Nathan Barley comes to TV

why do they include something horrible like a cat with scissors in its head in each ep?

interestingly(?) last night's South Bank Show seemed to touch on this:

Music and Arts
The South Bank Show
11:05pm - 12:05am

Adam Phillips - Going Sane

The renowned and controversial psychotherapist Adam Phillips argues that rather than seeing sanity as normal, sensible or conformist we need a completely new vision of what it means to be sane. His inquiry leads us on a colourful journey through madness in life, art and literature, from Hamlet and King Lear to Alice in Wonderland and Freud. On the way, Adam meets a consultant from Broadmoor and visits the Bethlem Hospital museum.

but i only caught the last 3 minutes having spent my time watching the swearing on Ch4.

"I Don't Beige"

he'd have totally gotten away with that hair if it wasn't for the paint pot lids.

bumphUK would be a great name for a magazine

The first-person narrator in those radio pieces was a damaged, confused, socially-miscued individual being variously shredded by terrible encounters with amoral media goons. I think perhaps Morris has brought a little bit of this My Wrongs character to Ashcroft.

I thought #4 was rather weak, though the low-angle shot of the cat-with-scissors was masterful.

I happened to hear that (and you have to listen quite hard to catch it) immediately after I'd sampled the chorus of David Bowie's Move On and played it backwards, after reading somewhere that it was All The Young Dudes reversed. Lo and behold, it was. Not quite palindromic, but in the same ballpark. Now, personally I'm just very interested in the idea of an album that plays the same backwards as it does forwards. I take that idea just as seriously if I come across it in Nathan Barley as I would if I read it in some essay by Cornelius Cardew. Sure, Claire immediately proclaims Rocket a "prannet", but it's boring to condemn ideas without offering something in their stead. Barley's suggestion that "we chop some sense into that bollock" at least has the virtue of being a creative solution (even if he never gets round to it).

That little scene outlines the problems the satirist faces. To dismiss the enemy as a "prannock" might just be rather boring if you're not offering anything as colourful (Claire). To fight editing with editing (Nathan) puts you on the same page as your opponent. And to give any kind of attention to attention-seekers already puts them on a pedestal. It's a no-win situation, zugzwang. You move, you lose. Morris and Brooker are already courtiers at the Hoxton court. They're making media about the media that makes media about media.

Is it on E4 tonight? Perhaps my mother-in-law would like it.

I take that idea just as seriously if I come across it in Nathan Barley as I would if I read it in some essay by Cornelius Cardew.

So do I. If Cardew made an effort of it and did it well, excellent. But this is one of those ideas that is much, much more likely to create something unlistenable or at least boring. The Doug Rocket character isn't going to create anything that's of value to anyone outside of his clique at this point in the game.

I took Barley's "let's chop some sense into that bollock" to mean "let's take bits of him saying his detached observations, chop it into jerky video bits, and cut the whole thing to some wild glitchy music." Basically the same impulse he seemed to have when he offered to use some of Claire's footage at his party. I'd imagine Claire would just put footage together to portray her subject in the best possible light, etc.

Has anyone else noticed that Claire's junkie choir thing is horrible, but in a completely perpendicular way to Barley's horribleness? The video of the junkie singing and playing guitar was a hint of Morris humor, I think.

The mutely furious cod-Orlando in bumphUK was great as well. The name of the shop is part of what Momus was talking about: it's clever ("bumph = stuff, junk" is pretty widely spread slang, yes?) and it's where satire tries to have its cake and eat it: cleverer than vice, but worse than them, but it knows it, yeah? (If this series leaves nothing else behind it, it may add ", yeah?" to the end of more ridiculous statements/straw men).

the tramp racing, the junkie choir/junkie song, the porno video nathan and his roommate were watching, the tokyo fashion thing, and the majority of the doug rocket stuff...

Dan and Nathan are in different sitcoms - when confronted with adversity, Dan blathers and fucks up, like Ronnie Corbett in Sorry, whereas Nathan is just gormless, but the world revolves in such a way that this doesn't hurt him "Los Banditos Boleros". Or perhaps it's a comment on how low the bar is set.

Somewhat of a surprise when the payoff shot is actually, funny, though. And shortly afterwards, kind of sweet.

Late in his interview, Zengotita talks about the things that can knock a self-mediator back towards some kind of "reality": accident, disease, death, and having children. So I'd like to ask people to speculate on what might happen to Barley in episode 6... or later in his life. Does he get hit by a car, become paralysed, and find himself terribly grateful when people visit him in hospital? Does he marry Claire and have kids and become responsible? Does he become some sort of Bono figure, and transform his self-mediation skills into a political quest for third world debt relief? Or does he just become some sort of locust with a camcorder, pillaging the world of its last resources and videoing himself as he goes?

Sure, RJG, the address is momus at t-online.de

Andrew, this was the essence of most of the scenes from the Big Train series, I recall.

Looking back over this thread (and, compared with the kind of debate about this going on elsewhere, it's been a delight) I realise that the connection in my mind between NB and Patrick Bateman had struck a few other people. The original NB is presented as a winner - venal, small-minded, blinkered and often plain evil but ultimately a sucess in his own little milieu. It's the moral sense of horror at this sucess that seems to be missing on the screen.

but he does win on TV as well, see the Japan TV thing last week. the horror is there too - for anything he does or says there is at one person in the same scene looking aghast or bewildered.

yes

.
.
.

It was amoebas.

By the way, this thread has now fuelled no less than two blog entries (one for each of my headset cellphones) elsewhere: on Click Opera and on Design Observer. Waste not, want not, as we say in Scotland.