Street? We're not worthy!
Sep. 13th, 2006 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus"Nathan Barley is a Channel 4 sitcom about a fictional twentysomething loathsome London media type," the Wikipedia informs us, "written by Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris, and supposed by some to have been inspired by the postmodern performance artist Momus".
Blimey! Fame at last as... as... well, the world's biggest foppish cunt.
"Nathan Barley is a webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker, screenwriter, DJ and in his own words, a 'self-facilitating media node'. He is convinced he is the epitome of urban cool, and therefore secretly terrified he might not be, which is why he reads Sugar Ape magazine - his bible of cool."
There are at least four problems with the theory that Nathan Barley is based on me. First, I'm clearly a talented artist, not a gadfly schmoozer like that loser. Second, I'm shy and thoughtful, whereas Nathan's a loud arrogant prankster who swears on the bus. Third, I'm not twentysomething but fortysomething. (But I guess time waits for no man.) And fourth, my bible of cool would obviously have to be a Japanese magazine. Something like FRUiTS or Street.
Well, knock me down with a feather! There I am in the October 2006 edition of Street, hot off the presses in Japan. Look! It's me, mum, with a whole page to myself!
I wish I didn't look so dull. It's not really the kind of picture that's going to inspire anyone the way this young lad inspired me back in February. I'm having a moderate-to-bad hair day, wearing a grey Graniph shirt, a pair of cream Humana slacks rolled to just under the knee, and "professional clogs". I wish they'd shot me today instead of back in July.
But that's the thing about Street; you don't wake up and remember you're going to be photographed for it that day. It just happens by chance, unexpectedly. Your path crosses the Street photographer (in this case New Yorker Fumi Nagasaka), she thinks you're interesting, the editor likes the shot, you're in. No advertising, no product placement, no stylist.
Of course, you never quite know it happens like that until it happens to you. I remember being disappointed, at a time when I was buying Cutie magazine regularly for the street fashion, to learn from a girlfriend who'd been shot by the Cutie photographer in Harajuku that they'd given her a lacy white thing to wear under her jean jacket, just to wake her look up a bit. That was styling, that was top down; it was pimping reality.
Street may be sifted, but it's unstyled. And so, if you're chosen, you get to represent what's happening on the street of whatever city they're covering that issue (I'm in the Berlin section; October also sees London covered). You become both a "quirky individual" and an ambassador, a standard-bearer. You get to stand for the grass roots, yet the job is self-appointed. It's not quite the same thing as being a "self-facilitating media node".
There's a scene in Episode 4 of Nathan Barley where our hapless hero has got himself the world's stupidest haircut, a Geek Pie (involving asymmetry and lots of tin lids from paint pots). It's all a terrible mistake, a big misunderstanding, and trendy Hosegate is withering in its disdain. But just beyond the pale redemption is waiting in the form of a Japanese film crew. They like the Geek Pie cut, and make pariah Nathan the unlikely ambassador of cutting-edge London style.
"Watch the fuck out, Japan!" Nathan sneers into the Japanese camera with Lydon-like arrogance. We get a glimpse of the wild success of his exhortation in the form of a parade of Tokyo fashion victims sporting the same silly haircut and murmuring "Nathan Barley, Geek Pie, cool".
Well, it just wouldn't happen like that. If Nathan really were "secretly terrified he might not be the epitome of urban cool" he'd just be jolly grateful to have the tribute of a page in his favourite Japanese urban style magazine. He might well fall to his knees and, in the classic gesture from another cult comedy series I'm way too young to remember, cry out "WE'RE NOT WORTHY!"
Blimey! Fame at last as... as... well, the world's biggest foppish cunt.
"Nathan Barley is a webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker, screenwriter, DJ and in his own words, a 'self-facilitating media node'. He is convinced he is the epitome of urban cool, and therefore secretly terrified he might not be, which is why he reads Sugar Ape magazine - his bible of cool."
There are at least four problems with the theory that Nathan Barley is based on me. First, I'm clearly a talented artist, not a gadfly schmoozer like that loser. Second, I'm shy and thoughtful, whereas Nathan's a loud arrogant prankster who swears on the bus. Third, I'm not twentysomething but fortysomething. (But I guess time waits for no man.) And fourth, my bible of cool would obviously have to be a Japanese magazine. Something like FRUiTS or Street.
Well, knock me down with a feather! There I am in the October 2006 edition of Street, hot off the presses in Japan. Look! It's me, mum, with a whole page to myself!
I wish I didn't look so dull. It's not really the kind of picture that's going to inspire anyone the way this young lad inspired me back in February. I'm having a moderate-to-bad hair day, wearing a grey Graniph shirt, a pair of cream Humana slacks rolled to just under the knee, and "professional clogs". I wish they'd shot me today instead of back in July.
But that's the thing about Street; you don't wake up and remember you're going to be photographed for it that day. It just happens by chance, unexpectedly. Your path crosses the Street photographer (in this case New Yorker Fumi Nagasaka), she thinks you're interesting, the editor likes the shot, you're in. No advertising, no product placement, no stylist.
Of course, you never quite know it happens like that until it happens to you. I remember being disappointed, at a time when I was buying Cutie magazine regularly for the street fashion, to learn from a girlfriend who'd been shot by the Cutie photographer in Harajuku that they'd given her a lacy white thing to wear under her jean jacket, just to wake her look up a bit. That was styling, that was top down; it was pimping reality.
Street may be sifted, but it's unstyled. And so, if you're chosen, you get to represent what's happening on the street of whatever city they're covering that issue (I'm in the Berlin section; October also sees London covered). You become both a "quirky individual" and an ambassador, a standard-bearer. You get to stand for the grass roots, yet the job is self-appointed. It's not quite the same thing as being a "self-facilitating media node".There's a scene in Episode 4 of Nathan Barley where our hapless hero has got himself the world's stupidest haircut, a Geek Pie (involving asymmetry and lots of tin lids from paint pots). It's all a terrible mistake, a big misunderstanding, and trendy Hosegate is withering in its disdain. But just beyond the pale redemption is waiting in the form of a Japanese film crew. They like the Geek Pie cut, and make pariah Nathan the unlikely ambassador of cutting-edge London style.
"Watch the fuck out, Japan!" Nathan sneers into the Japanese camera with Lydon-like arrogance. We get a glimpse of the wild success of his exhortation in the form of a parade of Tokyo fashion victims sporting the same silly haircut and murmuring "Nathan Barley, Geek Pie, cool".
Well, it just wouldn't happen like that. If Nathan really were "secretly terrified he might not be the epitome of urban cool" he'd just be jolly grateful to have the tribute of a page in his favourite Japanese urban style magazine. He might well fall to his knees and, in the classic gesture from another cult comedy series I'm way too young to remember, cry out "WE'RE NOT WORTHY!"
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 07:39 pm (UTC)Calm down, anyway, I'm sure they mock because they love.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 07:48 pm (UTC)That's exactly what I thought when I read Charlie's Brooker's original Cunt stuff (http://www.thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/). Affectionate passages like this one:
"Do you and your idiot loudmouthed friend deserve to be suddenly and inexplicably killed by a man armed with a hammer, cracking you on the skull right there at the table as you tuck into your snooty fucking pub lunch? Would it give the other diners a surge of nigh-on sexual pleasure to see you slumped face-first in a pile of sweet potato mash with blood bubbling from the back of your head and blending with the onion gravy while your malfunctioning synapses cause your limbs to shudder and pop in a grotesquely comic dance of death? The Kilroy team would like to speak to you."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:03 pm (UTC)Ugh, whatever it is, it's not funny. Someone please rescue Julian Barratt and everyone else I like from that writer.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 07:44 pm (UTC)i possess your crash still
Date: 2006-09-12 07:55 pm (UTC)trashbat.co.ck? or however you spell it? so not your style.
i had a hard time stomaching that show at all, actually.
&you must not look dull if they gave you a whole page! these editor's obviously know everything!
Re: i possess your crash still
Date: 2006-09-12 07:59 pm (UTC)Re: i possess your crash still
Date: 2006-09-12 08:05 pm (UTC)they should make scratch 'n' sniff fashion magazines. fill 'em up with phermones and reel in the ladies.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:03 pm (UTC)Well...
I know that comment is useless, but... ow... nothing!
I enjoy your music too.
See you!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:23 pm (UTC)Not at all, that's all I really wanted someone to say. The rest is just intellectual legerdemain.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:08 pm (UTC)Green with envy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 09:59 pm (UTC)Brooker has said it ain't Nick!
Date: 2006-09-12 10:13 pm (UTC)Also, Wayne and Garth cheered me up. Strangely, F Mercury would have been 60 today.
Greetings from W10 BTW.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 10:32 pm (UTC)That's really fantastic that you were printed in Street. I'm so jealous.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 11:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 12:49 am (UTC)Alas, I never made the cut. I'm not sure whether I should be dissappointed or gleeful.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:55 am (UTC)-Marc.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 03:35 am (UTC)That character sounds amusing (albeit mostly un-Momus-like) but that Japan joke has turned me off. Everybody knows we're all imitating them these days.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 03:57 am (UTC)I ask again: why do people hate Nathan Barley and not Nathan Barley?!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 04:50 am (UTC)Most people who've seen it love it. But it was one of those things that only really meant something to the small band of hipsters it attacked.
Some hipsters may have hated it for belittling them. Some non-hipsters may have hated it for making them feel excluded.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 04:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:59 pm (UTC)Only a few weeks ago did I meet some kid wearing neon-green hot pants (with rips in the ass) and wearing a torn 12yo girl's t-shirt. Never had a job, lived in a $1,600 loft, and traveled from film festival to festival submitting his "guerilla art". It's bananas, man.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 09:11 am (UTC)Jedermann sein eigner Fussball
Date: 2006-09-13 10:53 am (UTC)Although it certainly wasn't Nathan Barley, that North Korea entry had me splutter bibimbap over the laptop on Monday. Late at night, unable to sleep, I found myself imagining a short story in which the caterers for the book launch were having to source vintage Red Cross food parcels to create the right frisson for the canapés. The interfering demands of the pink-suited host finally proved too much and they rose up, decapitated the guests in a spirit of revolutionary proletarian justice and used the heads to play a lively game of football up and down Friedrichstrasse in the dawn light. And then I did fall asleep.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 01:42 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAB9kFDJyBw&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfyz68K5OWg&mode=related&search=
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:37 pm (UTC)As for my means of financial support, it's perfectly visible. I write articles about poo (http://wired.com/news/columns/0,71763-0.html?tw=wn_index_14) for Wired.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 03:37 pm (UTC)They could have done so much more with that show. A lot of the show is spent setting up oppositionalites and situations, which the writers then fail to do anything with. At the end of episode 1 I thought Nathan had started work at Sugar Ape, which would have given Dan something to do and the story somewhere to go... nothing doing though. The gears of the story are all carefully wound up, and then nothing happens. The plot just meanders for 6 episodes (I think Dan is supposed to be on a 'downward spiral', but it doesn't convince) and then it finishes.
The pilot was actually pretty good, but the series contains all the good ideas from the pilot stretched out over 6 episodes. I wonder how much Chris Morris had to do with the writing of the actual series. Probably not a lot? He's normally quite good with all the things the series suffered from, and some of the faults of the script are characteristically Brooker (eg. the lead female character is a 1-dimensional scold, which is probably a manifestation of Brooker's misogyny).
I've obviously thought too much about Nathan Barley :(
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 04:43 pm (UTC)Doesn't Djave Bikinus say there's a vogue in Hosegate for "the Mexican street gangs who wear bags on their heads"? That look has presumably been hyped in Sugarape, whereas the Geek Pie look hasn't. But sure, the plot and characterization were creaky, mere excuses to hang the bilious observations on.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 01:29 pm (UTC)Reading over the various passages and I saw the images and -- had to combine them.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 01:39 pm (UTC)