Canned Laughter

It's that tea towel again...

There was an amusing moment on Friday night's edition of More or Less, the BBC's entertaining statistical fact-checking programme. A doctor, writing in the Guardian, had claimed that an erection diverts one fifth of the body's blood supply into the penis. Crikey! An amazing fact, if true, which a lot of listeners had asked the More or Less team to verify ("Asking for a friend", I expect). So another doctor was asked by presenter Tim Harford: how much blood does the typical male body contain? Answer, five litres. So, Tim mused, one fifth of that is ... one litre! Um, I'm thinking of one of those one litre bottles of drink... And now I'm wondering whether I've been doing this all wrong! Made me laugh, anyway. [1]

Humour is a funny business [canned laughter]. I like to watch those Netflix "specials", for example, but they rarely if ever actually make me laugh. I often wonder whether they pay those people in the front rows to guffaw and nudge each other over moments of "recognition humour"? The cameras certainly seem to be able to find the right faces pretty efficiently. At best, I get a wry smile from the likes of Taylor Tomlinson or Dave Chappelle, although I confess to getting a broad grin from John Mulaney. Laughter, though? Nope.

One of my old home-town friends, Rob, was a good teller of jokes (he probably still is, although he'll be telling them in French, now). He knew how to pace and voice a set-up and then deliver a knock-out punchline [canned laughter]. But what puzzles me – I actually asked him about this recently – was where he had got all those jokes from in the first place. He didn't seem to know. Of course, back in the Dark Ages of public entertainment – on the long and winding trail from public executions and cockfighting via music-hall turns and silent-cinema slapstick to the Goon Show of blessed memory – the telling of jokes was an essential part of social life. "Have you heard the one about...?" or "Knock, knock!" were the stuff of any night down the pub. Jokes – in the sense of miniature stories intended to evoke laughter – simply circulated from teller to teller, origin unknown, as a sort of oral folk literature. Mind you, apparently Kafka would crack up when reading his own stories to his friends. Here, have you heard the one about the guy who woke up to find he'd turned into a giant cockroach? Heh... [canned laughter]. But, unless I'm mixing in the wrong circles these days, the sharing of the formal joke has largely vanished from most contemporary social settings.

I used to think that everything important – philosophically, spiritually, socially – could be learned by paying proper attention to jokes. Jokes seemed to me the last living vestige of an ancient oral tradition of teaching wisdom by means of tales and parables. Zen koans or the Sufi tales of Mullah Nasruddin, for example, seek to instruct at the same time as they amuse or astonish, as do some of the parables in the Gospels: a pun about passing a camel through "the eye of a needle" (the name of a gate into Jerusalem) has that same faint glimmer of a time-tarnished joke as the cartoons in ancient copies of Punch now have. It's even possible to imagine that much of the philosophical writing of Wittgenstein or Derrida was intended to be hilarious [canned laughter].

One of the more surprising items that I stumbled across in Stevenage public library, somewhere around 1969, was a two-volume tome entitled The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, by Gershon Legman [2]. The book recounts, classifies and analyses hundreds of "off colour" jokes, most of which are very American, totally unfunny, and entirely baffling to an innocent 15-year old. I was too embarrassed ever to borrow the book, but would thumb through it in a private corner of the library. If nothing else, it planted the seed of the idea that there might be more to jokes than making people laugh.

Of course it does help if a joke is funny. But tastes and contexts differ, and what is hilarious with port and cigars in a Vienna drawing room in 1910 may well not work over a cup of instant coffee in the offices of Spare Rib in 1972. Humour is clearly subject to historical change, like everything else. Freud, in his outstandingly unfunny routine Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, gives this example of a joke that he has decided is simply silly (or, in his words, "idiocy masquerading as a joke"):

A man at the dinner table who was being handed fish dipped his two hands twice in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbour looked at him in astonishment, he seemed to notice his mistake and apologized: “I’m so sorry, I thought it was spinach.”

Time has had its way with Herr Doktor Freud's ponderous analysis, and this is now just about the only funny joke quoted in the entire book. Though on the rare occasions I have told it I have substituted "custard" for "spinach" [canned laughter].

But here's something Freud-related I read recently that I found interesting:

A new joke, Freud explained, could be traded around “like news of the latest victory.” Freud’s phrasing is dramatic, and his analysis is convincing enough, but it’s never helped me to like the genre of “the joke” as much as I like puns, wordplay, quips, and general banter between friends. It comes back, I think, to Shoemaker’s distinction between the performative aspect of jokes and the collaborative nature of wisecracks. If stand-up comedy leaves me cold (and it does), perhaps it is because it is less founded on human sociability, than wisecracks, which are always rooted in an impulse towards friendship. Next to wisecracking, telling jokes seems lonely to me.
Ben Wurgaft, "Kidding, not kidding: the philosophy of wisecracks", Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21 2024.

There's truth in that observation, I think. A Netflix special is a spotlit one-person performance, where the laughter is not so much the pay-off as a form of punctuation, like musical breath marks, which a skilled comedian can ride through their sequence of "bits", leading up to a final "mic drop" finish and the inevitable standing ovation. It does look rather lonely up there. But not even most professional comedians tell jokes, as such, now. Jokes have gone the way of neat, grand historical narratives – history is long on set-ups, short on good punch-lines – and most comics seem to have swallowed whole the line that they are truth-tellers to power (or fearless sharers of personal anguish) and not mere retailers of jokes to a paying public.

Today there is a pervasive nervousness about the "appropriateness" of the unruly reflexes that trigger our laughter. Real laughter is anarchic, and no respecter of social niceties; an irrepressible sense of humour and wobbly boundaries (especially when loosened further by drink in good company) will catch you out and embarrass you, like an ill-timed fart [canned laughter]. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I have to admit that most of the jokes that stocked my personal repertoire before I went to university are now completely unrepeatable. At university, I discovered pretty quickly that telling jokes was about as tragically unhip as wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and a tie. Although, as a learning experience it was second to none: there's no quicker way of discovering where the shifting boundaries of "polite society" lie than telling a favourite joke and then watching the appalled expressions form on the faces of people you would quite like to have as friends. And it really doesn't help if you try to explain that a well-turned piece of sexist, racist filth is also a Great Teaching.

But here is a joke for children, that still makes me laugh:

This is the story of the Brown Paper Cowboy. He had brown paper boots, and brown paper trousers, a brown paper shirt, and a brown paper hat. He even rode a brown paper horse with a brown paper saddle. But one day the sheriff had to arrest him. Why? For rustling.

Goodnight, and thank you! [mic drop and standing ovation]

Truth to power?

(setup, but no punchline...)

1. Talking of massive erections, here's a link to Roy Harper's "The Lord's Prayer". If you don't know it, why not apply headphones, and give it 23 minutes of your attention? (You should at least listen to the first few spoken minutes, if only to discover the erection connection). N.B. that is Jimmy Page on guitar. Roy Harper's Lifemask album is one of those records that, in its original vinyl incarnation, only had one side as far as I was aware; Talking Heads' Remain in Light is another. I'm pretty sure I've never heard the flip side of either album. Harper's ecstatic recitation of humanity's post-Ice Age attributes reminds me of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, which I'm pretty sure he won't have known. Like Smart's poem, Harper's is packed with overreaching pomposity, some astounding imagery, and more wisdom than you might have bargained for; it's what you might call Prog Folk. He has a great voice and it's an incredible bit of production, too, and then there's that guitar...

2. Although not the most surprising. That was a little stash of pornographic photographs that fell from between the pages of Shakespeare's Bawdy, by Eric Partridge, an entirely serious work of scholarship. It was clear that libraries had designs on me from an early age. "Come in, lad, and look around... Here be treasure!"

Solid Air

Earlier in the year I was in the kitchen, when there was an urgent tapping on the window. Looking up, I expected to see my partner, whose house key decides periodically not to cooperate with the front door lock (or it might even have been bloody Greta Garbo again [1]), but there was no-one there. Spooky!

A minute later, there it was again. This time, I spotted the tapper: a Blue Tit was perched at the edge of the window, scrutinising the kitchen interior with that revved-up, robotically twitchy swivelling of the head that they do. For a week or two afterwards it would turn up regularly, first at one of the kitchen windows, then at the other, give everything a rapid once-over and a few taps on the glass, then fly off. Whether it was frustrated by the glass blocking access to the kitchen as a potential all-mod-cons apartment and larder or, more prosaically, gathering spider-web for an actual nest somewhere nearby, I'm not sure.

Then just yesterday, I was sitting quietly reading in this back room where I "work" these days, when there was a series of muffled thuds on the French windows (or les portes-fenêtres if you happen to be French). When I looked outside to see what was going on, I could see a dazed-looking squirrel backing away from a confrontation with its hard-headed, identical rival, who seemed to know and counter its every move, and presumably could also be seen backing away into the gloomy ghost garden inside my room. Outcome: a headache-inducing draw.

I am intrigued by the inability of creatures ranging in size and intelligence from flies to pigeons and even the more stupid cats to cope with the existence of glass windows. If a fly gets into the room, it will immediately make for the window, attempt to fly through it, then spend the rest of its short life trying to puzzle out why the air has become impassably dense, like a tiny mime with six hands. In late summer, the windowsills bear the dried-out husks of the fallen: bold but baffled flies who tried and failed to answer the riddle and pass on through to the other side.

On the outside of the glass, however, smarter spiders diligently rebuild and refine the webs that get wiped away periodically by the window-cleaner, having somehow understood that these zones of solid air make for a good trap: even the biggest flies that can crash through a web will smack into the glass and rebound, stunned, into the sticky mesh. It's amazing to watch how quickly an apparently comatose spider can snap into action and skate across a web to paralyze and wrap its next meal. Although it must be tantalising for them to see a plump fly repeatedly banging its head against the other side of that thin, invisible barrier; within reach but, according to some unfathomable, unbreachable law of the spiderverse, untouchable.

All of which poses one of those interesting-but-unanswerable questions. In an infinite universe, what are the chances that we, too, are baffled by, or unaware of the existence of structures or entities we are simply not equipped to detect or understand? We may not really understand gravity, but it is clearly there, and measurable. Speculation aside, our intelligence and awareness cannot push very far, if at all, beyond the limits imposed by our bodies and sensory apparatus. So I wonder: do we, too, invariably end up as detritus on some cosmic windowsill, having repeatedly tried and failed to answer the riddle and pass on through to the other side?

Heh. Just my Thought for the Day... Cue up "Don't Fear the Reaper"...

Once there was a way...

1. Allusion to a classic Pete and Dud sketch.

(BTW, if you don't know it, the song "Solid Air" by John Martyn is worth a listen (as is the whole album of the same name). An all-time favourite around here. It's true, as my friend Dave complains, that, as with the other stand-out song on the album, "May You Never", JM's songs can be simple and unvarying – they lack a middle eight, etc. – but this has never bothered me, I have to say. Best consumed very late at night, immobile on someone's floor, very stoned...).

Sizzle vs. Sausage

If you're not a follower of the photowebs, you may not be aware that there is currently a lot of excitement and speculative hoo-hah about the recent launch of – wait for it – the Pentax 17, a half-frame 35mm film camera with very restricted capabilities that will cost around £500. No, really.

I'm not about to review the thing, which strikes me as a bizarre attempt by Pentax to cash in belatedly on what must surely be a passing fad for film, with what amounts to an expensive remake of the most basic sort of point-and-shoot camera, last seen in the 1980s. I cashed in myself when I sold on my remaining 35mm compacts last year for what seemed to me like a lot of money (but rather less than £500 in total), although those were comparatively capable "full frame" cameras (Olympus XA and mju II) that I had used for many years as my family snapshot cameras. Given the quality, convenience, and sheer versatility of the typical phone camera, I can't see many people who are not essentially fashion victims choosing to burden themselves with any sort of film camera, not least because of the cost, delay, and likely disappointing quality of the end results (oh, those paper wallets of terrible 6" x 4" "enprints"...). Add to that the fact that there is an entire galaxy of unwanted but stellar film cameras out there to choose from, and you have to wonder what the Ricoh-Pentax team are on.

To be honest, I simply don't understand this enthusiasm for film. As I have written before several times, going right back to one of my earliest blog posts (Tears in the Stop Bath, 2009) it was a life-changing moment for me when going digital meant that I was finally able to abandon the darkroom – something I had endured as a necessary evil, at best – and best of all to save the large amounts of cash I had regularly been handing over for the processing of colour negative film. The nostalgia for film seems to me to be like a nostalgia for coal fires. Yes, sitting by a blazing fire can be an extremely pleasant sensation, but it's easy to forget the housework involved when it's a daily chore – humping in coal from the shed, clearing the previous day's ash from the grate, getting the fire going and keeping it going – and the fact that every other room would still be freezing in winter weather, and the whole house would feel chilly on cool days when the bother of starting a fire seemed excessive. Ah, what a joy it was to go to bed on winter nights between cold clammy sheets, and to wake up with frost inside the window! What a laugh when your unswept chimney caught fire, or a sudden downdraft puffed soot all over the carpet! Central heating? So much less fun!

No, what interests me is the (over)reaction. Usually sensible folk like Mike Johnston or Chris Niccolls seem to have been bending over backwards to be positive about this new Pentax film camera. To the point where people are actually saying things like, "I know it's pretty crappy, really, but I'm tempted to buy one just to encourage Pentax to carry on down this road, and make a good one next time!" What? Why would anyone donate money (and, call me a skinflint, but £500 still strikes me as a large sum of money) to a multinational enterprise for a product you neither need nor want just to encourage them to do better next time? Write them a bad review, guys, that's all the "encouragement" they need.

The most surprising aspect of the reaction, though, is the idea that, somehow, this oddly underspecified device – it has a slow fixed lens, zone focussing only, no manual settings, etc., etc. – has re-invented the simple fun of snapshooting. Although, actually, this may not be so surprising. If you read the camera reviews on PetaPixel and elsewhere, or even the musings of someone like Mike Johnston, you'll know quite how nerdy and obsessively detailed things have become. When it comes to digital imaging we've reached a plateau of excellence where, frankly, any camera at any price-point is better than you or I actually need. In fact your phone is probably better for most practical purposes. Now, these guys may claim to take photographs for fun and profit in their own time (although I have my doubts about that), but their day job is to compare autofocus speeds, screen pixel densities, menu options, button positions, and all the minutiae of present-day digital camera design, day in, day out. It surely has to be even more boring for them to write about than it is for us to read. So to be sent out into the street to review a new piece of photo-jewellery with the stunted functionality of a disposable camera must be quite a liberation; fun, indeed. But it's the sort of fun gadget, like a slow cooker or a spiralizer, that will be a short-lived enthusiasm for most, and end up in a cupboard, or on eBay.

Yes, digital cameras have become boring, having started out in a veritable Cambrian Explosion of innovative variety, now that they have all converged on a handful of tried and tested designs, all doing much the same things in much the same way. But so do fridges, microwave ovens, cars, power drills, hairdryers, and every other functional device and tool out there (although that Dyson bloke has done his best to shake things up). Clearly, when it comes time to buy a new camera the reviews have their place in weighing up one set of boring options against another. But if, like me, you generally buy second-hand kit, then the testimony of actual users counts for more; and even more persuasive is the hard evidence of the actual results they get.

The thing is that great photographs are never boring; you just have to have a boring camera (and, for digital, an even more boring computer and inkjet printer) to make them. Any old camera will do. Significant bodies of work have been made with actual toy cameras using film like the Holga and the Diana (see Nancy Rexroth's Ohio), and even with pinhole cameras, but that doesn't mean that using the same hardware as some successful artist you admire will endow your photos with the same fairy dust. Ditto an 8" x 10" view camera, an iPhone, or some eye-wateringly expensive DSLR. There is no substitute for having an eye for a picture, experience, imagination, access to your favoured subject matter, persistence, and above all a personal "vision" that aligns with and is enhanced by the characteristics of your chosen medium.

Someone out there, I'm sure, will buy one of these new Pentax cameras, make the essential investment in both time and money (and film processing, printing and/or scanning, will consume large amounts of both) and produce worthwhile work. Maybe the magic and "beginner's mind" inspired by a new toy won't wear off. Maybe the absence of choices – fixed lens, zone focussing, no manual settings, and so on – will stimulate rather than frustrate them. It's an approach that works for most of us, after all: I have to confess that I generally leave my cameras on "program mode" most of the time, myself (that is, when I'm not using my iPhone). But, please, everyone calm down: let's not confuse the sizzle with the sausage...

Essay Crisis Averted

Looking through my notebooks for something completely different, I noticed that I'd copied out a number of quotations on the "rational" in art over the years – mainly picked up via articles linked in Arts & Letters Daily – but had never got around to using them in a blog post. Here are a few:

Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion, which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life.

 Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (Heinemann 1897).

"An intelligible work is the product of a journalist," said the Dada founder Tristan Tzara, who wore the crown of incomprehensibility. Tzara thought if you could articulate a work, it was a sign of the work’s artistic impoverishment: "When a writer or artist is praised by the newspapers, it is proof of the intelligibility of his work: wretched lining of a coat for public use." In this formulation, obscurity is the sine qua non of art. Theodor Adorno echoed this theory: "Incomprehensibility persists as the character of art, and it alone protects the philosophy of art from doing violence to art."

"The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility", by Michael LaPointe, Paris Review, December 1, 2016 (writing about the Voynich Manuscript).

The problem is not that scholarship — at least the apprentice version practiced by bright young students at fine old schools — is serious but that it is not serious enough. It is the art that is grave and difficult. [Yvor] Winters solved this problem by insisting that the split between art and learning was based on a romantic delusion about the emotive, expressive, and personal essence of art. [Lionel] Trilling, while noting that "nowadays the teaching of literature inclines to a considerable technicality," found it impossible to contain the discussion of modern writing within the ambit of technique. To do it justice was to grapple with painful and personal matters, with one’s own thoughts about sex, alienation, injustice, and death, to "stare into the abyss" and then write a term paper about it.

Excerpt in New York Times from "Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth", by A.O. Scott (Penguin, 2016).

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as an illustration for children, that it is the reward for service to the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unchaining of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may be going on down below that you no longer know about, up above, when you write stories in daylight. Perhaps there is another kind of writing, but I only know this one; at night, if fear keeps me from sleeping, I know only of this kind. And the devilishness of it seems very clear to me.

Kafka in a letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which is very often topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita", 1954

 Oh, and there's this more recent thought, too, not entirely unrelated:

But I’m also haunted by something I saw in Google’s A.I. demo. The video featured A.I. briefly summarizing emails someone hadn’t read. Then it demonstrated generating new emails to reply with. It’s easy to extrapolate. The recipients will use A.I. to avoid reading that email and generate new A.I. replies for others to avoid reading. How soon until everyone’s inbox is overflowing with emails no human has read or written? Why stop at emails? A.I. can write book reviews no one reads of A.I. novels no one buys, generate playlists no one listens to of A.I. songs no one hears, and create A.I. images no one looks at for websites no one visits.

This seems to be the future A.I. promises. Endless content generated by robots, enjoyed by no one, clogging up everything, and wasting everyone’s time.

Lincoln Michel, "The Year That A.I. Came for Culture", The New Republic, December 20, 2023

This is just one particular view of art, of course, and easily dismissed as "woo woo". It's not entirely Post-Freudian, but the "unconscious" has clearly taken over from where the Romantics' yearnings for "something far more deeply interfused" left off. Or I suppose if we wanted to go much further back, it's the Dionysian versus the Apollonian view of the world. Pure reason does seem to lead us into bad places, though, doesn't it? I saw a nice quote recently that puts it well: "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." [1]

But what a relief never again to be obliged to write up some coursework (I assume that is what is meant by a "term paper"?) or even a well structured blog post about any of that, though. It's like waking up from one of those anxiety dreams about having to sit an exam you have forgotten to prepare for... Which is, I suppose, just one of the nightly pranks the irrational brain likes to play on the rational mind. Or might it even be the other way round?

So, rather than write that essay, here instead is my book Dream Theatre presented as an Issuu flipbook (As usual, click the circular device in the middle to go to a full screen view). Aiming for a pass mark, here, nothing more...

1. Author Joanna Maciejewska (no, me neither) on Twitter, quoted by Mike Johnston on TOP.

Just One Thing

It is terribly sad news indeed that Michael Mosley (that's doctor Michael Mosley, of course) has been found dead on the Greek island of Symi, where he and his family were on holiday, after going missing for a few days. I doubt many non-Brits will know who Mosley was, but he had acquired enough of the status of "national treasure" here for his distinctive vocal mannerisms and engaging broadcasting style to be regularly parodied affectionately on the weekly satirical broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Dead Ringers.

Among many life-enhancing advocacies, his popularising of intermittent fasting in the form of the "5:2 diet" has been particularly effective for many, myself included. After I had retired in 2014, I realised that thirty years of mainly sedentary work in an office had caused me to put on more weight than was healthy. I am short (5' 6"), used to have a 28" waist in my college years, and weighed around 70kg (roughly 11 stone). By 2014, I was buying 38" waist trousers (occasionally 40" for comfort) and weighed something over 90kg (roughly 14 stone); not good, and probably rather worse than that. But, by adopting the 5:2 diet a few years ago, I have now lost a bit more than 10kg (22 lb) and several inches around the waist, and hope to get back down into the comfortable mid 70kg range during the next couple of years. Thanks, Dr. Mosley!

It has to be said that this sort of shocking flip from carefree holiday to irremediable tragedy has a particular, almost mythic resonance. The mystery of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, for example, has echoed through the British media ever since 2007. Every year, though, someone will make some simple but tragic misjudgement in an unaccustomed, apparently safe environment that will haunt their friends and family ever after. I think of a member of staff at the school where I worked for a while as a teaching assistant, who was confined to a wheelchair. He had been walking along a beach, on his way to a wedding in Ireland. Realising he was late, he decided to take a shortcut by scaling the cliff, wearing his suit and everyday shoes. He never arrived, but luckily was missed and found. It seems that Michael Mosley's mishap was not dissimilar: walking home alone from the beach, and having taken a wrong turn that led to a lengthy and mountainous detour in blazing afternoon sunshine, he took a shortcut down a rocky slope, only to collapse unseen, yards from the safety of a beach bar. 

However, early reports on his disappearance conjectured a likely fall from a cliff or mountain ledge, with the inevitable speculative hints at a suicide. These have proved false, but I was immediately put in mind of something that happened – or nearly happened – to me when I was sixteen.

In the summer of 1970 I spent the last ever holiday with my parents, a ten-day package in a hotel in Cala Millor, Majorca. It wasn't great – I was behaving like a sullen half-wit with a grudge, as surly 16-year-olds will do – but it did have its moments. There were some memorable group trips, such as a descent into the caverns and lakes of the Cuevas del Drach, and a simple barbecue in a light rain shower, with freshly caught fish grilled right on the beach, raindrops spitting as they splashed the hot griddle. I also had my own room for the first time, so I could slip out at night and sample the nearby bars. Rum and Coke, por favor! Most memorable, though, was one of my earliest and closest brushes with death.

Rather than sit with my parents lazing on the beach, I had gone instead for long, solitary walks into the Majorcan countryside which, away from the hotels and bars, is truly amazingly beautiful. So, one very hot afternoon, I was walking along a nearby rocky peninsula named Punta de n'Amer, head down, dazed and dazzled by the heat and light and lost in my own thoughts, when I nearly stepped straight over the cliff at the end of the promontory. I still recall the shock of gazing between my feet at the waves lapping jagged rocks seventy feet below. I particularly remember the dramatic change in the ambient acoustic: one second it was all shrilling insects, up close and intimate like the tinnitus I now endure, the next it was the vast echoing antechamber of a lonely, painful death, narrowly avoided.

It would have been a true "Musée des Beaux Arts" moment. Out to sea a fishing boat was chugging by, and one can imagine the fishermen remarking (to paraphrase Auden) "something idiotic, a boy walking over a cliff", but sailing on, with a fresh catch to unload. Doubtless, my death would have been recorded as a possible suicide, rather than just a stupid misadventure brought on by adolescent self-absorption, amplified by exposure to peak afternoon Mediterranean sunshine.

The agony and self-questioning this would have caused my parents doesn't bear thinking about; in comparison, my adolescent tendency to behave like (no: to be) a truculent dickhead seems eminently forgettable, if not forgivable. It is something I do think about from time to time, though, along with all the other nearly-was and might-have-been disasters, embarrassments, and assorted near misses that didn't quite happen along the way. We are all like cartoon characters, sidestepping life-threatening perils such as falling anvils, deep pits in the road, and random explosions entirely by good fortune, dumb luck, chance, divine providence, fate, a guardian angel, or whatever other agency you choose to put it down to. The miracle is that most of us don't get flattened by that falling anvil most of the time, although some of us will. In the end, as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his novel V, we simply have to acknowledge "Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane".

I suppose if I had to think of "just one thing" (to use Michael Mosley's formula) that might keep us bumbling along as safely and for as long as possible, I couldn't do better than sergeant Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, who would say at the end of every morning roll call: "Hey: let's be careful out there..."

Majorca, 1970

The New Old

This business of becoming old has occupied my thoughts lately, for obvious reasons. It must always have been a tricky adjustment to make, but may be especially so for a generation that, rhetorically at least, hoped to die before enduring that grim fate, or at least to remain eighteen until the bitter end (ridiculous and misguided, obviously: I'd settle for thirty-six).

Of course, what "old" means in 2024 is rather different from what it meant in 1964, say, when I was ten and very far from old.

Back then, the elderly seemed to belong to a single tribe. At least, that was the case where the older people of my acquaintance were concerned. They dressed alike, all seemed equally at odds with modern life, and lived quiet lives on the periphery of our everyday concerns. They were old; nothing more. Although it's true that they were also old working-class people: short on schooling, unambitious, and after retirement in their mid-sixties terminally tired and seemingly devoid of purpose; sitting out their final years like flight-delayed travellers stranded in death's departure lounge. A coach trip to the seaside, a few drinks and a nostalgic singalong was about as good as it got. Really? No thanks! Cue up My Generation...

Famously, those post-war decades were the years when a heady rush of aspiration, opportunity, and youthfulness was coursing through the veins our tired old country. To be old, or to adopt the values of the old, was to be on the wrong side of history: for a light-hearted take, watch A Hard Day's Night. Almost overnight, it seemed to have become the elderly, not children, who were to be seen and not heard.

This was a child's perspective, obviously. In those days it was quite normal to know almost nothing about your grandparents; even, sometimes, their first names. Mine, certainly, existed behind an impenetrable wall of polite indifference, unable to help with school work, incurious about books or music, and seemingly incapable of sustained conversation, not least with an annoying and exhaustingly bright and bookish young grandchild, the very embodiment of the Brave New World in which they had found themselves adrift at the end of their lives, like first generation immigrants from a very foreign country. After all, back then, even plastics and television were still mind-blowing novelties, never mind the imminent prospect of actually flying to the moon. It must have been overwhelmingly strange.

Tom and Ivy (my maternal grandparents)

But, enough about them, then; what about us, now? We are the New Old, many of us gifted the likelihood of a decade or two more life than even our parents enjoyed, due to easy living, good diet, and modern medicine, although this prospect is given a certain edge by an inheritance of genes finally set free to express themselves in all sorts of good, bad, and random ways that evolution has not had time (and may never have cause) to catch up with. For the luckier ones among us, it can seem that death's grim departure lounge has lately been expanded and transformed into some sort of well-resourced holiday camp (not necessarily an attractive prospect, of course: see The Prisoner...). On the other hand, for the less lucky ones it has become the very grim prospect indeed of a lengthy stay in some cut-price care home.

One of our particular distinguishing features, I think, is that we are the first couple of generations of older folk who acquired various niche tribal identities and loyalties in our youth, often based on nothing more than our taste in music. It is important, at least to each individual's sense of self, that Paul was once a punk, Steve was a stoner, Harriet was a hippie, and Gail was a goth. These identities may have become submerged by adult life, but always persist at some level. Other, less frivolous youthful identities may have remained at the surface: Fran will never have abandoned her radical feminism, for example, and Robbie is still anticipating a revolution of some sort as the cure for all social ills. But such serious-minded orientations are very different from the sort of tribe mainly characterised by fashions in hair, clothes, music, drugs, and vague philosophies of life based on hearsay and song lyrics.

I think it's true to say that this sort of elective "lifestyle" identity had previously only been common among those living on the colourful fringes of society, where the bohemian and criminal classes found common cause in their rejection of conventional lifestyles. But our post-war safety nets had become sufficiently capacious for the young to "cosplay" as colourful outsiders for a while without suffering the consequences. And many did, especially during that time out from real life endowed by free higher education, or by a period of unemployed creative idleness financed by state benefits. You could choose from a whole dressing-up box of identities for a few years, then in most cases put away childish things (not to mention dangerous things) in the interests of family, career, and generally "fitting in".

True, increasingly from the 1960s you could continue to have your rebel cake and eat it, too [1]. You no longer had to buy into the whole conformist package to have a professional career, for example. At least, up to a point. It's one thing to refuse to wear a suit and tie or a skirt and heels; quite another to turn up late for work looking like you've spent the last few nights in a shop doorway. The line dividing "acceptable" from "unacceptable" behaviours is constantly moving – just look at all those Senior Sirs with their designer stubble and smart-casual open collars – but it will never move fast or far enough to accommodate the bone-deep rebel or misfit.

You, like me, probably have friends who have managed successfully to evade a lifetime of conventional employment. Result! (I suppose?). But in the more extreme cases (I think of my recently-deceased friend Tony) there can be a heavy price to pay for a refusal to "fit in": poverty, failed relationships, homelessness, and even prison terms and mental ill-health. There's an enormous difference between looking like an outsider and actually becoming an outsider. There's really no coming back from having "FUCK OFF" tattooed onto your forehead, whether literally or metaphorically, is there?

As for the rest of us, those latent tribal identities may sometimes start to emerge again in old age, like some treasured article of clothing kept in the back of the wardrobe for years, or pulling the tarp off an old motorbike stored in the shed. After decades of conventional life, no matter how "bourgeois bohemian" in style, some of us in our retirement years will choose to raise again the pirate flag of our ancient youthful affiliations. Why this should be is an interesting question. Perhaps it's to show presumptuous young 'uns that it's all been done before by the true pioneers (see my ancient post You Can All Join In)? Or perhaps it's just a way of signalling that you are finally free of wage slavery, living the life you had always meant to live?

Whatever the reasons, this sort of reversion is doubtless just an outward manifestation of the eternal nostalgia for lost youth, and only appears to be something new because there had previously been nothing much to revert to for previous generations of old folk, who had mostly left school at fourteen and immediately had to start looking for work: no extended educational opportunities or state benefits in those days! As is often pointed out, the "teenager" is very much a post-war invention.

Although it is true that my father did rediscover himself as "WW2 veteran" in his old age, donning a regimental blazer and medals at Remembrance Sunday services, something he had conspicuously avoided doing for all of the preceding five decades. But that was an identity earned the hard way, and not one freely chosen off any pick 'n' mix teenage rack: "Hmm, maybe I'll spend the next five years overseas in uniform, doing whatever stupid and dangerous things I'm told to do while dodging bombs and bullets? Hey, sounds great!" It has to be admitted, though, that despatch riders did have a pretty high quotient of cool, and it must have had its moments.

Dad in Calcutta, en route to Burma, 1944

Our own later-life declarations of affiliation to lifestyle packages abandoned decades ago are not necessarily false-flag operations. The legendary "fifty-quid bloke" who sustained record stores for many years always remained loyal to his music of choice: the rest of the package was fun, formative, but secondary. You simply can't work as a doctor or lawyer, for example, or teach classes of thirty-plus adolescents while nursing a hangover or stoned out of your gourd (don't ask me how I know this). But retirement means "fun" can come back into the picture, however defined, delimited, or constrained in old age. And why not?

A shorthand for all this might be "old men with ponytails". It can take many other outward forms, of course, although it does quite often seem to involve a leather jacket, shades, and a "characterful" hat of the sort favoured by musicians. Thin, grey, balding hair is not a youthful look, though, and it has to be conceded that the phenomenon is more often than not a male thing, women generally being more aware of when something is making them look ridiculous. Perhaps "ram dressed as lamb" is an expression that should be in wider circulation. [2] But then not caring that you look ridiculous is all part of the fun, isn't it?

Some old idiot, Xmas 2021

Talking of which, if ever I need cheering up I find that a guaranteed source of mirth are those ubiquitous documentaries on the streaming services about "classic" rock and pop, usually cobbled together from very brief clips of actual recorded performances, generously padded out with "talking head" interviews with a rogues gallery of venerable musicians, ex-musicians, journalists, and record producers, all now well into their seventies and eighties. Who are, naturally, usually kitted out with a leather jacket, shades, and a characterful hat, despite sitting indoors under studio lights.

That the once slender, shaggy-haired guitarist of long-forgotten band X – seen wrestling with a Stratocaster in a clip from The Old Grey Whistle Test ca. 1972 – now looks like a paunchy plumber (something he may well have become out of necessity in the intervening decades), or that the flamboyant lead singer now resembles a wizened shrunken head on a stick, ought not to be surprising: the depredations of age and excess on the male body are as sadly predictable as male-pattern baldness. Neither, indeed, should it necessarily be hilarious. But it almost invariably is, in a Schadenfreude sort of way.

But the hilarity is double-edged. To laugh at these guys togged up to re-live their brief days of glory as minor deities of rock half a century ago is also to laugh at one's own vanity, at the tragic absurdity of the New Old wanting to be forever young.

Eighteen 'til I die? Ridiculous... As I say, I'd happily settle for thirty-six.

Forever young in Swanage, ca. 1960

1. "You can't have your cake and eat it, too"...This is one of the more curious English proverbial expressions, usually directed at someone who doesn't realise or can't accept that they're faced with a binary choice. As a child, even as a native speaker with an interest in language, it took me years to work this one out: how could you eat a cake without having it? But "to have" here means "to still be in possession of" your cake, having eaten it, an impossible wish. That is, assuming (a) having it inside you doesn't count as "possession", (b) you only had just one small cake, or (c) weren't eating a large cake one slice at a time... Do you still "have" a partially eaten Victoria sponge, for example? One for the philosophers...

2. A play on another curious expression: "mutton dressed as lamb". Quite apart from the sneering misogyny, it's interesting how the original sense of "dressed" (i.e. "prepared for the table") has been lost, resulting in the curious idea that sheep should always be seen wearing age-appropriate clothes.

You Again, Again

These chairs are not on speaking terms

I noticed that an old post from 2014 – You Again, about Marina Abramović – has attracted a few readers in past weeks, so I thought I'd revisit it myself. In it there is a link to a video of an encounter between Abramović and her ex-partner Ulay, and I was surprised to find that I was more moved by it now than I had been back then. A decade more of living, a few more "absent friends", plus some near misses and general physical and emotional wear and tear will do that, I suppose.

Marina Abramović had a substantial show recently at the Royal Academy (September 2023 - January 2024) that attracted a lot of attention, not least for the dubious prospect of having to squeeze through a doorway between two naked bodies. But although I had booked a ticket in the end I cancelled for some reason or other. TBH, these days, the prospect of travel to London and back can be disincentive enough (see The Next Village).

So here is that post again, as usual in a new, improved! version.

You Again

Marina Abramović is back in the news. She is the ne plus ultra of performance art, the test case, working on the borderline where narcissism, obsession, insanity, sheer daftness, and that nebulous thing called "art" ebb and flow. She is the self-styled "grandmother of performance art", with the stories and the scars to prove it.

I'm not much interested in her work, as such, but the story of her relationship with fellow nutter-cum-artist Ulay is deeply fascinating to me. They met in 1976, and formed an intense folie à deux that found expression in some (now) famous performance pieces: breathing mouth-to-mouth until they both passed out from lack of oxygen; alternately slapping each other in the face until one or the other was unable to continue; bellowing incoherently at each other for hours... Heh... Just the usual stuff of any over-intense relationship, no? "Don't worry, children, Mummy's just suffocating Daddy!" Some of us will have been there from time to time, I expect, although not generally before an appreciative public audience.

But:

In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye". Abramović conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy, and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.”
(from Wikipedia's Abramović article)

The thing is, having decided to end their relationship as a grandiose piece of performance art, they never met again.

Until... In 2010 Abramović gave what is probably her most famous recent performance, "The Artist is Present", at New York's MOMA, in which she shared a period of silence with each of an endless queue of visitors to the gallery, sitting opposite them at a small table with a composed, blank expression. Then one day, remarkably, Ulay himself simply turned up and sat down, after those 22 years of separation. You can witness what happened next here on YouTube.

Despite the fact that some of those present clearly understood what was happening – which might suggest it was not quite as spontaneous an event as it seemed – it is nevertheless a very moving encounter, and in a spirit quite different from the studiedly inscrutable mask of the main performance. It's an undeniable moment of humanity, disrupting an art-form which usually seems little more than histrionic indulgence in a sterile narcissism, onto which we are free to project whatever we care to or need to. Which may, of course, have been the whole point of the intervention, a sort of reverse Emperor's New Clothes: Look! Beneath all that nakedness she was fully clothed all along!

There is a spoiler update, though: in 2015 Ulay would go on to sue Marina Abramović for breach of contract, alleging that she was declaring herself to be the sole author of works created jointly, and basically owed him loadsamoney. In the event he won, scoring €250K plus legal fees off his ex. Now that's what I call a performance! Although you do have to wonder whether it will ever figure in the catalogue raisonné of their joint projects...

These chairs are being friendly