The Tory MP Jonathan Djanogly is this week deeply and hugely embarrassed for having been found apparently looking at a saucy photo of semi-naked women on his smartphone in the House of Commons. The former business minister Anna Soubry had tweeted a picture from behind Djanogly in the chamber, and caught him out. But let’s be fair. He was looking at the 1958 picture Showgirls Play Chess Backstage at the Latin Quarter Nightclub – taken by Gordon Parks, a great African-American photographer, writer, composer and film-maker.
Parks documented postwar life in the US, and directed the 1971 blaxploitation movie Shaft, with Richard Roundtree playing the legendary tough private investigator. He also, in 1969, directed a serious, autobiographical movie about racism: The Learning Tree (based on his book of the same name), which made him the first African-American to write and direct a Hollywood feature film. Perhaps Djanogly should get in touch with the Gordon Parks Foundation in New York to organise an exhibition of his photographs at the Palace of Westminster.
F is for fishing
Andy Beckett recently wrote here about accelerationism, the belief that speeding up is progress and the inevitable way of the future. Certainly, it is incredible what we expect to receive instantly. Until recently I would try to translate sentences to and from French or German by painstakingly looking them up, word by word, in a dictionary. Now, of course, you can enter them into online translators. Has the order of the alphabet itself become a redundant piece of knowledge, left behind in the new rush?
I was brooding on this while reading Catherine Blyth’s elegant new book On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Speed and time-checking is a neurotic compulsion for the acquisitive classes seeking to cancel out the second half of the maxim “cash rich, time poor”. How do we break this damaging and self-harming addiction? There is a proverb that time spent fishing is not included in your allotted lifespan. So non-fishers will just have to find an activity that is the equivalent of fishing. Reading (as opposed to checking social media) is one. For me, it is swimming at a lido.
Memo to BBC: get Morty!
There comes a time when you have to just turn up sheepishly late to the cultural party, bearing your bottle of tepid wine and your excuse about having got the wrong train. It was only from my 12-year-old that I got the news about the funniest thing on TV. And now I see that its creators, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have been interviewed by the Guardian, and the comedian Richard Herring has already patiently attempted to spread the word. But Rick and Morty, the animation from the US Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim strand, really is mind-blowingly good.
A sci-fi comedy, it’s sort of like Futurama Back to the Future or Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Rick is an ageing, cantankerous, hard-drinking genius scientist with an unlovely habit of burping on about every eighth word. He has now moved in with his grownup daughter and their family, and is mentoring his timid grandson, Morty. With his dangerous space-time continuum experiments, he takes Morty on trips into alternative universes. The episode where they come back to their own reality and have to murder and bury their duplicate selves is just amazing. I have got hold of a German DVD boxset (with English subtitles) to get my fix. We should all stop going on about The Man in the High Castle, The Crown, The Affair etc, and just get the BBC to acquire Rick and Morty.
