Media, July 2024
Here are things I listened to, watched and read in July.
§ Music
A few months ago the TikTok algorithm started showing me videos by hey, nothing, a music duo from Athens, Georgia. I enjoyed their little videos and this month I bought and listened a lot to their album We’re Starting to Look Like Each Other and their EP Maine.
I guess they remind me of some 1990s and early 2000s sensitive guitar bands and they have some catchy tunes among the heartache.
Of course, having only stumbled across them on TikTok, I’m concerned that they’re actually a “music industry plant” because, as all little worryheads know, music can only be truly enjoyed if it’s “authentic”. Silly worryhead.
I’ve also been listening to Roxy Music’s first two albums. Up to now I’ve liked them but never been a massive fan – I wasn’t even sure if I owned any albums as CDs/files (I did, these first two). Here’s Re-Make/Re-Model (video from a performance at the Royal College of Art, audio from the album I think):
So good. There’s so much in it. I’ve been listening to them again because…
§ Books
…I read Re-Make/Re-Model: The Art School Roots of Roxy Music by Michael Bracewell which was excellent. I wouldn’t have thought that a book about a band which ends just as their first album is released would be that interesting but I loved this. It would be going too far to say that the group is incidental, but so much of what’s recounted is the people, events and ideas around the band’s members, through the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
Some of the topics covered: rock’n’roll in England; life in Newcastle in the 1950s and 60s; Marcel Duchamp; Richard Hamilton; Andy Warhol and New York; Roy Ascott; pop art; British avant garde music; the nature of art education (e.g. painting and sculpture versus newer ideas; and the difference between process and product); what it means to be “modern”; fashion and style; Antony Price; west London and the RCA in the 1960s and 70s.
Piecing together all these things through the lives of a handful of people attending separate art schools is fascinating, and the juxtaposition of different parts of popular culture, that I might usually think of separately, makes for an unusual history.
Also, it was interesting to see how earlier ideas were seen, compared to then-new ones. From 2024 they’re all “old” to different degrees. e.g. art teachers who were only interested in painting and artists from the early 20th century, and who thought pop art was nonsense. And how being into great Hollywood movies was unfashionable among most of the young arty crowd who were into nouvelle vague and social realism.
The story is also a good example of collaboration, of people being put in touch with others, of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts, of making something based on the strengths of those involved, of how to combine many varied influences to create a new thing.
Most of the book is the words of the people Bracewell interviewed, which makes it more interesting, especially as his own writing can sound a bit pompous. But I would have liked to read some interviews with people who weren’t part of the in-crowd. Much of the time Ferry, Eno, etc. are part of a clique doing their own thing, and we hear from them and their friends… but it would be interesting to hear what people outside of these gangs thought about them at the time.
The closest is Polly Eltes talking about the Moodies in the early 1970s in Reading’s Fine Art department: “I wasn’t a part of that, because I didn’t actually think it was art – I thought of it as showing off.” I can imagine other people saying similar things.
Otherwise, brilliant, and I appreciate the achievement of the band’s music so much more.
§ I also finished reading Man Hating Psycho by Iphgenia Baal which was fine. A few years ago when I started reading stories by youngish people about contemporary life, with phones and apps and messaging plus all the usual relationship drama, they were interesting and exciting: a little part of me still can’t believe the internet and all this is popular enough to feature in novels. But I think maybe I’ve read enough of these now.
And I read The Other Paris by Lucy Sante, as some getting-in-the-mood for a trip to the city that we’ve since postponed. It was good. A history with thematic chapters, topics skewed towards the people, their lives in the city, and resistance to the authorities. I’d have liked bigger pictures but then the book would have been even biggerer.
§ Films
All watched on TV:
Master and Commander (2003, Peter Weir). I’d never seen it before; I kept seeing people mentioning how good it was, an they were right.
The Castle (2023, Martin Benchimol, on iPlayer). A documentary about an Argentinian woman who inherited the large run-down house in which she grew up as a servant. Watched after reading this review and it was good. There’s no voiceover which is nice in some respects, but it left me wanting some more information and context.
Brats (2024, Andrew McCarthy). I imagine this getting made because McCarthy’s therapist got sick of him banging on about how being part of “the Brat Pack” ruined his life and told him to go and talk to the other actors, plus the journalist who coined the term, and get the fuck over it. Unfortunately he decided to turn this process into a film.
§ TV
We watched Rebus (BBC iPlayer), the reboot of the detective series. I enjoyed it, but then having never read the books I wasn’t hampered by any favourite aspects to the character being jettisoned. It was a bit more violent than ideal though; just cut away, I don’t want to see some of that.
I re-watched seasons 4 and 5 of Veep which continues to be wonderful and also seemed extra topical part-way through when Selina Kamala became the presidential candidate.
And at the end of the month we watched the third season of Slow Horses which was excellent. If we’d started early enough in the evening we’d have watched it all in one night.