alex thomson
16 March 2005
THE FT TOP 100 SONGS
84. Pulp – “Babies”
The genius of “Babies” is that the harder you try to make sense of the story the less sense the song seems to make: and the more you think about the song the less the story matters. This is a confession of what ‘happened years ago’ which is also a seduction; an attempt to rewrite (Freud might say ‘cathect’) pre-lapsarian companionship as the prehistory of today’s desire. But the urgency of the chorus – ‘I want to take you home’ RIGHT NOW – suggests that teenaged fumblings are not the prelude to but the truth of mature sexuality, hastily hidden under the mattress when adulthood knocks on the bedroom door. Making babies is the coverstory: “Babies” doesn’t just make the family the centre of precocious sexual experiment, but makes home, kids, boyfriend-girlfriend, everything else, an excuse for it.
Story: curiosity becomes desire (‘I wanted to see as well as hear’); fellowship ‘we listened’) is abandoned for solitary vice (scopophilia); the act of entering the wardrobe (shades of CS Lewis?) becomes both enclosure and a seemingly paradoxical kind of exposure. Shut in by our desires, we’ve also effectively cornered ourselves: ‘I fell asleep inside, I never heard her come’, I was hiding, but there was nowhere to hide… And then repetition: she caught me inside; you caught me inside her, and although this time I heard you stop outside the door, I still couldn’t do anything else!
Song: a hymn to the aimlessness of undisciplined teenage desire, not yet running along socially sanctioned lines, in which one body can be substituted for another, one sister for another, one sex for another. Desire which expands to fill the time (after school) and space (bedrooms detached from the houses which enclose them, which literally do not belong: sex before marriage as sex before mortgage!) available. Which is why this story can never add up: what’s unsettling isn’t just the substitution of one sister for another, but of me for the boy from the garage up the road; ‘I had to get it on’, driven not only by my displaced lust, i.e. lust itself, but by hers.
Excuses multiply guilt rather than rescind it, and “Babies” produces the fact of substitution – that for sex one body is as good as another – which love’s particularity seeks to tame and subdue. I want to take you home. Now. We can make up for all that lost time. So I was watching your sister; and I was listening while you went with Neve. So we never. Although we wanted to really. It was you all along. But we never. Until now. Now? If the chorus is supposed to make amends for or cancel out the past, it’s not just unconvincing, but a radical failure. The indeterminate ‘you’ to which it is addressed is never just you, never only you, never really you at all: it’s you or your sister, you and your sister, you and/or whoever else were to be sitting across the table from me now.
…And of course, YOU: and you, and you, and you? This is popular music and like the sound of one couple in the block shagging, as Jarvis recounts in Sheffield Sex City, one of the tracks that partnered “Babies” on the original Gift release, pretty soon it’ll have everybody fucking.
byebyepride in FT /New York London Paris Munich • 3 Comments
14 February 2005
What I Did In The Holidays
Well, I’ve now held a copy in my hand so I’m finally prepared to believe it really exists. Not sure when the official publication date is (tomorrow according to the publisher, “not yet” according to amazon. It’s a bit expensive, but if you were to order it through a library (or for your university library, if you have that kind of power!), there’d be one less copy sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
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13 January 2005
Defaced
I’ve always been in two minds (ha ha Janus-faced) about writing in books. On the one hand I’m suspicious of the fetishism of trying to keep a page clean, rather than treating a book as a machine for thinking (and for living, which is pretty much the same thing), as an external harddrive for our own memory. But I abhor writing in library books, which makes them a machine for not reading, as it becomes impossible to read without reading the marginalia, or to scan a page picking up only what’s been underlined by someone smarter, or dumber, or just with a different agenda to your own. I’m intrigued by the possibility of palimpsest, of rewriting the text, and of layering your own revisionings on each visit to a book, and fascinated by the chance to confront your own earlier thoughts as alien and obscure: why did that matter then? Who was I? Yet it can be shaming and embarrassing to do so. No really, what was I thinking? So I rarely mark up books unless I am working on them for a particular project, and with deadlines looming, it’s become a necessary shortcut for my current project. But on picking up my copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the new & improved translation, in a beautiful Stanford UP edition) this morning, to be confronted with the ugly scrawl of pencil underlinings, I felt an intense sense of melancholy. I’d forgotten they were there, and it felt as if I had vandalised my own possessions.
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13 December 2004
Expect to see more of this sort of story in years to come, illustrating our (human? Western? European? British? (not just pedantry, it matters!!)) propensity to dramatise change in terms of ending, disaster. Key quote = “New research shows that the era when television was the cultural glue that held the nation together appears to be at an end.” WTF? This reads like undigested Press Release, which is maybe what it is doing in an otherwise factual (ok, not really, since figures are never facts) piece. Why shouldn’t it be here? Well: a) what nation?; b) what evidence is there that TV ‘held the nation together’? (especially since the era of TV is also the era of decline of ‘Britain’ and British ‘identity’); c) what evidence tha the nation will now fall apart (or is there another type of glue slipping into place?); d) clearly without the media (inc journalists) to hold us together, there would be no cultural glue? Yeah, right. In fact the more I think about this the angrier I get, so I’ll stop.
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25 October 2004
Are Tomatoes Too Wet? Obviously this question is nonsense as it stands (a philosopher writes) since a tomato is as wet as a tomato is wet. I suppose what I really mean is, are tomatoes too wet to put in sandwiches? Admittedly, this had never struck me as an issue, until a certain person pointed it out to me, and went on to prove it by making sandwiches with sundried tomato paste instead. Miraculously, three hours into our train journey, our sandwiches were not soggy!
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22 October 2004
Popjustice suggests multi-format bonanza as the best way to shift copies of a new Band Aid single. But with the line-up face-off currently being between ‘credible’ bands like Coldplay (i.e. music for cunts) and pop bands (i.e. music for proles), surely there’s an obvious solution? Make two different versions (or more — why not a metal version, and a house version, with dozens of the anonymous dolly-bird singers who front production-line chart dance tracks taking a word each too) and race them! It’d be Blur v Oasis all over again, but for charity! And anyone who really wanted to prove they were buying the single for a good cause, could buy both (or all three, four etc.) versions. Plus we (smug bo-ho scenester nerd scum) could all speculate endlessly over who on earth buys this stuff, and try and start class war between the indieistas and the popists. Of course, anyone with ears will have to stop listening to the radio for several months before Christmas, but fuck it, that’s a price worth paying.
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19 October 2004
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
14: Being Alone For The Last Third Of Your Life
The month of fear has started me thinking about my life. As these things sometimes do. I realised that I spend much of my life afraid, in tiny, almost insignificant, trivial little ways. I am afraid I’ll be late, or that my students or colleagues will expose me as a fraud. I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing, or forget something important. I’m afraid I neglect my friends, that I’m not grown-up enough, that I’m too grown up, that I’m too shy, too loud, drink too much, drink too little, eat the wrong things. But I also realised that these are a) pretty common anxieties so having them was not something to be afraid of; and that b) they never really get in the way of getting on with my life. Being consistently five or more minutes early for appointments or trains would be seen by some people as a virtue, not a failing. I also realised that these are all things which are more or less in my control: they’re things I can do something about. I can leave five minutes early to ensure I don’t miss my train.
What I don’t worry about are the big external things: I don’t fear terrorist attacks (although when i was at school the bomb attacks on London train stations did worry me, since both parents commuted to work through London Bridge and Victoria every day); I’m not afraid of crime beyond remembering to lock the door when I leave in the morning; I may despair over the state of the world, but I’m not afraid that it will destroy my life suddenly, brutally, horribly. (And I know I’ve been lucky in life, generally.) These are all things over which I can have no possible control, so somehow my anxious brain simply leaves them be. If my everyday fears seem like the products of a over-sensitive survival system, prodding me to do certain things, to not do others, these big fears seem slightly strange and out of proportion to me, and always have done. I’ve never been afraid of the end of the world.
There’s also a third category, I realised the other day. I fear for things which are in the control of people whom I care about. So I fear for the health of my friends. I worry about them. I’m afraid they will fall ill, live in pain, or discomfort, or even die before their time, leaving behind — not me in particular, since I know myself to be relatively stoical about things beyond my control — loved ones, family and friends who care about them. I fear these things because they could be sorted out. You can eat well, exercise a bit. Little things which can make you safer.
I’m not afraid of being alone for the last third of my life. Not just because I’m in a great relationship with someone I love very much, and I can’t imagine (or won’t imagine) that not being the case. (Perhaps I have no imagination: I’ve often wondered if that’s true, and I’ve always felt that both memory and dreams have a much stronger hold on me than imagination does.) But more because it seems so out of my control as to not be worth worrying about. It would after all depend on the actions of all the people you already know, and of all the people you might befriend or come to know in the future. (I assume of course that whoever came up with the suggestion meant ‘alone’ did not just mean ‘single’, without what we stupidly call a significant other, in the Sex In The City sense of ‘alone’ which really means having no-one with whom you can drop the hard ethics of friendship). I wouldn’t like to be in a nursing home for thirty years, with no-one coming to visit me, but one would live through it: that’s what people do. I’m certainly not going to spawn offspring simply as a safety net against future abandonment. Being alone would be sad. Being alone is sad. But scary? I’m not sure.
byebyepride in Blog 7 • No Comments
On the way to the gym (to go for today’s hat-trick of tedious anecdotes) at about 7.20 in the morning, I pass three pubs which are open (is this unusual? It seems so to me), and which almost always have folk drinking in them. I also pass two sandwich shops which always smell of bacon rolls. (Certainly not unusual.) So every time I go to the gym, as you might imagine, I really really really ask myself WHY LORD WHY??? Funnily enough, on the way back (at least when I’m working from home, and not catching the train to Glasgow), this never seems to be a problem.
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Gym Life
Everytime I throw up, I think of Julia Kristeva. (This sentence is not, luckily, reversible.) All down to an encounter with her description of the abject at an impressionable age. By way of comparison, in five months of going to the gym, I feel like I’ve been getting more intimate with Deleuze. Firstly, based on my distant memories of his book on Masochism, I have to say that I’ve never been as masochistic a relationship as I am with my instructor. The basis of masochism for Deleuze is not abjection, or humiliation, nor even bondage, submission or pain, but the contract. This is formal, but internalised. So when I force myself to do something I really don’t feel like doing, out of a sense of obligation to an instructor I have only met twice, but with whom I now have an agreement, filed on a bit of paper in a drawer at the back of the room, I feel like I know what masochism is. Of course, I’ve probably mangled the concepts horribly. Apologies to k-punk and his chums. Secondly, I think I have found a way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s machines and assemblages stuff. It’s not so much that I go into the gym and use the rowing machine which sits there. It’s more that the rowing machine isn’t a rowing machine until it’s completed by being combined with my, equally incomplete, body machine. Together we are one sort of machine, apart other sorts of machines. I like this one better, but again, I’m happy to admit this is based on passing acquaintance with Thousand Plateaux and I’m sure our learned friends will put me right if I’m wrong.
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TV without the words
About four times a week I go to the gym on my way to work. In the gym I use various machines. Many of them face towards a row of large TV screens, which hang from the ceiling. These TV screens show a variety of channels, usually including BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, MTV Hits, and either Sky News, or, more recently, some Sky sports channel. Being fussy about what goes into my ears, I bring my own music-making machine — OK, OK, it’s an ipod — and headphones. But it’s hard not to be drawn to the flickering lights of the screens, when you’re pounding away on some tedious cross-trainer programme. So I spend more time than I would like watching TV without the words.
I remember reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat at school. If my memory is correct, one of the essays involves a patient who cannot understand / hear what is being said on TV by a prominent US politician, but who is convinced from his looks that he is lying. As a result of my gym time, that is pretty how I feel about all TV now.
Without the words, and with the ability to pan across a couple of news channels, and some entertainment shows at once, what is most striking are the grotesque smiles which seem to be compulsory. If the early morning magazine shows can trip lightly from the latest movie release, to bombings in the middle east, to what you should or should not be wearing, it’s only because all the presenters have to show no emotion at all about anything: only the gift-wrapped grins of the gormless. To pretend that all this stuff is the same is just lying about it.
That the news agenda is driven by what footage is available is a cliche. It’s also obviously true. More insidious, however, are the way shots are framed. Day in, day out, I see bombed-out cars, houses or general wreckage. Filling the frame, even the smallest attack can seem like monumental carnage. The fleeting moments in which a camera pans, or before the zoom in, are far more telling, and far more evocative. Because they show us everyday life in what could be a European country going on around, they strip the report of the exoticism routinely attached to the warzone, to the disaster area, to the mysterious and veiled East. Then we’re back to the twerps on the sofa.
It also means there are shows which I’ve only ever seen without the words. King of Queens, I can report, is about a fat bloke with a menial job and an enormous house, and the two sluttish women who seem to harass him for no particular reason. It has George from Seinfeld‘s screen dad in it. It has no jokes. Obviously. It comes on after Everybody Loves Raymond. At least in this case, I think I’m benefiting from not being able to hear what’s going on. And oh yes, the same chuckling fools are on here as on the news channels, the same hooker-aesthetic for sitcom women as for the ones on the music videos.
Recently we’ve had the wrestling on a lot. Everything about it is fake, from mock news-reports and tearful hospital-bed weep-a-thons to the ludicrous preening of the muscle men, and the repetitive pseudo-violence, — with the possible exception of the apparent enjoyment of the craven, braying audiences — but here no-one cares, and no-one pretends otherwise. (So perhaps the joke’s on me, for even expecting there to be truth on TV?) Made for idiots, and with storylines that are easy to follow even without the sound, this is probably the most honest show of the lot.
byebyepride in Do You See • No Comments
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