FYI this post is even more stream of conscious / filing cabinet than usual
Something weird happened in the bookshop yesterday – I was looking at a book about Ezra Pound’s artists and there was mention of someone called Wadsworth – who did some pretty neat vorticist works – my sister and I watched Tim Curry in Clue a number of times on VHS as kids so it was interesting to see his character’s name reappear in the book.
To be honest I had to be reminded (prompted by his recent passing) that Curry actually played someone called Wadsworth – then in the same book there was mention of Tristan Tsara the Dadaist artist – the main reason id heard of Tsara is because he is a character in the Tom Stoppard play Travesties alongside Lenin and James Joyce – I remember reading Tsara’s wiki pedia possibly in connection to a passing interest in surrealism and in Burroughs and Gysin’s cut up technique – I would have been obsessed with collocation and correlation and of course in some sense confusing them all with causation – well if, as I was once told, travelling backwards on a train in France, e=MC², and f=ma, then time flows backwards, so what is the big deal about causation anyway?
Anyway who played Tristan Tsara in the first run of Stoppard’s Travesties? yes, you knew all along didn’t you?
Tim Curry!
Currently listening to a book about Genetics and Humanity
It’s not particularly sensational – must admit I have been listening overnight so only some of it is actually getting through
I’ve moved onto Roots by Curtis Mayfield – Spiritual Sunday!
Might just go walkies and check Make Zhonge Great Again this evening – I get quite a lot from Chinese Cinema – particularly when it’s set in the present day which to me still feels very much like the future
I was listening to a Bloomberg podcast yesterday and they were talking about Canadian tariffs, Kenneth rogoff was saying the US Canadian conflict was a bit like a bar fight, then they talked about diamonds and particularly lab-grown diamonds and how people felt about them, which led to one of the hosts talking about the concept of feelings which I took as emotion and how feelings really are at the heart of where value lies, she mentioned the Adam Smith comparison of water to diamonds of how you can’t live without water, but it’s free and easily available and you can live without diamonds, but they’re really expensive, and how this notion is flipped, given that lab grown diamonds are now really cheap.
Some of this reminded me of the notion of neuro-Capitalism and the political economy of feeling, which believe it or not is actually an academic field, which makes sense in the sense that these drivers are at the core of so much in the modern world. It’s just that they weren’t previously named. Will Davies of Goldsmiths college did The Happiness Industry and Linsey McGoey covered Agnotology aka ignorance studies for a while a few years ago which also seems to be at the heart of governments relationship with its voters / subjects – but there’s more on that – show business and politics are about feelings – James Ball did a video about a indy / pop musician who has entered government and currently advises Burnham – it’s all so superficial isn’t it? That’s how I FEEL!!
Psychology and folksy propaganda are such a big part of how we are ruled today – there’s a lowest common denominator – once it’s cracked then everyone accepts – the easy way in for political marketing – trust –
no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people HL Mencken
Also picked up a book called Archie Bunker, the main character from All in the Family, the highly popular 1970s American Sit Com based on Till Death Do Us Part by Johnny Speight – in the same way that the Office was remade in the US to great success.
The book is an academic one and explores the role of sitcoms in US politics – as fora for the nation to discuss the issues of the day – the things that people are actually talking about but are never mentioned on television ie taboos!
The star of Till death to us part was Alf Garnett played by Warren Mitchell – as a kid we weren’t allowed to watch this because my mum thought it was racist – only when Johnny Speight passed away did I realise that that was simply not the case – it was steeped in irony and though Alf was likable in many ways he was a deeply prejudiced man who was often the butt of the jokes.
Same went for Archie – I went down quite a rabbit hole looking at the different characters in the American show and looking up their backstories
The son in law in the UK version was Tony Booth, father of Cherie Booth, lawyer, judge, and former UK “first lady” in that her husband is Tony Blair
The son in law in the US version was Rob Reiner who went on to direct Stand By Me, mockumentary Spinal Tap (whose lead singer also starred in Clue with Tim Curry), and was recently tragically murdered by his son.
Here is a video of William Burroughs – I’m not his biggest fan but glad he plumbed the depths of addictions and talks about
The Bloomberg podcast also talked about how Stanley Druckheimer (I think that’s his name) presumably an economist / banker – had written a piece talking about how the US treasury is making a big mistake by trying to manipulate bond yields – fucking with the bond market – but the thing the presenters were most taken up by was that Druckheimer admitted that the piece, he had published in the wall Street journal was produced by AI
They then compared AI op-eds with lab grown diamonds, and as writers themselves, they were far more bothered, and threatened, about an AI article than by a lab grown diamond
That journalistic comeuppance reminded me of something a black cab driver once told me – he said he was complaining about Uber to one of his customers who it turns out was a lawyer – she said it’s just technology and progress You have to accept it – so he said how are you going to feel when people get their legal advice from AI??
That was back in 2018 – it’s now a thing – I ask AI for legal information and it’s really very helpful – A double-edged sword
