Mark's glam

off cut from

And likewise, although we might like to emphasise the collectivity and cooperative element to blogging, what with being on the left and all, it was also — let’s be honest — a competitive space too. The blogging world was fuelled in part by competitive drives, by ego. And Mark was competitive, he wanted to excel, to flex his gifts — to come up with a better take than anyone else on whatever it was he was moved to write about. Mark’s ideas were very important, but he was also a pure writer in a way that an athlete is a pure athlete — in love with style, with the pacing and drama of a piece of prose. 

That side of him — the Nietzschean aristocratic impulse and style — is what fed into his particular glam aesthetic, and which he had to go through great contortions to reconcile with anonymous collectivity Kommunistic swarm-logic, because glam and socialism are irreconcilable — one is the opposite of the other. (But that’s a side-argument, and possibly an interminable one.) 

I learned recently that one of Mark's planned future projects  was a book about glam. As with Retromania coming out a few years before Ghosts, I pipped him to the post and came up with a reading of it that would have jarred with his own i think, he would have disliked the empiricism and wide-trawling approach of Shock and Awe.

His ideas about glam were based on a very select group of examples, as opposed to the historical reality of it (he would probably have said he was precisely interested in the antihistorical unreality of it - its hyperstitional potential rather its messy actuality. That select group would be Roxy Music... second-wave figures Japan, Grace Jones, Siouxsie, Steve Strange... and then bizarrely, a modern inheritor (which i cannot see) Roisin Murphy .. fellow travelers like Helmut Newton

I don't think he was even that keen on Bowie... I suspect he would have had little time for Bolan, or Sparks, or Cockney Rebel, or New York Dolls, or Alice Cooper ....  all the bubblegum stuff like Glitter, Sweet, similarly... And Slade would have been anathema 

This is a good example of Mark's approach - the blog essay Ripley's Glam

Very interesting reading -  the comparison between Tom Ripley and Bryan Ferry seems convincing, and redounds to Ferry's discredit (and underlines how reactionary a figure the actual real-world Ferry became - as opposed to the Ferry of his music-image, although that quickly became conservative too I think)

cf Eno, the figure who renounced glam very quickly, started dressing down,  and was a strong defender of Corbynism and long-term ecological thinking

Snippets from Mark's piece


"He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.

We can learn a great deal about the Glam impulse from these lines from The Talented Mr Ripley.....

Ripley's trajectory is uncannily in sync with that of Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of The Talented Mr Ripley. The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly. The roots still show, and the painful drama of becoming something you are not still carries an existential charge. Stranded and the subsequent albums, meanwhile, are the equivalent of the later novels; here, success is assumed, and the threats to the tasteful but banal idyll come from ennui, a certain unease with contentment, and – most ominous of all – the danger of the past returning. The vapid bucolia of Roxy’s Avalon – recorded when Ferry was himself married to an heiress and living on a country estate  would be the perfect soundtrack to Ripley puttering around in his Harpers and Queens dream home, Belle Ombre, with his wife, Heloise.

The first step to Ripley’s becoming a Something turns out to be his vampirising of the identity of Dickie Greenleaf....

 By taking the place of Dickie, Ripley can escape the pain, anxiety and awkwardness of being himself, a self. To become an Object = to be relieved of the pressures of subjectivity, untroubled by any interiority - isn't this one of central fantasies of Glam?

.... The pivotal moment of the novel comes when Ripley is no longer capable of sustaining his fantasy identification with Dickie. When Tom looks into Dickie's eyes and sees not the windows of a soul with which he can identify but the dead, glassy surface of an inert and idiotic dummy, he falls (back) into a deep existential nausea and vertigo, experiencing a moment of profound cosmic loathing and miserable dislocation....

Shulamith Firestone - “Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts that they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way – does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props – or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal”