Everything Else

If you Google “hard working band”, it’s no surprise that two of the first 10 results are Irish. We are a Catholic country, and it’s a Catholic meme.

Don’t you dislike it though? Personally I can’t stand this romantic idea of “the hard working band” or “the hard working artist”. Firstly, it is not actually “hard work” to be in a band. Not relatively. If anyone thinks so, try being a nurse, or a doctor, or cleaning toilets, or driving buses, or flipping burgers. What job do you do? Maybe you’re there right now. I’d wager whatever it is, it’s probably harder than being in a band.

Now don’t get me wrong, a band on the up may indeed be working hard, just as anyone who is trying to succeed at their career is. Indeed many bands or artists may rehearse a great deal and put in a lot of work. In fact, every band probably does. That’s why it’s irrelevant.  If a band or artist doesn’t give you a creative output you enjoy, then who cares how hard they work? You don’t hear hard work when you press play, nor should you.

The reality is that for a band or artist to really move us, they must create something we love or feel strongly about. That creative process does not necessarily include any “work” whatsoever. It may do, but it’s not a key component. I mean, if Paul McCartney had decided to add a long rapidfire guitar solo to “Yesterday” it may have been harder work, but would it actually have made the record sound better?

Creativity is what matters. Ideas are what matter. Work is just the realisation of both. Can we end this fetish once and for all?

BOXING hero Ricky Hatton last night called for Britain to stop pulling punches in the fight against street yobs.

Backing The Sun’s campaign to mend Broken Britain, Ricky said the violence can only be stopped by courts, schools and parents getting tougher.

He told us: “Things are terrible on our streets and seem to be getting worse. People are dying left, right and centre.

“It seems you can’t go out for a drink and walk home without someone setting on you.

“I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean stronger sentences for them.”

Ricky, who lives in nearby Hyde, recalled: “Last Sunday I watched the Manchester United and City derby, where the fans behaved impeccably. It was a wonderful day.

“Then a man was beaten up in the street and left badly injured. I found out next day. It put a dark cloud over everything. I feel desperately sorry for him and his family.”

Ricky went on: “We can’t ignore what’s happening any more. Every time you pick up the paper you read about youngsters killing someone, stabbing someone.

“I don’t think a slap on the wrist is enough. You’ve got to make an example of them in the courts.

“But something also has to be done across the board. Parents must be stronger, schools need discipline.

“And we need more police on the streets. If a group of kids is hanging around they should be moved on – but I’m not saying every kid on a street corner is a yob.”

Ricky believes much misbehaviour is caused by boredom due to a lack of anything to do.

He said: “When I was growing up I never saw trouble. But there seemed to be youth clubs everywhere then.”

Ricky, dubbed The Hitman, pledged to work with youngsters when he hangs up his gloves.

He said: “I’m going to become a trainer. Not just professionals, amateurs as well. Gyms are a place where these kids can channel their anger and find older role models.

“Delinquents can turn into gentlemen. There’s so many cases of that in boxing. I’d also like the gym to be a place where kids can go, like the youth clubs when I was a kid.

“I want to put something back into the community and stop the boredom that turns youngsters into yobs.”

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean a seriously good punch in the groin. Then, when they’re down, we mash their head into the pavement and shout “WRONG” in their face.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean eradicate violence from society.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean more youth clubs. Plus an occasional knife in the guts for petty thieves wouldn’t hurt.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean I’ve no real idea what needs to be done, but more pro-active rhetoric (that’s straight talking you nonce) would be a bloody good start.

PS: “FERAL THUGS”, I think I hear them howling in the night.

Pure Genius, All Over Again:

“A new Dylan biopic continues the cliche of the artist as Great Man, no matter what the reality

Bidisha
Monday November 5, 2007
The Guardian

Mad, bad and sad: that’s artistic types for you, if star biopics are anything to go by. I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s new film about Bob Dylan, perpetuates the cliche faithfully, if idiosyncratically. A succession of actors, among them Cate Blanchett, portray the whiny, mercurial singer at various stages of his development. Minor emotions are ramped up to epic scale, as if, like some biblical hero, Dylan must transcend each artistic challenge before advancing to the next. Here, it seems, is a deeply important man whose soul-contortions are more meaningful, whose crises are more pertinent and whose perceptions are just that bit sharper than the rest. Having been groped by the Muse, Dylan has achieved exalted status here on earth and is now ready to be idolised.

And so it goes. Gifted chaps are depicted as rugged individualists powered by pure genius, no matter how seedy their actual fates or how boring their real lives. So we have Jackson Pollock played by a wiry, gurning Ed Harris, Truman Capote as a grand swell who ventured tragically out of his depth and Picasso rendered by Anthony Hopkins as a lusty old goat. In life as in film the Great Men attract subservient women and are forgiven for their unkindness because of the marvellous gifts they present to the world. Biopics from Amadeus to Velvet Goldmine fabricate their mythic importance, turning artists’ demons into something sexy and compelling. Even the most immature act - say, chucking a telly out of a hotel window - becomes an Event, rank arrogance passed off as defiant self-assertion.

Even an artist’s failings become reflections of greatness. As another recent biopic, Control (about the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis), showed, a star’s brightness eats up the people who live at its edges: parents, old friends, failed rivals, discarded lovers. The director, Anton Corbijn, depicts the music world as a male club in which females are geishas or matrons. It is in this capacity that Samantha Morton gives one of her brazen, wounded performances as Curtis’s marginalised wife. Upon her falls the burden of his “artistic personality”. Yet Curtis, played by Sam Riley with melting eyes, comes out of it looking like a tragic hero, his shoddiness as a husband and father, his cowardice and hypocrisy, all excused by his talent.

In women it’s the opposite: their troubles are a function of their shrill pettiness and lack of staying power. In High Art, the character based on Nan Goldin is sacrificed to heroin abuse; Jennifer Jason Leigh’s seedy, squinting Dorothy Parker drinks her talent away. Female geniuses are passed off as neurotic nut-jobs and called by their first names - Sylvia, Iris, Jane, Jackie, Frida - like pet dogs. Sometimes the demeaning rewriting strays into outright falsity: we know from Hermione Lee’s bestselling biography that Virginia Woolf was a speedy, twitchy type, prone to losing weight - miles away from Nicole Kidman’s depiction in The Hours.

Viewers are in thrall to the Romantic inspiration that makes artists snatch up a pen and create a great work in one go, usually after some easily dissolved writer’s block. In reality, the creative life is much more like Last Days, in which Michael Pitt plays Kurt Cobain, pottering ineffectively while grooming his death wish. For all their rebel mythology, artists are conservative, devotedly serving their own vision for decades. Spending so much time alone with their ego or surrounded by cronies and handmaidens, they’re usually unpleasant. They’re attractive only when directors, screenwriters and cinematographers labour to make them so, knowing that audiences want their delusions vindicated.

· Bidisha is a novelist and critic”

I enjoyed this piece immensely. In fact it hit on some of the fundamental problems I have with the way we assess art and artists. A really excellent piece with predictably negative comments.

What were they smoking at the BBC when they allowed this story through?

“People will become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species. The descendants of the genetic upper class will be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” according to Evolutionary Theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics.

I guess this is when science becomes unscientific. In particular I had to laugh at this: “Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology. Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.”

Any chance of a scientific definition of “paying a genetic price”? Not listening to Bach all day or going to the opera in the evenings? How squat and goblin-like.

Next time you’re tempted to predict decline for the human race, have a read of this piece. What’s interesting is that even an educated person can’t resist making grand predictions of our demise that have no real basis in fact. As ever, I wonder if people do this because the idea that we are at the edge of humanity’s demise might make their lives seem less like the grains of sand in an eternity that they truly are.

Oh, and don’t miss the punchline to the piece. He carried out the report for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.