Rav Casley Gera

The end is in sight. One Prospect and a Harper’s to go. Neatly, this almighty tidying-up exercise seems to have coincided with the lapsing of all my subscriptions, which I’ve made a point of not renewing. So I’m beginning to feel a touch of sadness at the end of my odyssey. Fortunately, some of the best stuff has come right at the end.

10.31am. Surprising success at reading without breakfast. Am angered, though, by article in Prospect by Robert Jackson about higher education funding (read my response).

11. 21am. Philip Oltermann provides an excellent commentary on the explosive popularity of the group biography, as in The Metaphysical Club, A Night at the Majestic, etc. He argues, convincingly, that the fascination with the foundations of the soul that informed the growth of the biography have been replaced with an interest in the formation of networks, and the skill - or otherwise - of our heroes at creating them. Certainly, everything from Friends to Big Brother speaks to our obsession with the making and breaking of friendships. One popular British TV show, the recent series of Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands, made the whole basis of the competition the ability of the two teams to make, and retain, friends.

There are plenty of reasons why this should happen now. The much-commented-on breakdown of traditional communities of geography and workplace over the last fifty years, combined with the class breakdown now always referred to as “the end of deference,” means that the atificial, wordly barriers that cemented groups are also gone. Previously, sitcoms were based around a street, a bar, a family. Now, they’re based around the most arbitrary of things - a group of friends. The idea of high-minded intellectuals coming together over a mutual love of philosophy or art seemed frivolous when we were all stuck in friendships with our neighbours. Now people all over the world can come together over shared interests, or simple gelling, those networks seem like a primer on how to do it, and how not to.

And yet, there’s something emphatically not new here. Often, the things which culture deems interesting about ordinary people and intellectuals are those it deemed interesting about film stars years before. In the frenzied comtemporary press coverage of the Bloomsbury Group, the Fitzgerald/Dorothy Parker set, the Rat
Pack, or even the Brat Pack, we’ve always found celebrity friendships a source of fascination. Why? For the same reasons we’re fascinated by their romances: we like to imagine ourselves there. Men imagine being Brad Pitt to imagine being with Angelina Jolie, and women - and gay men - imagine being Angelina for the same reason (I never speak for lesbians). We watched Friends with such fondness because we imagined being one of the gang, and some of us, misguided as we are, even obsessed about Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s falling-out so we could imagine drying Paris’ tears and having her buy us cocktails. Group biography is no more than a hifalutin version of the same response - biography gave birth to celebrity culture, and now the influence has gone into reverse. A Night at the Majestic, by the marvellously-named Richard Davenport-Hines, takes as its starting-point a performance of Stravinsky’s Le Renard at the opulent Paris hotel in 1922, at which the composer was joined by James Joyce, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Proust. Who, reading that for the first time, doesn’t feel a twang of jealousy, a sense of I-should-have-been-there - as if, by proximity to a whole generation of genius, we might somehow gain a little by osmosis?

We are all scrambling around in the dark, looking for reflected light with which to illuminate ourselves. It’s just that different people take their light in different places. Group biography is an Oxbridge version of Heat magazine, but it’s none the worse for that.

11.51am. I’m itching to see Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4, a lauded but highly controversial cinematic tour through the horrors of modern-day rural Russia. Its opening sequence gives me an idea:

Under grey skies, past industrial detritus, through broken fences and mud, a prostitute traipses from a rural railway station to the funeral of a friend. The toothless old women of the town - the men, we presume, are dead - drink, curse and begin a bizarre orgy. They undress and juggle flaccid breasts. Febrile dogs chase shadows. A young man commits suicide in despair.

Doesn’t it sound great?

12.25pm. Charming, but wrongheaded, article by the wonderful Art Spiegelman in Harper’s about The Danish Cartoons (how long before that’s the name of a band?) Spiegelman’s support for the newspaper that published the cartoons is disappointing, but not surprising. More of a shock was that, without any advance warning, the article published the cartoons. I’d been studiously avoiding seeing them, on the basis that I had nothing to learn or gain from seeing racist, right-wing propaganda. I was wrong, of course. The cartoons are a mixed bag, and the oft-commented on one with a bomb-turbanned Mohammed is a subtle as a brick in the face - though not as offensive as the much subtler one portraying him with devil’s horns. But others are remarkably bland, and one cartoonist even refused the assignment altogether, instead calling the editors of the paper “reactionary provocateurs” (come to think of it, also a fabulous band name). Not that any of this negates the serious issues raised by a wilful trampling on the sensibilities of a victimised minority, but it does put a clearer light on the whole thing. I still feel Harper’s shouldn’t have published the cartoons, but perhaps a link to a location of them on the web wouldn’t have hurt. So, in the interest of debate, here they are.

1.32pm. Wonderful article about the Super Bowl, complete with an incredibly vivid portrait of Stevie Wonder:

There is something about the secondary manifestations of his blindness, the exagerrated way he lets his head flop from side to side, that suggests he has recently arrived from a distant planet, a playful, gigantic black baby who has absorbed all terrestrial sounds and language in a single gulp.

Isn’t this a wonderful idea? An enormous DeLillo-style cosmic culture-recycling machine. Maybe Stevie Wonder’s genius is that, having tapped and sang for white audiences as a childish update of the grinning negro, he turned the tables by using black music to capture and reflect the suburban white society he captivated. On the other hand, maybe not.

15.43pm. Distracted by friend invasion in uncanny echo of last time. OMG! They knocked down the old headquarters of Motown Records to make extra parking for the Super Bowl.

15.48pm. A barrage of revelations. Stevie Wonder gave Smokey Robinson “Tears of a Clown” as a Christmas present! And, the turf in the Super Bowl is artificial!

16.03pm. Nothing in the almighty brouhaha of Super Bowl XL

can match the sight of Aretha Franklin in the flesh. Rolls of fat begin just below her eyeballs and cascade down in waves to her chin, then to her neck, and down to her enormous bosom. A 300-pound mountain of congealed hurt.

16.08pm. David Samuels is fantastic. America, he contends, is not in fact a country but “a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality.”

And that’s it. It’s over. My magazine drawer is bare, my subscriptions have lasped. What, in the end, have we learned? Well, I’ve learned that, no matter how much they may purport to educate, magazines are, in the end, just entertainment - whether Harper’s or Heat, they simply can’t delve in the level of sustained detail to analyse an issue properly, to present multiple voices in a full debate. Only the capacity of a book can do that; while for the daily conversation that keeps us ticking over, newspapers and blogs are much more effective. Perhaps the rise of the lad mag and the “lifestyle” magazine marks the peak of the magazine’s role. There’s always been something contrived about the idea of a carefully selected range of stories, photoshoots and articles. In the age of consumer as king, when we wish to construct our own portfolio of interests, the magazine seems archaic.

However, I’m not sure I want to see them die. There is a certain kind of writing - rambling, slightly frivolous in its languid longwindedness, but thorough in its discussion of the issues - that suits the format, and which simply doesn’t work on the internet, where you want fast, accurate information. Of course, people still print, and a PDF-led model of distribution over the internet for reading on paper might work.

Either way, for now, my personal love affair with the magazine is over. They’re just not as stimulating, as fulfilling as books. I’m going to read a book right now.

Well, maybe I’ll just see what’s on TV…