James Bell Central

Kindness and Cunning

So that was summer, folks! I found it absolutely exhausting, perhaps because in large part it was seven weeks of childcare on top of working two part-time jobs. Not terrible by any means, but exhausting. And hot, obviously.

Speaking of which, this month I’m going to grapple with faint climate change optimism (feel free to skip that if it’s a topic you don’t have the emotional bandwidth for right now).

Other than that, it’s mainly celebrating some iconic musicians of yesteryear, because that’s been how it’s been.

Nothing to add on a personal front, really, because I haven’t had time to focus on anything. (Except doomscrolling.)

But enough burying the lead. Let’s talk about Dolly.

Obituary

RIP DOLLY PARTON

A number of icons died in quick succession recently: Tim Curry, Yayoi Kusama, and of course Dolly Parton.

Each of them leaves a big hole in our popular culture, but we all know Dolly was something else.

I tend to feel that when someone dies over the age of, say, 75… at least they lived a full life. However, Dolly Parton was still contributing to culture in a big way. Her funding of the Moderna vaccine. Her support for the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course, the continued funding of her Imagination Library project.

I’ll write a bit more about that side in a moment, but I just want to focus on my obsession: songwriting.

I was just singing 9 To 5 to myself, and when I got to “working 9 to 5, for service and devotion” I thought, as I often do, wait – what does that actually mean? You’re working for service and devotion? Does that mean anything?

And then I remembered that “for service and devotion” is actually the beginning of the next line: “For service and devotion, you would think that I would deserve a fair promotion.”

Silly me for second-guessing Dolly Parton’s songwriting skills.

Many great songwriters will throw in lines that don’t mean anything but sound kind of cool. (Looking at you, Nick Drake.) The greats of American country music never never never do that. Every line is load-bearing.

They might try to use as few syllables as possible. They might nod respectfully to their framed icon of Hank Williams on the wall, and try to write in the most plain, accessible, easy-to-understand language that they can.

But everything needs to mean something. Everything needs to have a point.

People keep covering, and will continue to cover, Jolene, 9 To 5, I Will Always Love You and her other classics because she always had something to say, and it’s usually something that continues to be relevant.

Recommended

TAP

One thing this newsletter has demonstrated over the years is that YouTube is good at taking algorithmic swings at something I didn’t know I needed.

By the 1980s the culture of tap dancing – which had been a powerhouse of American popular culture in the early to mid 20th century – was very much on the wane.

Nobody really cared about Sammy Davis Jnr and the other icons of that era.

But Gregory Hines did. The last carrier of the torch, he and his brother dazzled the movie-goers in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and that gave him an acting career outside of tap dance.

He died way too young, but he did manage to get this film made where, in this scene, he brings out all the greats and reminds you just how talented they were.

Now, you might not give a shit about tap dancing – that’s okay, most people don’t. But what’s happening in this scene is something else, I think.

Look at how old these people are! These people are old. These people are really really old.

And look at the extraordinary precision that they can still get from their bodies.

I find this one of the most uplifting movie scenes to deal with ageing. If any of these people had to do a gruelling world tour for six months, at that age, it would probably kill them. But get them in a room with their friends, and the talent is there, and the joy is there, and the decades of learning is there.

And it’s just fucking great.

Recommended

FRANÇOISE HARDY

Another icon who passed away recently (at the age of 80).

She was a queen of the French 1960s pop music scene, influenced by The Beatles and English language pop music but still très français.

This was one of her biggest hits, and a long-favourite of mine – I was amazed to recently find there was actually a music video for it. And goddammit if she isn’t every bit as cool and stylish as they said she was.

Not hard to see why Mick Jagger was totally obsessed with her.

Recommended

TOM SCOTT on BLETCHLEY PARK

OG YouTuber and one of the Internet’s favourite nerds, Tom Scott officially retired from his weekly YouTube video routine a few years ago, and (literally) flew off into the sunset.

He’s clearly had a good break, because now he’s back, and moving ever closer to the sort of BBC Four documentaries I used to love watching.

In fact, I think he very much has that David Attenborough / Michael Palin energy – which (as H will attest to) is pretty much the highest praise possible from me.

Here he is on a tour of Bletchley Park, talking to the guides and historians and getting some fascinating insights.

I mean, I am a middle-aged Englishman so this stuff is crack to me, but still, highly recommended.

Recommended

WINK & YOU MISS IT

Listening to Say You’ll Be There by the Spice Girls the other day, I was reminded that in the 1990s there was a synthesiser that everyone seemed to be obsessed about.

In fact, throughout the 80s and 90s there were two drum machines and one synth that basically became their own genres, and they were all made by the same company. They were: the Roland TR-808, the Roland TR-909… and the Roland TB-303. (Daft Punk’s first album had all three, and little else.)

Fatboy Slim’s first single was actually called Everybody Needs A 303, and after that it was everywhere.

But I think Norman (Fatboy Slim) Cook probably took his inspiration from this track I’m recommending: the national anthem for a particular kind of UK Raver.

Higher State of Consciousness by Josh Wink.

I think this was the first track that was about the 303. The focus is this keyboard riff that just loops, over and over, getting progressively more insane.

Also, I love the video which was filmed at a music festival just down the road in Otmoor. So even though it was a little bit before my time, it’s all kinds of nostalgia for me.

This is the ‘official music video’, by the way. Not to be confused with the other 112 official music videos for this track that you can find on YouTube.

Recommended

PEAK FRANK DREBIN

YouTube occasionally feeds me clips from the parody police show Police Squad, and it reminded me of this – which constantly squats rent-free in my mind.

Technically from the movie The Naked Gun, this is the best kind of parody of detective noir fiction.

Recommended

LOST WEEKEND by PHOEBE BRIDGERS

Still giddy, no doubt, from his success at the last Bastard Session in indoctrinating my entire family in the ways of drop dead by Olivia Rodrigo, Peter decided to try his luck again recommending the new Phoebe Bridgers album Lost Weekend – particularly this song.

The tone reminds me a lot of Billie Eilish, who I’m a big fan of. But I’ve been so busy these last few weeks that I have dipped in and out of the album but haven’t really been able to get immersed in it. Hopefully that will come.

But two things I love:

I love the opening lines to this first song (and therefore the album):

Crying in a suit and tie
But you should see the other guy

I also love this video, which is a ‘lyric video’ – something I never really saw the point of. ‘Either make a proper music video or don’t’ was perhaps my view.

But I realise when I was a young lad (in the 1840s) we had cassette and CD booklets where we could read the lyrics to while listening to the song. (Sure, you can do that on Spotify, but it’s an audio platform and it never occurs to me.) So being able to hear the song and see the lyrics can help get the meaning – particularly as they stay on screen as they get added.

Also, I initially thought this video would be lyrics over a photograph, but it’s actually a static video shot of fireflies (? other insects?) dancing in the beam of a laser over what looks like a Los Angeles flood control channel. Which seems to perfectly capture the mood.

So… maybe lyric videos are good now?

So this was the summer where it felt like climate change went up a notch. Frankly, I think every summer recently has felt like that, depending on where you are in the world, but this was Oxford’s turn.

The last big shock for me was actually the flooding of 2012 to 2014, which felt… I dunno, biblical. It just rained and rained, and I was living by myself on the boat, and it was a baptism of fire. Except it was water. And not a baptism.

Anyway, here we are.

My algorithmic feeds are like “Cool! You’re back on the climate collapse doom-scrolling? Here, shovel this down, you anxious little rabbit – we’ve got you on the platform for another hour at least…”

That said, I’m actually starting to see a bit more reasons for cautious optimism than I have for a while. I don’t think climate change will make humans extinct: we’re extraordinarily resourceful fuckers.

But of course, I might be wrong – and either way I do think it’s going to get rough in our lifetimes.

Do you know about the geopolitical significance of the petrodollar, by the way? I feel embarrassed I didn’t learn about it sooner, because I realise now it’s the elephant in the climate change summit.

Every country’s economy needs energy: for factories, hospitals, transport systems, homes, etc. And for the latter part of the 20th century, that energy tended to come from oil. Oil was always traded in US dollars – hence the ‘petrodollar’. So when oil-producing countries sold oil to the US they would get dollars in return, which they would frequently want to invest in the safest assets they could: US government bonds. It became known as ‘petrodollar recycling’, and was something of a virtuous circle for the US economy.

But it all relied on oil. Particularly in key Republican-controlled US states, where oil is still critical to their major businesses: petroleum refining, oil-fired power generation, plastics, fertiliser, asphalt, lubricants, etc.

Which meant that noises would occasionally be made about preventing climate change, but behind the scenes any meaningful action was sabotaged.

Now of course, in the second Trump term, they’re saying the quiet bit loud: the US government is actively embracing fossil fuels as quickly and intensively as they can, and trying to crush clean energy, which they see as a ‘competitor’. Which is obviously bad.

But, as I have said many times, they are also a bunch of clowns who are destroying US influence on the world stage by the day. They only have a few allies left, who are generally considered pariahs, and the rest of the world is trying to escape them, and the petrodollar, as quickly as they can.

Enter China.

Here is some good news:

TLDR: China has long been obsessed with energy independence from the United States, and their considerable production of clean energy products has just been stepped up dramatically.

And countries are snapping it up like… well, like there’s no tomorrow. Pakistan, for example, has been electrifying so quickly that in 2025, for the first time, more of its power was generated from clean energy (55%) than fossil fuels (45%).

Yes that does still leave us with the problem of economic dependence on China. But if the planet is still habitable we can at least work that problem.

I never liked the movie Cool Hand Luke. Even though it is considered one of Paul Newman’s greatest, and I’m a big Paul Newman fan.

The movie is a little bit like The Shawshank Redemption, except the Powers That Be successfully grind the hero down and win. The fact that the hero finally accepts his fate is even pitched as kind of a happy ending. It feels like it was written by a prison governor.

The title of the movie comes from a scene in which Newman is playing poker against all the prison tough guys, and he wins through sheer bluff, not having any good cards at all. He demonstrates that “sometimes even nothing can be a pretty cool hand”.

I’ve been thinking about that line a lot in the last few days. If you want to see what making the best out of a bad hand really looks like, I think you’re much better off looking at Dolly Parton.

She has spoken an interviews about how a bank teller had a crush on her husband, and her husband had a crush on the bank teller, and he was spending more and more time at the bank and that was the inspiration for the song Jolene. After she released that song I imagine her husband got himself in check pretty quick.

Apparently the same day that she wrote Jolene, she wrote arguably her most famous song.

At 21 years old, she had become a co-host on the TV show of extremely influential country singer Porter Wagoner. In 1973 she wanted to leave to start her own solo career, and he threatened to sue her if she did.

She left, but as she did she released the song I Will Always Love You, and dedicated it to him. He did sue her, he won, and she eventually paid him many years later, but the audience was absolutely on Dolly’s side. (Footnote: when Wagoner was old and sick and broke and dying, Dolly bought back his publishing rights that he had sold, gave them back to him so they would support his children, and stayed with him in hospital till the end.)

Then of course there was the time when Elvis wanted to cover the song, and she was delighted. But ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker wanted her to give up half the rights for the privilege. And, in her characteristically charming way, she said no thank you, go fuck yourself.

When Whitney Houston eventually turned to the song into the biggest hit of the 1990s, thanks to her movie The Bodyguard, you might expect there to be jealousy and animosity. Dolly heaped praise on Whitney’s version, however, and invested the royalties into numerous good causes.

I mean, I could go on, obviously.

But the main thing the obituaries have been reminding me is that she had (in spades) the two most important virtues we all need for navigating through this life.

The first is kindness. The second is cunning.