Sometimes when reading the news we think, “Please, sir, can I have some more!”
On the other hand, sometimes we think, “Would that the English/American people had but one neck!”
The first sentiment, of course, comes from Oliver Twist. The second from Caligula as recorded by Seutonius in Lives of the Caesars. One neck so he could chop it off, of course.
And I have good news. Caligula and Oliver have spawned. Not by any Elon Musk neurochip. But by honest pregnancy. Well, almost…
I heard about this story from an opinion piece in the Guardian. And, as usual, being the sort of person who is more interested in the lives of John Stuart Mill and Dr Johnson than in the lives of Tailor Swift, A Dell, ‘Peter’ Grimes, Kay T Perr E and others, I had to reconstruct the story with some retrospective surgery of the Frankenstein sort.
Surrogacy might not always be good. I’ll say. She instances neglect of children, neglect of mothers, etc., which is fair enough but misses the fact that surrogacy might be intrinsically – that is, absolutely – and not only instrumentally – that is, sometimes – wrong. Might be. Anyhow.
The fact: Lily Collins (who?) has given birth – but not quite given birth – to a child. Surrogacy, you see. (Quick, check what surrogacy means: donor egg or birth mother’s egg? IVF? Abortion? It’s all very confusing.) Parents post news on Instagram. Public responds, not always kindly. Father says, “Now, now, don’t criticise the missus,” and “Hey, you have no right to know our motives.”
I was about to give up on this entertainment – i.e. “One neck” rather than “Having some more”. But I decided to ask Google about this Lily Collins. Any relation to Lily Allen? Or Katy Perry? Or Laurie Penny?
No, not at all.
Daughter of Phil Collins.
And her husband, Charlie McDowell?
I found an article that said Lily Collins had prevailed upon her in-laws to watch a television programme. Newsworthy. Please, sir, can I have some more, etc. But the in-laws were Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, names I recognised, and – hang on, what, eh? How were they the in-laws of a McDowell? I sighed and asked Google again.
Son of Malcolm McDowell.
McDowell being a former husband of Steenburgen. Ah. Now, for those of you who are not geniuses like Einstein, this sort of thing is the closest we ever get to a Eureka moment: joining the celebrity dots. Craig Brown had fun with this in his little book of celebrity encounters, One to One, depicting encounters between Noël Coward and the Beatles, etc. (He reported no child, not even by surrogate, for that.)
So the daughter of Phil Collins and the son of Malcolm McDowell have produced a child. (By surrogacy.)
Phil Collins: drummer. Originally lead actor in Oliver! in the 1960s, famous since then as drummer in Genesis and later as singer for Genesis and under his own name. Recently had to give up drumming due to years of heavy impact and bad posture.
Malcolm McDowell: actor. Originally lead actor in the Lindsay Anderson film If…, also A Clockwork Orange. Hit a peak with Caligula, the mixed-pornographic-art film of the 1970s, and since then has been found agreeably smiling as the short-white-haired bad man in various Hollywood romps.
Oliver and Caligula.
Both famous since the 1960s.
Apex celebrities since the 1970s.
A granddaughter.
But not by nature – by art. Or by nature, oddly adjusted by art.
Surrogacy is a sort of simulacrum of natural birth, while still, just about, being natural: sperm, egg, womb, birth. We are not yet giving birth via rubber bladder, test tube, Lycra eggs or a SpaceX coffee cup. However, one sees why the progeny of actors and drummers might favour surrogacy, as art, music and theatre are all about creating a parallel reality. It is magic and pretence and living in two worlds at once: men goofing about in a room and creating magical, wonderful, involving art. Plus, no time to bear or labour over anything.
The real question is: what is to be perpetuated in the world as the Collins and McDowell bloodlines combine? Will we have an ability to play drums in 9/8 with an ability to listen to Beethoven with one’s eyelids peeled back? Possibly.
It is very tricky, morally speaking.
But it is very amusing that the simulacra of Oliver Twist and Caligula –Collins the drummer and McDowell the actor – have had their bloodlines combined.
What do you think of this news? Have some more? Or one neck?
About McDowell, I have no particular view. I tend to be a bit sneering about actors. Repeating other people’s words! Collins, however, is, as a songwriter and drummer, an originator and not merely a simulacrum artist: and, as with Bonham, Starr, Moon or Bruford, one is very close to some primal sense of time and the punctuation of time. It is profound. There is something very profound about a drum kit that turns a mere man into the closest we have to an octopus – a chess player of four limbs under extreme time constraints, always playing blitz. And there is something wonderful about well-drummed music. When I was younger, I didn’t notice, but now I marvel at Drumeo videos and exult in studies of Steve Gadd’s Aja or John Bonham’s Fool in the Rain. I spent my youth liking melody and harmony, but not so much rhythm – not consciously, at least, not the way I do now. So I feel some homage is due to these masters of rhythm, markers of time.
If you are interested, there is something quite incredible about the rhythm Collins uses for the instrumental section of Cinema Show, where he plays in seven time: 7/8 – a wholly unintuitive number to count – and does so without using the trick Pink Floyd used in Money. For Money, Roger Waters simply added one more beat after two bars of 3/4, i.e. [slowly] ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three + four. This is good, but far less impressive than what Collins did. In Cinema Show, he avoided such crude addition by dividing the bar of seven into two bars of three-and-a-half. Here the effect is [quickly] one-two-three-and, one-two-three-and, where each and is half a beat. It sounds odd when written, but what one has is a forceful and catchy rhythm that counts seven, irregularly, as if veering to the right and then veering to the left. Listen to it (from 5:55 in this). Once you learn this rhythm, you will never unlearn it. Whenever I clap, I always clap in this rhythm, which I am sure sounds as pretentious as a bald eagle of me, but it is true, and I do it – or started doing it years ago – mostly because it is exciting. By contrast, clapping in 2/4, or whatever rhythm other people use, seems like a very muted celebration of a performance.
It is a bit sad that the daughter of Collins became a mere actress, unlike his son, who is also a drummer. But there we are.
This story has no significance except its service to the gaiety of nations.
The child is called Tove, by Jove.
Good luck to everyone.
And listen to some drums, e.g. this marvellous accompaniment of an otherwise not-much T Swift song.
Have some more? Or one neck?
Dr James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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I think it’s clear that on various levels, these people are collaborators and have been offered a special place in the post-industrial gulag that has been constructed around us since early 2020. Whether any of them are clever enough to realise is another matter but I think they should be considered collaborators and accessories to the crimes against humanity that ‘climate change’ and ‘covid-19’ represent. Every word their traitorous mouths utter about climate or vaccination is evidence that must one day be used against them.
Never mind the few filthy rich celebrities private-jetting across the world; If there really was a climate “emergency” (you know, one of those must-act-now-or-bad-things-will happen-immediately-scenarios) then why haven’t the airlines taken one for the team and scrapped their business- and first-class sections and filled them out with economy seats instead?
I know it sounds extreme, but this is an emergency is it not?
If it were an emergency then extreme measures like this would be justified, perhaps even insisted on to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the aviation industry (and this would dramatically reduce it).
The answer is simple: “Emergency” is not the correct word at all to describe the current environmental circumstances. In fact it’s a vast overstatement that has been invoked for many decades by hysterical activists. (Don’t get me wrong, I agree wholeheartedly with environmental activism, as an antidote to the destruction us humans have left in our wake over the past century, but that destruction has taken the form of deforestation, water pollution and many other collective assaults on the earth, rather than carbon, climate and all the rest of this silly little mind game that’s been visited upon us).
Pretty much any preachy pronouncement on any subject from a member of the elites is likely to stink of hypocrisy
Any pronouncements from the self-styled elites will be stuffed with hypocrisy. The two go together like bread and cheese.
Arkle and Markle fly half way round the globe in a private jet. Arkle disembarks, takes his shoes off and then lectures the world on saving the planet. Admittedly the Windsors have severe intellectual deficiencies but crap like this suggests Ging needs the bottom block. Sharpish.