Tarantino’s Two Apaches

Tarantino’s superb Inglourious Basterds mentions Apaches not once but twice…. Brad Pitt’s Southern hero Lt Aldo Raine, specialist in interesting ways of killing Nazis, is called “Aldo the Apache”.

Another Apache is “Winnetou”, whose name turns up on the forehead of a German soldier when they’re playing the cards-on-foreheads guess-the-identity game in the restaurant scene with Germans and disguised Brits. We are told “Winnetou” was an Apache, but the reference is obscure – unless you’re a bad film aficionado, as QT is, of course.

Here, M. Apache knows only what Wiki knows. Winnetou was the hero of a series of late nineteenth-century novels by Karl May, who died in 1912. Winnetou is a Mescalero Apache, allegedly, but the values are Christian, not Native American – Winnetou dies a convert.

There were a dozen awful films in the 1960s, starring Pierre Brice, a French Baron, as the hero. YouTube shows the acting as wooden, the shots conventional, the “evocative” music enthused over in the comments by sentimental contemporary Germans. It’s the kind of thing QT would know about, thought it’s surprising that – even with his eclectic interests – he should like such deadly stuff. Perhaps he doesn’t.

The 1944 restaurant scene refers to the novels, which remain popular today – Karl May is one of the best-selling German authors ever, unbelievably – but presumably QT would first have reached Winnetou the Apache through the films, and reached back to the stories.

The key irony is that the values of the Karl May novels were Christian and humanitarian. Wait until you see the end of the restaurant scene stand-off – straight out of Reservoir Dogs, with added testosterone. Or deleted testosterone, if you prefer.

Evan Davis, egotist

Evan Davis ran into trouble with Peter Mandelson on the Today programme on Wednesday morning (12 August), as M. Apache predicted he soon might do. Clever but arrogant Evan fired up every time PM tried to criticise opposition policies Evan seems to want a complete ban on cross-party criticism of any kind.

This led to Mandelson trying to explain to him that voters make a choice between parties, and that criticism is legitimate. “Politics is about a choice…”. Yes, Evan, and it’s called democracy.

PM tried three times to explain what the Chancellor had said in his budget speech about the longer-term future, but this was swamped by Evan’s interruptions. “If you stop interrupting me…” PM said, in reasonable tones that made Evan seem excitable.

Then Evan got incomprehensible. He told PM and us that the economy has a structural deficit of 6% of national income. Fair enough. Immediately after that he said that new debt meant there had to be a tightening “of point eight per cent of GDP”. From 6% to .8 per cent in a few seconds was a bit too much, even for M. Apache’s usually agile intelligence. What on earth was he talking about? There was more, and it went on for a while. Then PM came in with a slyly timed “Have you finished?” And proceeded to answer the question.

PM’s most telling point came earlier. We pointed out a few weeks ago (see June 25 below) that Evan’s reflexive tendencies – he comments on the answers he gets – would get him into trouble, and this time they duly did. PM was able, quite reasonably, to say: “You’re not interviewing yourself, you’re interviewing me”.

It was a killer point for anyone who has listened to Evan’s methods this year. For Evan Davis, the important person in the studio is Evan Davis. The real PM, or this PM, are adjuncts to his big knowledge of economics –in excess this time – and his big ego.

Come on, Evan: calm down, stop being full of yourself, and think of your audience.

Apache films prove M. Apache right all along….

Down at the Café Coup de Poing, M. Apache was flicking through that great newspaper Le Monde when he came across an article about a filmmaker called Bruno Petit, who has escaped from working on the Bourse to make a series of tv films called “Scalp”. These are proving very popular, since they satirise the illegal goings-on at…the Bourse.

Funny thing though: M. Bruno P. – no, not that Brüno, stupid – has called his company 7e Apache Films, which pleases M. Apache greatly.

Even better, he meets his friends at a restaurant called Le Coup de Feu, in the Bastille area.

(For a waiter, a “coup de feu” is a moment of sudden activity, after standing around a lot.)

Better still, Bruno Petit is described as having “également un autre visage, celui de quelqu’un d’agressif”. His aggressive other side extends to his being “carnassier”.

M. Apache looks forward to a little carnivorous eating alongside M. Petit at the Coup de feu someday soon!

Stephen Glover’s goat

Stephen Glover has just published the latest of his paranoid attacks on the Guardian and the BBC (Indy, 27 July). According to him, these two organisations are conspiring to mislead by improperly promoting the story about massive telephone hacking at the News of the World.

There is nothing new here, he says, because we already know about what he calls “the former eavesdropping techniques” at the NOTW. – “as I pointed out in this column”. A journalist went to prison, and Andy Coulson resigned, and we should all go back to sleep. But the Guardian, “aided and abetted” by the BBC, is conspiring to keep the phone scamming story alive.

But which story? On 9 July the Guardian led with “Revealed: Murdoch’s £1m bill for hiding dirty tricks”. This wasn’t a story about hacking, it was a story about NOTW victims being paid off so as not to cause big trouble in the courts. For a few days, a few stars thought about taking legal action themselves, Max Clifford and Vanessa Feltz among them. If they do, and a lot of other victims join in, we shall see a merry time in the courts. And possibly a massive drain on News International’s finances.

Glover, then, can’t even identify the story correctly.

And this was a genuine story. We hadn’t heard before that Murdoch had made these payments. Behind it was a mass of police evidence never used for prosecutions. Behind that was the feeling that the Met was afraid to act against News International. Right in front was a reasonable suspicion that the NOTW and Andy Coulson were lying about the extent of the scamming, and the extent of what they knew. Mass NOTW-related amnesia at the Culture, Media and Sport select committee on 21 July tended to confirm this.

Now Stephen has his own story – that ten years ago the Guardian itself employed a private investigator to hack into Monsanto (you know – the GM people Tony Blair liked so much). Stephen’s story is, sadly, second hand: it belonged to David Leppard of the Sunday Times, whose own source was “a shadowy accomplice” he had worked with before. While Nick Davies’s Guardian story was properly sourced, the ST can do no better than “shadowy”. After Alan Rusbridger got the director of the private investigators involved to deny that it happened back in 1999 (yes, it’s ten years old, this story), the ST didn’t run anything to counter the Guardian story about Murdoch buying people off.

Funnily enough, Stephen Glover couldn’t get a “nervous” David Leppard to talk to him, whilst the Guardian “passed on its denials to me”.

So what’s going on here? M. Apache has hinted before that he doesn’t find S. Glover to be the sharpest knife in the columnists’ box. It seems he wants to get himself involved in this story, hassling Leppard and Rusbridger, worrying away at unsupported conspiracy theories, and all the while moralising in the dead language of the secular pulpit.

Rusbridger, he says, acts “holier-than-thou” and is on his “high horse”.

Glover insists again and again that the Guardian – sorry, the moralistic Rusbridger – did employ a hacker. He’s very sure of his source, in other words, and though he has no evidence that he can give us, and no known investigative skills, he is right. The ST didn’t run the story, so he will do it – even if “Mr Leppard” (as he calls him) won’t speak to him.

But what is Glover right about? Not about the Guardian story, which was about previously unknown payoffs, and a stack of interesting police evidence.

Let’s just glance at what’s serious about this story.

Andy Coulson is probably lying, and if he goes as Tory party communications director, then he just goes. (And goes to edit the Sun in the autumn.) If he stays, this story will keep erupting as a distraction, and he’ll go eventually.

More important than Coulson is the Met’s trepidation before Murdoch. If there’s good actionable stuff amongst the evidence collected, that’s a scandal.

If News International is discredited in a slow-burn process over the next year or so, then it will become less necessary for New Labour to suck up to Murdoch. Blair’s sweetheart deal will not be repeated, and the unhappy liaison can be wound up. Labour can find its own way.

And then there’s Parliament. (M. Apache feels slightly ashamed to be supporting that venerable and far from anarchistic institution, but needs must.) Central democracy needs to be redeemed after the expenses scandal, and vigorous action from select committees might help. Eventual legislation – such as reform of the libel laws, and a PCC with teeth – would be one way of rescuing something from the shambles.

Meanwhile, we can look forward to more self-centred look-at-me columns from Stephen Glover. What gets his goat, he says, is Rusbridger’s moral attitude, “that he somehow occupies a higher and better universe than the rest of us”, when really he is only another journalist. Stephen (not so brightly) seems to think that all journalists are the same. Trouble is, they aren’t. There is a difference between a Nick Davis with a story, and a David Leppard without one – or a NOTW hack with a Vanessa Feltz phone transcript in his hand.

If Glover is looking for problematic types, how about the crass vanity of Stuart Kuttner? He is the recently-resigned NOTW managing editor, who tried to tell the CMS select committee that certain MPs should not be there – and they laughed at him!

It’s not quite clear what Glover is getting at – his 27 July column is full of non-sequiturs and nonsense – but he does give the rest of us a chance to say something sensible by sorting him out.

Stevie G. is the little boy outside the tent, desperate to see what the big clowns are up to.

Himself, he is just a little clown.

John Walsh: Knicker Man

Sexy John Walsh, journalist and Padel squeeze, has tried to impress us by writing in French (Indy, 23 June). Sarkozy has taken to reading books, apparently, Zola and Céline among them.

Walsh tries to imagine what Sarko would have said to novelist Michel Houellebecq when he invited him to dinner. Walsh’s French goes like this: “Oh, Michel. J’ai lit tout de ton oeuvre”

This is hopeless. Lire (to read) doesn’t go to past tense lit. Un lit is a bed, and the person round here most interested in beds is sexy John himself.

It should be: j’ai lu toute ton œuvre. That’s only three mistakes, John.

But no French person would use this construction in the first place. Sarko would have said: J’ai lu tous vos livres.

Walsh then goes on to mention that Sarko has been reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he says is “savage”. Why doesn’t he also mention Céline’s notorious anti-Semitic tract Bagatelles pour un massacre, published in 1937, just in time for the war?

Walsh does a lot of superficial and tricksy stuff about the Goncourts and Proust and Flaubert. Why doesn’t he say how significant it might be that a very right-wing president is reading a very right-wing author? Why doesn’t he notice that Sarkozy is also reading Zola, a radical of his time, who in 1898 denounced the judgement in the Dreyfus affair in his famous “J’Accuse…!” newspaper article. It was a magnificent statement against state anti-Semitism.

Isn’t this contradiction interesting enough? Walsh doesn’t pick up any of it. Instead he burbles on about the alleged sincerity of Sarko’s new interests (so it’s not Carla), and Alan Bennett – always safe territory.

Instead of trying to make a serious point or two, Walsh is more interested in suggesting some people read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland because Obama is reading it. I bet he’s met a whole lot of people doing that.

Walsh mentions no less than twenty-two writers in his 750-word piece. He has nothing significant to say about any of them. A kind of literary jeering takes place instead.

On 9 June he made what looked like a similar point, about F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist agitator (tied to the current Tate Modern show). He wrote: Marinetti was a barking mad Fascist sympathiser. Very true of the 1920s. But not when he founded and propagated Futurism before the First World War. There was no Fascism then, and Mussolini was still a socialist. Hopeless, again.

A friend who has read John Walsh with more attention than he deserves says that a year ago he wrote about Edith Sitwell’s underwear, and the chances of her contemporaries making an entry therein. Kitchen-table bonking, le lit, knickers – these are John Walsh’s real interests.

Come on, John: if you’ve read so many books, try and say something thoughtful about them.

The Death of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson died in the late eighties. It was after Bad that it all went bad. It was a child of eleven, beaten up by his father, who died this week.

He took Motown and everything that it stood for, culturally and musically, and delivered it to the global stage. But he was produced by others, notably by Quincy Jones in the great albums of the 1970s and 1980s. He was a great musician, as so many are saying, but not a great thinking musician.

Compare him with Miles Davis, who changed jazz forever. Miles had a new sensibility, a transforming musical intelligence. Yet Miles acknowledged Jackson when he covered Human Nature on the album You’re Under Arrest in 1985. But it is Miles who is expanding musical boundaries here, not Jackson.

Listen to Jackson’s Human Nature, and it’s a child singing about love. Miles’s version is music for grown-ups.

Yes, Jackson’s music was at the pinnacle of popular consumerist culture. Yes, he created the template for pop production today. Yes, he was the first truly global black pop star.

All because he was good enough to be shaped and produced into something that took over the world.

“Michael Jackson” was a collective achievement, and the idea of individual genius doesn’t apply.

As musicians like to say, Jackson paid his dues on the Jackson 5 recordings. And on the MTV videos. But his individual success after that was always commercial, always a need to please, and to make money.

Remember when Jarvis Cocker was at some ghastly over-produced Jackson theatre event, and dropped his trousers in the direction of the star?

Yes, his death is a significant moment. He will feature in the history of music, but not as a pioneering musician. He was never allowed to be truly original.

As for his personal life, that was a weird tragedy right from the start. In the photographs at the hospital, his father looks like a monster.

Evan Davis: a very clever man

Evan Davis nailed Jack Straw beautifully on Today on 19 June. Straw’s usual hesitation waltz of stuttering speech came to and end when he got cross: “I’m sorry. What you’ve just said is an outrageous and completely unjustified charge against me. I’ve been completely explicit . . .” The sudden clarity was delicious to hear.

Davis had made the point that the figures for financing the Probation service were cooked, since they left out debt interest and social security costs. It was a nifty bit of superior economic knowledge. The absence of funding led, inter alia, to the terrible deaths of two French students at the hands of someone who should have been in prison.

Evan Davis is a very clever man. Evan Davis is very quick. Evan Davis knows a lot about economics. Evan Davis wants to tell the Chancellor what he knows about economics (which may well be more that what the Chancellor knows).

According to Peter Hitchens, Evan Davis is a dangerous man, who espouses liberal causes on Today. And so he does, and may he continue to do so. (Though M. Apache thinks he heard Evan say one morning that there were such a thing as “feral children”, a good Daily Mail line.)

Evan Davis signed off on this occasion with “Jack Straw – always a pleasure to talk to you”. The irony, not to say incipient sarcasm, was unmistakable. There was some blog-comment on this item, and M. Apache is not alone in being pleased at Jack Straw being seen off.

But we need Evan Davis – because we have in the making a liberal interviewer with teeth, who will eventually replace the middle of the road-rightist one with teeth, John Humphrys. Nondescript North American editor Justin Webb is due to hit Today in October, and Davis needs to get established as the liberals’ attack dog.

And he mustn’t make any mistakes. He already has the annoying habit of commenting on the quality of the reply he has elicited. Soon, somebody is going to jump on him for this.
Evan Davis is very arrogant, because he knows how clever he is.

If his arrogance gets the better of him – telling Gordon Brown he was slumping in his chair was not a good idea (especially on radio) – then he will find BBC suits and legal types after him.

Come on Evan: don’t screw up. Keep us liberals happy.

Richard Long: naturist

What is all this excitement about Richard Long’s retro at Tate Britain? The reviews were so favourable that he got an 8 in the Guardian’s review roundup. Is this deserved? No. (Only Rachel Cooke of the Observer didn’t like what she saw, and all praise to her.)

Richard Long is a naïf. He goes on long walks, and records where he went. He takes a short walk up and down, wears away a patch of ground, and photographs it. He picks up stones, puts them into simplistic patterns, and photographs them. Soon nature will take away his artwork.

He is the Ranulph Fiennes of the art world. Or rather, he’s the Ben Fogle of the art world.

He picks up stones and gets people to carry them to Tate Britain, and put them on the floor. These are his only actual sculptures. All the rest is photographs.

Long is not a ‘land artist’, he is an enthusiast with a camera.

And a maker of lists. Boring, forgettable, naïf lists of place names and weather conditions. In his early works, his framed lists of places visited, and the funny maps, also framed, have the titles written in by hand, with little pencil guide-lines (not rubbed out) done with a ruler. It’s like a child doing homework.

When he gets well known, this childish naiveté disappears. And then the little lines inexplicably reappear in 2006. It’s forced naiveté.

His 1960s photos are competent – but most of us can take a picture of a famous mountain – with our own tramping up and down visible in the foreground.

And then Richard Long tries to think. We get this:

Richard starts things off, but (he says) “Nature makes the rest – revealing the cosmic nature of the microscale.”

This is embarrassing. Small things are big things, really. That has been a cliché of modern thought ever since someone first looked down a microscope. Galileo, 1625, for example.

Then look at some of his recent photos, of Dartmoor, say. They have clearly been Photoshopped. So what happened to ‘nature making the rest’?

You can always trust nature – until you put her into Photoshop!

The new works for Tate B. are on the walls. These are mud works, or when not mud, liquid Cornish clay. There are finger marks everywhere. The last time Monsieur Apache saw anything like this, it was finger-painting from a children’s nursery.

Is Richard Long popular because he fits into an apolitical zeitgeist, in which people look to art for consolation and reassurance? Or popular for the Gaia idea that everything will grow back, so it’s all right really? That we can make our mark on the world, but only a tiny one, which nature – or the sea, or the growing grass – will soon wipe away? (And we wipe away our own little tears as this happens.)

Whereas the great issue of our day – and of the past 250 years – has been the way we have ripped goodness from the earth, and whether we can go on doing so.

It is a Prince Charles view of the world: safe, sentimental, unreal. But Long – like Charles – shows a ruthless commitment to his own limitations.

Being sentimental about “the land” is regressive. Giving Long a good review is regressive.

Richard Long is from Bristol. The only good artist from Bristol is Banksy!

Stephen Glover begins to get it

In his Monday Media column in the Indy, Stephen Glover is noticeably less enthusiastic about the Telegraph’s expenses campaign than he was two weeks earlier. Then, he spoke of its “courage” and historical significance. Now (1 June) he is more sceptical, and has realised that the Telegraph may actually be politically motivated.

He points out that the paper has been “softer on some than on others”, David Cameron in particular. He does a rather good analysis. “Only in paragraph three [of the Telegraph on Cameron] was his £680 claim to remove wisteria mentioned in a deadpan way”.

Stephen also points out – what not all of out here would have known – that Cameron does not have a “cottage” (Telegraph), but “a grand house” with a £350,000 mortgage.

Can Glover have been reading M. Apache? We pointed out on 20 May that his attitude to the Telegraph’s operation was naïve and star-struck. We pointed out how the right-wing paper had played verbal games trying to discredit Gordon Brown in ways that didn’t stick. Stephen now finds similar games going on, but pointing in the opposite political direction.

We don’t at all mind you lifting a critical attitude from this blog!

Well done, Stephen – come aboard!

Hereford Times journos oppose BNP

Congratulations to journalists at the Hereford Times who opposed the publication of a BNP advertisement (21 May).

The great majority were against it, but it appeared all the same.

Underneath the ad appeared these weasel words: "This is a political advertisement and it is pubished in good faith."

The editor of the Hereford Times is Liz Griffin (no relation).

The Telegraph and the crisis – and Stephen Glover (again)

Stephen Glover’s wide-eyed admiration for what the Telegraph newspapers have been doing gives us a chance to assess what he calls their “triumph”. The story will become part of history, Stephen says. And: “It will become part of journalistic lore”. He criticises the Times for not being hard enough on the MPs – one in the eye for you, Daniel Finkelstein. It “required some courage” to publish a few of the two million documents for which it paid an intermediary businessman either £100,000 or £300,000. That’s hard research.

Hero of the hour is Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis, whose reputation will be “burnished” by the “hundreds of connections” his staff have made. There is even a photo of Lewis, looking up into the camera like the golden-haired visionary he is.

Yet Glover’s own paper has shown that Will Lewis is corruptible. The Independent on Sunday pointed out – at some length and on page 3 – that last Friday the Telegraph played down the sins of Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls because Lewis and Balls are friends. They both like karaoke, apparently. The story was “hidden” downpage on page 8.

The real scandal of the Friday the 15th paper was surely the front page coverage of Justice Minister Shahid Malik. Two huge photos, trimmed to the ears to maximise weirdness, showed Malik on the left and his landlord on the right. A sullen off-centre Malik contrasted with a smiling Tahir Zaman, who is conveniently wearing an “Islamic” beard. There is a racist undertone to this conjunction. The photos of both men are larger and more unsettling than the photos of white-skinned males that the Telegraph has been running.

Perhaps this is what Stephen Glover means when he says that “in some respects” the Tele looks like “a pale shadow of the Daily Mail”. A bit of apparently-justifiable reporting which just happens to have a racist component would, we think, be one of those “respects”.

Stephen also thinks that the BBC was slow to see the serious side of things. He recalls hearing on Sunday 17th “the joyous assertion on a Radio 4 news bulletin that the The Sunday Telegraph had been forced to eat humble pie”. But what did this relate to? Was it not the STel’s abject withdrawal of imputations against Gordon Brown? In its editorial the paper wrote about the cleaning bill shared with his brother Andrew (because the cleaner wanted a single bill for tax purposes) that “There has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother” (page 26, and again not easy to find).

This sounds like “humble pie” to us, and did to other commentators. Stephen Glover hears what he wants to hear.

The Brown story was meant to damage him. It featured as the first item on the first day of the “revelations”. On 8 May there is a photo (moderate size) of him under the heading “Brown paid his brother more than £6,000 for ‘cleaning services’”. Do you notice those quotation marks? They imply that the payment was not really for cleaning services, but for something else. (They are also accurate, but that’s not how it was meant to be read). In Saturday’s paper (9 May) there is a story headed “Cleaning cash for brother was legitimate”. Friday’s story implied that it was not legitimate. Way down in Saturday’s story we find a Downing Street spokesman saying that “The Daily Telegraph was ‘wrong to have claimed that Mr Brown “appears” to have paid for little of his own living costs since moving into No 10’.” So Downing Street was on to the paper’s little verbal tricks.

The Friday report keeps coming back to Brown, making different points each time, and giving the impression cumulatively – but never with decisive evidence – that there was “something” wrong about Brown’s cleaning services claim.

The paper wrote that Brown’s statement “is likely to give rise to questions as to why the PM did not simply lodge receipts directly with the cleaner”. This would be an example of the “hundreds of connections” that according to Glover the Telegraph reporters have been so courageously making. But they fail to make connections when it suits them!

Other examples: why headline Sinn Fein MPs when the real story of the day was downplayed just underneath – Hazel Blears avoiding CGT on the sale of a home? That was atavistic anti-Irish Telegraph stuff coming through.

We’re not convinced Barbara Follett was in the wrong to claim for security when she had in fact been attacked near her Soho home – it was a weekend patrol costing £4882.32 a year for five years. Only well into the story do we read that her former husband – both were anti-Apartheid –was shot dead in South Africa “in front of her two daughters”. In other circumstances this could have been a sob story of personal danger arising from political conviction. But not when you want to score a point against a Labour MP.

For star-struck Stephen Glover this is no doubt more “pale” shadowing of the Daily Mail – but for us out here it looks like insensitive political malice.

Even Stephen faults the Telegraph on its refusal to say that it paid for the 2 million-item CD. This “seems a bit coy”. This is itself a coy reference to Andrew Porter, the paper’s Political editor, who has been touring the studios saying – when asked what they paid – that he isn’t going to “reveal his sources”. It’s nothing to do with sources: we know the source is a nicked CD. This makes SG look distinctly naïve, despite his air of worldly judgment and his discovery that the Telegraph is a great paper after all.

Come on, Stephen, don’t be naïve – this is political, right-wing, opportunist stuff. It’s not a “great” newspaper at work.

Ruth Padel and John Walsh: was it him?

Big scandal around the election of Ruth Padel as Oxford poetry professor. The rival to “Paddle” – as Kirsty Young called her on Desert Island Discs – was the great poet Derek Walcott. Somebody circulated 100 potential voters with photocopies from a 1984 book describing the advances that Walcott made to two women students when he was at Harvard in 1982.

As a result, Walcott withdrew from the election, and Paddle got the job.

In the Sunday Telegraph (17 May) Padel is quoted denying as “ridiculous” claims by a former ~Professor of Poetry (not named) that she had colluded with John Walsh, “a friend and newspaper columnist” to do this. She said: “I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties”.

Walsh is a columnist for the Independent. On 28 April he wrote a deplorably partisan column for the paper. He declared himself a supporter of Padel, and then took a hatchet to Walcott, reprising the 1982 allegations, which were set out in a book called The Lecherous Professor published in 1984. The book is not about Walcott – he features on pages 29-33 and again briefly on p. 36.

Walsh’s cynical column does exactly what the 100 anonymous envelopes did.

So do we have anything but Padel’s word that it wasn’t him?

Some irony was introduced by a Sunday Times piece by the mischievous Sian Griffiths (17 May again), claiming it’s widely known that a Padel poem called “Home Cooking”, which ends with a fuck on the kitchen table after a couple have glazed a Sainsbury’s free-range duck, is about John Walsh. “She did not deny Walsh was the lover”, the ST writes.

Walsh is one of the weaker brethren among columnists, and it’s always been a surprise that he was once literary editor of the Sunday Times. Perhaps that’s why the paper’s journalists are so well-informed about his kitchen activities.

All Sunday’s papers write against Walsh and whoever sent the Walcott photocopies. All, that is, except Emily Dugan in the Independent on Sunday – she contrives to write the story without mentioning him once.

In the Observer Catherine Bennett directs some well-deserved sarcasm towards Walsh (17 May). But she makes a point nobody else has the courage or knowledge to make: Padel is “a mediocre versifier”. That is absolutely right– she’s certainly not in the Carol Ann Duffy class.

Oxford’s decision is a disaster. Ruth Padel is a weak poet – “Home Cooking”, as a subject, suggests that – and she hasn’t got anything interesting to say beyond 600 words. An hour’s lecture won’t amount to much. She’s a conventional thinker, a nineteenth-century leftover. She lives off the boring fact that she is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. To her credit, she sounded genuinely upset by Walcott’s withdrawal.

If she thinks the activities of her ex-lover Walsh have “poisoned” her appointment, why doesn’t she just resign?

Come on, Ruth: you’re not going to win the Nobel, as Walcott did. There’s still time to get out.

No French dictionary at the Guardian?

Monsieur Apache is again dismayed by bad French at the Guardian (see Laura Barton’s efforts with Deneuve, below).

A photo of a Trafigura ship full of toxic chemicals has the words “L’Europe intoxique L’Afrique” painted on its side by Greenpeace.

The Guardian thinks this means that Europe has been “intoxicating” Africa.

“Intoxiquer” in French means “to poison”.

It doesn’t mean you’re making them drunk.

(See 14 May, pages 12-13 – also for a marvellous account of how Trafigura’s lawyers have tried to stifle facts and comment.)

Well, down at the Coup de Poing, we think Trafigura did it.

“In a bate”: conservative default culture

You’re a right-wing journalist or blogger in a hurry. You need a cultural reference. You dig down deep, to default culture territory. To all that stuff that’s buried so far down, you hardly know it’s there.

You are Quentin Letts, probably on your third article of the day. And you need to abuse Speaker Martin over his rants in Parliament. You write:

“In the middle of Mr Martin’s bate…”.

His what? Where did that come from?

Rather sadly, M. Apache knows where. From the Jennings and Darbishire books written by Anthony Buckeridge. When form master “Old Wilkie” was angry, he was said to be “in a bate”. Young Apache used to read these books – it all began in 1954 with Jennings Goes to School, and reprints are still being published.

Letts was born in 1963, so he would have started out with Speaking of Jennings!, published in 1973. Or else he picked it up at Haileybury.

But how extraordinary that Quentin Letts should think that Daily Mail readers are likely to respond to antiquated public school slang.


Then there’s Guido Fawkes. He blogs us with Lord (George) Foulkes’ successful attack on BBC presenter Carrie Gracie, when she admitted to a salary of £92K. But in Guido’s world no politician can ever be right, so he blogs the incident under the heading “Foulkes Doesn’t Like It Up Him”. This is from Dad’s Army, whose last new episode was broadcast in 1977. Foulkes showed no sign of being troubled, so the heading makes little sense.

What is it with rightwing culture and the 1970s?

What is Paul Staines?

Paul Staines – Guido – is not a “fascist”, as Nicky Campbell called him, but a rightwing anarchist libertarian. He is also barely articulate, and not very nice.

Another of the same kind, but all too articulate, is historian David Starkey. He was allowed a free run on the Gabby Logan show a couple-three weeks ago. The studio (Gabby was away) loved it – here was a real Oxford professor slagging off Gordon Brown! You could hear the thrill.
It didn’t occur to anyone to ask him a testing question – this was culture, right there in the studio.

The appalling Starkers only knows about one thing – Henry VIII.

Quite why a libertarian anarchist should go for the authoritarian Henry is difficult to work out. But that’s right-wing culture for you.

“The threat to democracy…”

No, not the expenses crisis, but people attaching themselves to it for their own purposes. First, Norman Tebbit, who on 12 May gave an exclusive to the Daily Mail in which he proposed not voting for any of the main parties in the European elections, so as to give them both a shock.

He wouldn’t say who you should vote for – but there are only two real options: the BNP, and the UK Independence Party. He can’t advocate UKIP without being thrown out of the Conservative Party, but everyone knows it’s what he means.

On the BNP, the Mail says that he didn’t advocate them, but it’s not put in direct quotes. The same on the Today programme on the morning of the 12th – Jim Naughtie quoted him as saying this, but you didn’t hear Tebbit say it in the interview.

Tebbit does say between quotes that the BNP is “socialist”, and is “Labour with racism”. This sort of madness is consistent with a twist to his mind that he’s always had – back in 1975 he called Michael Foot an advocate of “pure undiluted fascism”.

Tebbit’s move legitimates the far right in British politics. It’s a step towards fascism. We shan’t arrive there, because the far right isn’t (yet) strong enough. But fascism has always needed legitimation from “real” politicians. Tebbit was a minister of some kind from 1979 to 1987.

Oswald Mosley was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1929-1930.

Norman Tebbit was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1985-1987.


Second, airhead journalist Marina Hyde, advertising her new book on airhead celebs who get into politics and like Angelina Jolie go “wandering about Baghdad”, as she put it on the Gabby Logan show on Sunday morning (10 May).

Now that people “literally despise politicians” (is that something you can do not literally?), Marina says that Joanna Lumley gets it right over the Gurkhas, because she is “unsullied by the democratic process”.

Pardon? The democratic process isn’t the problem, it’s what people do within it, which can be sullying.

And Joanna Lumley, talking to Phil Woolas, haunting Westminster, and demanding to talk to Gordon Brown – she’s the one who is committed to the democratic process.

Come on Marina – get the air out of your head and stop saying stupid things about democracy.

John Humphrys: a great mind

On Monday 4 May’s Today, at 8:15 am, interviewing Harriet Harman, JH’s questions implied that Gordon Brown was responsible for the recession and the run on the banks. At 8.55, interviewing Gillian Tett of the FT, he accepts worldwide responsibility for the crisis. For Tett’s brilliant book Fool’s Gold shows how American bankers gave us sub-prime and consequent disaster.

This isn’t something you can be BBC-“balanced” about. Either Gordon Brown did it on his own – the view of everyone from our incompetent cartoonists to Times editorials – or the Americans did it. (Whisper: the second one is right.)

Talking to Harriet Harman, JH said that Brown “actually encouraged – and I use the word advisedly – the sort of crisis we are in with the banks”. Then by continual interruption, and that slightly sinister soft-voiced approach he’s got into latterly, he did his best to stop HH saying that the crisis was “caused internationally”, and was “globally interconnected”.

When Gillian Tett came on at 8.55 he let her say that “In reality the entire system went mad, and we have to fix the system”. Humbly, JH asks: “What’s the first thing we’ve got to do?”

Come on John, you can do better than this! (And I use those words advisedly.)

Duffers gets it

So Carol Ann Duffy is to be the new poet laureate. If there is indeed a future for the role –and there are arguments in its favour – then it’s high time we had a woman at the helm. That said, is Duffy an appropriate choice? She’s the obvious choice, popular (a relative term, perhaps), somewhat more of an intellectual than the smug and superior Wendy Cope, whose cosy and infuriatingly ‘accessible’ work is nevertheless limited and facile.

Why is Cope so highly considered? Beyond me. Sophie Hannah would have been a better bet. When Sophie ‘slags off men’ she does it with real wit and humour, unlike Cope’s dreadful seriousness and dull verses. Cope is so self-satisfied, doesn’t it just make you want to vent your spleen?

But for my money, the ideal candidate was (and is!) Pam Ayres. I’m being serious – she’s unpretentious, seriously funny, and appeals to a large constituency. She’s also genuinely quick-witted – as is attested by her live appearances on Just a Minute, with comedy giants such as Paul Merton and the late and dearly-beloved Clement Freud in the vicinity. I used to be sniffy about Ayres, partly because I felt annoyed that poetry had to be reduced to one-dimension, but in her field she’s a star and would make a great laureate. Either her, or someone like her – or you hit a different register altogether and go for someone serious and magisterial. Geoffrey Hill perhaps (he might just be interested, but he’s a man), or Denise Riley, whose wit and intelligence, and sheer philosophical depth, is breathtaking. She probably wouldn’t want the job though – or would find mischievous ways to undermine the brief.

So we end up with Duffy. I saw her read a few years back, with the late, great Robert Creeley. She read mainly from The World’s Wife, those oh-so-‘witty’ aphorisms about the ‘other halves’ of famous men. Thin stuff indeed, but the mixed-gender audience – in my recollection – far preferred her work to Creeley’s laid-back delivery and oratorical brilliance.

There is something dry and deliberate about her poems. You don’t quite believe in the people in the internal monologues, and you aren’t too interested when she speaks in her own voice. She’s not big enough. And the first thing you see on AbeBooks is the York Notes for A-level students reading The World’s Wife, now ten years old. This is poetry that has already been institutionalized.

She’s the logical choice, but it’s a missed opportunity. Ayres or Riley are the serious options, at either end of the spectrum. Oh, well, the public gets the poet it doesn’t deserve, I guess. C’est la vie! Down at the Café Coup de Poing we shall not be raising a cognac. Sorry, Carol Ann.

Dave Brown – the worst cartoonist in Britain

Dave Brown does big ugly drawings for the Independent. He is their lead cartoonist, and his work is awful. Worse than that, it is disgusting. Currently, he is obsessed by shit.

Last Thursday it was Obama, sinking up to his teeth in a river of shit, waving a toilet roll, and saying “ASK NOT HOW DEEPYOUR COUNTRY’S DOO-DOO IS FOR YOU, BUT … …. GLUG!” At first glance it looks like an attack on Obama (not a good idea at the moment), but you slowly realize it’s meant to be sympathetic towards his economic dilemmas.

He is shown misquoting JFK (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”.), but this is a pretty irrelevant attempt to put a gloss on the basic observation that Obama is “in the shit”. Since that isn’t any truer this week than it was on Inauguration Day, it hardly counts as a revelation. What is truly disturbing is the way every floating turd is drawn with loving care. And there are dozens of them.

On Friday 27th Brown was back again with the brown stuff – but this time it was virtual. The immense back end of a huge cat towers over Alastair Darling, who is saying “…AND TODAY I CAN ANNOUNCE THE CONSTRUCTION OF A £325 bn LITTER TRAY!” The cat’s arsehole is just above his head, with the word “RUMBLE!” next to it. The cat, labelled RBS, is about to pour shit all over the Chancellor.

Can somebody explain to Dave Brown that this is just not funny? There is nothing in it that makes you laugh. No perception, no new understanding of the crisis. We all know what RBS has achieved. If we must follow the ghastly metaphor, RBS, and that nice Sir Fred Goodwin, has already shat on the country, and everybody understands that. The “idea” of the cartoon is that this is a “fat cat”. That is a dead cliché, and D. Brown lacks the wit to bring it back to life.

Go back a few days, and we find Brown attacking Brown. It’s Monday 23 February, and the Oscars were awarded the night before. So here is Gordon accepting an award for “WORST PERFORMANCE IN AN ECONOMIC ROLE” (D. Brown can only write in caps). G. Brown is made to say – á la Kate Winslet – “LEHMAN BROTHERS…BERNARD…SIR JAMES…SIR ALLEN…OH..OH GOD! WHO’S THE OTHER ONE….” and then the dud punchline: “…OH, IT’S ME!”

Again, can someone explain to this deluded idiot that there is a difference between crooks like Bernard Madoff and “Sir” Allen Stanford, and G. Brown? And a difference between G. Brown’s attempts to save the situation, and the way the Bush administration let Lehman Brothers go under?

Cartoons work in an instant of understanding. Anybody following the crisis will instantly register the difference between crooks and incompetence, even if they can’t explain it all immediately. In that moment, the cartoon dies.

D. Brown draws G. Brown as a huge fat sweating woman in a purple dress, with a vast stomach and thighs. There is a reason for drawing G. Brown as fat.

A little while back D. Brown met G. Brown at some event. G. Brown said that he wasn’t really that fat. (He isn’t, either: it’s true, and D. Brown must know it, since he has seen the PM close up.) D. Brown came back with a self-serving little article in the Indy, in which he said that owing to this slight, he would now always draw the PM as fat.

What a sense of humour! What perception! What intelligence! What ego!
(There was a photo of the great artist at his board. He has that flat-faced inexpressive Kevin Pietersen look.)

His first effort after that was about G. Brown’s appearance before a Commons Select Committee. GB is shown leaving the room with his trousers burned away, and his buttocks huge and bare, with a hot-cross bun effect drawn on them. And why? Because he has been sitting in “the hot seat”! Top left, the ever-literate DB has a line about “buns”. This is American for the buttocks. It’s not a word that has ever taken in this country, any more than “butt” has.

Another little problem with DB is that his drawing is so heavy. It’s like a lead weight on the joke (if there is a joke). Truly great cartoonists, like Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, had a light touch and a line that’s worth looking at. Steve Bell is heavy, but quirky – and of course he’s funny, unlike poor struggling DB, who draws like those amateur artists who have to get in every boring detail.

Worst of all for the supposedly liberal Indy, DB is taking the Tory line on the economic crisis – that it’s somehow all the PM’s fault. Dave, if you can listen and not call us all fat – it’s not true, and people out here know it isn’t.

And do try to get rid of the awful clichés – “hot seat”, “fat cat” and “in the shit” aren’t going to make anybody laugh. Cartoons are supposed to give the person looking at them a new perception in an instant. You haven’t done this for a long time.

Salut!

Laura Barton meets Deneuve

Awful interview with the great actress Catherine Deneuve by the workhorse Laura Barton in the Guardian (16 January). A biography of Deneuve has alleged that her father, the actor Maurice Dorléac, was a collaborator with the Germans between 1940 and 1944. Barton quotes Deneuve as saying: “I’m going to sue the editor of the book”. Now, why would you want to do that? Editors knock manuscripts into shape. What Deneuve meant was that she was going to sue the publisher of the book – but the French for publisher is éditeur. Barton failed to spot this mistake in Deneuve’s usually good English.

What did Barton think Deneuve meant as she typed up her interview? Didn’t any alarm bells ring? How can you be so dim, Laura?

Equally ignorant was the Showbiz page of the Daily Express, who picked up the Barton effort from the first edition, and ran a story headed “Deneuve to Sue Book Editor”. It was the same ignorance of French. (The quotes were the same – unacknowledged).

Laura Barton is a hopeless interviewer anyway. Deneuve’s new film A Christmas Tale has the death of a child. So Barton– brilliant move! – asks Deneuve (who plays the mother) if it might have something to do with the death of her own sister, Françoise Dorléac, in a car crash in 1967, when she was aged 25. Deneuve is reduced to patiently explaining that the death of a fictional child is not the same as the death of a real person of 25. “She says it quickly, but not crossly”, Barton writes. So she knew very well it was a silly question – in which case, why ask it?

Later in the interview Deneuve mentions her decision not to play in a sequel to her most famous film, Belle de Jour. Barton quotes the actress:
“But I haven’t seen the film yet. Did you see it?” She says it warmly, as if asking after an old friend. “How is it?”
There is no answer, and we can guess why. Barton’s research didn’t run to watching the sequel to a famous film.

Barton is a lazy interviewer who doesn’t do her research. She falls back on dud questions. She doesn’t seem to know much about the allegations against Maurice Dorléac – but what would have been the value of her discussion of the pressures on people to collaborate?

Laura – you have access. Use it properly, and try to think a bit before you get in there with a great actress.