But first, the bad weather...

In anticipation of Cathal Coughlan's forthcoming album 'Rancho Tetrahedron', here's an interview about the last one, 'Foburg', that I did on Resonance FM in 2006. I think I did an ok job, although the nerves definitely show through in a couple of places where I can't really find my words.

Suprisingly, A Post About Football

This is one of the fastest-selling issues ever of French sporting gazette L'Equipe apparently. The intrigue has even juicier elements than Anelka being sent packing after insulting his coach - the confrontation is said to stem from the fact that Zidane had undermined Domenech's authority by contacting the players directly to suggest tactical changes. These changes were then presented to Domenech, who rejected them (apparently also knowing full well where they came from).

One of the first things to note about the French coverage of the debacle and the performances put in by Les Bleus is that it shows up the fallacy that it is specifically the British media that heaps undue pressure on the national team. If anything the French coverage, at least in this case, is even more scathing. While our papers still evince a certain perverse optimism, the attacks on the French side are absolutely withering. The Ribery scandal and the fact that France look almost certain to not make it out of the group stage (putting them in a worse position than England) might be contributing factors here, though.

But what has struck me particularly is a comment quoted in the Independent:

"By the end of the match, I was supporting Mexico," said Alain, 43, a chef in a Parisian cafe. "They at least looked as if they wanted to play and that football was still fun for them. Our guys - what do they earn? Millions? - looked bored, miserable and as if they didn't give a damn."

You can argue that the deep-seated psychological terror suffered by our players when they pull on the shirt is something specific to England, but this schadenfreude on the part of supporters/impartial observers is something that transcends national boundaries. And it suggests a deep frustration with meritocracy. On the English side too, the amount of money these players are making is freqently raised. And why not? If Richard Seymour is right in 'The Meaning of David Cameron' to say that

"Class is not a status, a culture or an ethnicity. By class, I simply mean the relationship between the minority who own the lion's share of wealth and capital, and the majority who sell their labour to get by"

then the working class-or-not backgrounds of the players are irrelevant. The hugely inflated salaries for those 'at the top of the game' are hardly unrelated to the fact of fans being milked for their loyalty via Sky subscriptions and higher gate/season ticket prices. It's not just in the emotional sense that people are (or have) invested in these players.

As with captains of finance, though, we hear that the players are worth their salaries as that's what's necessary to retain the services of these most talented people. The trouble for footballers, as opposed to bankers, is that we actually get to watch the players doing what they do - badly. There may be differences of opinion on what the causes are for their woes and what the corresponding solutions might be (sack the coach, bring on Joe Cole etc) but there's widespread agreement on the fact that what we've seen so far in this tournament is a malfunctioning team. There's that truism that everyone's an expert when it comes to football. Of course there are difference levels of analysis, more acute points of view, but I maintain that we can all watch the England team and see that they are not only playing badly, but not even enjoying playing. It might not be true that everyone's an expert, but everyone can see and judge what these players are doing to earn their money. And whatever the supposed merits are that make them worthy of their pay packages, the sentiment abounds that, frankly, me and my crippled friend and my blind grandma playing our hearts out against Algeria just because we're overjoyed to be in the World Cup would make for a more edifying spectacle than what was witnessed.

We mutter about bankers not being worth their bonuses and all politicians being corrupt but since we don't have first-hand, visual evidence that ties their actions to our woes (and could such evidence even exist..?), we can still be convinced that this is only cynicism, that it's a judgement that only really applies to a minority. When there's a political scandal, a newspaper sting or a Channel 4 documentary catches someone in the act of abusing their power and influence, the initial sense of righteous indignation felt is quickly followed by a weariness and resignation - having your most cynical, kneejerk opinions confirmed is pretty depressing and we gradually, happily, and perhaps with some relief, revert to a the mildly optimistic default position, while the revelation that our betters are nothing of the sort is re-relegated to the status of a niggling suspicion. That was why at the height of the expenses scandal, the papers rationed their revelations, maintaining the high as best they could, to gradually diminishing effect and to the point where the attempt to relive the excitement of those heady days through the David Laws 'saga' (whatever the rights and wrongs of his position) was a dry, weary clusterfuck that left everyone involved feeling soiled and sorry - the press for going through the motions of calling for one more head, the coalition for going through the motions of 'accepting his resignation', and from anyone else for summoning interest in the news.

Back to the football... and between international competitions, when we don't get to see England in action, we 'forget' that they are a mediocre side and are (cautiously) optimistic again by the time the next one comes around. But while we're watching, the World Cup, perhaps partly for its scale (this is supposed to be the best team our country can produce) brings the reality of meritocracy very close. And we don't appear to like it.

Think You're Hard Enough

An excellent essay on Houllebecq by Ben Jeffrey, apparently writing the Zero book on Houellebecq, pinpointing very well the perversely invigorating quality of Houllebecq's prose.

Hysteria!

After watching Dario's Argento's 1977 horror classic 'Suspiria', the one with the Goblin soundtrack that's become hip in recent years, Justice sampling it etc, it occured that best equivalent in pop for Argento's brand of horror, at least in this film, is The Associates' 'Bap de la Bap'. It's in the luxuriant textures and the hall-of-mirrors sounds, but also the rising intensity, reaching a peak of hysterical, irrational but somehow totally lucid panic - too much lucidity, for in that moment you've grasped something terrible and it's even worse than you could have possibly imagined. The mouth gapes ever wider, the pupils dilate further...

"How does an antelope feel when it's getting chaaaased? The same as man with a geiger pointed in his faaace!

Folk politics, folk psychology and TV drama

David Simon:
“If we had anything right in the first four seasons as to the nature of the city, its problems, and why those problems seem so insolvable, why is it that we're not intensely aware of those problems?”



The montages that close each season of The Wire, although inseparable from the episodes preceding them where the relationships between these disparate scenes are explored, the “money” is followed and so on, they can also be viewed in themselves as pieces of popular art concerned with a Real that isn’t that of folk politics, of naïve-realistic cause and effect. It’s tempting to refer to The Wire’s attempt to map a more complex reality in terms of Metzinger’s ‘convolved holism’ in which “objects of experience are made up of other objects in a nested hierarchy.” In these montages it’s always an ‘individual’ who, momentarily, becomes the nexus of the events of the series. These montages mirror the opening credits, which are impersonal, depersonalised – no faces, no selves, just the money, drugs etc going round. On the most functional level, these moments end the series with a nice update of where the main characters are and what the state of play is in Baltimore. They can also be read in the conventional terms of character psychology as moments of realisation ie the character becomes conscious of the fact that they are caught in a web that is not of their making (with, in the Season 2 montage above, Nick Sobotka clinging to the fence with eyes closed, as if plugging into the network - I chose this one specifically because, via the container port, it has a scope that extends beyond Baltimore and the US). And yet the montages contain scenes which those characters could not have direct knowledge of, so that what we are also being shown is a sample, a taste of the what lies beyond an individual’s phenomenal experience. Simon’s “if we had anything right…” is an important qualification – although, as a journalist, I think Simon sees a lack of proper reportage as the most pressing issue to be addressed (the thrust of the fifth season) – it perhaps indicates a sense that, in philosophical and neurobiological terms, he and the other Wire writers were attempting to map the unmappable. But with its vision that ‘contains’ folk politics and folk psychology, The Wire’s message is that if we don’t try to look at the world in this way, we won’t learn anything. It also makes a serious case for fiction and art (albeit supported by a great deal of journalistic groundwork) being the best means of trying to apprehend the real of neo-liberal capitalism.

In a Sight and Sound article, the BFI’s Mark Duguid goes on the defensive for British TV drama, claiming that UK efforts have been overlooked in the rush to praise the American ‘golden age’. Some of his points ring true (the shallowness of British TV criticism for example) but is still forced to concede that “we might have to accept that sprawling, authored work isn’t a natural British form, just as our novelists don’t perpetually strive to write the Great British Novel. Anyway, how realistic is competing with America?” and mentions the budget for the latest HBO series. Budget issues aside (but see an earlier blog post for comments on how HBO is funded, and also hasn’t the quality of previous HBO projects then attracted big money producers like Tom Hanks?) but this relativist approach (ie both US and UK shows are good in their own ways) avoids the issue of whether it is precisely the scope of certain US dramas that accounts for the richness that so many admire, this sense of the form attaining a new maturity. Duguid also concludes “Though American drama may deal with universal themes, we also need drama that reflects our specific lived experiences and social problems, drama that can help to combat the alarming deficit of empathy that distorts public understanding of, say criminality, abuse or injustice (something that I’m not convinced much American television, however, sophisticated, does).

In other words, British drama should remain synonymous with social realism and kitchen sink psychology. Meanwhile, one of the defining features of the key US drama series is the way they transcend, or at least complicate, folk psychological (and by extension, folk political) interpretations of reality.

More is likely to follow on this subject.