What a world we live in. One in which Dave is taken for a conservative, Ed is taken seriously and our cultural gurus aren’t taken for what they are: aesthetically illiterate idiots.
Or Morans, if you’d rather. As in Caitlin Moran, the arbiter of taste at The Times.
Actually, one should take pity on Miss Moran, for she is heart-broken. As she put it in an article a few days ago, “I miss Amy Winehouse, man.” (Note the diction, so in keeping with the stylistic heritage of this venerable paper.)
One wonders why she has to suffer. A visit to any karaoke pub in a sleazy part of town would cure Miss Moran of that nostalgic longing.
There she could find an ample supply of dishevelled, tattooed, booze-sodden, drug-addled sluts belting out unmusical pagan chants to the accompaniment of the three chords that are the sum total of pop ‘music’.
Such a slumming trip wouldn’t be on the cards though. Miss Moran probably wouldn’t go to a place (or neighbourhood) like that, and I doubt she really misses Amy.
Her statement wasn’t cultural but ideological. It was a prelude to her rant, saying that “21st-century British Culture is not British culture. It is, rather, a tiny monoculture of straight, white, public-school men, masquerading as the culture of a multicultural, multi-class, multi-sexual, half-female country.”
One wonders if either Miss Moran or her editors or, most important, her readers realise that this is meaningless drivel even on her own puny terms.
At the bottom of the anthropological universe where the likes of Winehouse reside, the kind of genus Miss Moran holds up as being typical doesn’t exist at all.
Even in what these days has to be coyly described as high culture, the attributes that so vex Miss Moran are seldom found all together, though they often appear severally.
Half of today’s novelists are women, and even less ‘progressive’ times yielded many figures breaking the imaginary stereotype Miss Moran has in her febrile mind.
I won’t bother you with a long list of great British female novelists and musicians, or homosexual writers, artists, our most respected art critics and thespians (a little clue: just look at most great Shakespearian actors of the last half-century or so) – you are perfectly capable of compiling such lists yourself.
True, most of those objects of Miss Moran’s disdain are white, but she must learn to be patient. After all, Britain was practically all-white for 1,500 years, and this unfortunate situation can’t be changed overnight. We are on the right track though, and there are already enough black Hamlets and Lears to pour balm on Miss Moran’s multi-culti wounds.
Yet again, what matters here isn’t the text but the subtext; not the denotation but the connotation. Which is an all-abiding urge to reduce this ancient, civilised Western country to a primitive tribe gyrating to shamanistic shrieks and losing every semblance of aesthetic judgement.
A piece of avuncular advice though, if I may, Caitlin. Don’t write things like “egalitarianism is, like love, only really useful when it’s an adverb, not a noun.”
People may think you are not only stupid and subversive, but also illiterate. Neither word can ever be an adverb, dear. Were you too busy turning on in your youth to study basic grammar?
Such are our taste gurus, the fishers of virginal souls. Their catch is spectacular and at times they even manage to reel in souls that are far from virginal, such as, alas, mine.
The other day I read the reviews for the new film The Duke of Burgundy and decided I had to give it a go. After all, every critic in every broadsheet gave it at least four stars and usually all five. “Stylish”, “sensual”, “genuine substance” – such words were persuasive enough to make me part with my hard-earned.
I ought to have known better.
The film depicts an S&M, B&D affair between two women, one older than the other. The leitmotif is the same play-acting scene repeated ad infinitum: the younger pervert plays a servant who does something wrong and has to be punished by the older degenerate.
The punishment takes the shape of oral urination mercifully administered behind a closed door and hence communicated through sound effects only.
The overall message, as far as one can discern it, is that such is, or at least can be, true love. Omnia vincit amor, and love can even conquer the taste of piss in one’s mouth.
The form matches the content. Every frame is pseudo-artistic, pretentious, diffused-focus, somnolently paced emetic rubbish, and it’s not even original rubbish. When I managed to force my eyelids open, I could discern direct references to at least half a dozen cult films, including the stocking-donning scene from The Graduate.
This is what art is supposed to be like for someone who knows nothing about art. It’s like cre-itive, man, as Miss Moran would put it. Djamean?
Against this outpouring of chichi, tasteless, pseud visual demagoguery, one almost misses the fact that the film doesn’t offer a single reference to the eponymous Duke of Burgundy. Perhaps this is meant to be part of the supposed mystique.
But it’s not the utterly giftless and aesthetically challenged director Peter Strickland who interests me here, but our cultural commentators, the chaps and chapesses who shape the tastes of our gullible public.
Have they all formed some kind of Masonic cabal to destroy our culture? I doubt they have, at least not literally. But one struggles to think what they’d do differently if they had indeed met in a smoke-filled room to draft a secret programme.