The BBC’s headline read ‘Bolton appointed US envoy to UN”, and suddenly I found myself hoping that it was Michael Bolton. What a splendid envoy he would be! Crimped mane streaming behind him, its middle parting as white and straight as the American Dream, his linen shirt open to the medallion-line, he would clutch the speaker’s microphone with both bejewelled hands and tell it from the heart and the Heartland.
Then, his face a mask of yearning agony, his curious tenor (testiculari constrictissimo) cracking from the sheer emotion of it all, he would address Washington’s concerns over China’s Most Favoured Nation trading status in light of alleged human rights abuses. ‘How can we be lovers when we can’t be friends? How can we make love when we can’t make amends?” And the Honourable Mr Bolton’s response to his country’s perceived abandonment of the Iraqi people? ‘I said I loved you, but I lied —”
Had people, I wondered, been overcome with a similar irrational yearning in 1969 to discover that it was not Neil but Louis Armstrong who was radioing back from the Eagle at Tranquillity Base? How wonderful it would have been to have Satchmo, nattily togged out in pressurised space-waistcoat and gravity-spats, crackling across the void, ‘Mission Control, I see fields of green, red roses too —” How much more significant to have watched him shuffle away on to that twilit plain to fill his moon-trumpet with lunar soil samples, only to look up and gasp, ‘What a wonderful world!”
But then, as now, realpolitik would have ruined the moment. Had Armstrong reported seeing friends shaking hands, saying how do you do (‘Mission Control, they’re only saying ‘I love you’”), Houston would have panicked, desperate to know if they were saying it in English or Russian. And so it was in Washington: a different Bolton, an opportunity lost, Big Ballade diplomacy deferred.
Musings on music and modernity were complicated by the SABC’s screening of Shine, the story of Australian pianist and roguish groper of women’s breasts, David Helfgott, who triumphed over a ferocious inability to dress himself and is now one of the bestselling classical pianists of all time.
Of course one would never begrudge a bloke like Helfgott his fame: not only has he had to deal with mental illness, but allegations abound that his wife keeps him off his meds so that his passion for playing the piano isn’t blunted. And you can’t expect a guy to tour for free, you know: tickets to his concerts are among the most expensive in the world.
Which is curious, since critics agree that his ham-fisted honky-tonk clangings show all the touch and expression of a grand piano being dropped out of an aeroplane on to the head of Wile E Coyote. Most better classical radio stations will not play him, because they have minimum standards.
But the public, it seems, doesn’t. The people who buy Helfgott’s offerings do so to celebrate the human spirit, and because they’ve never heard real musicians. Indeed, one critic described his squirming horror at being trapped in one of the Australian’s recital in New Zealand, at which the audience burst into human-spirit-celebrating showers of applause during a quiet bit of Chopin, being of the demographic who thinks a song is ending when it gets softer. You know, like on the radio. That’s rather like walking out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when Frank N Furter says, ‘I see you shiver in antici —” because you think it’s over.
Luckily, impending elitist apoplexy was staved off by the first episode of the new local Idols series. Some snooty wags have suggested that the entire idea encourages mediocrity. Piffle. Idols encourages nothing except indiscriminate napalming. And it gives the M-Net-watching, mostly white middle class exactly what it wants. That this happens to be mediocrity is entirely coincidental.
Besides, there was nothing mediocre about young Michael from Cape Town, whose awkward teenage body and shaggy head belied a misunderstood soul seething over its mistreatment by the universe. To be fair, he didn’t sound worse than anything you’d hear on commercial radio or at feeding time in a Triassic bog; and his rage at the judges’ dismissal of his talents seemed not entirely unjustified.
But what rage! What Old Testament righteousness and brooding vengeance! Watch this kid. He’s going to go places. Probably in an armoured car at the head of a column of tanks making a daring dash through the Low Countries.
And Michael Bolton won’t be there to mediate.