I’m really enjoying Tariq Goddard’s occasional forays at The Quietus; the lad’s got a fine turn of phrase about him.
There is a tentative Curtis consensus which allows those who rate him and those who don’t to coalesce round certain qualities inherent in his work that the latter simply don’t attribute as much value to as the former.
I like to think we could have a very enjoyable chat over a beer or three.
The Adam Curtis Party Conference that he’s describing, however—whose most notable feature seems to be not only the non-presence of the man whose name it bears, but the nigh-total lack of engagement with his work by the speaking attendees—seems to have been rather less enjoyable. That said, the cross-spectrum rogue’s gallery feel of the speakers list feels indicative; these are times for strange bedfellows, if only in the form of the occasional one-night stand. The old alignments and alliances are broken, perhaps irreparably, and people are looking for new formations—though not yet, perhaps, entirely willing to make the concessions necessary to their creation.
I also feel like Goddard has a better sense than most of Curtis as artist, and manages here to articulate a lingering sense I’ve always had that Curtis films are essentially novelistic, after the manner of a Delillo or the other “systems novelists”:
He is at his most powerful precisely when he does not speak and only shows; his narrative is pointed because it mirrors the minimalist connecting dialogue which provides links to silent films. It is a category error and mistake to berate him for not creating with original materials or clearly elucidate what it is he is trying to say from a theoretical perspective.
The fact that those reading Curtis primarily for clear political purposes are those most frustrated by what they parse as his reticence is, for my money, the very best indication of his status as genuine artist. That he has managed to blag it into the form of a job at the Beeb merely compounds the kudos. Hats off to a real one, as I’m almost sure the kids never say.
The title of this post comes from a much-loved line from a song by Gavin Friday—the only song of theirs I know, in fact, and which I only know so well because it was collected on an album-length sampler cassette from Island Records that (I think) I acquired at the Phoenix Festival in 1995, and which I walkman’d for years, until the tape snapped.
My lack of certainty about what happened at Phoenix ’95 can be ascribed to the most guessable of possible reasons. To repeat the old joke that we stole shamelessly from the Sixties (yes, just like everything else): “if you remember the Nineties, you weren’t there.”
On which topic: I too read the Miranda Sawyer piece that Pete Ashton mentions here, and had a similar beef with it. TBH I found her insufferably smug at the time, too—but I think my feelings both then and now are more easily explained with a bit of hindsight: Sawyer and her ilk were half a generation ahead of us, and managed to get aboard the groovy train when it first left the terminus in the late Eighties, and when there were still seats to be had.
Those of us who tumbled out of school and clambered aboard in ’93, ’94, however, were left to stand in the spaces between the carriages—and that was actually exciting enough for most of the rest of the decade, before the ultimate damp squib of the Millennium took the wind out of everyone’s sails, and 9/11 turned up like cops to a house-party at 5am. The older cohort had by this time built their businesses and/or profiles; us younger folk, when we finally got our shit together, found that the train had been cancelled, and that the scene elders had bundled off and grabbed all the taxis, leaving us stranded in some anonymous dormitory town at 2am with nowhere safe to sleep.
(I can’t speak for everyone in my cohort, obviously, but I really wasn’t paying attention to the tannoy announcements, so to speak.)
I wrote another three or four paragraphs here riffing on the justly famed passage from Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas before I realised that I had already written them pretty much verbatim, exactly two years previously, right here on this blog. I have apparently reached that stage of life where one’s riffs and anecdotes are so rutted into the tracks of one’s mind that one starts mistaking them for features of the landscape… the holloways of personal history.
Well, selah. What is there to do but keep trundling on, eh?
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