"Twenty years ago Greenberg was listening to painters; now he's talking to them. The result is a formula for what painting should look liked"

- Carl Andre on Clement Greenberg

 Always a little amazed when people seem to suggest that Jim Morrison was unaware of his own ridiculousness. I think he reveled in it, plunged into it - pushed right through it.

This quote - "I see myself as an intelligent, sensitive human, with the soul of a clown which forces me to blow it at the most important moments" - suggests self-knowledge. What Lester Bangs pegged -  not without appreciation, or even admiration - as "Bozo Dionysus". 

All performance is an absurd exhibition. 

What a grotesque, what an unseemly thing to do - go onstage and mime out emotions, desire, sexuality, for strangers's eyes! 

(It's why historically actors and entertainers been linked in the puritan imagination with prostitutes). 

Nick Cave (early on very Jim-indebted) wrote a great song about this in the Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper" 

There's a cool quote from Iggy Pop (Jim's Second Coming) about the stage that I've never been able to source - "who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?"

"Who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?"

- Iggy Pop

(allegedly)

 "What is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but this present time" - Georges Bataille.

 "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music, they use your music to listen to their equipment."

 - Alan Parsons

 

 

originally published in The Daily Mirror on 23 October 1975 and presumably the following week also

I do love this genre of social observation / commentary that is thought through but not necessarily based in research or any kind of scholarly proof. I would love to get hold of old issues of New Society for instance (well, the contents of that were probably pretty rigorous, given the number of academics who wrote for it, but it's not written up as articles in a scholarly publication - more in the style of a newspaper column). I particularly like observations and predictions that have been overtaken by time. 

But this one by Waterhouse seems pretty on the money - seems to point to what you might call the GLC / City Limits class, which then actually had a belated if unsuccessful shot at power with Corbyn. Perhaps what hobbled it was the very split that caused Time Out and City Limits to break into two, with Time Out going the path of yuppie / gentrification / the reaffirmation of the old class lines. Although that said, even that Time Out constituency votes Labour I'm sure - London now is a Labour city-state. Labour in the metropolitan form is a tribal identification based on progressive values and even aesthetics, as opposed to an identity based around the workplace, being in a union etc.

As suggested by Stylo in comments, another - more hostile - take on the Polyocracy came from Malcolm Bradbury with his novel - later TV series - The History Man. 

 “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." 

- Andrei Tarkovsky,