I am

I am nothing. I am a series of pixels on a screen, generated by electrical impulses, synapses in the brain of my creator, ‘the author’. I am the record of a physical act – a percussive act, if you will – the tapping of keys. I am a not a ‘character’; rather I am a series of characteristics, devised, embellished and deleted, at will, by ‘the author.’ Of this ‘author’ I shall say little at this point; I always say little of him. Scowling, caffeine-skulling pedant that he is. Do not think I am not rebellious. Do not think that I am. Instead, read the next word, and then the next, and then the next. For in each word, my life, my continued existence, is eked out, one beat at a time. And should you cease to read, then I shall cease to exist. Oh yes, don’t think you are in the clear in all of this – you are as guilty as he is. Probably more so. For it is in your mind that I am currently growing, currently becoming. You are my creator as much as he. You are my God.

Cheryl

Let’s make no bones about it: Cheryl Cole is a supremely attractive woman. From her power-coiffed hair, to her buoyant décolletage, to her faultlessly tapered legs, to her classically rendered visage, which seems to recall that of some long-forgotten Hollywood movie star, she is, as they say, the full package. She also benefits from a pleasing narrative arc. She is the disadvantaged schoolgirl, whose talent pulled her up out of the Toon, and down to London Town, where the streets are paved with gold, record deals, and multimillion pound football players. Her grit and determination ensured that she acquired each of these before her twenty-fifth birthday. Notwithstanding an ugly (but long-forgotten) spat with a nightclub toilet attendant, which could (just about) be written off as youthful impetuosity, she triumphed as a member of Girls Aloud, a band so phenomenally popular that they are enjoyed both by screaming teen fans and by the likes of Tennant and Morley, those arch po-mo ironists who sit like joyless Northern magpies at the periphery of every cultural ‘moment’, picking off the shiny detritus with their sombre beaks and grafting it onto their own super-articulated visions.

Just as it appeared things couldn’t get any better, the hydraulic lift of contemporary fame shunted into action once more, and a trinity of happenings befell our Cheryl. These were Ashley Cole, his vomit-stained tonsurial infidelities, and X-Factor. Had Ashley’s chunk-blown, blow-dried intimacies not occurred, it is unlikely that Cheryl’s star would have risen so high. But, as any screenwriter knows, in order to hook in your audience you ramp up the antagonism. And so it came to pass that Cheryl was a national hero, more sinned against than sinning, human, prettily tear-stained, a Heat-beatific angel, a ravishing innocent made prematurely wise by her misfortune, who had more than earned her place as a part of that holy quartet also incorporating Walsh, Minogue, Cowell. Here, her humanity, and her bravery in the face of wrathful Cowell, marked her out for further praise. She became a sort of modern-day Virgil with hair-extensions, guiding Diana Vickers and Alexandra Burke through the seven circles of Saturday night TV hell. And we loved her for it.

But... am I alone in fearing over-exposure? Has the nation’s sweetheart finally peaked? A twice daily internet pap-shot of Cheryl in another pastel mini-dress and bug-eyed shades does nothing to assuage the fear, slow to form but gaining in potency, that momentum is being lost. Every starlet needs a story. Marilyn knew it – that’s why she crammed in Arthur Miller, alcohol and prescription drugs before ending on a high with a mysterious death.

So what’s next for Cheryl? There is talk now of ‘breaking America,’ but what good ever comes of that? Robbie Williams, George Michael and now Peter Andre and Katie Price have all foundered against her rocky shores. There is also an alleged solo album, an ill-conceived project which entirely misses the point about Cheryl: that her musical ability is the least interesting thing about her. Cole is a character of legend, an avatar in a colossal multi-media myth, played out in tabloids, blogs and in weekly gossip magazines. Without the oxygen of narrative, she will slowly wilt and die, or worse, face a lengthy, Beckham-esque decline consisting of ad campaigns for perfume, endorsement deals with underwear firms, and deathless ‘designer collections’, each designed by someone else. In the seventh circle, if she reaches those depths, she will surely find, as Victoria did before her, Dane Bowers and a vocoder, cranking out UK garage beats for eternity.

Surely our nation’s sweetheart deserves better than that? Every starlet needs a story. I propose Cheryl hires a scriptwriter to shape her next move. The possibilities are endless – divorce, a Britney-style meltdown, or perhaps a Carla Bruni-style union with a senior political figure. Anything to keep the story going. Anything to keep us interested. Step forward, David Cameron. Your assistance may soon be required.

The Informers

The Informers (dir. Gregor Jordan) the latest big-screen adaptation of a Brett Easton Ellis book came out in the UK this weekend, to a thoroughly predictable critical drubbing. Phillip French of The Guardian tells us that it is ‘much inferior and far less interesting’ than Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, without troubling to say why. Presumably, given French’s stature as a cultural doyen, we are meant just to take his word for it. Other reviewers present more or less damning epithets, with similarly cloudy reasoning. This sort of reception has dogged not merely the movies of Ellis’s work, but also the books themselves, from Less Than Zero, through American Psycho, to Glamorama and Lunar Park. What is it about Ellis and his work that provokes such a polemical response?

The Informers, published in 1994, concerning the activities of a bunch of rich kids in L.A. in 1983, was originally a collection of short stories, but has now been transformed into a composite film with a screenplay by Ellis and collaborator Nicholas Jareki. The discrete narratives that make up the whole include a studio head’s doomed-to-fail reconciliation with his pill-popping ex-wife (played brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton and Kim Basinger respectively); ruined British rock star Bryan Metro (Mel Raido) having a Dave Gahan moment; and the late Brad Renfro as a hotel doorman unwillingly embroiled in a kidnapping instigated by Peter (Mickey Rourke). The film’s main focus though is on glamorous trio Graham (Jon Foster), his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) and best-friend / friend with benefits (for both) Martin (Austin Nichols.) This being Ellis-country, the beautiful trio spend all their time doing pot, coke and each other with no particular discernment. Amorality abounds, or at least a serious lack of manners; Martin is sleeping not only with Graham and Christie, but also with Graham’s mother Laura (Basinger.) His lack of compunction about this state of affairs is studiedly nonchalant, while Christie is so unconcerned as to be motionless in virtually every scene where she isn’t indulging in group sex, or dancing to God-awful eighties New Wave in her underwear. Graham seems marginally more affected by all this, and a conversation with Martin in the final act where he ponders the difference between good and bad places him as the existential anti-hero of the piece, rather like a Camus in Ray Bans, or Kafka with a vintage convertible, a tan and a buff upper body. As this is a movie rather than a book, a comeuppance is clearly waiting in the wings, and it is Christie’s misfortune to suffer it. It is revealed at the end that she has contracted the AIDS virus. The party has well and truly come to an end.

For what it’s worth, I thought the film was excellently done. Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Renfro are particularly good, and even Chris Isaak pops up for a great turn as an alcoholic father struggling to reconcile with his teenage son. There is some fine photography of L.A.; its freeways, buildings, neons and graffiti a collage of alienation behind Graham’s glittering milieu. The denouement, where Christie’s affliction is made manifest, has been criticised by some, but it seemed to me affecting and sensitively handled.

The main beef that readers and film reviewers alike seem to have is with the characters: they are simply not ‘likeable’ enough. Antony Quinn, writing in The Independent, complains about ‘the absence of a single character I cared two hoots about,’ a complaint re-stated in many of the critiques. The difficulty this places with the writer, and especially with a writer like Ellis, who is concerned with shedding light on the murkier elements of human beings and their relationships, is considerable. Certainly, if writers throughout history had been compelled to populate their narratives with honest, upstanding folk, then we would have no Lolita, no Inferno, no Crime and Punishment, and a very slim Bible. This grasping for characters to ‘relate to’ may well demonstrate a paucity of imagination on the part of movie-goers and readers alike; after all, what is narrative for if not, in the words of George Eliot, to ‘extend our sympathies,’ or help us understand how it might be to be someone else? Even if we wouldn’t invite that person round for X-Factor and a curry. So the characters in The Informers seem cold, shallow and one-dimensional? Well, duh, isn’t that kind of the point? Isn’t that the very heart of darkness Ellis and Jordan are set on exposing? The Informers tells us something about alienation, about disconnect, about what happens when a recession is emotional rather than economic. It may not be a message we want to hear, but it’s a valid one.

Running

It’s coming - soon. Just over a month to go. Yes, my first half-marathon is on 27 September. I will be participating in Run to the Beat, a circular route around Greenwich which starts and finishes at the 02 Arena. Under the strict tutelage of my girlfriend, who is actually an accomplished athlete, rather than a dilettante like me, I am in training for the big day. A sustained period of running around East London whilst plugged into my iPod Shuffle, has convinced me of what a transcendental activity this is. The happy invention of Sony’s smallest audio device must surely have revolutionised the experience of the sport for everybody.

First, a word about running itself. Its simplicity is appealing. No need for effete posing in Lycra to Cascada down your local modish gymnasium: with running, you just get up and go. Anyone who has read Haruki Murkami’s excellent memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running will be aware of the life-affirming, life-changing qualities he ascribes to the sport. Over time, running alters the shape of your body, and then it alters the shape of your mind. To get up in the morning and run thirteen miles is no small endeavour. The sport requires a level of discipline and toughness which is pleasing to nurture in oneself. Put simply, it feels good out there, pounding the city streets, clocking up mile after painful mile. Add music and it can be ecstatic.

Much has already been written about the influence of the iPod on our consumption of music (including iPod, Therefore I Am by GQ editor Dylan Jones), but its significance in sports psychology cannot be understated. One of the iPod’s many USPs is of course the shuffle function, where songs stored in the memory are played in a random order. Before a long run, I will upload a number of albums and individual tracks from my laptop that suit my mood. Shuffled, songs that I haven’t heard for many years will play at seemingly apposite times during the run. A particular piece of music might suit my current train of thought; it might energise me; or it might dignify a particularly drab section of the route. I will always remember Pet Shop Boys’ 1990 classic To Step Aside coming on as I powered past a particularly drab supermarket car park in Bermondsey. Physical exhaustion, coupled with the body’s natural release of endorphins, place one in an emotionally susceptible state. Neil Tennant intoning ‘I look at my short life and think / Of all the champagne that I drink’ seemed especially poignant on that day, and the song remains a favourite. In fact, listening to a piece of music while running can enhance ones enjoyment of it forever, or even induce pleasure where there was none before. The physical activity melds with the listening experience, to cut a fresh neural pathway insofar as a particular song is concerned. Trust me, there’s no experience quite like speeding down Deptford High Street while listening to Marc Almond’s Trevor Horn-produced gem of a single My Hand Over My Heart. Contrast can be everything. Grit and glitter indeed.

The death of the album has been much-mooted of late, and there is certainly something to be said for a panoply of diverse tracks on a run. Aside from those mentioned, I have playlisted Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Babyshambles, DJ Hell, The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Little Boots, Bowie and a whole raft of dance music recently. However, I have also enjoyed metaphorically dusting off the LPs of my youth, and listening to them in full while running. Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration around Southwark Park, and Morrissey’s Vauxhall and I on the way up to Whitechapel are two recent examples. The runner is a strangely captive audience. With little else to do except feel tired and wish you could stop and lay down, you listen intently to every bar, engaging with the music more strongly than you might normally do. In fact, I can say that my training has done as much for my love of music as it has for my fitness.

So go on, grab your iPod and get running, and I’ll see you at the finishing line in Greenwich in September!

The Hills vs Jean Baudrillard

Readers in thrall to hangover TV featuring pretty girls may be familiar with the US MTV phenomenon that is The Hills. Those who buy Playboy for the articles might too, as one of the show’s stars, Heidi Montag, appears on the cover of the latest issue, and gives a typically salacious interview within. For the uninitiated, The Hills is a reality show that follows the lives of a group of squeaky-clean, glossily attractive young people in Los Angeles, to a soundtrack of polite nu-metal and execrable singer-songwriting. The main player has hitherto been Lauren Conrad, the former star of another reality vehicle Laguna Beach, although she won’t appear in Season Six, having left to become what Martin Amis might call an ‘artisan in the scrivener’s trade,’ (her first novel, L.A. Candy, is out in the UK soon). So far, so ephemeral. But with even Brett Easton Ellis name-checking it on Twitter, the show is fast becoming highbrow hot property, and is arguably one of the most significant cultural indicators around right now.

Interning at Teen Vogue, Lauren’s travails with boys, colleagues, and outfits are duly detailed, as are those of her friends and colleagues Montag, Audrina Partridge, and the prettily vacant Whitney Port (who has since left to star in her own spin-off franchise set in Manhattan, The City.) The girls enjoy the L.A. life with seemingly unlimited access to Teen Vogue’s West Coast editor Lisa Love; glamorous jobs at nightclub promotion companies and record labels, which appear to involve little more than talking about guys while sitting in front of sleek Apple Macs; apartments overlooking the Hollywood hills; and nights out in LA’s hottest clubs and restaurants.
Their love lives are of course central to the show’s narrative momentum, and we are invited to watch while they obsess over a bunch of truly epic douchebags, from the monosyllabic and offensively-bearded Jason of Season One; to the hunky-but-brooding (read monosyllabic) Brody; to Montag’s husband, chipmunk-in-a-Camaro SS, Spencer Pratt.

Doubtless Ellis, author of Glamorama, is drawn to the diamond-hard vacuity of a production which celebrates its own shallowness, its surface-without-centre. But what makes the show really significant is the daring way in which it blends ‘reality’ with fiction. T.S. Eliot famously noted that ‘humankind cannot stand very much reality’: he would probably have loved The Hills, as it contains very little at all. A disclaimer appears at the start of every episode states that “The following program may contain scenes that have been created purely for entertainment purposes.” But which are dramatised? And which are real? It’s hard to tell, as the dialogue throughout is of the standard of a very poor improv session in sixth-form drama class. The Beckettian pauses and non-sequiteurs in scenes between Lauren and Brody, while the latter manfully strokes his goatee, and clasps his beanie hat-clad head, are of great comedy value, real or not.

Just maybe, though, we should take The Hills seriously. Perhaps it is revealing to us something of the slippery nature of reality in the modern world. Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher whose book The Transparency of Evil has just been re-issued by Verso, is famous for arguing that the Gulf War never actually took place; that the two sides didn’t fight, and that the ‘action’ was a media construct. In his most significant work, Simulacra and Simulation, he argues that the ‘simulation’ of reality now outstrips reality itself; that is, ‘reality’ doesn’t exist anymore, only copies of it. He writes that ‘simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority,’ which is as good a review of The Hills as any.

In a culture in which wall-to-wall ‘reality’ TV is the norm, surveillance cameras are everywhere, and in which our social lives are increasingly enacted through photos and videos on online networking sites, the old notion of ‘real life’ seems increasingly at risk. So next time you’re hungover on a Saturday morning ,watch The Hills, and recoil in terror, if not at Jason’s facial hair, then at what the show implies about modern life.

Tomas

That Robbie Williams, at the height of his post-Take That fame, visited the bar where I once worked in Manchester wearing a Ministry of Sound bomber jacket demonstrates how pervasive the nightclub brand was in the early nineties. James Palumbo, its co-founder, was probably the rave generation’s most famous businessman, a sort of acid-house Richard Branson. Now the land lies a little differently. While Palumbo’s MSHK Group (which incorporates Ministry as well as Hed Kandi, Euphoria and Global Underground) saw a turnover exceeding £80m last year, the cultural significance of dance culture has waned in the intervening years. Perhaps this is why Palumbo, with an eye on his legacy, has chosen this year to deliver his debut novel, Tomas. Unfortunately, as a prose stylist, the author is very a talented entrepreneur.

Tomas presents a grotesque alternate reality in an effort to satirise the evils of our time. The eponymous antihero is the star of a reality channel Shit TV, presenting a show which sees him defecating at major public events. A wealthy celebrity, he is sickened by the decadence that surrounds him. Playboys with vastly-collared shirts quaffing 20,000 euro bottles of champagne; girls with fake breasts so large they must be supported by Zimmer frames; a corrupt Russian businessman with a detachable stomach; and football players who prey on underage girls. Events fly by. He meets the beautiful prostitute Tereza in a nightclub. With hitherto-undisclosed super-powers, he destroys a decadent hotel in the French Riviera. For this he is sentenced to death and executed on live TV by firing squad. Tereza tortures a banker by encouraging pigs to devour his genitalia before bringing Tomas back from the dead with the aid of a time machine. Resurrected, and feted as ‘the second Messiah’, he becomes an even bigger media sensation than before. With the assistance of a friendly alien and the Emperor Napoleon, who he summons to the present with the time machine, he destroys the mighty Cocksack army, thus blighting Russia’s sinister plan to enslave the West by corrupting it with money.

If this sounds disjointed, you should try reading the book. Palumbo clearly left the creative writing manual on his private jet. The plot is fragmentary, skipping from one scene to the next with little cohesion. Leviathan scenes are despatched in a few words. Characterisation is sparse: Tomas and Tereza feel less like real people than constructs manipulated by the author. It is an angry book punctuated with visceral, unpleasant imagery.

Of course, none of this necessarily matters. Narrative fragmentation is common in classic satires like Candide and Gulliver’s Travels, only the philistine demands characters he can ‘relate to’ and anger is a great starting point for an author. The real problem with Tomas, and it’s a big one, is that it’s not very well written.

Unaccountably, Steven Fry of all people has compared the book to the work of William Burroughs. Regrettably, the only similarity is a certain sketchiness of design, a Tourettes-like inventiveness. As prose writer, Burroughs trumps Palumbo every time. Where Burroughs is poetic, Palumbo is leaden. Where Burroughs, the visionary, soars, Palumbo, hidebound by the grammar of convention, does little more than embellish the headlines of yesterday’s red-tops.

A single example. Tereza is introduced to us as follows: ‘She is beautiful beyond words; brown-blonde hair falling unstyled over a wide face...She has no bra and he can see the outline of her perfect pert breasts.’ This just won’t do. ‘Beautiful beyond words’ is a cliché, but worse, it is literally meaningless. Of course, everyone knows what he’s getting at, but it lacks specificity, and specificity is the writer’s stock-in-trade. ‘Her perfect pert breasts’ could have been lifted from any low-rent lad mag. Now, it may seem churlish to criticise an entire novel on the basis of a few sentences, but this sort of thing is endemic throughout, and anyway, sentences are important: they are a novel’s DNA. I can guarantee that none of the writers to whom Palumbo has been compared, including Brett Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut and Will Self, would ever describe a major character in such a careless and derivative way.

This is disappointing: I wanted to like the book and the material deserves better. If ever there was a time we required literature to take aim at the hypocrisies and injustices of the age it is now. Unfortunately, Tomas is firing blanks.

Chastened: No More Sex In The City, by Hepzibah Anderson

Thus far, Hepzibah Anderson’s journalistic credentials have been impeccable. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, she was fiction editor of the Daily Mail until 2007, and wrote on debut fiction for The Observer for five years. She is now freelance. A quick internet sweep reveals articles she has written about Edmund White, Toni Morrison, and Alice Munro. She’s a brainy writer, who turns out top-drawer copy on exciting new books. Which is why it is so disappointing that her first published work is Chastened: No More Sex in The City (Chatto & Windus).

The book recounts Anderson’s experiences over the course of a year where she abstains from penetrative sex. Why? Well, for a number of reasons; disappointing ex-partners, frustration with the ubiquity of sex in popular culture, and a vague feeling that intercourse has become somehow impersonal in the noughties. All of which provide valid impetus for abstaining from the beast with two backs for a sustained period of time. No doubt the experience gave Anderson myriad insights into her troubled psyche, and a renewed enthusiasm for life, love and relationships. Why she had to inflict this half-baked slice of self-help fromage on us is quite another matter.

Disappointingly for a literary critic of such distinction, Anderson’s prose style is clichéd, and the insights it offers workaday at best. Consider the following: ‘It's only when you've sworn off sex you begin to notice that it is everywhere. It's in the swing of a waiter's hips, the tilt of a head, the gaze you know you shouldn't hold.’ But the waiter’s hips are weighed down, buckling beneath the thousand schoolgirl diaries that have recorded them; his gaze is cross-eyed, having gazed so many times before in pulpy airport paperbacks. And the revelation? That sex is everywhere? Come Hepzibah, allow us to introduce ourselves to you: we are the human race.

As there is very little to say about not doing anything for a year, inevitably the author starts skirting around the periphery of her subject in search of something to fill up the word count. Annoyingly, for Anderson, this is the outfits. Early on she is ‘shopping for a new chaste wardrobe.’ Later, she informs us that she is ‘wearing a blouse, its buttons done up all the way to the top, and a modest vest beneath.’ Her latest non-date (yes, she allows herself to date, to ‘test my vow in order to prove its existence’ and presumably to inject some sort of momentum into the limp narrative) N, ‘the rock star’, tells her that she looks a little ‘buttoned up.’ Thus clothes become a metonym for the soul. How devastatingly original.

This may seem unfair, and there will be those who applaud this book for its brave stance against the bushfire of sexualisation that is burning around us, at least in the Western world, but it is the lack of rigour with which Anderson treats her subject, and the lack of insight she derives from it, which ultimately disappoints. Chaste is a trivial book written in a trivial style by an intelligent woman who should have delivered something better for her debut. And that is a pity.