The Bluestocking, vol 239

Frizelda the Follower Fairy

Happy Friday!

Whatever you think of the rail strike, the RMT’s Mick Lynch had a great week, rebuffing Richard Madeley asking him if he is a Marxist; Piers Morgan having a go about his Facebook profile picture being a Thunderbird; Kay Burley trying to get him to confess to wanting to do some scab-bashing, and a Tory MP waffling about how the strike was disrespectful to veterans (v. much the right-wing equivalent of “IN PRIDE MONTH????”).

Helen

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Photo by Simon Noh on Unsplash

Where Did The Long Tail Go? (Ted Gioia, Substack)

If you’re a musician, there’s almost no way to earn a middle-class living if you operate on the fringes. We still have musicians trying to do just that, but instead of gaining recognition as representatives of a vital counterculture, they merely languish as the forgotten souls that the mainstream culture left behind.

The bottom line is that the blockbuster hit didn’t die. It didn’t die in movies. It didn’t die in books. It didn’t die in music. The contrary happened. It was the counterculture that got squeezed and marginalized.

And if you’re looking for the final irony, check out both the front cover and back cover of The Long Tail book, where the first thing the publisher announces is that the book is a BESTSELLER! If they really believed that the blockbuster hit was dead and small niches are the future, they would have made a different claim—something along the lines of: buy the book everyone else is afraid to read. Because that’s what a flourishing underground culture actually says to the mainstream public.

Interesting read on a future that didn’t happen.

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Photo by E. Diop on Unsplash

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Depp v Heard (Sarah Hepola, Substack)

On one side, a global army of Depp stans, the phrase itself like a new country, Deppistan, who saw this as the last great hope to save a man wronged by media overreach, an activism gone awry, and a woman far more cunning than coverage lead us to believe. On the other side — well, what was the other side? A brave few voiced support for the Internet’s number-one villain, who dared make her bruises public (though the bruises were disputed), while most Heard supporters gathered in tucked-away corners to bond over the familiar sight of a powerful man playing the gentleman in public only to play the bully behind closed doors. Far more legion was the army of regular folks appalled that we watched this at all. A war raged in Ukraine. A war raged in our streets — gun violence, the roll-back of Roe v. Wade, a pandemic that kept leveling up — and we wanted to talk about these two assholes?

“It’s our generation’s OJ,” said a 32-year-old man standing in line to enter the court at 6am. It was the fourth week of the trial, and competition for those 100 seats had grown so fierce that people camped overnight. The line was mostly women, about 95%. They came from the area, or they drove in from Ohio, Florida, Alabama. A sign posted outside the courthouse said the line couldn’t form before 1am, so the hard-cores devised a numbering system and gathered in the parking garage till then with their fleece blankets and folding chairs, using a nearby bathroom at the juvenile detention center. They played cards, they played Johnny Depp trivia. People watching on YouTube sent delivery pizzas and cases of Red Bull. “The solidarity is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” the man told me, and that includes the time he camped overnight for a Harry Potter book release.

This is the best piece I’ve read on Depp v Heard—it’s a real testament to the idea of reporting, i.e. sitting through every single bit of evidence and being in the room where it happens. This was the first TikTok trial, and part of that is down to the legacy media outlets not offering the same level of coverage.

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European Royalty Corner: Last week was Princess Ingrid Alexandra of Norway’s 18th official birthday celebrations (the British royals appear to have been NFI). One of the portraits was of five heirs to the throne.

Left to right: Princess Estelle of Sweden, Princess Amalia of the Netherlands, Princess Ingrid of Norway, Princess Elisabeth of Belgium and Prince Charles of Luxembourg. This is four future queens and a future Grand Duke. (The heir to the Spanish throne, Leonor, is also female.)

Also present at the dinner was Princess Martha Louise of Norway, 50, who renounced her place in the monarchy and now lives in LA. Her daughter Leah is a TikTok beauty influencer and Martha Louise recently announced her engagement to Gwyneth Paltrow’s favourite shaman. He says he thinks they first met in a past life when they ruled Egypt together. (What are the chances of being royal in two reincarnations, eh? Some people have all the luck.)

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Quick Links

1. “On the other hand, my years of reviewing have taught me that sometimes the least promising titles turn out to be the most interesting. Who would have imagined that the autobiography of Big Brother blabbermouth Jade Goody would be anything other than trashy? But in fact it was an eye-opener, a window on to poverty and deprivation in modern Britain. When Jade was a baby, her father used to hide guns under her cot. Aged four, she was made to roll joints for her mother. Aged five, she was beaten by her mother until she was bruised all over her body, and sent to foster parents.” Craig Brown signs off 20 years of book reviewing (Mail on Sunday).

2. “He is by far the angriest man I meet in Devon. This is not raging North Shropshire, where former Conservatives would denounce Johnson on street-corners, or Chesham and Amersham, where the atmosphere was a kind of gleeful transgression in sunlight. It feels sadder than that: splintered, tetchy, defeated, as if Johnson’s corruption is settling over everything like dust, leaving people bewildered and exhausted.” Tanya Gold visits Tiverton (Unherd).

3. Peter Hitchens’s ceaseless war against ‘Frizelda the Follower Fairy,’ whom he believes is depriving him of twitter fans.

4. “Earlier this month Lucy Grieve, the co-founder of Back Off Scotland, wrote an article for The Scotsman outlining the need to travel from Scotland to England for second-trimester abortions, since no health board in Scotland provides abortion care up to the longstanding legal limit of 24 weeks. . . In Northern Ireland abortion was decriminalised in October 2019. But abortion services have still not been commissioned, as the health minister, Robin Swann, has refused to comply.” Laws don’t mean anything without access. (Guardian)

5. If Trump and Biden don’t run, there’s a decent chance that the next US presidential election could be Ron DeSantis, Republican scourge of Disneyland Florida, versus Gavin Newsom, California Democrat. I’m still looking for a good profile of the latter, but the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins has just obliged on DeSantis: “Articulate and fast on his feet, he has been described as Trump with a brain.”

6. “These days, it feels as if an identity that, not long ago, felt unique to me in most rooms I entered has gone mass.” It’s no fun to be non-binary when all your friends are also non-binary (The Cut).

7. You can find my latest Start the Week, on the legacy of Nuremberg and war crimes today, here.

See you next time!