Sidenotes #17 - Amy Winehouse RIP, Sadiq Khan
And some American Fiction and some Spanish travels..
I wish I didn’t feel the need to start off with weather related gabbles but I’ve just come back from Galicia in Spain where the weather was peaking at 25 degrees, elegant old ladies strolled around in their immaculate bright red coats and little cafés served hefty set menus of croquetas and grilled fresh fish that would cost - in total - €10.50. I was brought more prawns in one starter than you could find in a week’s worth of London restaurant dinners. While we’re not capable of similar sleek budgetry over here, at least we could be having a sort of…post-winter? Not a full-thrust, tops-off summer of hot asphalt and sticky Calippos and grass marks on swollen legs and burning rubber…just something in-between…? Anyway, here are some other things I’ve enjoyed - or, perhaps in the case of Mark Menzies, taken note of - recently, that are a bit more easily accessible than a five-day holiday.
Another naughty Tory
Another by-election? Not this time. But the story of Mark Menzies, a former Tory MP (he resigned the whip and will sit between now and the election as an independent) asking a 78-year-old local party volunteer for £5000 in the middle of the night because “bad people” wanted it, before using donor funds to cover the bill…got me to thinking about the allegations that have been made against him before. Menzies allegedly asked a Brazilian male escort to buy him drugs. He was also questioned by police after allegedly getting a friend’s dog drunk and was reported to have been drunk at the Proms, prodding other spectators with the tip of his Union Jack flag. He’s denied most or all of this. But with it all coming so soon after the story of William Wragg sending images of himself to a nefarious sort who then used the images as kompromat to blackmail him (successfully) into sending over private details of other MPs…
I just wonder how bored these people are? Do they not have dishes to do? Clothes to fold? Stuff to get on with? Adele once said that fame can be so intoxicating you can get used to other people doing stuff for you, and her pin-drop realisation she was losing herself and becoming a famous person was: “I think it was something simple like running out of clean clothes. And me not having the initiative to wash my own clothes,”
“I was annoyed that my clothes weren’t clean. So I told myself I’d better abseil down. And go and do my f*****g laundry.”
I’m not saying that everyone should do their own laundry, because god knows it takes a while to dry (the weather, right!?) and if you can get the help, fine. But I do think once you remove men from esteemable acts, so they can prioritise the supposedly important business of chatting and shuffling papers, they actually lose more confidence than they gain. Esteemable acts are the little things we do every day that draw a connection between us and the rest of the world, that make us feel accomplished and proud of ourselves, like we’re in charge of our own space. Without these, they’re going to crave something that feels very real and human and messy. It’s like when a guy jangles coins in his pocket, or whistles loudly, or catcalls. All these outsized expressions of a competitive desire to be the most HERE, the most REAL, the most RESPECTABLE… are all just such clear statements of needing to cement their presence that I do just find myself wondering how little they must think of themselves. And then they get themselves into these terrifying situations, taking it further and further, either not seeing the danger or not caring and most definitely not asking for any help until it’s dangerously late…I just don’t think you’d have that if you were having to go home and take the bins out on the regular.
American Fiction
I know so well the conversations I’ve had with female creatives about how to get projects off the ground. People want confessional, trauma, horrible stuff told by a palatably pretty lady. Distress in a dress! And American Fiction goes so much further by tossing up how “important” and “urgent” it is to hear of stories of Black struggle to the exclusion of Black excellence. Or just Black neuroses. So we follow Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) a disgruntled and cynical literature professor as he’s plunged into dealing with family stuff, while trying to make some money as a published author once again. Its criticism of excessively right-on campus culture is right up there with Tar’s and happens in about an eighth of the screen time.
As well as showing the quotidian travails of an upper-middle class Black family now in at least its second generation of hyper-education and intellectualism, this film tells a story of the ridiculous wrangling of storytelling for a market. There are some fabulously witty back and forths, some absurdly nonsense escapades and a brilliantly trashy almost-final scene. It sends up a newer era of Blaxploitation fiction (could A Thousand and One, which I wrote about last week be part of this?) and reflects the reality for some Black Americans somewhere in the middle of the misery of ghetto living and the abstract utopia of Afrofuturism. The whole idea is, as I saw it, to show that Black people can live a relatively gilded existence, where things might go wrong, but that’s more because people are flawed and get old and unwell and fall apart, not just Black people. My only wish is that there’d been more of Issa Rae in this; the head to head her character, Sintara Golden, has with disgruntled Thelonius, is absolutely gorgeous, and reminds me of the really zingy debate scenes that would arise in Dear White People, a show I must return to finish soon!
You can watch American Fiction on Amazon Prime
As for me…
Back to Black
How do we memorialise someone who we remember so well? Who we can find footage of at the tap of a screen? I’ve written an article for Vogue about the tall task of maintaining Amy Winehouse’s legacy and how Back to Black, the first fictionalised retelling of Amy’s life - and love, because apparently her love life was the ultimate focus of everything - mainly falls flat. That said, it does carry one, unintentional legacy of Amy in the public abuse that Sam Taylor-Johnson, the film’s director, and Marisa Abela - who plays Amy pretty well, are fielding online.
People absolutely love to suggest that they’re not like the tabloids, that they’re better than those scum. But it’s also people posting on TikTok or Instagram. Twitter used to be the bad place, and X is definitely a terrible place. But the lack of accountability on image-based apps is astonishing. Remember when you could see others’ interactions? Your partner liked their ex’s best mate’s photo of a cocktail in a jam-jar mug….uh oh! Someone call your best mate who has a moustache tattoo on her finger and a heavy slanted fringe! These days, you simply can’t see who’s posted on what, or get much insight into their habits. You can’t see what a prick someone’s being, and neither can anyone they work with, or anyone who might want to remind them of their responsibility as a citizen with friends, family and colleagues who may be horrified to see what they’re saying.
Heat magazines’s circle of shame, which was obviously retired years ago, carried the tag line “Celebs, they’re just like us!” The idea is that with the rise of digital paparazzi (who could just take so many more photos a day) and the very beginnings of celebrity blogs and MailOnline (remember when it was just an outpost of the newspaper, a title that needed extra large font for its elderly readers, rather than the world’s megalith of salacious gossip?)…all these glossy, perfect celebrities could be knocked down a peg or two. We could all recognise that these gods were mere mortals, and we’re not so bad by comparison.
Now, though, I think we’ve got to recognise we’ve long been at something closer to “tabloids, we’re just like them!” Because people - and it is people - not only read and engage with nasty stuff, but quickly tap out mean and vile things (sorry lads, as icky as it is that Sam Taylor-Johnson married a teenager two decades her junior, calling her names won’t actually fix anything!) without much accountability. And those posting even the shortest, snidest comment on social media underestimate the power of it, how widely read it might be and indeed how it influences our public understanding of one another. (My reckoning is more people have read the 40th comment under a post about Brooklyn Beckham selling sake than have read the 20th page of a newspaper on any given day).
Anyway, the article looks at that all, and the film itself, in much more detail.
Sadiq Khan
London’s mayor is seeking re-election for his third term and I couldn’t help but wonder…what’s he going to do about policing? Especially after the Met Police was found to be sexist, homophobic and harbouring people with “racist attitudes” (it stopped short of saying it was racist, but I do sort of want to know Baroness Doreen Lawrence’s opinion on this…)
Well, we sat down together for a chat about his 10-point plan to make women safer in the city. So there’s stalkers being fitted with electronic tags, £10m on 50 homes for domestic abuse survivors and a pilot to provide legal support to victims who report sexual violence. And some culture change projects which I’m not 100% on - can a mayor really ever land this sort of stuff? - but still am impressed by.
Read it all in the i paper (the whole thing was ready for print WELL before the Gideon Falter shenanigans)
And finally
I’ve not listened to THAT album yet (I need a quiet couple of hours with the laundry) but I want to mention Spain again. No matter the ancient Middle Earth-seeming landscape you’re plodding through, or how far you feel from the real world, you’ll soon be spat into a sleazy old man bar or fresh youth hostel where they’re playing music from MY youth. So there was the old dude playing Robbie Williams’ Feel out of a tinny speaker, which just felt too epic for the moment (a pub selling bocadillos), a café playing Natasha Bedingfield’s These Words (I tried to stay to hear all of Sean Paul’s Like Glue when it came on) and a dusty bar playing Rihanna’s S&M at 10am while men in greasy jeans and leather jackets hoiked up spit and played on flashing fruit machines. The best, though was walking past some builders playing some KC and the Sunshine Band…
I just think it’s too soon for an Amy biopic like what’s it’s been , 10ish years?