Column comment

The first in a most irregular series.

Russell Brown™ has posted a note about us on Public Address, therefore we exist. But what does he mean by calling us ‘solid’? He can talk.

Brown’s Wide Area News is worth getting the Listener for (plus you get Jane Clifton, whose new book Political Animals is very funny). He’s changed the nature of media columns: there’s as much if not more reportage than comment. It’s no longer good enough just to read the papers, watch the news and write a column about it. You have to tell the reader something they didn’t know.

Which brings us to veteran journalist Jim Mahoney, editor of Truth, who came out fighting with a robust response to Warwick Roger’s North and South media column about the venerable weekly: ‘His remaining readers will not be surprised by his excessive use of the first person singular… [His] career has been distinguished, if that is the right word, by cheap shots at fellow journalists.’ And there’s more, in an open letter to the magazine’s editor combative form on Michael Moore, the director of what Mark Steyn, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Hitchens, calls crockumentaries:

‘I was invited by Michael Moore to be his interviewer at the Telluride Film Festival for his awful, baggy, dishonest, boring movie, Bowling for Columbine. In that film, clips about the Kosovo war from Serbian television are used as objective. Moore implies that the bombing of Kosovo might have inspired the murderers in Columbine. You don’t know where to start with someone as mentally lazy as this. This was on the anniversary of September 11 terrorist attacks, and he said, “Well, if it’s true that bin Laden did this thing in New York...” It was early in the morning; just a second, I thought. “Say that again? If they did this?” He said, “Well, if they did this.” And he opposed the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan—a reactionary, conservative position couched in radical anti-imperialist language…

‘He says he considers the Iraqi resistance—the beheaders and kidnappers and rapists, the people who throw petrol and explosives into the mosques of rival Muslims, among other things—the equivalents of the Minutemen of the American Revolution. This is the statement of a flat-out Brownshirt. It has to be described as such. And all the people who thought that was a great movie to rock the vote, they should be fucking ashamed. There is no room for compromising on a thing like this. He’s a lying, fascist, thug.’

Finally, Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic, recommended Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, so I bought it. It has lots to say about why men (it’s almost always men) obsessively collect recordings, and how we all listen to music differently now that it’s not a special occasion each time. A couple of centuries ago you had to be a wealthy aristocrat and employ Haydn and an orchestra if you wanted to hear music whenever you wanted. Even public concerts are relatively new. Now, he says, thanks to CDs or your iPod you can ‘hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon and the Easter Oratorio on Chanukah. [You can do the] morning crossword to the “One O’Clock Jump” and make love right though the St Matthew Passion.’

Now that’s just showing off. Because I am the sort of person Ross describes, I could quickly ascertain that ‘One O’Clock Jump’ (Count Basie, Decca, 1937) lasts for three minutes and one second, and that the St Matthew Passion (John Eliot Gardiner, DGG, 1989) lasts for two hours and 38 minutes. The crossword in three minutes and a shag for two and a half hours? Yeah right. Even in New York.