Forget about keeping it real

Reality is unkempt, but also needs reclaiming.

For years I felt that that photographers had it better than writers. I knew an abundance of both. I am one, had briefly been the other and so felt my data and conclusions were good. The proof went further than my feelings. The photographers I knew had exhibitions, sold prints, printed books and kept working, whereas if I look at the writers I knew (good ones, at that) the smart ones went into I.T. or P.R as the victory of pictures over words in the battle for human attention and credulity seemed decisively won. Then A.I levelled the playing field like a nuclear bomb, everyone was as done for as each other because soon, nothing on any screen will be credible as fact, incredulity will be the only constant and those feelings… will be the only proof we have.

It seems - on this bright, spring morning - but the shake of lamb’s tail until a plausible version of my voice and thinking can take a Zoom meeting, with one’s appearance to follow. A range of apps that will accelerate the drift toward the banishment of any sense of difficulty (boredom being merely the outlier of this) are the fun end of the wedge. Next up will be the difficult thought and the uncomfortable feeling. Perhaps their present cure – a sense of outrage which seems to simplify the inner world by doing the same to the outer - will be upstaged by an impression of the world so bespoke, so ego syntonic and convincing with whoever you have become (and the endpoint of any growth thereafter) that you will never know trouble again, or see nothing but, depending on your disposition.

There will be trouble of course. Your clever doorbell which now films unwanted callers will soon be able to produce convincing documentary evidence that anyone who presses it carried out 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination. Your only choice (unless it’s you the doorbell tolls for) is whether this intrudes on your consciousness at all - or you remain cortex deep in the event-pornography of digital engagement. Like the song says, this is hardcore.

I once saw Kubrick or Arthur C Clarke reflect that something they had gotten wrong in 2001 was thinking that as computers became more powerful they would get larger rather than smaller. I would submit that the similar flaw in The Matrix is the idea that machines need us for anything at all. We are getting there because we are doing this to and for ourselves.

I was at the leaving do for a great magazine editor this week. This was someone who knew that the best ideas were sometimes forged over lunch – a lost art, on multiple levels. This piece on the unravelling of my own consciousness was commissioned over a cold bottle of Riesling almost a decade ago and continues to do good business today. I didn’t go into the restaurant wanting to write it, it was, like the events of the story itself, an organic occurrence – which is to say the natural outgrowth of minds and persons well met.

At the leaving do, those photographers, writers and editors gathered discussed the fate of the magazine itself – the artifact, if you will. The prognosis was not great. What will remain, we conceded, is the name , what will replace it is, ‘The Event.’ Significantly a thing-in-the-world as opposed to (though often available as) a-thing-on-a-screen, and yet eerily in its invocation at corporate level and its phonetics recalling its deadening forbear, ‘Content.’

See, for me reading IS the event. A book, a magazine, even the Kindle on a train, in a café, a bus, a pub, in bed wherever… one comes to be transported (and sometimes on transport) to learn, to not-quite surrender to a cascade of possibility because the reader is doing the work of understanding and thus becomes participant-observer and not quite the passive learner of modern inclination. The spectator suggests (and demands) the spectacle, which stirs up the ghost of Guy Debord. ‘The Event’ (how gauche) seems fit only for Nicky Haslam’s tea towel of disdain. Kill me now, as the saying goes. If I hadn’t watched so many people die with COPD and it wasn’t so expensive I would resume smoking at this point. Pushing smoking outdoors might have been the start of this phase of our problems, it ought really be the phone that one should take outside. The phoner, the digital drunk, and not the smoker, ought be the social castaway.

What then might resistance look like? Let us give the movement a name, The Realists, and then concede that it is (like reality) very much underway. Because the Internet is not bad-in-itself - just our supplication to it - I have no shame in presenting the solution via YouTube (where I found it) in the form of a man named Terry Miles who roams the pubs and bars of the world looking for unattended pianos.

In this episode, Terry visits The Peacock in Stepney and something spontaneous happens at six minutes 52 seconds in with the arrival of a local character named Terry the Fish. I would strongly recommend you watch the whole thing and allow this to unfold, as it were, in real time – partly because time in this pub is moving at a human pace. A pace which permits what happens to occur in a way in which digital pace and appetite tend not to because this is a thing going down in the world as a complex act of synchronicity – and not, in any sense of the modern word, ‘an event.’ Also our hero here – like more than one of mine, uses a Zimmer frame.

It is with sadness I reflect that a great pub pianist I used to hear a lot, Roy the Hat, is dead and my friend who used to sing with him is de facto homeless, unreachably alcoholic and suicidal. On the plus side - my favourite pub which was being swamped by young people has undergone a profound vibes shift since another friend has taken to bringing his octogenarian aunt in there along with her frame -a demographic power play which I wholeheartedly approve of, not least because it was the older folk who suffered the most socially from the phones-over-smoking manoeuvre. It seems odd to me that (in one analysis) we have harassed people into long life so effectively that we must now contrive legislation to do away with them.

The good news is that there is something irrepressible about the need for and emergence of the really real. Theatre, I think, will be a big winner in the wars to come. And not just the big-ticket West End version but the small room, grass roots variants along with stand-up, folk music – none of which - despite their roots - need be backward looking nor wrangled into branded events. To say nothing of just being an interesting person. And if you don’t believe me, here’s Quentin Tarantino.

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