All About My Dandy – more background

a programme note for ‘I Am Dandy’ (1999)

Back in the days when gentlemen’s style magazines were attempting a balance between chesty starlets and feature articles of substance, rather than the current formula designed solely to dance in your well-lagered lap, the pioneering and much missed Editor of GQ, the late Michael VerMeulen, invited me to fly to Las Vegas in order to nail the alien thing. Las Vegas is as close as you can fly to Area 51, also known as Dreamland, a swathe of land attached to the gigantic acreages of Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.

VerMeulen was happy to pay fees and air fares for a feature that we both knew would signally fail to deliver anything of substance if substance was to comprise the uncovering of an unwholesome relationship between the American government and extra-terrestrial creatures able to bend gravity to their passionless will. The Editor, a man of strong views often delivered across crowded rooms in a stentorian manner, regarded the whole alien thing as bullshit. He had, however, a taste for material that attempted to understand what lay behind beliefs that were impetuously adopted yet widely distributed. My brief was to cover a lot of ground, some of which lay between Nellis and Roswell, New Mexico, much of which would focus on tales and fragments that could be found flying at ever increasing speed through the cloud chambers of the contemporary mythosphere.

My own fascination with impetuous belief derives in part from an eager and immersive experience of the Sixties. To wind back that far is to make a shortish story far too long – it will be sufficient to submit that I did everything you were supposed to do in those years of letgo and associated with some hardened practitioners of the art of Living in Vagueness. The mastery of the vague, which loosened so many from the austere and straitened materialism of the Fifties, was to become, in the ensuing decades, the invaluable philosophical instrument of those for whom the confusion of the outer with the inner would constitute a strategy for survival.

I must try to be precise about what I mean by vagueness. So totally uncool did the material world become in the course of the 60s that systems of analysis originating from it were summarily dismissed from usage. The act of evaluation was similarly curtailed – it was okay to love or hate things but not, like, as an ego. Things were good because they emanated their goodness – all you needed to do was submit to these essences in order to appreciate them. This was not the reluctant strategy of the Self under fire, it was a voluntary liquidation in the interests of attunement to a universe of essence and vibration. At the street level it meant that a lot of the people you knew consistently stopped short of saying what they thought or felt in favour of a fulsome, celebratory issuance of vapour. Psychology still existed but it was recomposed in terms of value-free interiority – the further you travelled inside, the closer you came to formless essence. The psyche was certainly not a place of intensification or contradiction.

I went along with a fair amount of bollocks back then but the business of valorising vagueness unsettled me. It seemed to involve little more than the worship of Nothing and, as such, had advanced no further than the faiths and beliefs of the straights and normals who had constructed the horrid world that we wished to supplant.

The idea that certain monolithic and enduring spiritual institutions are based on Nothing has never ceased to astound me. The idea that a subscription to Nothing might get you through the night hardly seems fair. The decisiveness and efficiency with which many people lead lives based on a vague belief that there is some overall purpose to their activities leads me to conclude, sourly and enviously, that there must be something in all this Nothing. Clearly it would be comforting to believe in some of this bullshit but really, life’s too short.

Over the last thirty years I have been involved in a personal yoga of disentanglement featuring the assumption of a variety of difficult and ineptly balanced positions. For several years, once the Sixties wound down into 1973 or thereabouts, I was simply relieved not to have to affect a childlike openness to experience in the same breath as a demonstration of worldweary, omniscient cool. This was a double bind well worth consigning to oblivion. It was not until the late Eighties that I began to realise that my encounters with the Vague, always a source of irritation, were on the increase again and were, this time around, accompanied by the feeling that Vague had gone mainstream. It is tempting but possibly romantic to speculate that the psychic counterpoint to the craven, Thatcherite engorgement of the wallet was an anxious yearning for emptiness.

The entangled dance between these extremes is nowhere more eloquently performed than on the Strip in Las Vegas. Locked in a slow, humid conga, thousands of tourists shuffle past the spectacular hotel and casino facades whose incongruous pastiches induce a love of flying – far, far away from the roulette wheel to places of adventure, grandeur and timeless wisdom. The Luxor Hotel is strong on the latter commodity – a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Cheops fronted by a painted Sphinx as long as a 707, it offers ensuite apartments terraced all the way up to the pyramidal apex and, at no extra cost, the implied possibility of communing with the cat and dog gods who inspired men to make mummies and move masonry.

At this intersection of the ancient astral and the American attraction I took a buffet lunch with a man who lived in a trailer town right next to Area 51. Glenn Campbell was author of The Groom Lake Desert Rat, an electronic newsletter from the front line of contemporary mass hallucination. His wry, sceptical field reports had captivated me for months. Campbell, aka PsychoSpy, wrote regularly about the exotic characters who either lived in or made pilgrimages through Rachel, Nevada (pop 103). Despite the amused distance he kept from the subjects of his reports, Campbell was patently enthralled by some of the detailed accounts that he had extracted from those privileged to reverse engineer anti-gravity devices alongside helpful aliens in heavily secured hangars.

When I visited Rachel myself, I met Sharon, the young woman employed by Campbell as his assistant at the Area 51 Research Centre – an archive and sales outlet housed in a weather-beaten trailer. As I poked around she let me in on a truth about the whole alien thing. The grey tourists with toddlers’ bodies, it transpired, were actually the fallen troops of Satan, abetted by members of the New Age movement. They had been despatched to divert us from the imminent Rapture, wherein the righteous would ascend to Heaven for ‘a seven year party’ while those bearing the Mark of the Beast would stay behind, standing on their heads in a sea of excrement. Or something like that. I may be conflating two accounts here, one of them last heard some considerable time ago, in the shadows at the back of the bike sheds.

To move from Glen Campbell’s futurism to his assistant’s medievalism in the space of a car ride from Las Vegas to Rachel was to embrace the unfussy inclusiveness of contemporary hysterical belief. The historical sequencing of folklore seems to have collapsed, leaving a pick’n’mix that subverts the notion that the things people believe in are invariably determined by certain specifics of their time. At the end of the 19th century flying objects were often identified as extraterrestrial blimps or gas balloons. Our 20th century sightings of flying saucers are informed by our passage into the age of jets and rockets. This sort of analysis is useful but as a model it does not stretch to an explanation of our concurrent sightings of angels, spirits, fairies and Satanic ritual abusers.

As Elaine Showalter points out in ‘Hystories’, her account of contemporary hysterical epidemics, the clinically efficient late 19th century diagnosis of hysteria, then restricted almost entirely to women, has little value a century later, when modern media have the capacity to disseminate anxiety about a wide range of topics on a global scale. The pervasiveness of this ‘anxietised news’ contributes to the formation of a new style of hysteria characterised by what could be called a broad-minded credulity afflicting men and women alike and drawing on centuries of superstition as well as a predictable menu of fashionable hot topics.

To drive, as I did, from Nevada to New Mexico and back again was to snorkel through some fairly turbid undercurrents. In a motel in Arizona I took a room next to the one used by the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, when he was planning his destruction of the Federal Building, a deed that would result in the deaths of 168 people. The motel manager assured me that McVeigh was ‘A very nice young man, very nice. Very polite.’ After his arrest, McVeigh claimed that he was compelled to do what he did because the US Army had implanted a mind control microchip in his buttock.

Somehow the idea that McVeigh was very nice seemed to be a precondition for such an invasive procedure. If he had been a very nasty young man then the attentions of a malign implanter would have been superfluous. Obviously, a very nice young man would not dream of doing what he did unless he had been tampered with. This predilection for the remote control of innocent citizens is something the US Army shares with extra-terrestrials, whose favourite orifice for such lodgements, according to the literature, is the nose. All this is to place the cart before the horse, however, for we are first obliged to ask who or what it was that implanted the extraterrestrials in the minds of very nice people. And while we’re about it, we should wonder about the implantation of fairies and angels, spirits and demons, the madness of cows and the vague feeling that there is a pattern behind, like, everything.

In her essay ‘On Circles’, presented elsewhere in this programme, Carole Silver persuasively demonstrates the persistence of certain structures beneath some of the implantations. She compares the activities around fairy rings to 20th century alien abduction scenarios then describes the manner in which hundreds of years of folklore can come full circle, as it were, when crop rings and alien visitations are fused into a single narrative. Originality is under attack here – despite the obligation to update the trappings of these tales with references to contemporary technology, it seems we can only dream or imagine according to templates that are as old as the hills.

These supernatural events are not, of course, seen as imaginary. Things are being done to us. In this sense there is a continuum running from a delight in faerie to a conviction that central government is out to get us and will use all the covert devices necessary to bend us to its will, to disarm us, if you like. Politics, presumably, begins at the point when the things that are being done to us are attributed to agencies in the real world. The Oklahoma City bombing, as a response to things being done to a very nice young man, is, in these terms, pre-political. This notion, however, raises so many questions that I’ll just move along now.

If we could resist suggestion none of this would be going on. Suggestibility is the key and suggestibility is the ultimate concern of ‘I Am Dandy’. Before a suggestion can take hold, attention must be monopolised. Everyone knows how to do this. It’s what you do when you want people to pay attention to you. No conversation would work without it. Our minds would wander, registering an attention deficit.

Attention seekers may monopolise against our will, when we will feel brainwashed, bullied or hectored. They may install a monopoly without our knowing, in which case we might, if we found out, claim to have been subliminally influenced. There is a special case, though, in which we actually consent to the reduction of our resistance to the monopoly. This might be called hypnosis.

The example of the pioneering and innovative hypnotist Milton H. Erickson forces a reassessment of hypnotism in general. Rather than commandeering attention, Erickson appears to slip in through the back door and, before his subject knows it, behave as if he were the lodger. Erickson talks constantly to the subject, in a low-key manner, eschewing explicit instructions in favour of rambling, chatty small talk. Present in these ramblings are unobtrusive suggestions, often disguised as convivial invitations to sit back and take it easy. Single words associated with pleasure and relaxation are worked quite repetitively into sentences – again, not as instructions but colloquial embellishments. Using what at least sounds like rather monotonous and unremarkable conversation, Erickson delivers his subjects into deep trance.

If Erickson can do it, why can’t we? Sounds easy enough. Notwithstanding the tremendous craft and subtlety deployed by Erickson, it may be that, as keen amateurs, we all have some of his skill and much of the suggestibility of his subjects. It may be that we are endowed with the capacity to facilitate trance in others and ourselves. The same sort of thing has been said of telepathy, of course, and the evidence for such a latency is practically nonexistent. But if trance is seen as emerging from the close control of attention, wherein the subject becomes indifferent to all but a narrow range of input then our everyday lives suddenly seem rather entrancing.

To be entranced readily is to be available, it may be a precondition of hysteria. All the wild scares, all the mad enthusiasms – and their equally energetic disavowals – put down their roots in such easy capture. ‘I Am Dandy’ seeks to examine a continuum that runs from everyday persuasion and cajolement to unconcealed hypnosis. It suggests that the seeds of mass hysteria and moral panics are to be found in the most commonplace transactions. Featuring scenes in which members of a group use a range of overt and covert hypnotic techniques to enforce their will, the show alludes not only to ordinary bullying but to some of the rather more controversial phenomena that constitute the hysterical landscape. The broad-minded credulity of its characters facilitates their immersion in the warps of recovered memory and the transports of abduction, possession and delusion. The idea that in trance there is truth offers them something that is simultaneously fragile, focused and nourishingly vague.

1999

Dandyism – some background

‘Dandyism’, for these purposes, is the quality of being ‘Dandy’ rather than being ‘a Dandy’. In 1999 I wrote and directed a play called ‘I Am Dandy’. The title referred to a state of feeling ‘just fine’. The play took three years to write, ninety per cent of which involved making notes. I love the play. In 1994 I got a job. For the previous thirty years I had been either a free-lance or the co-director of my own theatre company. These do not count as jobs because the work was not alienating. The job I got was as a Senior Lecturer at a provincial university. Of the many shocks I experienced in my first employment, the most profound involved the discovery that there were people ‘above’ me who could tell me what to do. I hadn’t experienced this to any significant degree since leaving my family home at the age of 18. I was now an employee with a number of employers. I was expected to want only the best for the institution that employed me.

Since I didn’t really care very much for the institution, a degree of pretence was called for. Many readers will find these observations rather commonplace. I can only further observe that, largely as a consequence of a twenty year spell of writing and, initially, performing with Lumiere & Son Theatre Company, I had become sequestered from the experience of workaday subjugation.

Anyway, for five years I went into shock and didn’t write a thing. One day an affable colleague in charge of ‘research’ asked me how my research was going. I had no idea what he was talking about. I saw myself as an ex-theatre writer and, most recently, journalist. I didn’t do research, that was something my father, a biochemist, did. I told my colleague this, I insisted I was a journalist. His face fell. You have to do research at universities or else your department doesn’t get enough money the following year. As a result, a great deal of research material of no great use or importance is generated. Rather like the Dutch government, which used to buy artists’ work off them to give them a living then put it in storage, universities maintain libraries in which a lot of nicely bound research outcomes sit, unbothered by human contact.

I told my colleague that I had just done a programme for BBC Radio 4, in which I had interviewed a number of writers and commentators about their view of the future. ‘That’s national exposure!’ he cried. ‘Is there a book in it?’ What do you mean? ‘You could publish the interviews in a book, couldn’t you?’ Not one that people would wish to read, I thought. Yes, I said.

So began the promotion of a piece of radio journalism into a fund-worthy venture that eventually, thanks to the system-savvy persistence of my colleague, generated a sum of money large enough to mount a play. I had tagged the notion of writing a play onto my application, recognising that I had just been offered a way back into doing what I do best. The book fell by the wayside, politely declined by publishers who knew that few would wish to read it.

Despite my feeling that employment was synonymous with the end of art, I had been making notes for a show that I imagined I would put on one day, whenever circumstance delivered me from the day job. I wanted to present a succession of non-narrative scenes that examined aspects of contemporary hysteria. Blessed with a profound atheism for as long as I can remember, I found myself increasingly fascinated, as the Millennium approached, by the persistence of irrational beliefs in an age that boasted of its technologised victory over nature and superstition. I was bored with reading about UFO abductees and accounts of the interesting past lives of the currently dull, however, and more concerned with the extent to which everyday transactions were suffused with a vagueness that was justified as a form of spirituality.

In the programme for the show, which opened at the Festival of British Visual Theatre on the South Bank in October 1999, I laid out some of the ideas that I wanted the play to articulate.

I Am Dandy – the First Section

The show was written in separate sections. At the time of writing I had no firm sense of the proper order of the sections, I found this out through rehearsal. The section below, however, was intended to open the show.
Writing in this modular way helped me to avoid narrative, which I consider inappropriate for theatre. I don’t mind it in films but that’s another story.
Theatre scripts shouldn’t be a great read, they should be an okay read. Otherwise why go to the theatre?
This script only describes some of the action. Between each section the actors had to get from place to place. These movements were evolved in rehearsal. If you wrote them into a script it would be tedious to read.
The characters are called A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H in the script. This was because initially I wanted to eliminate writing for gender. The company comprised four women and four men and roles were allotted in rehearsal. From the point at which roles were taken up the actors gendered their roles according to their gender. Similar attitudes pertained to the notion of character. In rehearsal it sometimes became convenient to give, say, a couple of B’s lines to G. If you write strong, psychologically rounded characters you can’t do this. The actors were all very skilled and intelligent. They overcame the writer’s reticence in matters of character and gradually imposed characters on their roles. This always happens. Character is over-rated. Structure is what counts.
In the play the characters have proper names, like Mark and Cherry. Several of them have more than one name. This is because they aren’t necessarily the same person all the time. Sometimes they are the same person but other characters ignore this and give them different names.


Lost in Thought
The cast of eight – four women and four men – is discovered seated on chairs arranged in a row upstage. A, B, G and H are men. C, D, E and F are women.
The women wear elegant dark dresses and high heeled shoes, the men wear smart dark suits and white shirts with ties. All are well groomed.
They look personable, pleasant and keen. They are in neutral mode – not frozen or very still, just not doing anything yet.
This opening tableau is held for quite a long time. After a while one of the performers, A, puts his hand up to his face, assuming, in a low key way, a thoughtful pose. The others notice this and study him with interest. One of the performers asks him a question.
B Mark? [A appears not to hear] Mark? What are you doing?
[Pause. Still no response] What are you doing?
A looks up.
A I was lost in thought.
B What do you think about?
A I think about the past.
A longish pause as the performers consider this intelligence.
C Really? [A appears not to hear.] Mark? [A looks up.] Do you really?
A What?
C Do you really do that?
A I’m sorry?
C What you just said – was it true?
A Did I say something?
Pause
The performer C [Pauline] assumes a thoughtful pose. The others notice this.
B [To E] Pauline is lost in thought.
E appears not to hear. B assumes a thoughtful pose.
D What is there in the past, Mark? Can you remember?
F His name isn’t Mark.
D assumes a thoughtful pose. By this time A, B, C, D and E are all lost in thought.
Pause
G [With sudden excitement] It would be marvellous if… [G’s voice trails off and he becomes lost in thought. After a while he has another idea] Wouldn’t it be terrific if the…if the…
[His voice trails off again and he becomes lost in thought]
G’s reverie is interrupted by H
H If the…?
G turns his attention to H
G Wouldn’t it be terrific if people had more in common!
G becomes lost in thought again
H Tom! That would be marvellous! [H becomes lost in thought for a moment then, with sudden excitement, has another idea] If people had more in common… [H becomes lost in thought for a short moment then completes his statement excitedly] If people had more in common then a lot of terrible things would never come to a head!
G snaps out of his reverie excitedly, as do all the others who are lost in thought i.e. A, B, C, D and E.
In loose unison the performers rise from their seats, moving into an enthusiastic, animated cluster. They laugh gaily, shake hands, kiss and bear hug each other – lifting one another off the ground and whirling round, greeting each other like long lost friends. G and H are congratulated heartily for their ideas.

the first section ends

§§§§§

Terry Gilliam

This piece was first published in Icon magazine in 1998

“I wanted to keep him away from the film,” says Terry Gilliam, film-maker, of Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist. “His chaotic behaviour would not work there.” This is curious. It’s true that Thompson, a known wildman, has acquired an impressive reputation for his mastery of drugs, booze and high-powered weaponry, but one might imagine that 57 year old ‘Monty Python’ founder member Terry Gilliam could match him shot for shot. The director of such anarchic and visually dense flights of fantasy as ‘Brazil’, ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ and ‘Twelve Monkeys’, Gilliam has come to be seen as a force of misrule both on and off the screen. Surely he would embrace Hunter Thompson’s flamboyant eccentricity with open arms.

The truth of the matter is that Gilliam is a man for whom a fine balance is all. In his films, in the making of his films and in the conduct of his life Gilliam constructs a relationship between order and disorder that often unnerves those around him. Sometimes he thrives in the chaos that he generates, sometimes his sallies into wildness have disastrous results that threaten to destroy his career.

The contradictions abound. Gilliam started his professional life in cartoon animation, a medium that demands a slow, painstaking precision quite at odds with the themes of abandonment that his work celebrates. His attitude to Hunter Thompson, whom one might imagine to be a soul mate, suggests that, for Gilliam, wildness is all very well as long as it’s kept firmly in its place.

The film that its director wished to protect is, of course, Gilliam’s version of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, starring Johnny Depp and currently scheduled for a Spring release. The movie is based on Thompson’s legendary account, first published in ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine in 1971, of the hallucinated journey of Thompson alter ego Raoul Duke and his attorney, Oscar Acosta, to Las Vegas in order to cover the Mint 400 off-road race. ‘Fear and Loathing’, subtitled ‘A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream’, was published as a book in 1972 and won the intense admiration of multitudes of those who Just Say Yes for its integration of Odyssean quest themes with the most scabrously lurid, no-holds-barred, no-substance-too-hair-raising chronicle of excess that did for psycho-tropic drugs what the Marquis de Sade did for animals and hand-maidens in ‘100 Days of Sodom’.

Despite Terry Gilliam’s circumspect approach to the erratic author of ‘Fear and Loathing’, the director’s latest project is, in terms of spirit, squarely aligned with the body of work he has produced over the last thirty years. The quality that links spirit to visual content is, in Gilliam’s case, effervescence. The frames of his movies are thick with detail, layered plane upon plane and receding into architectures that are both labyrinthine and cavernous. Costumes are elaborate and objects are exotic – qualities that can readily be applied to the characters that inhabit Gilliam’s narratives. The films typically foreground men distinguished by their unruly energies and vaulting imaginations. Although they are often pitted, like Sam Lowry in ‘Brazil’, against byzantine bureaucracies or, like Parry in ‘The Fisher King’, against oppressive convention, there is invariably a suggestion that those with a soaring spirit deserve to fly even though they are as likely to find degradation as redemption.

Gilliam first came to prominence with the cheerfully violent animated links that he produced for British TV’s ground-breaking comedy series ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’. In the early seventies the show was phenomenally successful, its inspired daftness and absurdist anti-authoritarianism genuinely revolutionising the state of the nation’s humour. The word ‘Pythonesque’ was understood right across the Isles and Tuesday nights (or was it Wednesday?) became a stay-at-home fixture of crucial importance. Gilliam was the only American in the six-man team yet his humour was perfectly attuned to the British sense of the odd. The trademark Python peculiarity was not merely a variety of silliness, though. It had a dark and even troubling side that would surface in a less whimsical form in much of Gilliam’s later film work.

Invited to talk about his earliest years, Gilliam kicks off with gusto, holding forth so energetically that, several hours later, his voice will eventually grow hoarse and compel him to stop. “Yes, my father was a carpenter…” He pauses, grinning impishly. “And my mother was a Virgin!” He bellows with laughter, “I’m the Messiah!”

Born in 1940 in Minneapolis, Gilliam locked into his vocation at an early age. “As a kid, animation was the thing I loved,” he recalls. “I don’t know if ‘Snow White’ was the first movie I saw but it certainly feels like it. I was a huge Disney fan and I had all these books on ‘How to Draw Cartoons’, full of Betty Boop and all of those figures.”

Like the Surrealist painters, animators work in an imaginative world in which all things have the potential to turn into other things. Seen in these terms, animation has an affinity with chaos that belies its rigid technical nature. When this fascination with the fluidity of appearances is applied to a project like ‘Fear and Loathing’ it becomes clear that Hunter Thompson’s narcotised and shape-shifting vision of America will be well served.

“My mother,” Gilliam continues, “has early drawings of mine where I was taking Hoovers and common household appliances and turning them into Martians.” Why does he think he did this? “Why? Because I’m a mutant. It’s called mutation. I’m a freak!”

The freak also had a strong attachment to all things medieval. Much later on this obsession would inform the narratives of some of his films and also provide him with sublime models of conduct befitting a man who had come to see his life as a quest for the integration of the unfettered imagination with the unforgiving world.

When he was thirteen Gilliam’s family moved to suburban L.A. and Terry found further novel uses for household objects. “I’d take a five gallon ice cream carton, cut a slit and make a knight’s helmet out of it, using eucalyptus branches as a sword.” The boy wasn’t just transposing the Wild West to Arthurian Albion, however. His interest, initially kindled by movies like ‘Ivanhoe’ and an avid reading of knightly epics, also ran to matters of specific period detail. “I loved heraldry – right from the start I was designing my own shields. I loved chevrons! Dragons, mythic beasts – they just appealed to me from a very early age. It works on different levels – viscerally, archetypically and as a design focus.”

By his late teens Gilliam was starting to go public with his obsessions. “My dad used to bring home these four by eight boxes that had held these panels he’d installed in office buildings. When you spread them out you had eight by eight of corrugated cardboard!” Such bounty could not be left unprocessed. With minutes to go before the doors would open for the Senior Prom, a manically active Gilliam would be putting the final touches to the towering medieval castle facades that fronted the stage. “No one had access to cardboard that size! I made castles for years – you can get inside them and be safe from all of the dangers of the world.”

Almost as an afterthought Gilliam mentions another aspect of his late teen years. “I was going to be a missionary. I went through college on a Presbyterian fellowship. I was a right little zealot.” The need to reconcile the pull between freakish self-expression and zealous self-discipline seems admirably served by medieval legend, which delivers equal doses of derring-do and adherence to the purest principles.

Years later Gilliam’s skills in Higher Cardboard would resurface in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’. “The National Trust, who owned all the castles we’d booked, threw us out with two weeks to go,” he says ruefully. “They said that comedians would not respect the dignity and fabric of the buildings. So half the castles you see are just cut-outs stuck up on hills. It’s like life is just one big circle that keeps going round and round.”

The youthful preoccupation with the Middle Ages never went away. In addition to ‘Holy Grail’ (1974) it can be seen at its most visually explicit in the early movies – floridly in ‘Jabberwocky’ (1977), intermittently in ‘Time Bandits’ (1980), updated to a 15th/16th century hybrid in ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) and glimpsed in ‘The Fisher King’ (1991).

But what on earth can an unrepentant medievalist bring to the deranged and wanton psychopharmacological fever dream that is ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’? Gilliam’s answer establishes that his key obsessions are very much alive in this context. “It’s about two crusading people whom the world has let down in some way. The spirit of the book is about excess. Right at the start there’s a Dr Johnson quote ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’ This is all about the loss and failure of the Sixties and here we have two characters who go to excess in order to get to the heart of the American dream.”

It is not only Hunter Thompson’s fictional characters who are disillusioned by the sting in the tail of the Sixties. Gilliam himself was so upset by the turnabout in the national mood that he left America for England and has lived there ever since. Nicola Pecarini, Director of Photography on ‘Fear and Loathing’, has a keen appreciation of the film’s meaning for its director. “I discovered how important the movie is for America and especially how important it is for Terry,” he says. “It’s all about why he decided to leave: the start of the Vietnam war and the crushing of ideals – the same ideals that Hunter has.”

Medieval legend, with its epic tales of wounding and renewal, is clearly a more reliable source of ideals. Paradoxically, when the visual references to the period are at their most sparse, Gilliam’s real use for the medieval becomes clearer. In ‘The Fisher King’, two emotionally damaged men (played by Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges) in present day New York act out elements of a medieval fertility legend and regain their lost wholeness. The Robin Williams character sees himself enwrapped in the medieval story of the Fisher King who, as a boy, had a vision of the Holy Grail bathed in fire, only to wound himself badly when he reached out to take it. The King does not recover until a Fool gives him a cup of water. His wound is healed and he sees the Grail again.

Terry Gilliam implicates himself deeply in this mystical narrative of the healing quest. Within the movie itself, he admits to a very close involvement with both his protagonists – “I’m an actor-director, I identify with the characters to the point that I’m an actor: I am that character, so I see the film through their eyes. I got confused at certain points because I was both Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges.”

‘The Fisher King’ was made after the disastrous ‘Baron Munchausen’, a project that went dramatically over budget and well over length, was almost taken over by the studio and only returned on condition it be cut to two hours. The movie is a prime example of Gilliam-driven chaos untempered by control wherein the director got so caught up in constructing elaborate set pieces that the whole operation went into orbit. Gilliam reluctantly complied with the studio’s strictures but Columbia Pictures punished him by making only 117 prints for the entire American release. For a while it looked as the director would never work again. Gilliam’s confidence was shot. “So ‘Fisher King’ was a healing thing,” the director confesses. “The male characters are broken people, they’ve got to come back. That was a movie definitely done after a battering.” The medieval, for Gilliam, has become not only a source of imagery and inspirational deeds but a place in which to lick wounds and touch base.

Over the years nearly twenty attempts have been made to adapt ‘Fear and Loathing’ for the screen. Adaptations have been circulating since the 70s and Jack Nicholson was among the many who took options and hired writers to wrestle with the novel’s intractable shape and style. In 1980 Art Linson directed a Bill Murray vehicle called ‘Where the Buffalo Roam’, employing Hunter Thompson as ‘executive consultant’ and depicting the latter’s unique approach to self-medication. It didn’t do well.

British film-maker Alex Cox had the penultimate crack at the book. Viewed as a maverick for his eschewal of mainstream Hollywood values and tending to view himself somewhat as an auteur, it seems that Cox, according to parties closely involved with the project, had a vision for the film that was very much at odds with the essence of Hunter Thompson’s original. Adamant that he could successfully impose this view, Cox dug his heels in to such an extent that he alienated some of the key players.

The script went the rounds again, at one point turning up on the desk of Terry Gilliam’s agent. Gilliam had admired the book for years and, despite the fact that he rarely works with screenplays that he hasn’t written himself, eagerly took up the baton. Patrick Cassavetti, a producer on ‘Fear and Loathing’, takes up the story. “Philosophically and spiritually it felt right to Terry and he was the one director who could make it manageable. But the option on the book was about to expire, Johnny Depp had been waiting around overlong and we had another project going that we had to launch in 1998. We had to start straight away but we thought that was okay – gonzo journalism is done on the same basis.”

Gilliam rejected Cox’s screenplay and found he had ten days to come up with another one. He teamed up with Tony Grisoni, who had recently written ‘Queen of Hearts’. Initially Grisoni had problems with gonzo journalism, Hunter Thompson’s term for that branch of reportage which does not distinguish between the crazed mental state of the reporter and the objective reality to which the reporter is struggling to attune. “Gonzo works for a novel, it doesn’t really work for a movie script,” Grisoni explains, “You’ve got to try and shape it without destroying the spirit of that.”

In May ’97 the two writers assembled daily beside Gilliam’s espresso coffee machine in his London house. “We just laid into it,” says Grisoni, ‘I’d sit at the keyboard and we’d talk and talk and I’d keep typing. Terry insisted that if we needed a line, rather than invent one we’d find one from somewhere in the book and pull it in. Hunter Thompson’s writing is so particular…I can’t do better than that. Nor can Terry.”

Halfway through the novel, Grisoni felt, the narrative becomes unworkably shapeless. The writers had to have a clear strategy. “We decided to build up to this drug, adrenochrome, the drug to end all drugs. He takes it and boom! He goes out. When he comes to, time has passed and things have happened. All he has is his tape recorder, which he plays back, gradually piecing the missing time together.”

In order to impose an evolving rhythm on the screenplay the writers decided to heighten the counterpoint of relationships in the story. “There’s an interesting seesaw business going on between Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo (the attorney, renamed for the film). One is more in control than the other then the power switches. This goes on all the way through. Gonzo exhibits more and more dangerous signs of mental disorder and gives us a character progression.”

Grisoni is hard pressed to identify the specialities of each of the members of the screenwriting partnership. Both men, he asserts, are fundamentally concerned with structure and shape yet manage to construct a genuinely flexible working atmosphere. “The great thing is that you’re encouraged to come up with a thousand lousy ideas for the sake of the one good one. We were working at speed and this had a headlong energy that was right for the tale. It helped you not be too self-conscious. I learned a lot about trusting to instinct.”

Gilliam’s skill at setting up zones of creative chaos within orderly structures is not restricted to the making of screenplays. Like Grisoni, Alex McDowell, production designer on ‘Fear and Loathing’, found the director focused but elastic in the pre-production process. “Two weeks before anyone else started, Terry and Julie Weiss, the costume designer, and I went through the script in a meandering, lateral kind of way.” In the course of this protracted brainstorming session ideas for atmospheres and images began to emerge. Gilliam had described the film as ‘Alice in Wonderland meets Dante’s Inferno’ and proposed an organising vision for the character of Duke that was carried through all stages of the project. “Terry likened him to a war correspondent out there in a battlezone,” Tony Grisoni recalls. “And ‘out there’ is also inside him: the drugs are a sort of carpet bombing.” McDowell found these images crucial. “We talked and talked about where we came from politically,” he explains, “And this got us to all the layers that we were interested in: the Vietnam War, Beirut, they all came up as references.”

Those close to the director agree that he welcomes a genuine creative dialogue. Gilliam confirms this when he describes his working relationship with McDowell. “It’s a leapfrogging process,” he says. “I’ve got very strong ideas, he’s got very strong ideas. I do sketches, I get photographs, paintings, I gather research and reference material. Then I start designing the stuff. Then the designer comes on and says ‘What about this?’ and a dialogue starts. They come up with a good idea, and I come up with a better idea and they come up with a better idea than mine. And we do it.” Once the director and designers had reached agreement in depth on the look of the thing, there was an abrupt change of gear. “Terry was off with the actors and I’m left,” says McDowell. “We didn’t see him much until the shoot.”

While Gilliam was talking visuals, his lead actor was getting to grips with the legend he had been hired to portray. Thompson has, in the past, been known to have suffered fools very reluctantly indeed. Callow journalists, for example, have had shotguns fired off (but not at them) in their proximity and rubbernecking visitors have been submitted to gruelling trials by intoxication. Depp, a Hollywood godling, was really going to have to pass muster. In fact it all went terribly well.

“Johnny and Hunter spent an enormous amount of time together at the beginning, up at Hunter’s place,” says Gilliam. For the director this was a vital hands-off period, but when it had to be wound up a certain delicacy was in order. “Then I came on board and suddenly I was stealing his creation. It’s like ‘Johnny is spending more time with Terry! Whoa!’ Suddenly jealousy is rearing its ugly head and it gets very strange.” This faintly petulant tug-of-war between the dukes of disorder is, however, only the interest paid on a shrewdly packaged loan, as Gilliam points out. “The more Johnny can absorb from Hunter the better because then I don’t have to do that research – Johnny will be the one to be truthful to what the character is.”

Although he won’t say as much, Gilliam seems not to have enjoyed the three weeks of location work that opened filming on ‘Fear & Loathing’. He refers to the fact that Las Vegas, with its mythic, monolithic public image well established, doesn’t really need film-makers or their money and consequently accommodates them rather begrudgingly. “We wanted to film in a casino, obviously, and the only time they’d give us was between two and six in the morning! And they insisted that the extras did real gambling! I just hope our people made some money!”

The movie was made in a hurry on a modest budget ($18.5m) and at times resources – human ones – were overstretched. Again, Gilliam will not commit himself in any detail – “It had to be a good shoot, we didn’t have a choice but I don’t think it was a well organised film. Its birth was not easy. It was always rough and things didn’t go the way I wanted them to. Certain people didn’t… I’m not going to name names but it was a strange film, like one leg was shorter than the other. There was all sorts of chaos.”

Nicola Pecarini is convinced that Gilliam is a master of chaos. “For example, in Bazooka Circus, you’ve got 400 extras in 70s hair dos and twenty seamstresses and costumiers on a three am call to get the first 200 ready by eight thirty. Terry walks in and asks for one little change and right there: Boom! Chaos! He’d deny it but it’s unconsciously deliberate. Chaos gives you adrenalin and speed and it awakes your senses. That’s how he likes it.” Designer Alex McDowell argues that Gilliam injects disorder when the constraints of shooting get on top of him. “He’s getting the most pressure from the most people and he gets round it by creating chaos to give himself space. There’s a lot more tension in the air when he’s on the set.”

“But Terry takes chaos very far,” says Nicola Pecarini. “And there is an amazing order in his chaos! He chooses the people next to him to handle the solutions to this and sometimes they can’t handle it. We had two of them just cracked up.”

Clearly there’s good chaos and bad chaos. Sometimes the most tiresome and inauspicious situations goad Gilliam into conjuring up the good stuff. “Somebody says ‘Hey, the sun is going!’ and I go ‘So why the fuck are we still on this shot? Come on! We gotta move! Go! Johnny, get in there, look there, say those words! Shoot, shoot! Do it again!’ If you’ve got good people, it works. And some of the best stuff comes out of that.”

The very best chaos, though, is born out of total control. This means sound stage. This means big crew, much hierarchy, lots of delegation. Take the Bazooka Circus setup. In the novel, Duke and his attorney experience serious madness in the venerable Circus Circus casino. Lawsuits being so terribly compromising these days, the producers change the name and the crew gets building. A three tier set is constructed on the stage and Gilliam braces himself for a big one.

“Ellen Patterson was the coordinator of that sequence. She had to just keep badgering me: ‘Answer this, Terry’, ‘What’s this?’, ‘What’s happening here?’, ‘What do you want there?’ – I told you – ‘No you didn’t!’ – Yes I did, that’s what I want. – ‘That’s all you get. Bye!’ So what I need is people who pester me, which is not the way most directors work.” The London-based American has severed his connections not just with his country of birth but the deferential ways of its most renowned industry. “In Hollywood the idea of pestering the director and treating him like this child who needs to come up with the goods, they find that hard to do.”

Ensconced in the set, the child director knows what he likes. “What I want is to have enough toys around, enough things: props, people, sets, anything. Toys! If somebody says ‘Oh, shit, that’s not working’, well ‘Fuck, that’ll do it, we’ll start out on that instead.'” This thing with things stems from the earliest days of Gilliam’s career. “It’s almost like doing animation again because it’s just me and these things – I’m in control. My mind is very good at juxtaposing, assembling things and that’s what the animation was all about. Suddenly – ooh, there’s an idea comes out of that. Those are the moments I really find exhilarating on a film.”

As soon as he has shot the movie, Gilliam can’t wait to get back to his family, back to the country steeped in the epic history that he finds so inspiring. In a suite in London’s Soho film district, ‘Fear and Loathing’s editors are cutting diligently for a screening at Cannes in May. Next door, in his office, Terry Gilliam is talking flat out. His arms are flailing, he breaks off every few minutes to cough convulsively and his voice is worn down to a croak. The interviewer starts to feel guilty, as if he were heedlessly exploiting this generous man. But the man keeps going. That question at the back of our minds, for instance…”Yeah – the strange thing is, I don’t take drugs. I’ve never had acid in my life. Never had peyote, never had mescaline. Marijuana makes me implode, I go numb. I never had acid because I thought I’d try to fly out the window. I don’t want to fly, I can fly. This is a thing I know.”

What the connoisseur of disorder knows very well is the border country. You don’t pitch camp on either side, you hover over the middle, taking the best of both worlds. Not like the young King who snatches at the Grail and is burned; not like the wounded monarch rigid with melancholy. Not even like the Fool, who does the right thing without realising it. Terry Gilliam knows he has to keep circulating, even when he’s with fellow wildmen. Especially then. “I wanted to keep Hunter at bay. That’s the only way I could treat him and the book with the disrespect they deserved.” He coughs alarmingly, loosening strands from his pony-tail, then looks across the desk. “You must have enough now.”

1998

Self Expression

An article in the New Scientist (07/05/2006) draws attention to a curious development in the Galapagos. In the 1960s a species of finch on the islands could be found divided into populations of birds with either large or small bills, reflecting their enduring tendency to eat either large or small seeds.

Forty years later this distinction within the species had almost vanished – medium-sized bills had become the most common. Human intervention is the cause: people had been providing bird feeders filled with rice, the finches were no longer subjected to an evolutionary force that compelled specialisation to ensure survival, the medium size bill would now cover the reduced diversity of the situation. This is ‘reverse speciation’.

It is possible that comparable processes are unfolding in our contemporary culture. If we substitute a cornucopia of consumer goods for rice feeders and our consuming selves for the Galapagoan finch then it becomes interesting to ask whether there’s any human equivalent to unconventional speciation going on. Humans and their prosthetic technologies appear to have both sidestepped and frustrated the standard issue evolutionary process to such an extent that, while many of us are taller than our grandparents (better food, better health care) we have become resigned to the absence, in the playground, of children whose facial features reflect generations of increasingly prolonged exposure to screen-based media by developing square eyes.

Evolution describes the emergence and subsequent success of promising differences within species adapting to non-ideal environments. In the case of the finches it seems as if the environment, untypically, moved towards, rather than away from, an ideal state. Differences were no longer useful. Given that human bodies do not change shape so readily, if we’re looking for evidence of ongoing speciation we must shift to another frame of reference altogether.

Articles about the success of MySpace tend to feature two main sets of issues. The site is seen either as amiable, democratic fun or a domain for the grooming and enticement of unsuspecting youth by paedophiles and other sexual predators. In July, 2005, Rupert Murdoch bought the site for $580 million. Some commentators have registered their suspicions about the magnate’s intentions for his new acquisition. In the words of Wired magazine’s Spencer Reiss, Murdoch plans ‘to turn MySpace’s teeming masses into a wholly new kind of media entity, an advertising, marketing, and distribution vehicle that gives News Corp. a hand on the steering wheel of popular culture worldwide.’

On the 8th September, however, The Register dispelled some of the speculation. ‘ “The goal is to be one of the biggest digital music stores out there,” MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters. “Everyone we’ve spoken to definitely wants an alternative to iTunes and the iPod. MySpace could be that alternative.” We think the idea is to sell the music without any content protection, and let the bands decide how much each track or album will sell for.’ The music industry is, of course, thoroughly engrossed in MySpace and both unsigned bands and major labels are continually finding ways of extending the viral marketing potentials of the network.

It would be interesting to know just how the teeming MySpace masses are viewed by their new owners. To what extent are are they seen as people? For sure, they generate many signs of vitality and their youthful unpredictability is spoken of with a degree of awe even by Murdoch himself. MySpace is a thriving social network but the act of engagement with the site seems actually to divest users of their identity at the point of entry. To be a ‘person’ or, in MySpace’s terminology, a ‘friend’, is to be defined in a very particular way.

Data entered into the standard MySpace templates establishes a profile that acts as a point of departure for correspondence-based relationships that may be enhanced by music, video clips and photo sets. The outer limits of what may be achieved are determined by the ingenuity and design skills of the users but at the front end the user’s online persona is defined largely in terms of consumer preferences – after basic details including name or nickname, age, approximate location and, in many cases, zodiac sign are entered, standard categories offered for data entry include favourites lists for music, films and television.

While it’s largely up to the user how the profiles of strangers are interpreted and reciprocated – they constitute a way of getting multiple and multiply branching relationships started – the options on offer reflect the priorities of a consumer culture rather than a relationship culture. The latter term would have to describe a milieu in which people saw each other as likeable or interesting rather than primarily concerned with liking consumer goods. The individual defined in terms of his or her consumer preferences is an individual waiting to be consumed.

If someone asks you what your mother is like you tend not to itemise her favourite DVDs. You have probably known her for a while and therefore might feel able to describe her in terms of characteristics and qualities rather than her possessions or her inclinations to possess. It’s likely that you extend a comparable richness of description to your offline friends.

It’s no surprise that Murdoch and his ilk (who didn’t originate the MySpace profiling parameters) favour profiling that is consumerised, elicited under the guise of social networking, within a network that replaces the evolved, distinguishing characteristics of the user with a much narrower range of indicators. This is reverse cultural speciation. That the members of the online community, 111 million of them at the time of writing, succeed in keeping MySpace vibrant is testimony to their spirit of resistance, even if membership of the network has become almost conventional for a certain age group.

In the absence of resistance, however, the effects of reverse cultural speciation can be dramatic. When people submit to a profile of themselves based on what they buy, they may begin to define themselves in terms of qualities ascribed to the products – a Stockholm Syndrome effect in which the hostage starts to identify with the values of whatever it is that constrains him. A kind of liberation then becomes possible. I am not a person, I am a pair of characterful shoes. Or, more precisely, I am all the qualities that the shoe’s brand has made available to me.

Another New Scientist article describes the research of roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who has built a robotic replica of himself. The android double has no artificial intelligence, it is rather an extraordinary extension of what, in special effects movies, used to be called animatronics. The highly realistic facial features are animated by remote control, to produce an eery and momentarily convincing likeness.

The android’s designers feel that the lip movements of Geminoid HI-1, as it is known, are still slightly slow and unnatural and are trying to adjust the control system so that proper sync with Ishiguro’s lips is achieved. This should avert the further development of a problem with HI-1’s creator for, as the article’s author writes, ‘Ishiguro has discovered that he is adapting his own lip movements by speaking more slowly.’

A human is adapting himself, initially unconsciously, to the shortcomings of an android. In this particular case, it’s not hard to understand: the guy wants to optimise his research project. In the broader frame of things we seem to be seeing a technologised version of the Stockholm Syndrome again. The nice thing about androids is that they will always be simpler than we are. That’s not a good reason, however, for trying to please them. Does the hand control the hammer or the hammer control the hand? Perhaps when technologies are exceptionally bewitching it seems impolite not to put them at ease.

An odd possibility suggests itself: as the apparatus of mimickry grows more and more sophisticated its development is held back by the decreasing sophistication of the objects that are being mimicked. A Zeno’s Paradox is raised – in Ishiguro’s case this would result in the development of an android that faithfully captured qualities derived from an original that imitated its imitator. Humannness recedes infinitely. Reverse speciation: a languid descent into the warm and soporific billows that you came from.

Reversal is not always characterised by the diminution of affect, however. A late 20th century variant on this back-to-frontness runs ‘I do not feel like what I suspect feeling like a person must feel like – so I’ll turn the volume up.’ When, on ‘The X Factor’, contestants stridently yet plaintively declare that they know they have the factor in question, their conviction is unsettling. Apparently oblivious to the conventional links between assertion and proof, some contestants are possessed by a rage of belief that bears absolutely no relation to their capacities. This is part of the legacy of Thatcherism: the notion that instead of having qualities you simply tell everybody you’ve got them and Lo – you’ve got them! Pure magic.

In the 80s this style of bragging was a response to a prolapse of the psyche occasioned by the extinction of job futures and the comprehensive privatisation of state assets. The workless underclass more than tripled in size in the course of the eighteen year Thatcher reign (19.1% of British households were workless in 1994). Middle class careerists learned that they were to become portfolio persons. Dependency culture blossomed. A sense of worthlessness, we must assume, was widespread. The cure for such emptiness is fullness and if it cannot be acquired it must be mimicked. To brag is to mimic the voice that recognises and praises your substance. It is to dispense with the person or persons who might volunteer such a response. It is to suck one’s own tits.

Bragging in 2007 is so much a part of the cultural landscape that one almost forgets it’s out of order. In my own lifetime I can recall the magnificent, partly ironic, wholly amiable poetic boasting of Muhammad Ali, the ‘Louisville Lip’, who, in the early 60s, mesmerised white and black crowds alike not just with his butterfly float and his bee sting but his witty, rhymed match forecasts. That the match featured himself and the forecasts were largely accurate transformed the bragging into ornate statements of fact. The racial factors added to the spectacle a political dimension that made bragging seem an exceptionally radical act.

But that was Ali. Two decades later, a few years into the Thatcher regime, bragging had become so thoroughly integrated into the behavioural vocabulary that the braggart seemed on the brink of achieving the impossible: the uncritical acceptance of his nonsense. The German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had, in the mid 50s, seen the ground being laid for just such a re-modelling of the contours of self-expression. In his book ‘The Sane Society’ (1955) Fromm suggested that capitalism had spawned a new character type to suit its purposes. The Marketing Character is one for whom “everything is transformed into a commodity, not only things, but the person himself, his physical energy, his skills, his knowledge, his opinions, his feelings, even his smiles.” When “the person himself” is commodified then the subject acquires certain user privileges, not the least of which is permission to evaluate, in a frank and dispassionate manner, the person himself. The portal to braggartry yawns wide. It’s not me I’m praising – it’s this character that lives nearby.

There was the braggart, trumpeting messages whose essential content was something along the lines of “I am skilled/clever/loveable” and there were the listeners, not nodding their agreement but certainly withholding their dissent. In the olden days, one dimly recalls, a member of the public other than oneself would say something along the lines of “You are skilled/clever/ loveable” and a warm feeling would ensue. This other person, an inhabitant of the fabled ‘Out There’, was steadily eliminated from the equation as the century moved to millennium and character grew ever more marketable.

There is, of course, bragging derived from an incontinent pride in genuine achievement. It’s tedious but not fundamentally assailable. The late 20th century bragging of which I speak was not, however, tied to achievement. This may well derive from the removal of the possibility of achievement that was visited upon swathes of youth in the Thatcher era. In 1987 the Prime Minister said “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Faced with this endorsement of atomistic loneliness the individual man and woman might ruefully conclude “All right then, given that I am clearly not loveable I will make up for it by loving myself and being seen to do so.”

Celebrity worship is essential in this scheme of things. Nine years after the fall of John Major’s government, New Labour’s policies of lying and endangerment have further underscored the disposability of the citizen. They don’t love the citizens and they don’t want them to feel like citizens. Again, the solution lies in mimickry. Time for the dressing up box, time for the much vaunted ‘reinvention’. The modern world has shown me that my version is obsolete – let’s get to work! Role models model roles that may be applied in the course of this process.

Reinvention is that amusing idea that if you don’t like yourself you can build a better one. Not possible. Immutable personal characteristics prevent it. Immovable social conditions hobble it. But let’s not be despondent. It appears that some people are exceptionally loveable and are celebrated for it. Leaves may, therefore, be taken from their books. Such as their hair. Or body shape. Or manner. Etc etc. That many of them are actors is suggestive. It suggests that not only is acting loveable but that acting is being, it’s all that anyone ever does anyway. That’s a relief.

Reinvention is not speciation. Moving the furniture around doesn’t change the shape of the room – unless we are content to be merely the sum of the furniture we own. If that’s the case then we can generate new versions at the speed of a haircut. Whatever the substance of the reinvented person may be, the emergence of a novel online broadcasting facility such as MySpace is uncannily timely. It is as if the breadth of the broadcast were proportionate to the degree of artifice required in the contemporary personality. The greater the artifice the more widely must it be bruited in order that contact with those of like mind can be consolidated. Self expression becomes synonymous with publishing.

It’s not that the kids aren’t alright, it’s that as these marvellous democratising networks expand they inevitably dilute the vocabulary that describes what it is, or could be, to be a person. As a consequence feedback from the world to the person becomes a force for reduction. One beak fits all.

2007