Sid Vicious: My Way

Sleeve art for the 7" single release (Virgin Records, 1978) 

from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979)  

For many people, the most memorable scene in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is the one in which Sid Vicious gives his own unique interpretation of that sentimental slice of cheese made famous by Sinatra: My Way.  

Whatever one might think of him, there's no denying that the 20 year-old Sex Pistol gives an astonishing performance and embodies a look and a moment of punk perfection on stage at the Olympia, Paris.

Indeed, even Paul Anka, who wrote the song - adapted from on an earlier release by Claude François and Jacques Revaux - conceded in an interview thirty years later that whilst he had been somewhat destabilized by Sid's version, he nevertheless admired the sincerity of the performance.

And French pop's greatest poet and pervert, Serge Gainsbourg, who witnessed Sid's finest few minutes on stage, was so smitten that - according to Malcolm - he thereafter kept a picture of him on his piano, alongside that of Chopin.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know. And whether Sid ever did anything his way is, of course, highly debatable; philosophically speaking, the very idea of free will determining an individual's actions seems dubious.

One suspects that had it been his decision, Sid would have covered a Ramones track and that the choice of this particular number was therefore McLaren's. Still, it was a good choice - and a fateful choice; for Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, the end really was near ... 


See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch Sid's magnificent performance of 'My Way'. 

Note: Sid's firing of a gun blindly into the audience at the end of the song is a nod towards André Breton's idea of what constitutes the simplest act of Surrealism and is evidence of how the artistic and philosophical roots of the Sex Pistols lay in Paris as much as London and New York. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's Parisian adventures in 1978 as a kind of punk flâneur, click here.           

A Sex Pistol in Paris

One of the more amusing scenes in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle features Sid Vicious wandering the streets of Paris in the spring of '78, confronting locals including a policeman, a prostitute, and a young female fan working in a pâtisserie.

One is tempted to describe it as a provocative form of punk dérive - a mode of experimental behavior, theorised by Guy Debord, in which individuals aimlessly stroll through the city and allow themselves to be seduced by the attractions of urban society and random encounters with strangers. 

I'm not saying that Sid gave a shit about psychogeography - or that he needed lessons from anyone on emotional disorientation - but, as a Sex Pistol, he was well-versed by Malcolm in the art of creating situations that challenge the predictable and monotonous character of everyday life and he cuts an undeniably unique figure as a spiky-haired flâneur, beer bottle in hand, and wearing his favourite swastika emblazoned red t-shirt ...

See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch the scenes of Sid drifting round Paris as discussed above. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's performance of 'My Way', click here. 

On Courage and Cowardice (with Reference to the Case of Sir Craig Mackey)

Sir Craig Mackey with the white feather he should receive 

when stripped of his knighthood

Image: Press Association

I. Courage

Courage - be it bravery in the face of physical danger or hardship, or the determination to do the right thing even in the teeth of popular opposition - is one of those ancient virtues that still resonates today. One is even tempted to suggest it's a universal human value.

Certainly in the Western philosophical tradition, courage is right up there; Socrates and his followers may have subjected it to questioning and been unable to ever quite arrive at a satisfactory definition of what it is, but they never doubted its importance. The man who would be master of himself must be able to control his fear and endure suffering. And wisdom alone, as Cicero knew, isn't enough here; it also requires the heart's strength. 

Even Christian thinkers in the medieval period admired courage - often thought of in terms of fortitude - and listed it as one of the cardinal virtues. Indeed, it was also said to be one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. That said, Aquinas and company tend to see courage in purely reactive terms, as a form of perseverance, rather than as something active, such as bravery in battle.

Later, in the modern era, Hobbes thought of courage as a natural virtue belonging to the individual that assists in his survival. Hume also identified courage as a natural virtue and suggested that it was the one of the sources of human pride and wellbeing. For whilst excessive courage can, perhaps, result in recklessness, it brings the individual the admiration of his fellows (and of posterity) and plays a protective role within society - whereas cowardice, on the other hand, lays us open to attack.   

For the existentialists, courage is the affirmation of being in the face of the void and life's absurd cruelty; a way for man to exhibit faith in themselves and grace under pressure, as Hemingway once put it.  

II. Cowardice

Etymologically, the word coward enters into English from the Old French term coart and implies having a tail - as in an individual who turns tail and runs whenever danger threatens, or one who places his tail between his legs like a submissive dog.   

Essentially, cowardice is the opposite of courage; a condition wherein fear and/or excessive self-concern stops one from taking decisive action or speaking up and saying the right thing. It is both a failure of nerve and of character and is looked down on as universally as courage is respected. Indeed, it is often not only stigmatized, but severely punished; particularly within a military context that demands every man do his duty and be brave under fire.  

III. The Case of Sir Craig Mackey

And so to the case of Sir Craig Mackey, Deputy Commissioner of the Met ... A man now condemned and widely mocked by colleagues, journalists, and members of the public as a coward, after it was revealed that during the Westminster terror attack last March, in which PC Keith Palmer was fatally stabbed, he drove off, sharpish, having first locked the windows of his car.

To be fair, he was unarmed and had no protective equipment; he also had the safety of his passengers to consider. So maybe he was simply following police protocol. But, having said that, this story is profoundy dispiriting; one expects more from a British Bobby and a knight of the realm (or indeed any Englishman worth his salt).

Let the People See (Reflections on the Open Casket Controversy)

Dana Schutz: Open Casket (2016) 

Oil on canvas (99 x 135 cm)

I.

There are of course several famous portraits of black boys painted by white artists. One might think, for example, of the mid-19th century picture of a youngster who, having crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway, found himself in Liverpool and an object of aesthetic interest to the Pre-Raphaelite William Windus.  

But perhaps none have been as controversial or caused as much fuss around issues concerning race and representation, as the recent portrait by Dana Schutz of Emmett Till - a black teenager who was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 ...


II.

Entitled Open Casket, the work was displayed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. Campaigners, led by the British conceptual artist and author Hannah Black, called for the removal - and, indeed, destruction - of the picture on the grounds that it transmuted black suffering into profit and pleasure (which, in a sense, I suppose it does).

There was also a small-scale protest at the museum, organised by African-American artist and activist Parker Bright, who described the exhibiting of the work as a black death spectacle (which, in  a sense, I suppose it is).  

Ironically, however, Schutz was attempting to signal her own bleeding-heart liberalism. For the work - based in part on a famous photograph of Till's disfigured and mutilated corpse lying in an open casket (this at the request of his mother, so that everyone might view the violent reality of American racism) - was created in response to the media coverage of recent shootings involving young black men and white police officers.  

Schutz responded to the criticisms of her picture by pointing out that whilst she may not know what it's like to be black in America, she does know what it's like to be a mother and to experience pain; that the importance of art, for her, lay in its power to open up a space of empathy and bring people together. Acknowledging otherness and the pathos of distance that exists between individuals, Schutz nevertheless - perhaps naively - insists that we still share a common humanity.

Some of those coming to her defence tried to frame this issue in terms not of racial identity and the imperial white gaze, but freedom of expression. But Hannah Black doesn't have much time for this line of argument: not when, in her view, white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded upon the silencing and constraint of others and the contemporary art scene remains a fundamentally white supremacist institution, despite all the nice people working within it.

Again, this may or may not be true - and I don't really care one way or the other to be honest - but Black's last line, dripping with contempt, is one that made me smile. As Nietzsche said, it's merely Christian to forgive one's enemies; you must also learn how to hate your friends (even when these people are your dealers, curators, or publishers).

On Goya's Red Boy

Goya: Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (1787-88)

Commonly referred to as Goya's Red Boy

Commissioned by an aristocratic banker to produce a series of family portraits, including one of his youngest son, Manuel, Goya produced one of the most charming - if creepiest - pictures in modern art. 

The whey-faced child is dressed in a rather splendid red outfit. In his right hand, he holds a string attached to his pet magpie; the bird has Goya's calling card in its beak and is watched intently by three wide-eyed cats. On Manuel's left, sits a cage full of finches.

Whilst portraits of children and animals have a long and popular history in Spanish art, Goya seems to pervert this tradition by using the beasts to add an element of menace rather than delight to the work. To suggest, for example, that even the innocent world of childhood contains cruelty and is threatened by the forces of evil: Manuel, sadly, would die a few short years later, aged eight. 

His death is surely coincidental; child mortality was simply a fact of life in 18th century Europe (Goya saw only one of his own children reach adulthood). But there's something uncanny in this work which seems to anticipate such a fate. Little Manuel, despite his finery and the presence of his animal companions, looks like a lost soul.  

Still, he's achieved a level of fame and immortality far beyond that of his siblings who survived him; even Andy Warhol would one day sit at his feet. 

Notes 

Readers interested in viewing the Red Boy can find the work displayed at The Met Fifth Avenue (Gallery 633). 

For a fascinating essay on the painting and its extraordinary popularity, see Reva Wolf, 'Goya's "Red Boy": The Making of a Celebrity': click here to read online. 

See also The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, (Penguin Books, 2010). In the entry dated Friday, December 31, 1976, Warhol writes about a party at Kitty Miller's apartment: "And after dinner, I sat underneath Goya's 'Red Boy'. Kitty has this most famous painting right there in her house, it's unbelievable."    

The Blue Boy Will Never Die: On Fear, Fashion and Immortality

Gainsborough: The Blue Boy (c.1770)

According to D. H. Lawrence, the northern consciousness is gripped by a fear - almost a horror - of the body, especially in its sexual implications. This naturally has a detrimental effect on the plastic arts which "depend entirely on the representation of substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies". 

Thus, whilst English painters are very good at painting people hidden away inside their clothes, they daren't handle the living flesh that lies beneath; the social persona becomes more important than the actual man or woman.      

This may of course contain an element of truth. But isn't it also possible, as Cioran suggests, that what really terrifies is not the body in its erotico-libidinal aspect, but the body as an object prone to disease, ageing and death; that, ultimately, clothes don't serve to get between us and life in all its naked beauty, but us and nothingness ...    

"Look at your body in a mirror: you will realise you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs [...] and you will see how close you are to the grave." 

Maybe that's why Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough et al cared so much about painting subjects in all their finery; not simply because they were bourgeois - and not in order to deny the "gleam of the warm procreative body" - but because it's only when he has his glad rags on that man is able to entertain ideas of immortality: how can we die when we wear a pair of blue satin knee-breeches?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lawrence knows that it's not the sexual body so much as the diseased body that scares the pants on people, which is why he spends most of this essay discussing the cultural and psychological consequences of syphilis [click here for a discussion of this elsewhere on this blog]. He also knows the importance of clothes, even if, as here, he likes to think flesh as more important than fashion and imply that human nakedness has greater authenticity than our sartorial splendour.  

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section entitled 'Sartorial Philosophy' in chapter 6, 'Abdications'. 

Gainsborough's Blue Boy is quite clearly a costume study as well as a portrait; the shimmering blue satin of the clothes is rendered in a spectrum of cleverly calibrated tints and applied with a complexity of fine brush strokes. It's a picture in which Jonathan Buttall, the son a wealthy merchant, achieves his immortality. The work now hangs in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  

Wigging Out with Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol: Self-Portrait  
from the Fright Wig series (1986)

I.

A wig is a head covering made from human or animal hair; or, rather less convincingly, synthetic fibres. Whilst concealing baldness is certainly a popular reason for wearing one, there are many others; some people wear them on religious grounds, for example; some do so simply for the pleasure of enhancing, disguising, or transforming their appearance. 

The Case of Andy Warhol is particularly interesting ...


II.

If, initially, Warhol wore a wig as a young man in the 1950s in order to hide prematurely thinning hair, he eventually styled his public persona upon a never anything but artificial looking collection of silver-white wigs. Indeed, Warhol's wig-wearing might even be seen as a wonderful piece of performance art concerned with self-creation and self-promotion.    

Made from hair imported from Italy and sewn by famous New York wig maker Paul Bochicchio, Warhol opted for his trademark silver-white wig in order to look slightly alien and also in the knowledge that if you have always looked old, no one can guess your real age. Allowing his own hair to protrude at the bottom of the wig ensured no one mistook it for anything other than a piece of artifice.

Strangely, however, just as the wig came to be seen by others as Andy's natural look, so too did Warhol grow to feel it was an essential element of his identity - we might almost say that just as some wear their hearts upon their sleeves, he wore his soul upon his head. 

And so it is that when Warhol had his wig snatched off his head by a young woman at a book signing in October 1985, it was as much a violent assault as when Valerie Solanas shot and seriously injured the artist back in the summer of '68. Indeed, Warhol described this shocking and painful later event as the day his greatest nightmare came true. 

Nevertheless, real trooper that he was, Warhol simply pulled up the hood on his Calvin Klein coat, smiled, and continued signing copies of his newly published work America. It might also be noted that although the perpetrator of the assault was held until the police arrived, no charges were pressed.


See: Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett, (Penguin Books, 2010). In the entry covering this wig-grabbing incident at the Rizzoli bookstore in the Soho district of Manhattan, Warhol describes his assailant as very pretty and well-dressed and suggests that this may have been what prevented him from pushing her over the balcony.  

(Un)Common People: Jarvis Cocker and William Shatner

I.

Although it peaked at number two in the UK Singles Chart back in the summer of 1995, pretty much everyone now agrees that Pulp's Common People is the finest - maybe even definitive - Britpop single; one with all the humour, anger, energy and intelligence of punk.

So, hats off to Jarvis Cocker, who came up with the tune on a small Casiotone MT-500 keyboard and wrote the lyrics. For me, Cocker is not only a more interesting frontman, but also an eminently more likable human being than either of the Gallagher brothers or, indeed, Damon Albarn and the rather self-satisfied members of Blur.       

Having said that, I'm tempted to suggest that as brilliant as his interpretation and performance of his own song is, there's one man out there who has given us an even greater version - and that man is William Shatner ...  

II.

Whilst primarily known as an actor, William Shatner is actually a man of many talents - although, arguably, singing isn't one of them. Not that this has stopped him from recording a number of albums, beginning with The Transformed Man (1968), in which he delivered his uniquely exaggerated (cod-Shakespearean) take on songs including 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and 'Mr Tambourine Man'.

During the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, Shatner gave a memorable reading of the Elton John song 'Rocket Man'. It's a performance beyond parody that still leaves many viewers who watch it on YouTube in a state of utter astonishment: click here.

Shatner's greatest musical moment, however, was to come in 2004, on the album Has Been, produced and arranged by Ben Folds; an indie rock version of 'Common People', featuring Joe Jackson as a guest co-vocalist.

Critics and fans alike - including Jarvis Cocker himself - were shocked at just how amazing the result was. Shatner does an excellent job, paying due respect to the original whilst, at the same time, putting his absurdly over-dramatic spin on the song. So, hats off also to Capt. Kirk! 

Notes

Pulp, 'Common People', released 22 May 1995, from the album Different Class (Island Records, 1995): click here to watch the official video, featuring Sadie Frost, on YouTube. 

William Shatner, 'Common People', from the album Has Been, (Shout! Factory, 2004): click here.

  

On Philosophy and Prostitution (Reflections on An Illicit Lover's Discourse)

Everything I know I learned in the School of Vice!

I.

Reading a fragment by Cioran in which he advises the philosopher who is "disappointed with systems and superstitions" to imitate the street savvy scepticism of that "least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute", reminded me of my own musings from long ago on this topic, collected as An Illicit Lover's Discourse ...    

II.

The aim of this short work, written many years ago and privately published (with a revised title) by Blind Cupid Press in 2010, was not to describe in detail the world of the Prostitute, but to examine the nature of the love affair that exists between her and her clients; for in this relation we discover much of the violence, obscenity, and poignancy of modern life.

The necessity for the book lay in the following consideration: the discourse of the Prostitute and her Illicit Lover was at that time openly displayed in every other central London phone box. This discourse, spoken and shared by thousands of amorous subjects, had received very little attention, scorned as it is by the languages of authority which, nevertheless, often share in its image-repertoire and sustain its stereotypes.

Essentially, I was hoping to indicate the manner in which some of the more frequently occurring myths upon which the pornographic imagination is founded are circulated by and within wider culture and reveal how legitimate discourses - of literature, fashion, and advertising, for example - frequently feed off and into the writings and images of the Prostitute.

The short fragments were written in relation to a large number of cards collected casually over a two-year period from phone boxes mostly in the Paddington and Soho areas of London, where they'd been conveniently placed by the Prostitute. To my mind, these cards constituted a populist and promiscuous medium and could be thought of as an obscene form of folk-art. Mushrooming in the fetid, urine-soaked environment of the phone box, they represented the public face of prostitution and were an affirmation of the Prostitute’s right to self-expression and self-promotion.

I made no attempt to establish any unity or development between the fragments. In fact, the only link between them was one of insistence and repetition; qualities which are of course inherent to pornography as a genre. Thus, as in the cards upon which they were based, the same words would appear over and over in the text, constructing the Prostitute not as a woman like any other, but as a symptomal subject of the pornographic imagination.

Some fragments broke off short; others contradicted something that had already been said elsewhere in the text. Ultimately, however, this was unimportant: the fragments were not meant to be taken too seriously and the success or otherwise of each depended on whether the reader was able to relate it to some aspect of their own experience and in this way be able to declare its truth.

If there was anything central to my assemblage of fragments, then, I suppose, it was the body of the Prostitute - although whether we can actually locate and reveal such is debatable. For the body of the Prostitute must not be thought of as a natural object just waiting to be discovered, but rather as a cultural construction in which is encoded a whole set of values: the shape, size, colour, age and all the ornamental attributes of the Prostitute’s body signify what we imagine illicit sexual desire and femininity to be. Thus the body of the Prostitute exposes our own fantasies.

Wishing neither to celebrate nor condemn the Prostitute, my affection for the figure as a woman who denies nothing and no one and lives beyond judgement, was fairly obvious throughout the text. Found in all places, all cultures, and all ages, the Prostitute is, paradoxically, someone who is forever at the margins of society and has abolished all history in her person. She is, in this manner, untimely.

And if this makes her philosophically interesting, then the manner in which she silently accepts the abuse of those who speak against her and call for her punishment makes her lovable in my eyes.

Notes

E. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section 'Philosophy and Prostitution' in chapter 1: 'Directions for Decomposition', pp. 81-82.

If I'd known of this text at the time of writing, I almost certainly would have referred to it. For what Cioran writes here is very close to my own position. I agree, for example, that the prostitute offers us a mode of behaviour which philosophers would do well to consider; detached and yet open to everything; lacking moral convictions and prejudices; quick to change position, etc. And, crucially, whores don't fuck between the bed-sheets ...   

Stephen Alexander, Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

In Memory of Tara Fares (Notes on Fanaticism)

Tara Fares on Instagram / Photo by Omar Moner

Tara Fares, the Iraqi beauty queen and outspoken social media star, has been shot dead in Baghdad by unknown assailants, after receiving a series of vile threats on her life. She was 22. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior promises an investigation - but we all know why she was murdered and by whom.  

Her death comes just days after the murder of Suad al-Ali, an Iraqi human rights activist who was shot and killed in the southern city of Basra. Again, whilst the gunman has so far been unidentified, one doesn't have to be Columbo to crack this case.  

When men enthusiastically put their most cherished ideals and beliefs into action, the result is all too often bloody; history is nothing but this violent trajectory. As Cioran says: "Once a man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable."    

Cries of religious ecstasy and shouts of devotion are echoed in the moans of victims. And blood always flows when epileptics and ideologues - primed with explosive conviction - insist their way is the way; "firm resolve draws the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter".

To live peacefully and happily requires learning how to curb enthusiasm and counter all certitudes, absolutes and convictions with irony and a smiling insouciance. For if the former ideals are allowed to contaminate the soul, the result is fanaticism: that fundamental human defect which instills in us the desire for truth and terror.

To quote Cioran once more:

"Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they [...] undermine fanaticism's purpose, analyse its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. [...] What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man ..."

He concludes:

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

And that's why I prefer Instagram over Islam, fashion over faith ...

See: E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). Lines quoted are from the section entitled 'Genealogy of Fanaticism' in chapter 1, 'Directions for Decomposition'.