of Reeves and Phillipson) is to project contentment and satisfaction with what he’s doing whatever is happening and to act like an affectless human pianola spewing out ready-made sound bites that will read well in the press. He’s like a human version of AI.

My friend asked his phone the question ‘Is Keir Starmer an android?’ and the AI feature gave this helpful answer…

“No, Keir Starmer is not an android; he is a human politician and lawyer who has served as the Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He has been described as having a robotic demeanor by some critics, but this is a metaphorical expression of his political style, not a literal description.”

Controlling Meaning

Are the Culture Wars about more than the control of the narrative? Perhaps they are about the control of MEANING and interpretation, things that distinguish human beings? The creation of meaning derives from the motherboard of the one doing the creating.