(Re-)turn to Red

Fig. 1 Killing Joke: Turn to Red  

(Malicious Damage, 1979) [1] 

Cover design by Mike Coles [2] 

 

 

It's amazing how certain songs and certain images can stay with you for many years after you first encountered them. 

 

Take, for example, the debut EP by Killing Joke with a sleeve design by Mike Coles (fig. 1). It's over forty-five years since its release and yet whenever there's a red sunrise - as there was this morning over Harold Hill (fig 2): 

  

 

Fig. 2 I Wonder Who Chose the Colour Scheme ... 

Photo by Stephen Alexander 

 

 

- it's not shepherds that I think of, but the track 'Turn to Red' that begins to play in my head (even though, ironically, the song twice informs us that the sky is turning grey). 

 

And it's Mike Coles's Mr Punch figure [3] that I look to see dancing across the rooftops; which, I suppose evidences the power of his design, as recognised by Russ Bestley: 

 

"One mark of a great designer in the field of music graphics is in the way that the audio and visual become almost inseparable - you can't listen to the music without picturing the cover artwork, and vice versa." [4].

 

Bestley, in fact, is a huge admirer of Coles's work: more so than me, to be honest; I'm far more of a Jamie Reid fan and punk purist [5]. 

 

Having said that, I agree with Bestley that Coles's images for Killing Joke set the scene for the music; that you can almost hear the band's "dark, raw power when you look at their early record covers" [6], including the Turn to Red EP, which nicely combines collage with drawing and photography set against a flat red background [7].

 

And, coincidently, it was Mike Coles's Turn to Red design that influenced me when asked a couple of months ago by Catherine Brown to come up with an image to promote her walking tour of Hampstead, following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence, as part of this year's Being Human Festival [8]. 

 

I hope - should he ever see the image (fig. 3) - that it makes Mr Coles smile ... 

 

 

  

Fig. 3 Turning Hampstead Red with D. H. Lawrence (2025) 

Stephen Alexander (in the manner of Mike Coles)

 

Notes

 

[1] The Killing Joke EP Turn to Red was released in a 10" format by Malicious Damage on 26 October, 1979. It had two tracks - 'Nervous System' and 'Turn to Red' - on the A-side and just one track on the B-side; 'Are You Receiving?'. 

      It was then re-released on 14 December of that year in a 7" and 12" format by Island Records, with an additional track; a dub remix of the title track called 'Almost Red'.   

      The title track, featuring a closed groove so that the word red is repeated endlessly (or at least until you lift the needle of the record), can be played by clicking here. And for the remastered 2020 version, with a video by Mike Coles, click here.

 

[2] Mike Coles can be found on Facebook: click here. Or visit the Malicious Damage website: click here. Coles's artwork is also available to buy from the Flood Gallery: click here. Finally, readers may be interested in Coles's book; Forty Years in the Wilderness: A Graphic Voyage of Art, Design & Stubborn Independence (Malicious Damage, 2016), which traces a pictorial history of his work under the Malicious Damage  label, including the record sleeves, posters and flyers promoting Killing Joke. 

      Historian of punk and post-punk graphic design, Russ Bestley, writes of this book: 

      "Part autobiography, part personal reflection, part celebration, this publication may lead to a critical reappraisal of the designer's work alongside more widely acknowledged contemporaries, though such considerations are far from being a driving force for the project, and the title ironically sums up Coles' attitude towards independent and autonomous production." 

      See Bestley, 'I wonder who chose the colour scheme, it's very nice …': Mike Coles, Malicious Damage and Forty Years in the Wilderness', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Issue 3, (Sept. 2016), pp. 311-328. The essay, which I shall refer to throughout the post, can be downloaded as a Word doc from the UAL research depository: click here.

 

[3] Coles already had a long interest in the traditional British puppet character of Mr Punch and the latter would become a key figure in his work: "'Mr Punch was something that fascinated me before Malicious Damage or Killing Joke. That drawing from the first single was done in 1977 after I'd been to the Punch & Judy festival in Covent Garden'". 

      Mike Coles, quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 18 August, 2016.

 

[4] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.

 

[5] Whilst Coles is to be respected as an image-maker who developed his own unique aesthetic, for me, he strays just a little too far from what I would consider a punk visual style. And indeed, by his own admission, he "'never took much notice of all the punk stuff'" and "'never really felt a part of the punk movement'". He was more influenced by "'Victorian freak show stuff'" than the Situationists. Quoted by Russ Bestley in the above cited essay, from email correspondence of 14 August, 2016.   

 

[6] Russ Bestley, as cited in note 2 above.  

 

[7] Readers might be interested to know that along with the hand-drawn image of Mr Punch and the picture of two smiling figures taken from a toothpaste ad, the cover features a (high-contrast) photo of Centre Point (which remains a London landmark to this day).   

 

[8] The Being Human festival is an annual celebration of the humanities led by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, working in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. 

      Each November they put on hundreds of free public events across the UK in the hope that they might garner support for the continued study of art, literature, history, and philosophy, etc. by demonstrating the value and relevance of such disciplines; the humanities, it is argued, enable us to understand and fully appreciate what it means to be human. For further information, click here.  

      Dr Brown's Hampstead walk took place on 8 November, 2025 (11:00 - 13:00): click here. It will be noted that it was decided to use an alternative (inferior and far less humorous) image to advertise the talk for reasons unknown.    

 

 

Haddaway, Man! An Open Letter to Peter Wolfendale

Hi, my name is Pete, 

and I’m a systematic philosopher [1]  

 

 

I. 

 

Hello Pete, my name is Stephen Alexander, and I mistrust all systematisers and would normally seek to avoid them [2]. In your case, however, I'll make an exception ... 

 

For like you, I'm an independent scholar - which you amusingly suggest is merely a fancy way of saying unemployed with a Ph.D - who is less than impressed with the "ossified social cliques" [3] that control academia and although I live in Essex, my roots, like yours, are in the North East of England; my father was from Gateshead and my mother from Whitley Bay. 

 

We also both came out of the philosophy department at Warwick: I note that you completed your doctoral thesis on Heidegger in 2012; I finished mine, on Nietzsche, in 2000. 

 

So we have some things in common. 

 

 

II. 

 

However, I also note that you consider yourself "a heretical Platonist, an unorthodox Kantian, and a minimalist Hegelian" [4], and whilst I'm pleased to see you qualify your Platonism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism in this manner, I'm still troubled that these are the three thinkers you name as your primary sources of inspiration. 

 

And whilst we both have a wide range of interests, I'd say my curiosity is motivated more by hate than by love and, actually, I think you're mistaken to say it's all good at the end of the day. 

 

As for your "trinity of dialectical virtues" [5] - sincerity, explicitness, and consistency - well, I had to smile as these are possibly the three things I most try to avoid on Torpedo the Ark, where I never mean what I say or say what I mean and couldn't care less about whether my text is haunted by the spectre of logical contradiction [6]: I am Monsieur Teste in reverse! 

 

III. 

 

Two confessions: 

 

Firstly, I haven't read your 2014 book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, even though I probably should have. For whilst I was never in with the OOO crowd, I did read a good deal of Graham Harman's work and found a lot of it resonated with my own (rather more material and less metaphysical) interest in objects. 

 

It was only when Harman started promoting his version of OOP as a new theory of everything and boasting of how he had become a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" - and had even "captured the notice of celebrities" - that I grew tired of him and his flat ontology [7]. 

 

Secondly, I'm not sure your new book is going to feature on my list of Christmas reading either. 

 

That's mainly because as someone who is still very much committed to Nietzsche's reverse anthropocentrism - i.e., his attempt to translate man back into nature and demonstrate how virtue itself is animal in origin - I suspect I'm just the sort of thinker whom you are seeking revenge against in the name of Reason unbound from all such petty naturalism. 

 

What I am going to do, however, is follow your advice and start by reading your newer blog writings (those classified as Phase 3) and then read one (or more) of your interviews, in the hope that I can better understand what you mean by rationalist inhumanism and Promethean socialism; neither of which I very much like the sound of [8]. 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] This line of greeting from Wolfendale - and the photo - are taken from his blog, Deontologistics: click here. 

      For those readers who might not know, a systematic philosopher - such as Wolfendale - is one who seeks to develop a logically coherent and comprehensive body of knowledge based upon fundamental principles in order to explain the world we live in. To create such a perfect system - or metanarrative - has been the (insanely ambitious and inherently oppressive) dream of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 

      As for the term deontologistics, this is a neologism coined by Wolfendale to describe his own research project into the nature and limits of reason and his aim to establish a system of philosophy of the kind described above. 

      In moral philosophy, deontology is the idea that an action should be based solely on whether it is right or wrong according to a set of fixed principles, with no consideration given to the consequences of that action. In other words, it's a form of fundamentalism; insisting that one's duty or obligation is always to uphold the letter of the law and stick to the rules no matter what. 

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Twilight of the Idols ('Maxims and Arrows', 36), who then goes on to add: "The will to a system is a lack of integrity." See the Hollingdale translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 35. 

 

[3] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[4] See the short biographical note on Wolfendale on the Urbanomic website: click here. He is one of their authors and his debut book, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes, was published by Urbanmomic in 2014. His new book, The Revenge of Reason, is forthcoming at the end of this year; a work in which he ponders the fate of Reason in the 21st century and lays out his vision for neo-rationalism as a distinctive philosophical path towards an inhuman destiny. 

      Ray Brassier obviously thinks highly of him, as he wrote a postscript to the former and supplied a preface to the latter. Details of both works are available on the Urbanomic website. 

 

[5] Peter Wolfendale, 'Introduction', Deontologistics: click here. 

 

[6] When it comes to sincerity, explicitness, and consistency, I side with Nietzsche, Wilde, and Roland Barthes (even at the risk of falling into what Wolfendale terms unrestrained irony). Barthes famously rejects the ideology of clarity (or explicitness) in Critique et vérité (1966), just as he mocks the idea of logical consistency in Le plaisir du texte (1973), from where I borrow the idea of M. Teste in reverse. 

      For my thoughts on (in)sincerity, see the post dated (9 July 2018): click here. 

 

[7] I'm quoting Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books, 2018), p. 8. For my thoughts on this book, see the post published on 24 March 2018: click here. 

 

[8] From what I understand at this point - without having done much reading in the area - rational inhumanism seems to intersect with (or emerge from) Ray Brassier's idea of transcendental nihilism and is an attempt to liberate reason from human biology, psychology, and cultural history. 

      As for Promethean socialism, I believe this refers to the deliberate re-engineering of ourselves and our world on a more rational and egalitarian basis. In other words, it's a kind of left-leaning accelerationism that affirms techno-scientific progress and the overcoming of natural limits. 

      One can't help feeling we've heard all this before and that, ultimately, if you strip Wolfendale's work of its complex and sophisticated philosophical theorising, one's left with just another fevered dream of a future utopia.

 

 

Douglas Murray Contra Michel Foucault

The Ghost of Michel Foucault Haunting Douglas Murray

(SA/2025) 

 

I. 

 

Readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark may recall that I have written several posts which mention the neoconservative political commentator and cultural critic Douglas Murray: click here.

 

And whilst I wasn't exactly blown away by either of the books of his that I've read - The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019) - I still find him in many ways an admirable figure and, if forced to choose, would still rather go to dinner with him than Gaby Hinsliff.   

 

However, the fact that Murray continues to denigrate Michel Foucault's work - or, more precisely, abhor Foucault's influence within academia - is something I still find disappointing (and kind of irritating) ...

 

 

II.

 

Speaking in conversation with philosopher Roger Scruton at an event organised by The Spectator in 2019 [1], Murray concedes that, as a writer, Foucualt is often brilliant and his books are "filled with resonant phrases and so on" [2]. 

 

However, Murray cannot forgive the fact that Foucault deconstructs the notion of truth as an objective thing in itself, to be pursued rigorously and maintained as an absolute standard or ideal: "I finally read Foucault last year and I have to say: I'm so appalled ..." 

 

And why is he so appalled? 

 

Because, says Murray, whilst he'd previously read about Foucault's work and heard others discuss it - and whilst he'd always known that he "sort of instinctively disliked it" - it was only after reading it [3] that he realised how catastrophic Foucault's philosophical project really is:  

 

"this sort of perversion of all life [...] as being solely about power, and the ignoring of every other human instinct - the total ignoring of love, the total ignoring of forgiveness; power, only power." 

 

That, I think, is an unfair and grotesque caricature of Foucault and his work; one that goes beyond being a gross oversimplification [4]. 

 

I'm not a Foucault scholar, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't think of power as something that could be possessed and didn't think either in terms of oppressed groups needing to be emancipated from the domination of more powerful oppressors; he was a post-Nietzschean thinker, not a neo- or quasi-Marxist [5]. 

 

Thus, whilst power certainly plays an important role in his philosophy, he conceives of it in a highly novel manner as something complex that produces things (including us as subjects) and puts something new into the world; it induces pleasures, generates discursive practices, forms bodies of knowledge, etc. It is power - not love - which runs through the entire social body and which, as a matter of fact, calls love into being [6]. 

 

For Murray this is a distortion of the truth: but then, he would say that wouldn't he, as an idealist who, despite professing to be an atheist, still affirms Christian virtues [7].  

Oh, and whilst we're discussing this: I think it's also profoundly mistaken to blame Foucault for the rise of identity politics (which Murray does): Foucault, the masked philosopher and anti-essentialist, argued that identities are not inherent but socially and historically constructed and could easily become traps or a form of subjugation.

 

Instead of creating or maintaining identity, Foucault's political strategy was more focused on refusing it and developing new forms of resistance and even a cursory reading of his work makes it pretty obvious that he would have very little time for today's identity politics (would, in fact, see it as reactionary; a return to the same old bullshit to do with fixed categories and subjectivation). 

 

I really don't understand why Murray fails to see this; particularly as he claims to have read Foucault. It's almost a wilful misunderstanding - one which Jordan Peterson also buys into - and if I said earlier that I'd rather go to dinner with Murray than Gaby Hinsliff, I'd like it to be noted that I'd sooner go to dinner with Foucault than Murray (even if dinner with Foucault often involved nothing more than a club sandwich and a Coke) [8].  

 

Notes

 

[1] The full transcript of Douglas Murray's conversation with Roger Scruton (8 May 2019), in which they discuss what it means to be a conservative, can be found on The Spectator website: click here. All lines quoted in this post from Murray are taken from here. 

      The relevant clip from the night in which Foucault is condemned by both men, has been posted by Culture Wolf on YouTube: click here. Anybody who thinks they might like to watch the entire event online can visit The Spectator website: click here.     

 

[2] Note how Murray doesn't say ideas; implying Foucault was a mere stylist rather than a major thinker. 

 

[3] The fact that Murray doesn't mention any specific books or essays, leaves one to wonder the extent of his reading of Foucault who published around a dozen books during his lifetime and who has had at least twice as many posthumous publications of essay collections, lecture series, etc.

 

[4] It is also, of course, a live paraphrase of a passage that will appear in The Madness of Crowds:    

      "From Michel Foucault [...] thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of 'power'. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say 'power'. Not because they haven't absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens."

      See Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 53. 

 

[5] As one commentator has recently pointed out:

      

"Right-wing critics frequently label Foucault's thought as another species of Marxism. Douglas Murray wrote in The War on The West (2022) that  'Foucault's obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia.' Jordan Peterson has also been fond of calling Foucault a 'postmodern neo-Marxist'.

      It's a popular and long-held narrative, but there are several problems with it. For one, it is incoherent to describe Foucault as a 'neo-Marxist' or a  'cultural Marxist'. He, like other postmodern thinkers, was broadly opposed to Marxism."

      - Ralph Leonard, 'Michel Foucault still confuses the Right, 40 years later', Unheard (25 June 2024): click here. As Leonard rightly goes on to argue, it's Nietzsche, not Marx, that haunts Foucault's philosophy. 

 

[6] I'm thinking here of something written by D. H. Lawrence:

      "For power is the first and greatest of the mysteries. It is the mystery behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the phallic erection is a first blind movemet of power. Love is said to call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse; that the slumbering power calls love into being."

      See Lawrence's essay 'Blessed Are the Powerful', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 327. 

 

[7] In a live streamed video conversation on a Christian radio podcast with the theologian and former Anglican Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, Murray confessed:      

      "I was brought up a Christian, a believing Christian into my adult life, and am now, I suppose, in a self-confessedly complex situation of being among other things an uncomfortable agnostic who recognises the values and the virtues that the Christian faith has brought."

      See 'The Big Conversation' (season 3, episode 3), hosted by Justin Brierly (13 May 2021): click here.

 

[8] In an amusing interview, Foucault expressed his preference for American fast food over French cuisine; specifically mentioning a club sandwich and a Coke, followed by ice cream. 

      The interview, with Stephen Riggins, was first published in the Canadian journal Ethos (Autumn, 1983). As well as revealing his favourite meal, Foucault also voiced his thoughts on the quest for monastic austerity and a cultural ethos of silence. It can also be found under the title 'The Minimalist Self' in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Alan Sheridan and Lawrence D. Kritzman (Routledge, 1988), pp. 3-16.  

 

Heidegger's (Absent) Dog

 

Martin Heidegger and Rae based on an image 

created by Ruth Malone using ChatGTP

@goingalongwithheidegger 

 

I. 

 

According to Ruth Malone, whilst Heidegger's method of comparative analysis between the human, the animal and the stone can be defended against the charge of anthropocentrism - provided, that is, that one accepts his foundational ideas and the validity of his philosophical approach - he nevertheless didn't understand dogs, in her view, and she is certain, therefore, that he could not have had a canine companion. 

 

I'll return to that final point later. Firstly, however, let me try and summarise Miss Malone's position set out in a short piece on Substack entitled 'Heidegger's captivated animals' [1] ...  

 

 

II.  

 

Heidegger famously thought animals, including highly intelligent animals like dogs, were poor in world in comparison to world-forming humans; although they are much better off than inanimate objects, such as stones, which, in his view, are entirely without world; i.e., have no access to being [2].  

 

Animals - and again, this includes mutts - may not understand the world as we understand it, but they are, nevertheless, instinctively captivated by things; in fact, it is this term - captivation [Benommenheit] - which defines the animal's particular way of being and how they are essentially different from us and from rocks [3]. 

 

And for Malone this is sufficient to get Heidegger off the anthropocentric hook. Being poor in world is a consequence of captivation but does not describe the essence of the animal; our four-legged friends are neither intrinsically deprived nor inferior in any fundamental sense, it's just Heidegger has a penchant for thinking negatively and views lack as a key aspect of being (and not merely the absence of something). 

 

In fact, as Malone indicates - drawing on the recent work of Sean Kirkland - it's impossible to carry out the Destruktion of philosophy that Heidegger calls for unless one posits a concept of lack and adopts a privative method or approach [4].       

 

Having found that we have something in common with the animal - we both have worlds - Heidegger then destructively examines the notion of poverty "revealing the both having and not-having of world by the animal" [5], before then dipping into zoology in order to tie his idea of captivation to animal behaviour. 

 

"Importantly, at this stage, Heidegger's approach is no longer driven by comparison with the human but builds a positive account of the being of the animal using the findings of biology. As such, Heidegger develops an account of the animal way of Being which can no longer be described as privative but now [...] contains a 'wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare'." [6]

 

This suggests that not only is the animal other to us, but, in some ways, has an advantage over man; the fallen animal; the unhappy animal; the mad animal who has lost his healthy animal reason [7]. 

 

And yet, despite this - and despite Malone's valiant attempt to defend Heidegger from the accusation of anthropocentrism - I can't help still having the impression that Heidegger had little time for nonhuman creatures which, according to him, have no language, history, or hands and cannot even be said to dwell or die.   

 

And indeed, Malone herself kind of circles round in order to conclude that it's difficult "to maintain the view that the animal is poor in world once one sees its captivation and 'wealth of openness'" [8] - and perhaps it's mistaken to posit the notion of weltarm in the first place; or, at any rate, wrong to group all animals together. 

 

For whilst the lizard does not recognise the rock as a rock [9], it seems clear to Malone that dogs do recognise their ball or favourite chew toy. Therefore, she suggests, the latter can recognise beings as beings, even if they cannot reflect upon and understand the being of beings and if Heidegger had only enjoyed the companionship of a canine chum he'd have had to acknowledge this.

 

 

III. 

 

And so we return to the question of whether or not Heidegger ever had a dog ... 

 

And, to my suprise, it seems that Malone was right in her supposition: he did not, in fact, own a dog; nor is there any mention in the numerous critical and biographical studies of his ever having any other kind of pet animal either.  

 

Notes

 

[1] See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', on Substack: @goingalongwithheidegger (16 Nov 2025): click here. 

 

[2] See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indiana University Press, 1995), Pt. 2, Ch. 2, § 42, pp. 176-78.  

      It's unfortunate that Heidegger chose to use the terms weltbildend (to describe human being), weltarm (to describe animality), and weltlos (to describe stones), as they do appear to lend themselves to an anthropocentric and hierarchical philosophy, both in the original German and English translation (world-forming, poor in world, without world).   

 

[3] Malone rightly reminds us that Derrida sees a logical difficulty in Heidegger's insistence on the fact that the difference between the animal's poverty and the human's wealth is not one of degree, but, rather, a difference in essence: "if the animal is so very different to the human, then how can a comparison, which results in the idea of the animal as 'poor in world', be meaningful?"

      See Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals' (as cited above) and see also Derrida's discussion of this issue in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 49.   

 

[4] See Sean D. Kirkland, Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2023). It's an interesting new study of Heidegger's project of Destruktion (a project famously taken up and radically extended by Derrida, of course, as déconstruction).   

      Malone summarises the three steps of Heidegger's methodology, which Kirkland derives from Being and Time (1927), and which she argues structures his comparative analysis of humans and animals, as: 

      "1. Start by bringing something positively to light. 2. Reveal destructively what is beyond that which is successfully brought to light. In other words, reveal what had remained concealed in the first step. 3. Focus the destruction on the 'posing of the question', not the claims, conclusions positions or philosophical results." - Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', as cited above.

[5] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[6] Ibid. Malone is quoting Heidegger writing in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ... p. 255. 

 

[7] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche here; see The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

[8] Ruth Malone, 'Heidegger's captivated animals', cited above in note 1.  

 

[9] As someone who likes lizards more than dogs, I'm not entirely comfortable with this claim. For whilst a lizard may not know what a rock is in an abstract conceptual sense, it's smart enough to know that rocks are not just great places to sunbathe, but, in providing camouflage and shelter, are also crucial to its survival needs and studies have shown that they carefully select rocks and remember which ones offer most advantage. 

      Thus, even if their relationship with rocks is primarily based on instinct and learned association, they are not devoid of higher cognitive functions (they can solve problems, learn simple tasks, exhibit advanced social behaviours, etc.). 

      One recalls the following short poem by D. H. Lawrence, from his 1929 collection Pansies:

 

A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening 

no doubt to the sounding of the spheres. 

And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you 

And swirl of a tail! 

 

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards 

they’d be worth looking at. 

 

 

On the Question of Whether to Tuck or Not to Tuck

Larry David confronts a tucked in videographer (played by Mike Castle) 

about his sweater wearing tendencies in a season 11 episode of 

Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2021) 

 

 

I.

 

One of the disadvantages of living with a Greek woman who likes to cook and bake is that you inevitably end up eating more than you should of things that you probably shouldn't be eating in the first place and, as a result of that, one - just as inevitably - puts on weight.

 

Thus it was that my waist measurement ballooned from 32" to 34" and even 34" was beginning to feel tight.

 

Now, I don't really care about raised blood pressure and cholesterol levels, the threat of type 2 diabetes or any of the other health issues linked to obesity that doctors try to scare you with - but looking fat was not something I was prepared to accept ... And so, action had to be taken!

 

And, as a matter of fact, it proved quite easy to lose weight: eat less, eat healthier, and move more; it really is as simple as that. So now I'm back to having a 32" waist and can once more pass naked before a mirror without (too much) embarrassment and shame. 

 

 

II. 

 

Now, however, I have a new problem: the trousers bought a few months ago with a 34" waist keep slipping down unless I use a belt, which, unfortunately, I don't like wearing. 

 

To try and get around this, I have decided to tuck in my sweater; even though I have never been a natural tucker in of clothes and would drive my mother nuts when I was a child insisting that my shirt be pulled out and the cuffs and collars always left unbuttoned. I hated the idea of looking neat and tidy like a good little boy (is there, one wonders, a punk gene?).          

 

However, times change and people change and - to my surprise and amusement - I now discover that I like having my sweater tucked in! Indeed, I'm almost tempted to say that it is the more stylish option, depending of course on the type of sweater; it's material, its construction, its fit etc. You don't want to try and tuck a bulky jumper with a ribbed hem down your trousers as this does not result in a good look.

 

I used to think tucking in a sweater was always something of a fashion faux pas. But now I know it isn't; that it can create shape and help define one's waistline. 

 

 

III. 

 

And so now I watch a little differently the scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David gives a stylish young videographer a hard time about the fact he has tucked his sweater into his pants, asking him how long he's been doing it; do people comment on it; has he ever noticed other people doing it; were there other tuckers in his family, etc. [1] 

   

According to Larry, the only other person he's seen tucking in a sweater is James Mason (playing Humbert) in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Nabokov's darkly comic novel Lolita (1955) and he even treats us to dialogue from the movie: 

 

"Lolita, do you think I should tuck in my sweater? Does it look good? What would you do? What would you advise me? Would you advise me to tuck?" [2] 

 

It should be noted, however, that this scene and these lines are either misremembered or entirely invented by David for comic effect. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Curb Your Enthusiasm, 'What Have I Done? (season 11, episode 8), dir. Jeff Schaffer, written by Larry David and Jeff Schaffer (first aired 12 Dec 2021). The videographer is played by Mike Castle. The scene can be watched on YouTube by clicking here.   

 

[2] Dialogue from the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm cited and linked to above.  

 

 

An Open Letter to Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren and the Art of Living Like a Hobo

Simon Reynolds and Stephen Alexander 

 

I.

 

Thank you for your remarks on a recent post entitled 'Destroy Success' (7 Nov 2025), in which you were either highlighting (without judgement) the paradoxical aspect of Malcolm McLaren's life and multifaceted career as an artist - the successful failure; the professional amateur; the bourgeois anarchist, the inside outsider, etc. - or you were making some kind of moral appraisal [1] and suggesting (without actually using the terms) that he was a fraud and a hypocrite.

 

I'd like to think you were doing the former and that any antipathy towards McLaren that you feel is nonethless born of love and an ongoing obsession with this fascinating figure: "Even now, despite all the reprehensible things he did and the suspicion that he helped misdirect a generation [...] I can't quite amputate McLaren from my consciousness." [2] 

 

I couldn't help wondering if perhaps you also begrudge the fact that, in his final years, Malcolm was paid large sums of money to give talks all over the world to people in business as well as the arts, travelling first class and staying in the best hotels, etc. But then, why would that be the case when you also give lectures and interviews on an international stage in your capacity as a hard-working pop-historian and pedagogue ...? 

 

 

II. 

 

Your main gripe seems to be that enjoying the rewards of such a lifestyle is further evidence of Mclaren's hypocrisy: "I mean, it's not exactly 'living like a hobo' ..." [3]

 

But, here again, I would disagree: for living like a hobo doesn't mean begging in the streets like a bum [4], anymore than being a punk means adopting a certain look or thinking one has to be angry and miserable all the time in order to be militant, like the po-faced political ascetics who would preserve the purity of the punk revolution. 

 

Whilst the etymology of the term hobo is uncertain, I like to imagine it could be an abbreviation of homeless bohemian, a description that could well be applied to McLaren who "cultivated the mannerisms and appearance of a bohemian outsider" [5] and whose life involved constant travel and a deliberate rejection of conventional work and societal norms; partly out of a desire for freedom and sometimes just for the fun of it. 

 

Malcolm may not have illegally hopped freight trains, but he rarely paid for his own travel - or even his own cigarettes! - and, just like a hobo, he was an extremely resourceful individual, flitting between London, Paris, and New York just as he had once flitted from art college to art college, living on his wits and other people's generosity. 

 

Above all, McLaren stayed true to the number one rule of the Hobo Code [6]: Decide your own life; don't let another person run or rule you. 

 

And one recalls, of course, that Duck Rock (1983) may have thanked many people for their collaboration on the project, but it was solely dedicated to Harry K. McClintock; better known by his hobo name, Haywire Mac, whose Hallelujah! I'm a Bum (1981) Malcolm insisted was crucial to an understanding of duck rock or hobo-punk as he conceived it and an album he made me buy in Collet's bookshop [7].  

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: living like a hobo is primarily about adopting a certain attitude and recognising the creative potential within failure - if I may return to this word. In a piece for The Guardian written two years before he died, McLaren wrote:

 

"I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules. It was one of my tutors [...] when I was an art student, that really brought it home to me. He said that only by being willing to fail can you become fearless. He compared the role of an artist to that of being an alchemist or magician. And he thought the real magic was found in flamboyant, provocative failure rather than benign success. So that's what I've been striving for ever since." [8] 

 

McLaren's, therefore, is a very special understanding of failure; an artistic and philosophical understanding of the term. 

 

One is almost tempted to bring Samuel Beckett in at this point; for Beckett (as I'm sure you know) uses the symbolic figure of the tramp to explore various existential themes and informs us that what we learn from failure is not how to succeed in the future, but, at most, how to fail better [9]. Success, says Beckett, is not even an option; we are destined to fail - such is the tragic character of Dasein.

 

The fact that Beckett - like McLaren - affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic satisfaction, is something admirable I think. Nietzsche would call it a pessimism of strength [10] and he made it a central teaching of his Dionysian philosophy; a philosophy that, like McLaren's vision of punk, finds creative potential in destruction and flamboyant failure. 

 

McLaren had his successes - but he didn't chase or desire success. Indeed, if anything - and again to quote your own words Simon, if I may - he was thwarted by success [11]. His dream was always to go down in flames or sink beneath the waves [12].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to the claim made by Reynolds that Paul Gorman's excellent biography of McLaren failed to give a "moral appraisal of its subject". It was an allegation swiftly refuted by Gorman, who rightly pointed out that the primarly task of a biographer is to write a critically objective study, not pass judgement. 

     See: Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', a review of Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2021), in The London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 5 (10 March 2022), and see Paul Gorman's letter in response in the following issue (44. 6), dated 24 March 2022. Both can be read by clicking here.             

 

[2] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to above.   

 

[3] Simon Reynolds, comment on the TTA post 'Destroy Success' posted on 10 Nov 2025 at 16:56. Click here. 

 

[4] In the revised and expanded fourth edition of his The American Language (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), H. L. Mencken argued that although commonly lumped together, tramps, hobos, and bums are actually distinct fron another. Both tramps and hobos like to travel around and lead an itinerant lifestyle, but the former try to avoid work preferring just to dream (and drink), whereas the latter, whilst enjoying some prolonged periods of unemployment, essentially want to work, albeit in a series of jobs with no desire to establish a long term career. As for the bum, according to Mencken, he neither wanders nor works.  Obviously, such a fixed and rigid classification is highly questionable.     

      

[5] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.  

 

[6] A set of ethical guidelines known as the Hobo Code was created by a hobo union during its 1889 National Hobo Convention, in St. Louis, Missouri.  It consists of more than a dozen rules intended to govern the conduct of hobos nationwide and help dispel negative stereotypes associated with their lifestyle. These rules essentially boil down to: 1. Respect the law. 2. Help fellow hobos. 3. Protect Children. 3. Preserve the natural environment.

      The National Hobo Convention continues to be an annual event - held in Iowa since 1900 - where the Hobo Code is still recognised. Readers wishing to know more are encouraged to visit the Open Culture web page on the subject: click here.  

 

[7] Collet's was a bookshop (that also stocked selected records and tapes) founded by Eva Collet Reckitt in 1934. It was famous for selling radical and revolutionary publications, particularly those from Russia and Eastern Europe, and acted as a hub for left-leaning intellectuals. 

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, 'This much I know', The Guardian (16 Nov 2008): click here. 

[9] See my post on Beckett's short prose work 'Worstward Ho!' (1983) and the idea of failure (11 Jun 2013): click here.   

 

[10] This phrase - Pessimismus der Stärke - can be found, for example, in Nietzsche's 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy (1871), where he describes it as a "predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence", arising from strength and well-being rather than decadence or enfeebled instincts. 

      See 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin Books, 1993), p. 3.    

 

[11] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.  

 

[12] It is interesting to note that, etymologically, the term flamboyant that Malcolm used in relation to the kind of failure he aspired to, comes from the French and means 'flaming' or 'wavy'. 

  

 

A Post for Poppy Day

A remembrance poppy [1] 

 

 

One of the things I don't like about the poppy-wearing period in the UK [2] is that it has become overly politicised and increasingly something that feels invested with the bullying spirit of the mob. 

 

The writer Phineas Harper is entirely correct to say that red-poppy propaganda also elides the horror of conscription and thus contributes to a "collective amnesia that sanitises history" [3], disrespecting those who were coerced into military service (i.e., forced to fight and die for king and country). 

 

Further, it fails to acknowledge that many of those Brits killed during the Second World War, for example, were not members of the armed forces but civilians. 

 

In fact, along with the 384,000 soldiers killed in combat there was a civilian death toll of 70,000, "largely due to German bombing raids during the Blitz: 40,000 civilians died in the seven-month period between September 1940 and May 1941, almost half of them in London" [4].

 

Finally, like Harper - and as mentioned - I find that the tone of the national conversation around remembrance has significantly altered; less mournful and more jingoistic:   

 

"Remembrance should be a serious, sober, freely chosen tradition, not a cosmetic game of frogmarched performative allegiance. Staged patriotic fervour has nothing to do with sincerely honouring the memory of [the fallen ...] and, perversely, risks tipping remembrance into unreflective sabre-rattling bravado - glorifying war rather than mourning it." [5] 

 

In part, this drift from serious forms of remembrance into patriotic parody is due to the fact that those who actually experienced the horrors of the First World War are now dead and even those who lived during the period 1939-45 are now far fewer in number and any elderly ex-servicemen - as we used to call them before the Americanisation of our language [6] - who do dare to go against the official red poppy line are discreetly ignored or patronised on breakfast TV [7].  

 

Does this mean I'm a pacifist, or that I'm going to be pinning a white poppy on my lapel? 

 

No: I don't have a moral objection to war per se. But, for the reasons outlined above, I do find wearing a red poppy problematic. 

 

And, like D. H. Lawrence, I do detest the thought of war in the modern machine age; "a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon fodder" [8] and I wouldn't want to be seen to be lending support to this in any way.  

 

Notes

 

[1] Made by disabled ex-servicemen and sold in the UK and other Commonwealth countries in support of the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal, this artificial flower - inspired by the poem 'In Flanders Fields' (John McCrae, 1915) - is worn in memory of military personnel who died in war.   

 

[2] This period lasts from All Souls' Day (2 Nov) until either Armistice Day (11 Nov), or Remembrance Sunday if that happens to fall on a later date (12-14 Nov). 

 

[3] Phineas Harper, 'I wear a white poppy because Remembrance Day's staged fervour does little to honour my grandad', in The Guardian (8 Nov 2024): click here.  

 

[4] I'm quoting from the UK Parliament report into military casualties and the civillian death toll during the two World Wars, available online: click here.   

      

[5] Phineas Harper, The Guardian (8 Nov 2024): click link in note 2 above.   

 

[6] This is another thing that irritates me; the fact that commentators in the media and figures from various official bodies and institutions are increasingly using the term veteran, rather than the traditional British term ex-serviceman. 

      The irony of adopting an Americanism to refer to our former military personnel seems lost on them; one suggests that they click here to watch an amusing Sacha Baron Cohen sketch from Da Ali G Show, season 3, episode 2 (HBO, 2004).   

 

[7] I'm referring to the case of Alec Penstone, the 100-year-old ex-serviceman who appeared on Good Morning Britain (ITV, 7 Nov 2025) and who, when invited to give a message to viewers watching at home, said that the sacrifice made by his friends and comrades wasn't worth it as the country is in a worse state - with less freedom - now than when he fought for it. One of the interviewers, Adil Ray, clearly embarrassed by this, asked him 'What do you mean by that?' as if he had said the unsayable or was so old and senile that he didn't know what he was saying. To watch the interview on YouTube, click here.   

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 159.  

      Those who are interested in knowing more about Lawrence's rather romantic understanding of combat in the heroic age before it became an affair entirely of machines and abstraction - when men still possessed natural courage and fought up close and personal with their enemy and didn't kill from a distance by simply pulling a trigger or pressing a button - might like to see the post titled 'In Praise of Fighters: At the Gym and on the Battlefield with D. H. Lawrence' (18 Sept 2020): click here.  

On the Politics of the Smile

 And Still You Wear That Happy Face ...

 (SA/2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst totalitarian regimes do not enforce happiness and demand that citizens always smile per se, they do, nevertheless, require outward displays of satisfaction and conformity and often clamp down on any signs of discontent or unhappiness. 

 

Thus it is that one doesn't see many frowns on the faces of those depicted in state controlled propaganda and public emotion at mass events is carefully stage managed. 

 

And this is as true of Disneyland as it is of Nazi Germany; of corporate-media spectacles, such as the Olympics opening ceremony, as it is of a worker's parade in Pyongyang. 

 

Mickey Mouse, Joseph Goebbels, Danny Boyle, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, all know how to put on a good a show and make the people smile. 

 

In other words, they all understand the importance of exploiting what Freud calls the pleasure principle [2] and transforming what should be a natural expression of joy [3] into a regulatory facial mechanism that signals the correct response to power.

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, the smile can still, I think, be a counterfascist gesture; for as Baudrillard reminds us, there is the possibility of a sudden reversal even in a single ironic smile, "just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master" [4].

 

This is not to imply we can laugh all our troubles away, but to suggest that the more hegemonic the system, the greater is its vulnerability to even the smallest of set-backs or acts of defiance. Any challenge, even at a micropolitical level, represents a failure and threatens to quickly go viral; a total system requires complete control and demands absolute complicity. 

 

Thus, smiling - perhaps more with the eyes than the mouth - is still an important ability to possess. If one smiles with a mix of cheerful insouciance and philosophical indifference to the circumstances in which one finds oneself [5], then, who knows, perhaps others might smile back ...             

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The title of this image is taken from the lyrics written by Jello Biafra and John Greenway for 'California Über Alles"' (1979), the debut single by American punk band Dead Kennedys. The background artwork is a detail taken from the sleeve for the single, designed by Winston Smith. 

      The main image (allegedly) shows a woman wearing a smile mask intended to fight depression, taken in Budapest, 1937. The theory behind the mask, designed to force the wearer's mouth into a smile using mechanical devices like wires or medical tape, was that if people looked happier then they would feel happier. Unfortunately, if such masks were ever actually used, they proved to be ineffective and did nothing to reduce the high number of suicides in the city at that time. 

 

[2] For Freud, the Lustprinzip is the instinctive seeking of pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. In his 1921 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, he considered the possibility of something more primal and operating independently of a pleasure principle conceived in relation to the life instinct; something that he termed the death drive (Todestrieb).   

 

[3] Whilst it's true that in different cultures and societies smiling can convey emotions other other than joy and amusement - such as confusion and embarrassment, for example - there are no non-smiling peoples and evolutionary biologists have traced smiling back millions of years to our earliest ape ancestors.

      Interestingly, smiling may also be something that men do more than women and a common female complaint is being told to smile by male strangers, as this is seen as aggressive and controlling rather than born of concern for their happiness.     

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser (University of Michigan, 1994), p. 163.  

 

[5] It's important to note that I'm not asking for sincerity to be expressed in one's smile; nor do I want people to smile enthusiastically. I want them to smile in a manner similar to the Cheshire Cat, so that they become elusive and enigmatic (or imperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari would say).  

 

 

Musical bonus: Nat King Cole 'Smile', recorded and released as a single in 1954, it can be found on the album Ballads of the Day (Capitol Records, 1956): click here. 

      Or for Jimmy Durante's version of 'Smile', originally found on his 1965 album Hello Young Lovers (Warner Bros.) and which famously features in the movie Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019), click here.