When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but … | Continue reading
In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a c … | Continue reading
In Tasmania, a man is claiming that his exclusion from the Ladies Lounge, an exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art, constitutes gender discrimination. The museum’s lawyer contends that his being turned away is integral to what the art is about: “Part of the experience is being … | Continue reading
Once again, I just record these observations with little or no comment. One day, they’ll have a place in my magnum opus about cultural assumptions, the bells-and-whistles box set spun off from my MA dissertation. But till then... In Radio 4’s slightly contrived panel show One Per … | Continue reading
An interesting piece by Emma Green in The New Yorker about a resurgence in what’s known as liberal arts and/or classical education. Whatever you want to call it, it stands in opposition to the modern mainstream of pedagogy, favouring the canonical Great Books (and implicitly Dead … | Continue reading
A while back, I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen, with a focus on That Song, which had become ubiquitous two decades or more after it had first been released (and mostly ignored). And today, in the midst of an online discussion about the incongruous uses to which it’s been put (s … | Continue reading
Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response: Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s b … | Continue reading
I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look. | Continue reading
In, of all places, a news item about the death of Stuart Organ, who for many years played the headmaster of Grange Hill school, I see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead described as “a spin-off of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. And the phrase strikes me as total … | Continue reading
The clever people who sell Lyle’s Golden Syrup are removing the image of bees swarming round a dead lion from at least some of its packaging. “Our fresh, contemporary design brings Lyle’s into the modern day, appealing to the everyday British household while still feeling nostalg … | Continue reading
Sean Thomas in The Spectator claims to have found empirical evidence that music is getting worse. I agree with his conclusion, but don’t recognise his claim to objectivity; music is getting worse because I’m getting old and so, presumably, is Mr Thomas. If I were young, it would … | Continue reading
I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that … | Continue reading
There have been complaints that Michelle Terry is to play Richard III at the Globe. Not because she’s she’s the artistic director of the theatre and appears to have nabbed the plum role for herself, but because the monarch has a disability, and Ms Terry doesn’t. (The fact that sh … | Continue reading
An alternative reality, in which Swinging London was devised and documented not by Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Beatles, but by Samuel Beckett. (Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.) | Continue reading
Oh what a brouhaha there is about the lack of love Barbie has received in terms of nominations for the upcoming Oscars. (In short, it got a nod in the Best Picture category, but its female director and female star were less happy. Ryan Gosling, nominated for Best Supporting Actor … | Continue reading
Stolen from someone. Can’t remember who, which is grimly appropriate, I guess. Not for the first time, I think how much Barthes would have relished social media. Also, from John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure: Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of l … | Continue reading
In 1974, JG Ballard gave an interview to an 18-year-old admirer, Akihiko Kokuryo, and offered a message to readers of the speculative fiction magazine in which it was published. Translated into Japanese and then back into English it feels like a pretty good way of coping with the … | Continue reading
The new movie Mean Girls (which is in fact the film version of the stage musical of the old movie Mean Girls) would appear to have been stripped of its, well, meanness. “If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the … | Continue reading
The Ship of Theseus, aka Trigger’s Broom, isn’t quite the same thing as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, but it occupies a similar space. And it does emit some lovely memeage. | Continue reading
For no particular reason other than that tonight is a time to pretend to be Scottish, a selection of the names of lower league football teams. Poetry of sorts, ya wee radges. Have a bearable one. Strathspey Thistle Civil Service Strollers Gala Fairydean Rovers Carnoustie Panmure … | Continue reading
By Siân Ejwunmi-Le Berre, whose TV adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy starts tonight, and will probably annoy a) people who’ve read it and have a particular idea in their heads of how it should be be, which is fair enough, and b) people who haven’t read it but aargh, … | Continue reading
When I was in primary school, the first Friday afternoon after the Christmas holidays was a toy day, in which each of us was permitted to bring one thing we’d received from Santa and enjoy it with our friends and/or enemies. (It was a couple of years before I realised that the ki … | Continue reading
A study at the University of Valencia has cheered up grumpy Luddites everywhere by concluding that reading printed texts improves comprehension more than reading digital matter does. But they’re not entirely sure why. One theory is that the “linguistic quality of digital texts te … | Continue reading
I found this plea for financial assistance on a website that includes the full text of my book about Radiohead. I wonder how much they’re planning to pay me. PS: Received an email from one Miles Wihrt (don’t know if he has any connection with Internet Archive), who asked: Are you … | Continue reading
Searching for something else that I’ve now forgotten, I found something I wrote in 2007, responding to a very reasonable and polite suggestion that in this blog I was being a bit harsh to people who don’t read much and don’t know a lot about politics and philosophy and the like. … | Continue reading
The years when your musical tastes truly mattered to your identity are long gone, we are constantly told. The younglings no longer define as metalheads or b-boys or goths or disco queens or indie shambles; they just leave themselves at the mercies of the blessed algorithm and let … | Continue reading
Rolling Stone, for the first time in many decades, nails it. And we have to return to Anthony Bourdain’s summation of the man: Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a new … | Continue reading