Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

scrolling up i just noticed that hadley freeman's 'ask hadley' column about band t shirts is what first got this "7-year-old thread" revived

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2009/jul/06/bartons-britain-m1-motorway

'Frail red poppies dance by the roadside ... and the wind comes charging at your legs'

'The M1 [...] is a very, very good road'

I read the Festival Fairy article in the print edition. They're giving her enough rope.

Aarrrgghhh...don't anyone show that M1 thing to Patrick Keiller.

I thought of PK too - it is GCSE project PK, maybe, just as her pop columns were 6th-form Freaky Trigger.

I kind of think of the columns as City and Guilds Greil Marcus.

Joe Moran's new 'On Roads' is a much better version of This Kind Of Thing, incidentally - an odd cross between Marc Augé and Morrissey.

^OTM.

Her voice (I presume that's her voice) is too weedy, the prose is too wet and the shots are sub-Robinson In Space (a guy smoking in his car! the Wimpy and the telephone boxes!). I guess I'm just jealous I didn't think of getting paid for ripping off Keiller so weakly.

well, I now know all about that book. what a terrible opening to this review:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/13/on-roads-joe-moran-review

Ow. But then what a bizarrely specialized comparison later:

At the other end of his tonal range is a version of JG Ballard's techno-sublime, which sees roads as both inciting and earthing the psychopathologies of a culture. But most often he sounds to me like the Elvis Costello of "London's Brilliant Parade": a singer of lugubrious songlines, geekily affectionate towards his chosen terrain, but suspicious of any easy declarations of love.

I know and even like that song, but I bet a lot of Review readers don't.

Lynsey Hanley sometimes comes across as a post-punk Anthony Powell. But most often she sounds to me like the Lloyd Cole of 'I Didn't Know That You Cared': singing with languid melancholy into a vast beige canyon of rock sound.

Major pop omission from Moran's book is, of course, It's Immaterial's "Driving Away From Home":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Nclc1693w

Bracewell's eye for the matter and detritus of the seashore matches that of McEwan's On Chesil Beach. But most often he reminds me of Joe Jackson's 'Nineteen Forever', stabbing through metallic riffs into a fading youthful romanticism.

Oh, that song ... but what about 'Driving Home For Christmas' ???????

Brian Dillon's meditations on memory make one picture a younger W.G. Sebald, one who could finish a day's lugubrious walking by pitching up at a provincial disco. But most of all they are reminiscent of Sleeper's 'Sale of the Century', a jaded vista of fin-de-millennium life through the eyes of a young pop singer on the make.

I was sure I read another review of On Roads that started with Black Box Recorder and..er..I did.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/06/roads-moran-motorway-strange

by a former ilxor. good to have him bring up ballard, 'making strange' (even 'a making strange', ugh), and interwar architecture. that shit doesn't get enough play in his stuff.

The book starts with a journey upwards, as the arterial roads of the interwar period, lined by semis and art deco factories, are replaced with the total driving experience of the motorway, lined merely by countryside and service stations.

hmmmm

but anyway that 'on roads' book sounds terrible! in both reviews!

His method emerges partly out of recent French ethnography, which has turned its attention to what it calls the infraordinaire, and which practises an equalising semiotic vision (Roland Barthes meets Clifford Geertz) whereby a service station or train-carriage is as semiotically rich a document as a novel or a film.

you have to be really, really bored by novels and films to think this. but i suppose the description 'semiotically rich' is a red rag for me. "how did you like the novel?" "oh, it was semiotically rich."

Something must be wrong ... he didn't bring up ... postpunk!!!

God yes, mentioning Ballard is a real stretch when reviewing a book about motorways.

you have to be really, really bored by novels and films to think this

Don't agree with that. Looking intently at the environment and reading it are skills that can be useful and illuminating for anybody, not just post-Situ "cultural theorists" or whatever.

Something must be wrong ... he didn't bring up ... postpunk!!!

― the pinefox, Tuesday, July 7, 2009 1:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol yes.

Don't agree with that. Looking intently at the environment and reading it are skills that can be useful and illuminating for anybody, not just post-Situ "cultural theorists" or whatever.

― My Slow Descent into Assholism (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, July 7, 2009 1:23 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

being rational for a minute, i can see this.... just about. it is possible to write about anything and make it interesting, as long as you lay off the cult-studies stuff & have a voice worth hearing.

but i do think that a good novel or film is more likely to address weighty, human issues than a reading of a train carriage. he's saying that a train carriage is equivalent, as a thing to "read", to a novel or film.

find this almost impossible to get behind, but would find it easier if the reviewers weren't cult-studs guys.

This is partly tied up with me not being a fan of plot/story/excitement, they're usually the least interesting bit of a film or book to me - accept that this is a potentially douchey position, but that's how I roll.

But I spent some time during the last year working on a Local History class, pretty low-level stuff as far as education was concerned, more a way of encouraging some people back into education. And the amount of interest you can generate from looking around the city centre with a fairly knowleadgable guide and the eyes and experiences of a group of random people is hugely fun and enlightening.

Beyond that, although I absolutely don't subscribe to the idea that we passively consume entertainment, I think a media/entertainment-saturated environment might be weakening our ability to look clearly at the mundane, to soak it up, to get meditative really. I think practices that can help people work towards that in a non-wanky way are generally positive and to be encouraged.

Altho yes I guess what we can discover by drive-by meditation are not the same kind of experiences and ideas as novels or films address, in terms of human issues.

I think practices that can help people work towards that in a non-wanky way are generally positive and to be encouraged.

imo the good ol' narrative is the best way to do this. especially with history! i wouldn't know how else to handle it. remain completely unmoved by arguments against narrative, and don't understand how the folks advancing them are meant to be of the left. if you're claiming the marxist heritage, you are also signing up to a teleological view of history.

I fall out with Marx about all sorts of stuff nowadays. But I'm not denying a place for narrative, as a way of interpreting the world. Just not the only way, and I want to find an equally valuable place for a zen-like wallow in presence or phenomena or something. The mundane is the best label I have at the moment. Biggest problem for History I can see at the moment...okay, not problem but limit of what History is...is an inability to get at some core of how it feels to be an individual within a moment in time within a context. Narrative kind of pins and deadens and yes you need that too but.

i see what you mean... lol in the end i think im just asking for people to do what they do well, not rely on theory to give them the facts, etc. in practice narrative always includes a volume of description, scene-setting, and so on. but it provides an exciting way of moving from description to description, from individual to generalization... like with 'public enemies'.

haha

I think narrative/mundane are both there in almost all movies. Definitely in all mainstream or entertainment movies. Even full-length pornos usually make some concession to it. It's more a question of where your focus goes as a viewer. Mann strikes me as a guy who spends as much time thinking about the non-narrative aspects of his movies as he does anything else. Maybe all lol auteurs do this.

My general theme here is that psychogeography is a potentially cool idea mostly practised by nobs.

Don't know why I italicised that. Don't remember doing it in fact.

could be a l0u1s jagg3r thing

My general theme here is that psychogeography is a potentially cool idea mostly practised by nobs.

Nobs as in poshos or dicks? I'm leaving l0u1s jagg3r out of this one.

Tom you oughta know by now I'm gonna use those terms near-synonymously. But I meant the latter really. Okay, what about psychogeography is cool unless you actual use that word to identify what you're doing? Have never to my knowledge told Mrs V I was popping out for a quick dérive.

for people to do what they do well, not rely on theory to give them the facts

this, really.

no i mean maybe the word psychogeography is coded to be in ital, a la lewis jagger.

More likely too much time on ILX and I'm just subconsciously inserting random bbcode tags at this point.

by a former ilxor.

Owen Hatherley was a former ilxor? I did not know that. Under what nom de plume did he roll?

Wrong emphasis there - probably "did not know that" would make more sense (just about).

Steve Buscemi in Ghost World: discuss

Ahhh, using your own name - clever...

Some sort of weirdo, this guy?

Just catching up with this thread - loving the above and to and fro-ing of ideas and thinking - but when I read it I just liked it 'cos it was about roads.

xpost

Dunno, too busy lolling at this timeless Miccio post: The fact that I couldn't jerk off to a movie rife with well-endowed hipster chicks in short skirts reaffirms how unpleasant I found most of the film.

That's true, about the film, really - the girls are naurally beautiful but Buscemi is naturally vile.

btw people have lost sight of the crucial question, which concerns the relation between narrative and theory in the work of Laura Barton.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/09/women-men-better-off-without

not clicking on tanya gold stories. the more you click, the more they'll print her.

It is a very true truism that men are good at music because they prefer it to speech.

Not sure I'd call this a truism, maybe more a... challop