I’ve never really decided quite where the irony-balance lies in this song. After all, David Byrne is as self-consciously urban (in the pre-MTV, racially neutral sense) as anyone. Certainly, as someone who regularly chafes at British culture’s knee-jerk for a nostalgic vision of country life, I can’t help but thrill at such unabashed horror at a back-to-nature future that many people at least claim to long for.

But that line in the last verse - “as it fell apart, nobody payed much attention” - hints at a darker interpretation. After all, one of the central ironies of the modern environmental movement is that the very close-to-nature lifestyle which some of its proponents call for is probably exactly what we’ll wind up with if the kind of “civilisation” Byrne eulogises here continues to run out of control.

Anyway, it’s funky. Enjoy.

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I’m not going to mock Norman Mailer by pretending I can write anything sufficiently meaningful, passionate or truthful to do him justice. Suffice to say that reading his books, I realised for the first time I could care as much about American literature as deeply as I did about American popular culture.

If you fancy a bit of bathos, you can read my cackhanded attempts to mimic the style of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. But far better, I think, to enjoy a slice of the original. The below - scanned in, so apologies for any errors I’ve missed - comes from Mailer’s depiction of the astonishing events in and surrounding the Democratic Convention of 1968, when police employed what one Democratic delegate called “gestapo tactics” against anti-war protesters in the streets (Chicago’s mayor, corrupt Democratic machine politician par excellence - and the father of its current mayor - responded by loudly suggesting to said delegate, across the convention floor and visibly on television, that he should fuck himself). Here Mailer describes the last night of the convention.

*

Shortly after convening, the convention showed a movie thirty-two minutes long, entitled ‘Robert Kennedy Remembered’, and while it went on, through the hall, over the floor, and out across the country on television, a kind of unity came over everyone who was watching, at least for a little while. Idealism rarely moved politicians - it had too little to do with property. But emotion did. It was closer to the land. Somewhere between sorrow and the blind sword of patriotism was the fulcrum of reasonable politics, and as the film progressed, and one saw scene after scene of Bobby Kennedy growing older, a kind of happiness came back from the image, for something in his face grew young over the years - he looked more like a boy on the day of his death, a nice boy, nicer than the kid with the sharp rocky glint in his eye who had gone to work for Joe McCarthy in his early twenties, and had then known everything there was to know about getting ahead in politics. He had grown modest as he grew older, and his wit had grown with him - he had become a funny man as the picture took care to show, wry, simple for one instant, shy and off to the side on the next, but with a sort of marvelous boy’s wisdom, as if he knew the world was very bad and knew the intimate style of how it was bad, as only boys can sometimes know (for they feel it in their parents and their schoolteachers and their friends). Yet he had confidence he was going to fix it - the picture had this sweet simple view of him which no one could resent for somehow it was not untrue. Since his brother’s death, a subtle sadness had come to live in his tone of confidence, as though he were confident he would win - if he did not lose. That could also happen, and that could happen quickly. He had come into that world where people live with the recognition of tragedy, and so are often afraid of happiness, for they know that one is never in so much danger as when victorious and/or happy - that is when the devils seem to have their hour, and hawks seize something living from the gambol on the field.

The reporter met Bobby Kennedy just once. It was on an afternoon in May in New York just after his victory in the Indiana primary and it had not been a famous meeting, even if it began well. The Senator came in from a conference (for the reporter was being granted an audience) and said quickly with a grin, ‘Mr Mailer, you’re a mean man with a word.’ He had answered, ‘On the contrary, Senator, I like to think of myself as a gracious writer.’

‘Oh,’ said Senator Kennedy, with a wave of his hand, ‘that too, that too!’

So it had begun well enough, and the reporter had been taken with Kennedy’s appearance. He was slimmer even than one would have thought, not strong, not weak, somewhere between a blade of grass and a blade of steel, fine, finely drawn, finely honed, a fine flush of color in his cheeks, two very white front teeth, prominent as the two upper teeth of a rabbit, so his mouth had no hint of the cruelty or calculation of a politician who weighs counties, cities, and states, but was rather a mouth ready to nip at anything which attracted its contempt or endangered its ideas. Then there were his eyes. They were most unusual. His brother Teddy Kennedy spoke of those who ‘followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eyes’, and that was fair description for he had very large blue eyes, the iris wide in diameter, near to twice the width of the average eye, and the blue was a milky blue like a marble so that his eyes, while prominent, did not show the separate steps and slopes of light some bright eyes show, but rather were gentle, indeed beautiful - one was tempted to speak of velvety eyes - their surface seemed made of velvet as if one could touch them, and the surface would not be repelled.

He was as attractive as a movie star. Not attractive like his brother had been, for Jack Kennedy had looked like the sort of vital leading man who would steal the girl from Ronald Reagan every time, no, Bobbie Kennedy had looked more like a phenomenon of a movie star - he could have filled some magical empty space between Mickey Rooney and James Dean, they would have cast him sooner or later in some remake of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and everyone would have said, ‘Impossible casting! He’s too young.’ And he was too young. Too young for Senator, too young for President, it felt strange in his presence thinking of him as President, as if the country would be giddy, like the whirl of one’s stomach in the drop of an elevator or jokes about an adolescent falling in love, it was incredible to think of him as President, and yet marvelous, as if only a marvelous country would finally dare to have him.

That was the best of the meeting - meeting him! The reporter spent the rest of his valuable thirty minutes arguing with the Senator about Senator McCarthy. He begged him to arrange some sort of truce or liaison, but made a large mistake from the outset. He went on in a fatuous voice, sensing error too late to pull back, about how effective two Irish Catholics would be on the same ticket for if there were conservative Irishmen who could vote against one of them, where was the Irish Catholic in America who could vote against two? and Kennedy had looked at him with disgust, as if offended by the presumption in this calculation, his upper lip had come down severely over his two front white teeth, and he had snapped, ‘I don’t want those votes.’ How indeed did the reporter presume to tell him stories about the benightedness of such people when he knew them only too well. So the joke had been a lame joke and worse, and they got into a dull argument about McCarthy, Kennedy having little which was good to say, and the reporter arguing doggedly in the face of such remarks as: ‘He doesn’t even begin to campaign until twelve.’

They got nowhere. Kennedy’s mind was altogether political on this afternoon. It did not deal with ideas except insofar as ideas were attached to the name of bills, or speeches, or platforms, or specific debates in specific places, and the reporter, always hard put to remember such details, was forced therefore to hammer harder and harder on the virtues of McCarthy’s gamble in entering the New Hampshire primary until Kennedy said, ‘I wonder why you don’t support Senator McCarthy. He seems more like your sort of guy, Mr Mailer,’ and in answer, oddly moved, he had said in a husky voice, ‘No, I’m supporting you. I know it wasn’t easy for you to go in.’ And even began to mutter a few remarks about how he understood that powerful politicians would not have trusted Kennedy if he had moved too quickly, for his holding was large, and men with large holdings were not supportable if they leaped too soon. ‘I know that,’ he said looking into the Senator’s mild and magnificent eye, and Kennedy nodded, and in return a little later Kennedy sighed, and exhaled his breath, looked sad for an instant, and said, ‘Who knows? Who knows? perhaps I should have gone in earlier.’ A few minutes later they said good-bye, not unpleasantly. That was the last he saw of him.

The closest he was to come again was to stand in vigil for fifteen minutes as a member of the honor guard about his coffin in St Patrick’s. Lines filed by. People had waited in line for hours, five hours, six hours, more, inching forward through the day and through the police lines on the street in order to take one last look at the closed coffin.

The poorest part of the working class of New York had turned out, poor Negro men and women, Puerto Ricans, Irish washerwomen, old Jewish ladies who looked like they ran grubby little newsstands, children, adolescents, families, men with hands thick and lined and horny as oyster shells, calluses like barnacles, came filing by to bob a look at that coffin covered by a flag. Some women walked by praying, and knelt and touched the coffin with their fingertips as they passed, and after a time the flag would slip from the pressure of their fingers and an usher detailed for the purpose would readjust it. The straightest line between two points is the truth of an event, no matter how long it takes or far it winds, and if it had taken these poor people six hours of waiting in line to reach that coffin, then the truth was in the hours. A river of workingclass people came down to march past Kennedy’s coffin, and this endless line of people had really loved him, loved Bobby Kennedy like no political figure in years had been loved.

The organ played somewhere in the nave and the line moved forward under the vast - this day - tragic vaults of the cathedral so high overhead and he felt love for the figure in the coffin and tragedy for the nation in the years ahead, the future of the nature seemed as dark and tortured, as wrenched out of shape, as the contorted blood-spattered painted sculpture of that garish Christ one could find in every dark little Mexican church. The horror of dried blood was now part of the air, and became part Of the air of the funeral next day. That funeral was not nearly so beautiful; the poor people who had waited in line on Friday were now gone, and the mighty were in their place, the President and members of the Congress, and the Establishment, and the Secret Service, and the power of Wall Street; the inside of St Patrick’s for the length of the service was dank with the breath of the over-ambitious offering reverence - there is no gloom so deep unless it is the scent of the upholstery in a mortician’s limousine, or the smell of morning in a closed Pullman after executives have talked through the night.

The movie came to an end. Even dead, and on film, he was better and more moving than anything which had happened in their convention, and people were crying. An ovation began. Delegates came to their feet, and applauded an empty screen - it was as if the center of American life was now passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation - was that possible? They applauded the presence of a memory. Bobby Kennedy had now become a beloved property of the party.

Minutes went by and the ovation continued. People stood on their chairs and clapped their hands. Cries broke out. Signs were lifted. Small hand-lettered signs which said, ‘Bobby, Be With Us’, and one enormous sign eight feet high, sorrowful as rue in the throat -’Bobby, We Miss You,’ it said.

Now the ovation had gone on long enough - for certain people. So signals went back and forth between floor and podium and phone, and Carl Albert stepped forward and banged the gavel for the ovation to end, and asked for order. The party which had come together for five minutes, after five days and five months and five years of festering discord, was now immediately divided again. The New York and California delegations began to sing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, and the floor heard, and delegations everywhere began to sing. Humphrey delegations as quick as the rest. In every convention there is a steamroller, and a moment when the flattened exhale their steam, and ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!’ was the cry of the oppressed at this convention, even those unwittingly oppressed in their mind, and not even knowing it in their heart until this instant, now they were defying the Chair, clapping their hands, singing, stamping their feet to mock the chairman’s gavel.

Carl Albert brought up Dorothy Bush to read an appreciation the convention would offer for the work of certain delegates. The convention did not wish to hear. Mrs Bush began to read in a thin mean voice, quivering with the hatreds of an occasion like this, and the crowd sang on, ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, his truth goes marching on,’ and they stamped their feet and clapped their hands, and were loose finally and having their day as they sang the song which once, originally, had commemorated a man who preached civil disorder, then mutiny, and attacked a fort in his madness and was killed, John Brown was also being celebrated here, and the Texas and Illinois delegations were now silent, clapping no longer, sitting on their seats, looking bored. Every delegate on the floor who had hated the Kennedys was now looking bored, and the ones who had loved them were now noisier than ever. Once again the party was polarized. Signs waved all over the floor, ‘Bobby, We’ll Remember you’, ‘Bobby, We’ll Seek Your Newer World’, and the ever-present, ‘Bobby, We Miss You’. Yes they did, missed him as the loving spirit, the tender germ in the living plasma of the party. Nothing was going to make them stop; this offering of applause in the oratorical vitamin pills Hubert would yet be there to offer. The demonstration went on for twenty minutes and gave no sign of stopping at all. Dorothy Bush had long ago given up. Carl Albert, even smaller than Georgie Wallace, was now as furious as only a tiny man can be when his hard earned authority has turned to wax -he glared across the floor at the New York delegation like a little boy who smells something bad.

However did they stop the demonstration? Well, convention mechanics can be as perfect as the muscle in a good play when professionals have worked their football for a season. Mayor Daley, old lover of the Kennedys, and politically still enough of an enigma six months ago for Bobby to have said in his bloodwise political wisdom, ‘Daley is the ballgame,’ Mayor Daley, still (lining with the Kennedys these last three days in his desire for Teddy as Vice President, now had come to the end of his political string, and like a good politician he pulled it. He gave the signal. The gallery began to chant, ‘We love Daley.’ All his goons and clerks and beef-eaters and healthy parochial school students began to yell and scream and clap, ‘We love Daley’, and the power of their lungs, the power of the freshest and the largest force in this Amphitheatre soon drowned out the Kennedy demonstrators, stuffed their larynxes with larger sound. The Daley demonstration was bona fide too - his people had suffered with their Mayor, so they screamed for him now and clapped their hands, and Mayor Daley clapped his hands too for he also loved Mayor Daley. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

At the height of the Daley demonstration, it was abruptly cut off. By a signal. ‘Shut your yaps’ was an old button, no matter how the signal came. In the momentary silence, Carl Albert got his tongue in, and put Ralph Metcalfe (Daley’s Black man) who was up on the podium already, into voice on the mike, and Metcalfe announced five minutes of silence for the memory of Martin Luther King. So New York and California were naturally obliged to be silent with the rest, the floor was silent, the gallery was silent, and before those minutes began to be up, Carl Albert had slipped Dorothy Rush in again, and she was reading the appreciation of the convention for certain delegates. Business had been resumed. The last night proceeded.

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I still remember the wet Wednesday afternoon in Sheffield when, rifling in my usual way through Sparky’s CD collection, I stumbled upon the greatest hits of Nancy Sinatra. In the full flourishes of my retro-Americana phase at the time - cf. the cowskin on the floor of my second-year bedroom - I thought it sounded like kitsch fun. I wasn’t remotely ready for the psychedelic rollercoaster it turned out to be, complete with lush orchestration, bonkers greek-mythology lyrical allusions, and the ghostly presence of a mysterious male crooner. Later that day, Sparky identified the source of both the voice and the marvellous imagery: Country maverick and prolific producer Lee Hazlewood. Lee died on August 4 of cancer, and I still haven’t explored his substantial non-Nancy oeuvre properly. But perhaps now’s as good a time as any to start. In the meantime, pop over to Some Velvet Blog, named for Lee’s best-known hit, for an appropriately thorough introduction.

Lee and Nancy on my favourite (gasp!) version of “Jackson”:

“Summer Wine”:

His wonderful solo “No Train To Stockholm”. As one commenter puts it, “if only all country could be like this”:

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As vaguely-out-of-touch friends do, she tracked me down on Facebook and friend-ed me. Which is all fine, and perfectly normal, and no, don’t worry, this is not yet another merits-and-drawbacks-of-Facebook discussion (it’s been around three years, people! keep up!). What made me annoyed was Mandy’s name on Facebook. Not Amanda Abigail Davis. Not even Mandy Davis. Just Mandy D. Accompanied by a non-identifiying, artsy picture.

I was genuinely irritated. Facebook is for real life, I thought to myself. Use bloody Myspace if you want to call yourself a funny codename and have a picture of Brad Pitt as your avatar. That’s why it’s populated primarily by teenage girls. Facebook works because people are real on it - real names, regular photos, bewilderingly complete contact information. It’s official, it’s trustworthy. It doesn’t purport to be a gateway to some magical other cyber-life. It’s designed to fit in with your real one. This is why, for example, you won’t find the obscure picture on the front page of this site on my Facebook profile, but one where you can actually tell what I look like.

Mandy said, after I grilled her, that she doesn’t want her identity stolen. Fair enough, though why not just hide your profile from non-friends? But really, the point isn’t just about Facebook - it’s about a wider shift in what “social networking” sites are supposed to do.

In the first few years of the internet, there was much written and said about its potential to afford people new identities and new lives. You might be a teenage girl in Iowa, but there was nothing stopping you becoming a legendary gay man on the New York club scene, a successful share trader, or a respected philosopher on UseNet. And equally, of course, you might be a 40-year old man, but you can exist as a 14-yr old girl in chat rooms - for at least as long as it takes to groom a potential sexual victim. Many of the services central to social networking services on the internet from webmail to myspace - operate on essentially this anonymous basis. There’s essentially no restriction on who you can be - as long as you can keep up the pretence.

But here’s the thing: we don’t really want wild, additional e-personalities. In many cases, we really just want to be ourselves. I’ve always been suspicious of cute e-codenames, usually going for the unexciting ravcasleygera. Increasingly, I’m seeing everyone else do the same - not just my twentysomething friends, but the teenagers who have essentially grown up with the internet too. They may have an additional, “secret” identity for particular interests - so do I - but they’ll usually have a straightforward online identity to pin their cyber-ego on.

Why? Because you only need an additional identity if you want to meet people you wouldn’t meet in ordinary life. In fact, though, we mostly want the internet to be an extension of our “real” lives. If you look at the average, e-savvy teenager’s myspace friend list, there may be 3000 people on it. But if you look at who they’re actually in regular message contact with, it’ll be friends from school. Groups services like Yahoo! Groups do exist for topics and virtual collaborations, but the vast majority are a supplement to a real-life group. Skype has conference rooms you can go into to talk to strangers; but of all the millions of people of Skype, there’s usually only a handful in them. IM, email, VOIP, even themed services like Flickr: I bet the majority of people you communicate through these mediums are your actual real-life friends. And where new friendships do blossom on the internet, they usually turn into real-life relationships - or wither. I’ve met two new people through myspace; one I went on to meet in real life, the other I fell out of contact with.

This realness - the internet as an extension of real life - is the key to Facebook’s runaway success. Facebook famously didn’t start open to the whole world, like Myspace. It started within an already very closed community - Harvard students. And it grew incrementally, through other elite US universities, all world universities, and then finally to non-students just last year.

I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. I joined on the third day, and I must have been one of the last. People pounced on it, because they saw a clear reason for it. In a closed community like a university, there are tens of people you know - maybe you took a class with them, or shared an activity like a play or sports team - who you don’t see on a regular basis - the kind of people who, if the only means of contact were in person, phone calls and emails, you could lose touch with. People like Mandy Davis, in fact. With Facebook they remain tied to you, albeit lightly, just enough to maintain contact. And it worked. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one Harvard senior told me last year, has “had a more profound effect on college life in America than anyone in the last twenty years.” People didn’t swarm all over Facebook to escape their humdrum day-to-day, but to improve it.

It’s easy to sniff and say, if you care about someone, you’ll stay friends with them no matter what. But this ignores psychological realities. Anthropologists have noted that, as hunter-gatherers, we used to travel in tribes of 150-200 people. Then, when we settled down to agriculture, our settlements were around this size. And even now, if you take the average person, and measure the number of people in their social network - from the lady behind the counter at the dry-cleaner they chat to every week, to their friend’s brother they occasionally meet up with - you’re looking at about, you guessed it, 200 people. These relationships are significant; we don’t live in tiny villages any more, but a sense of belonging to a community - or, rather, of wanting to - is still hard-wired into us. You may only need six people to carry your coffin, but we’d all like to imagine a hundred or so people turning up to the funeral.

In a village, or a university, you might see these people in the library or greengrocer. In a city, though, you can lose them as quickly as you got to know them. The greatness of Facebook is the way it helps with that. It’s become a ritual - after you meet new people, on a night out, a trip away, or through a friend - you trak them down on Facebook. It’s a way of securing a connection that might otherwise fall by the wayside.

So, I’m not dropping my militant stance when it comes to real names - and real photos - on Facebook. Facebook is for real life in the real world. With more and more of us living in cities, and greater and greater cultural diversity, it’s becoming easier and easier to meet like-minded people. But with our ever-busier and more mobile lives, the trouble is keeping in touch with them. The great potential of the internet isn’t so much its capacity to enable new friendships and relationships. It’s to help secure existing ones.

Yours,

Ravinder Madron Casley Gera

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You can’t show it on a screen, but the print version had a nifty mirror effect on the TV screen. Whether the grey-eyed executives picking up a copy at their local CVS feel like they’re reinventing the internet remains to be seen, but either way, user-generated content (UGC - not to be confused with the cinema chain) had well and truly arrived on the cultural map. As well as its Time cover, it had its coffee-shop friendly bible: Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, describing how a top-down model of media dominated by large producers was about to be supplemented - and usurped - by a near-endless supply of independent content. The difference, of course, was money. Letting people upload videos from their mobile phones had always seemed like a good idea. But not necessarily one with a lot of money to be paid. The moment Google dropped $1.65bn into Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s laps, that changed.

Now, no sooner has an internet trend reached cultural penetration, then traditional media begins hamfistedly to try to get in on it. Web 2.0 was to prove no different. Quickly, fevered speculation began about how best to bring UGC to TV. Never mind the fact that this had been happening ever since the popularisation of video cameras - think You’ve Been Framed! - now a new generation of UGC-TV cropped up, led in the UK by Trouble Homegrown, an offshoot of the teen cable channel.

Now Britain’s first entire channel focussed on, if not quite dedicated to, UGC, has launched. Named - slightly craply - Current TV, it’s been onscreen less than a month, and I just discovered it tonight lurking on Virgin Media channel 155 (it’s also on Sky 229). At first glance, it’s predictable YouTubeTV - a succession of three-to-five minute films, many made by viewers, strung together by pretty, dumb, mildly trendy young hosts. And it makes no attempt its internet-me-too roots, even calling its mini-shows “pods.”¹

But watch a few minutes of Current TV, and it’s clear this is a little more than bedroom video on the big screen. First of all, the quality - if not creatively, than at least in ambition and production values - of the content. In one hour, I saw a brief documentary about Glasgow’s “neds,” another comparing Iraqi opnions of the American occupation, and another on an American community gym, all slickly edited and complete with graphics. And the filmmakers weren’t all the 14-yr-old boys every user-centred website depends on. The “pod” showing when i first stumbled upon the channel featured a stocky, goateed man in sunglasses and a beanie hat doing martial arts on the beach. “Hang on,” I thought, “that looks like The Edge.” Of course, all goateed men in shades and beanie hats tend to look like The Edge. But, as it turns out, The Edge it was - in a four-pod day-in-the-life documentary made by bandmate Bono. Now, Bono hasn’t always been selective in his embrace of new media forms - think the ill-fated plans for a Zoo TV cable channel in the early 90’s. Nevertheless, it’s a big step up from films of people falling over drunk.

But it’s not just the production values that makes Current TV surprisingly impressive. It boasts something that’s inreasingly rare in mainstream new media: ideals. Current seem serious about political and news content, with an army of so-called “vanguard journalists” delivering quick-fire images and commentary from inside everything from China’s prostitution industry to African mineworking conditions. And the user-generated content, too, has real political bite. The aforementioned pod on Iraqi views of the occupation (made by Iraqi independent media group Iraq Eye) delivered more of an Iraqi perspective on the occupation in three minutes than I’ve seen in the mainstream news in the last year, while a brief introduction to the growing Nigerian film industry was a classic example of the kind of broader coverage of Africa - more than just starvation, war and misery - that many have been crying for more of in mainstream media.

It was clear that Current wasn’t just a low-budget startup. The tip-off came in the credits of Bono’s film: “thanks to Joel Hyatt and ‘Big’ Al Gore.”

Al Gore?

It turns out (praise be, Wikipedia!) that Current TV is, in fact, the invention of the world’s favourite loser himself. I do recall, after the 2000 election, Gore rumbling about the need for an independent new cable channel to challenge the conservative domination of the news media. It turns out Current is an evolved version of that idea. It also turns out it’s been onscreen over 18 months in the US. Think about that for a second - the pod-based format was invented before YouTube even launched. Far from a quick cash-in, Current seems to be the true TV equivalent of web 2.0, drawn from the same ideas but independently developed. What’s more, it trumps it on ideals. Gore’s plan from the beginning was to give space to independent voices. The YouTube founders just wanted somewhere to put videos to show to their friends.

Of course, ideals and TV are a difficult mix. This Nation article recounts the evolution of the concept - from a well-meaning grassroots network to the slick MTV-with-brains we see now. Being the Nation, of course, it goes way over the top.

“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a member of Current’s board of directors. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”

Interesting! Economically viable! The fascists! Current’s three-minute format certainly doesn’t allow for in-depth, nuanced reporting, and the previews of saw of “vanguard journalism” certainly privileged get-it-on-camera correspondence to proper reporting. But while I’m a huge fan of big-’n'-balanced documentary, it’s not the only way to expand the horizons of the traditional media. Rather than “MoveOn.org in prime time” - which, let’s be honest, sounds horrendous - Current has the potential to offer something much more powerful: a TV analogue to the blogosphere. The messages may be quick and simple, but they will hopefully come from a bewildering range of sources - providing a forum for, as Current put it, “any story that traditional news media won’t touch because it’s too big, too small, or too something.” The high standards required by TV transmission, as well as the quasi-democratic selection process (pods uploaded to the website are voted on by users, but it’s not clear how much influence this has on selection), will inevitably silence some voices. But given the number of 9/11 conspiracy movies on YouTube, it’s hard not to think, “good.”²

Current TV isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t going to infiltrate everyday life to the staggering extent of YouTube. But perhaps that’s not the point. What it is is the first new TV channel I’ve seen in years that’s genuinely different. Isn’t that reason enough to be excited?

Current TV: www.current.com and www.uk.current.com; Sky 229; Virgin Media 155

1. You have to really think about this to see just how horrible it is. The “pod” in iPod means, essentially, what the word pod means - a small, cute vessel. For all the overuse of the suffix since - and I say this as the proud owner of a knackered Korean “GoGoPod” MP3 player - that sense has generally, until now, been retained. But if you apply the word to content, as Current have done, it becomes totally meaningless.
2. They will, of course, also face a host of potential problems over political evenhandedness or otherwise. Do they show the well-produced pod in favour of Palestinian terrorism? What about the one expressing sympathy with al-Qaeda?

Hat tip: Josh

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Gossip is young + full of blood. We have existed for 5 years. We are a punk band consisting of 3. We are interested in art, change, the underground, dancing, fashion, punk history, crime and movements. We will nvr die. We are artists, poets, cooks, writers, feminists, designers, musicians & djs. This is life dedication to action, passion & drive.

- Gossipyouth.net

What’s not to like? After a long, long time of near-ideological obsession with authenticity and straightforwardness, the music scene has shown encouraging signs of flamboyance and theatre over the last couple of years. The Gossip have the heart of true soul music, with some of the wild visual flair of the 80’s (including - yes - Leigh Bowery, who I will stop going on about now). The statement above veers dangerously close to pretension, but its sheer, gormless, youthful enthusiasm sees it through. “We will nvr die” is probably as good a rallying cry for generation myspace as any.

.

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This particular clip has the added benefit of this strangely amusing description:

If you have ever seen Rocky Horror show… chances are you have seen this video by Meatloaf. They play it alot as a trailer before Rocky Horror… at least in Miami they do.

(Equally funly, in addition to writing and keyboards, Jim Steinman is credited with “Lascivious Effects”)

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I’ve always been disappointed by clubbing. Now, I’m not instinctively a club person - I mostly like music with guitars in, I prefer beer to class A’s, and I start to flag at about three on the usual night out. The club world swam into my consciousness in around 1994, via my brother’s obsession with jungle; but no sooner had I become aware of this strange world, than Britpop broke and carried me along with it. Life became a blur of collarless shirts, sideburns and Sovereigns, middle-class parents suddenly bemused by their violin-playing darlings’ newfound interest in pool and darts.When I escaped suburbia and went away to University, I had a bona fide dance phenomenon on my doorstep - Gatecrasher - but crap finances, blind fear of some sort of accidental drug consumption causing my premature death, and the nagging awareness that £15 was a lot of money to spend when I’d probably get tired and go home at 2.30, kept me away. Since then, I’ve had my moments - I’ve spent Christmas morning at Pacha in Buenos Aires, danced like a gibbon on my own for an hour in Newcastle fuelled by nothing but WKD, seen hip-hop pioneer Kool Herc, and been told off for walking into a Carl Cox set at 10.30pm and immediately starting to jump up and down and punch the air. I’ve even had the strange experience of being the only person in a dancefloor of two thousand people to recognise the latest slice of house loveliness queued up by John Carter as a remix of U2’s “Mothers of the Disappeared” - only to blow my advantage, and my cool, by excitedly screaming to my friends, “it’s U2! It’s fucking U2!!” at the top of my voice. I, in short, have clubbed - a respectable amount for someone who has every Bob Dylan record up to 1980.

And yet, I’ve always had a sense that the really exciting parts of clubworld have eluded me. When I was giving it the full Pulp, in 1995 and ‘96, I sometimes found myself daydreaming enviously about the ideas and images streaming out of the club scene. While Britpop prized world-weary cynicism, dance seemed hugely idealistic, even cod-spiritual - always aiming for that transcendent moment on the dancefloor, or at sunrise in Ibiza. While indie had vague undertones of violence, dance was quite literally “loved up.” And while Britpop was obsessed with the ordinary - songs about making the tea, millionaire musicians pointedly being photographed playing pool and getting into fights - dance seemed full of fantasy, of performance, of costume. Looking back now, Keith Flint’s “Firestarter” costume seems like a poor imitation of American punk. But in the drabness of 1996, with football taking over the nation, the simple fact of a man in eyeliner on Top of the Pops seemed viscerally exciting.

And as I became aware of the history of New York’s club scene, first with Studio 54 and later with Michael Alig and the club kids, clubland just seemed more thrilling, challenging, and expressive - particularly as I was just realising the contradictions between lad culture and my homosexuality. The fact that the club kids scene ended with Alig’s conviction for murder only made it more fascinating.

As time went on, my occasional forays into clubworld always came tinged with a sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found this fantastical aspect of the scene. At Pacha, people spend a lot of money to look beautiful, but no-one could be seriously accused of expressing themselves. In recent years, I’ve let theatre fulfil my need for performance and costume as a means of escape and self-expression - and i’ve become more aware of the prevalence of such things on the gay scene, at nights like Duckie. Nevertheless, a defined performance seems dead compared to the images of fast-moving, young, androgynous clublife that still rattled around in my head.

Until I encountered Leigh Bowery.

I’d heard of Bowery, mostly as a character in Boy George’s musical Taboo and as the operator of the London club night of the same name. I also dimly remembered reading in around 1994 about Minty, the band/performance art collective Bowery spent what turned out to be his last months working with. I had a vague sense that he may have worn interesting clothes. I had no idea of just how he encapsulated everything I’d sought from nightlife, until I saw The Legend of Leigh Bowery. A nil-budget documentary by the amusingly-named Charles Atlas, Legend provides a compassionate peek at the fashion designer/club promoter/performance artist/queer icon. More importantly, it contains hundreds of pictures of his clothes.

There are too many incredible Bowery images to present more than a first impression here (plus, none of the best ones come up on a Google Image Search). But the spattering here should give you the general idea. Throughout the late 1980’s and early 90’s, Bowery was the dark heart of the club scene.

It’s important to emphasise that: he wore these clothes in clubs. Despite the label “fashion designer,” he never expressed any interest in designing for anyone else but himself, and though towards the end of his career he made moves towards performance art, it remained heavily club-based. Mostly, though, he just got dressed up to go out.

And go out he did. Sometimes unable to drink or piss for hours because of the mask and fake vagina he often wore; sometimes in excruciating pain, and usually fuelled by nothing more than a few vodkas; he would go out and dance for hours and hours. And by dance, I don’t mean anything remotely composed or prepared. My favourite image of the film is of Bowery, fully gimp-masked, waving his hands out in front of him like an ecstatic zombie, and spinning wildly around. Given his considerable bulk, that must have been scary to see (and I suppose his transcendence of his size is another aspect of what attracts me to him. It takes a unique type of body confidence to use a corset to turn your belly into a pair of breasts).That lack of drugtaking is very important. For what’s so striking about Bowery is his seriousness - purely from the testimony of his friends, it’s clear he thought carefully about his outfits, and endured considerable discomfort to wear them. Contrast that to the New York scene, where extremes of costume and behaviour were always inseparably tied up with extremes of drug use. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. But I found myself more attracted to Bowery’s thoughtful, deliberate creativity - he never collapsed into self-parody or self-destructiveness. And his intense, lumbering maleness, which contrasts so effectively with the androgyny of his costumes, is so much more complex and attractive than the New York kids’ adolescent queening.Had it just been for Bowery’s spectacular club career, I’d have found him fascinating and inspiring. But it turned out there was a whole other chapter of Bowery’s extraordinary story that resonated with me even more.

The Hertfordshire Mercury is not a very good newspaper. With nothing to report except traffic alterations and the occasional robbery, it’s a thin read. But I always remember an article I read when I was about 12. It was an interview with an artist about his relationship with one of his regular models. He described how he “bends himself into incredible shapes for me.” It was accompanied by one of the portraits of the model, nude, sprawled across a chair, one foot cocked. The model was male, large, bald. I remember being transfixed by the portrait, and for the first time by the idea of the relationship between artist and model - that weird uneven intimacy, with the artist coolly analysing the model’s nude body and the model glimpsing the full passion of the artist’s inner thoughts. Contrasted with the staid, comic images in the popular imagination of models perched on stools in front of a class, this was intense and intoxicating. I’ve been slightly fascinated by the relationship between model and artist ever since.So when, towards the end of the film, Legend describes Leigh Bowery’s modelling for Lucien Freud, my ears pricked up. I’m a huge fan of Freud, and was interested at the thought of this king of costume baring himself for this most unfoolable of eyes. But I never expected what I saw - although those of you who know Bowery will no doubt have guessed. The sight of the first of the portraits shown in the film jolted me like an electric shock. It was, of course, the very painting I’d seen in the Mercury years ago.

The article had been an interview with Freud about the Bowery sitting. Leigh had me again. He’d been haunting me, like some nude Magwitch, for over 14 years.

Leigh died in 1994, just as I was beginning to become aware of the very scene he’d dominated. But even though I’ve only discovered him properly now, aged 26, I’ll always consider him one of my formative influences in life. He helped to inspire many of the aspects of the 90’s club scene that I was drawn to - and directly inspired my interest in the model-artist relationship, even though I didn’t know it was him. He was my Marc Bolan, my Bowie - my unknown teenage idol, the person who made my tiny smalltown world a little bigger, a little more diverse - even though I didn’t know his name.

Leigh Bowery, 1961-1994

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I suppose you could accuse me of jumping on the Mercury bandwagon. Although the ex-Pulp man’s croonings had floated onto my radar before his latest album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, I did take the opportunity of the nomination to give it a proper listen. For the uninitiated, Coles Corner is a richly orchestrated smoky-lounge bar album of wistful ballads that recalls Pulp’s This is Hardcore more than their more commercially successful material. It’s unashamedly retro, and unashamedly Americana.

Which got me thinking. As many of you will know, I went to university in Sheffield, and spent four mostly very happy years there. I loved the city, and I’ve always been pained by the tendency of those who don’t know it to write it off as a typical northern hellhole. While Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds have been rehabilitated in the public eye as they’ve been regenerated economically, Sheffield still seems to exist in some vague collective memory of the unpleasant 1980’s North. Weather maps, that handy barometer of city status, invariably show Leeds before Sheffield. If it wasn’t for The Full Monty, it’s easy to think people would forget the city exists at all.

And yet Sheffield boasts, amongst other things, one of the richest musical underground histories of any city. Beginning with the post-punk era, Sheffield bands have been consistently some of the most challenging and interesting, and often commercially successful: from the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80’s, to Pulp, the All-Seeing I and its offshoot Eye Monster and Moloko in the 90’s. Plus, as the home of Warp Records, Autechre and Gatecrasher, the city made a vital contribution to the club explosion of the 90’s, with Gatecrasher’s epic 24hr marathon - at which a couple of my braver friends did bar work - probably the dance scene’s most well-known Millenium Eve offering. Not to mention that one of the biggest-selling rock bands of the late 80’s, Def Leppard, and the band behind the fastest selling debut album of all time, the Arctic Monkeys, all hail from the city.

And yet, held up against Liverpool or Manchester, Sheffield is nowhere in public awareness. There are no bus tours, no elaborate BBC Easter programmes, no Mike Winterbottom films, to celebrate the scene (although there’s this reasonable documentary). How many of the bands mentioned above did you know were from the city? Indeed, the city’s attempt to recognise its and the rest of the country’s pop music acheivemetns - the National Centre for Popular Music - was a complete disaster, not in small part because the city’s people saw it as a bit silly. In Manchester, it would have had a chance.

So why this lacklustre performance, if not of the actual artists of the city, then of the idea of the city as a cultural centre? A quick listen to Hawley’s music offers an answer. Rooted in some imagined America, some time before punk and probably before the sixties, the album can’t honestly be said to represent any serious evocation of Sheffield life. And, thinking about it, the same goes for most Sheffield music. The Human League’s eyeliner-soaked energy-synth melancholy reflected the harsh landscape that created it, but sought a distant glamour with its gender-bending style. The Leppard never hid their determination to win an American audience with sounds they’d recognise. Even Pulp generally eschewed geographic specifics for a sort of universalist poor-geek solidarity (most in evidence on “Mis-Shapes”); their most obviously rooted lyrics are about London (”Mile End,” and “Common People”’s references to St. Martin’s College). While Joy Division/New Order confronted a range of apocalytic and fantasy images in their lyrics and videos, their essential misery always seemed to have seeped up from the streets of the then-beleaguered city. And the “Liverpool sound” is incredibly clearly defined, with the La’s and the Coral making no efforts to hide their debt to their Beatle forefathers.

The simple truth is there’s just not enough in Sheffield to build a mythology on. No crucial role in imperial trade; no guilt-ridden involvement in the slave trade, or proud part in abolition. A few closed-down steel factories, of course, but even the major battles of the 80’s industrial decline were fought elsewhere in Yorkshire. The empty building next to the old City Hall, that was built as the HQ of the National Union of Mineworkers but quickly abandoned, neatly summarises Sheffield’s sense of having not quite taken proper part in the industrial boom, and postindustrial decline, that drove British northern pop music for forty years or more.

Hawley’s one clear use of Sheffield detail makes the point. Coles Corner, the nominated album, is named after a meeting point in the city popular with lovers. I’ll admit to racking my brains when I heard this, as I’ll admit to not hearing of it when I was there. It turns out that it’s between two main commercial streets, and is so named because the Cole Brothers department store (the local face of John Lewis) used to be there. Now it’s a HSBC. As a point of collective memory go, it’s fairly mediocre. The Monkeys are discovering this now: in a recent interview on American radio, they blushingly batted away the interviewer’s attempts to pin down details of the “Sheffield scene.” Gatecrasher was referred to as “something our brothers told us about.” Attempts to build some sort of Madchester-style pop moment about Sheffield are doomed to fail when the live scene consists of the Leadmill, the University, and a few small pubs.

Sheffield is pulling itself up, of course, with the usual formula of designer clothes stores, lottery-funded musuems, and trendy branding. But its heart isn’t really in it. The much-heralded cultural industries quarter, designed to use the city’s creative heritage as a springboard for economic growth, was frankly a disaster. The pop museum now a student’s union, the area’s dominating business now is a Spearmint Rhino. Previous attempts at revitalisation, based around the city’s equally under-recognised sporting heritage, were equally doomed. Because Sheffield never found a really strong narrative of despair in the 1980’s, it naturally hasn’t embraced the narrative of rebirth that has captured Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.

Instead, as always, Sheffield’s mind is on something else. Hawley’s Sinatra impersonation, like Phil Oakey’s eyeliner, shows the Sheffield spirit is still about escape and about fantasy: making something as mundane as a department store and turning it into romance. The Arctic Monkeys do boast a strong sense of place, and it’s lovely to hear the references to Hunter’s Bar and Rotherham in “Fake Tales of San Fransisco;” but let’s not start calling them anything as grand as a Sheffield Sound. The real spirit of Sheffield has one eye on the past, the future, the other side of the sea, wherever. Lying in the gutter and staring at the stars, I suppose. That’s what makes the city so invigorating. That, I think, is why I remember it so fondly: it’s a place that can’t help but encourage dreaming. That’s why it’s Hawley, and not the Monkeys, who really represents Sheffield in the Mercury shortlist. I wish him luck.

Richard Hawley website
Richard Hawley on Myspace
Listen to Richard Hawley
Watch “Cole’s Corner”:
Click here to view the embedded video.

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We live in an uber-digital age. 3.3 billion text messages were sent in the UK in the last month. Everyone from U2 to the Pope has commented at length on the never-ending sea of media messages that buzz, pop and bleep over us from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep at night – and even in between.

So it takes skill and inspiration to make a comment on on this brave new world that makes an impact. Which makes the work of New York mix artist Christian Marclay even more impressive. His 2003 piece Video Quartet, recently granted a proper room in the rehanging of Tate Modern, makes for a startling evocation of media overload: startling not for its technical skill or apparently sage commentary, as with so many pieces on similar themes, but for its humour and humanity.

Consisting of four adjacent screens, each with an independent soundtrack, showing clips from various musical films and TV shows and televised concerts, the work doesn’t differ in form from other media-collage. Its effect, at first, seems simply like a mash-up mix CD with video; 2 Many DJs TV, almost. However, the piece’s ebbs and flows generate a remarkably strong emotional reaction. Four co-ordinated bursts of energy- frenetic jazz solos, gunshot percussion and the combined vocals of Louis Armstrong and Julie Andrews, for example – will give sudden way to moments of calm, with fingers on tables and lone voices maintaining the flow. Yet there is never silence, until the end of the 13-minute piece; with the coming of each lull in activity begins a crescendo which will usher in the next movement. It’s these moments – impossible to explain, to be honest – that give the piece its power.

Unlike the Technicolor ad-fest portrayed in the likes of Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Minority Report, or Falk Richter’s Electronic City, our lives are not a constant stream of intrusive images and blaring noise. No, not even if you live in Manhattan, I’m informed. Rather, the pernicious influence of “always-on” comes not from its in-your-face brashness, but from its subtlety. It’s not the fifteen ringing mobile phones in the street that spoil your day; it’s the one that goes off in the gallery; the phone call when you’ve just got in the bath. It’s the squeeze placed on moments we used to reserve for quiet that makes technology an uncomfortable companion. The shifting pace of Video Quartet means that it mirrors our lives more truly than any frenetic Microsoft-advert speeded-up-video portrayal. But that trumpet, that hiss, that note, that sits quietly, but always getting louder, underneath every lull in the action, is what makes Video Quartet really relevant.

[ Video Quartet is at Tate Modern now]

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So what’s the big deal with this well-known example of the same thing? It’s not the video, which is a bit naff, and which I only present here because I can’t find a straight mp3 anywhere. No, it’s the song itself - it’s been eating its way into my brain. It’s something about the extent of the collage - while the BB’s gave us songs with totally sampled backing, this is one of the only records I can remember that’s entirely made of samples, vocals and all - and mostly non-musical samples, to boot. It’s so effective, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done more, but no doubt you fabulous people are all going to email and me and tell me that, actually, it has, by X and X and X.

So get telling, and enjoy the video.

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Others enjoyed various noodles and soups, excellent starters, and meat dishes of various sorts. Portions are good, and even the house white wine was perfectly nice. One apparent howler is the Leeky Beef, which one diner declared bland. But one iffy dish out of 20 meals is pretty good going.

So if you’re looking for a venue, don’t fall into the Covent Garden price trap. Take a powder to Cay Tre, you won’t be left wanting. And after, you can always pop to the Foundry for a drink - despite having just undergone perhaps the world’s oddest upmarket-pub-revamp, it’s still shambolically Berlin-y.

Not that I’ve ever been to Berlin; but people who have assure me that’s what it’s like.

[Cay Tre, 301 Old Street, London EC1V 9LA, 020 7729 8662]

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Support comes from Mary, who, bless her, isn’t very funny, but tries hard. And her rubbish moments just make you appreciate Greg more. I always imagine her with a big blonde perm and a pink tunic, slightly patrician-y. Again, I daren’t look at the website, as she’s probably a lank-haired dropout.

Anyway, here’s the website, and here’s the rss/podcast feed.

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Enjoy! R

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