La Terrasse

‘Selling all of you to all of you’

2012-02-05T11:13:00.000Z

It was good to see Dennis Potter on television again this week, in a repeat of a 1987 interview with Alan Yentob (still on iPlayer for the next few days). He said this:

Capitalism now is actually about selling all of you to all of you, but they don’t know what it is they’re selling – the only object is to keep in the game, to keep selling something.

I wondered at first whether the pronouns were wrong – shouldn’t it be ‘us’ and ‘we’ for ‘you’ and ‘they’? But no, there were corporations in 1987, pushing sales through contexts for sales; and there are corporations now, even more literally selling us to ourselves. So maybe ‘us’ would have been better, but it wouldn’t do to forget about ‘they’.

Here is Kirill Medvedev, in the new issue of n+1:

The entire progressive intellectual tradition of the 20th century has tried to oppose large-scale government-engineered projects and geopolitical divisions. And yet today’s intellectual – who values these traditions – will sometimes conveniently forget that, for example, his ability to realise his wonderful particularity, uniqueness, and inimitability (in his creative endeavors and rich and varied personal life) is available to him and other Europeans thanks to the fact that his government buys natural gas at a reduced price from the tyrant of Turkmenistan. […] Should we stop writing poems? Go crazy from guilt? No. No. We just need to transform our picture of the world a little, and we can begin by ceasing to talk nonsense about the clash of civilisations.

Because otherwise you become an appendage of the system that allows you to take up whatever art you want, develop whatever styles, discourses, and poetics you want, on the condition that you do not interfere with politics, with real life.

Lastly, I don’t have the exact quote for this, but one of the TV interviews on the Psychocandy reissue has Jim Reid furiously rebuffing a comparison of the Jesus and Mary Chain to Joy Division, as Bobby makes out exaggeratedly with a girl on the sofa beside him. It’s iconoclastic stuff: ‘I’m not even comfortable with us being mentioned in the same sentence as Joy Division, Joy Division were rubbish. Our rivals are Duran Duran*.’

These things seemed to be related somehow.

____________________

* On reflection, I think he might have said Spandau Ballet.

Azita – ‘Disturbing the Air’

2012-01-29T14:57:00.000Z

Listing William Hazlitt’s ‘brilliant passages’ last time, he seemed to emerge as a more forthright, and a far cooler presence than he does from the essays themselves. His acute critical sense does tend to lay waste to his subject, and he doesn’t spare himself. ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’ is one of the most vicious essays in Table Talk, and there is a thread running through the book suggesting that if you say, or ‘fix’ something, you kill it: ‘The ideas we cherish most exist best in a kind of shadowy abstraction’. That he fixes so many of his shadowy abstractions is to our benefit, rather than his own. Elsewhere he draws a line between actor and celebrity:

An actor, after having performed his part well, instead of courting further distinction, should affect obscurity, and ‘steal most guilty-like away,’ conscious of admiration that he can support nowhere but in his proper sphere.

This is one of my favourite ideas, one which always makes me think of Kristin Hersh’s sleeve notes to the In a Doghouse compilation, in which she says:

the idea was always to leave a big, fancy present on the table and tiptoe out of the room

And now it crops up again, in a fractured song thrust through the fabric of this record in three places, at the beginning, middle and end:

Disturbing the air
Every time you move

Always on a slightly lower, more minor piano chord than you had remembered. It’s insane modesty in one sense (‘do I dare disturb the universe?’); in another an exaggerated, paranoid sense of contingency; in another a description of depression, when to move a limb through the heavy air seems all but impossible.

The thing I most want to say about Disturbing the Air is, it’s a different type of record to anything else I came across last year. There’s a risk of making it sound precious and self-absorbed, in comparison to those other albums which, when they are sad, want consolation, knowing that things will get better; when they are tender, it is with hope; when they are dark, it is with glee. Like Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career in 2009, Disturbing the Air casts aside these crutches. All it wants to do is document, with wit but without laughter, the shadowy abstractions of an attachment which mustn’t fail, but which has failed:

Sweep these ashes from my soul, I need my rest
You had to cut me down once you knew you were the one I loved the best
(‘Parrots’)

I have staked my soul more than I could afford
(‘September’)

It struck me, how rare it is for anyone to remind me of Mark Eitzel, whose command of this kind of situation is more recursive than most – it’s not just that you see that I love you, and therefore hold me in contempt; it’s also that I see your pathetic reasons for rejecting me, and spurn them. Compassion is saved from smugness by abjection. There are hints of this kind of thing from Azita: beyond the initial anger (‘see you in hell’, she snarls, in ‘Parrots’) is compassion for ‘my love’’s unfulfilled promise in life, which is anything but bitchy:

Say you’re the finest up why don’t you rise high and shining
Everyone waited for you
(‘Say You’re the Finest’)

Jon mentions, in his fine review which I’m trying not to be too influenced by, that there is a shift about a third of the way into the record, when despair gives way to impressionistic metaphor, and the tone lightens somewhat. Emotionally, the shift is from anger to reminiscence, from reaction to review, and here are circumstances which can’t be killed by fixing, because they are already dead. Fixing them is an attempt to preserve them, but once done, the relationship, twice killed now, begins to erode the singer’s identity in a second shift:

When I step into that silence I too will disappear
(‘Ghost (When I Are You)’)

Should I be other
Or not at all
All of those years piled up
Bundled and burned

Should I be lost to you
That can’t be me

Who could be there but not there?
(all from ‘Should I Be?’)

When did a ghost ever disturb the air?

In closing, the peaceful ‘Keep Hymn’ piles up more of the religious references (‘Close your eyes with holy dread / And pray for peace’) which are scattered through the other songs too. They appear as an extension of unreality, the loneliest, most impersonal crutch. This record is remarkable for its beauty, ‘acoustic chamber music’, another review calls it, which is about right – despite the nature imagery, it never takes you outside, unless it’s to an unlit ocean at night (in ‘Stars or Fish’). And that beauty comes from its control and its singularity of purpose – despite the agonies on show, it never occurs to the listener to feel sorry for Azita. Disturbing the Air is a deep dark well from which to draw strength.

William Hazlitt – ‘Table Talk’

2012-01-22T12:47:00.000Z

got side-tracked a few times whilst reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Her own book of essays, The Common Reader, which I thoroughly recommend, lists all the great things which were going on a hundred years prior to its publication:

Waverley, The Excursion, Kubla Khan, Don Juan, Hazlitt’s Essays, Pride and Prejudice, Hyperion and Prometheus Unbound were all published between 1800 and 1821.

A hundred years further on, it would not be difficult to compile a list of great things published between 1900 and... well, 1922, let’s stretch it to, to take in ‘The Waste Land’, Ulysses and Cops, but it needs that distance, I suppose. Woolf (whose Hogarth Press published ‘The Waste Land’, and turned down Ulysses) thinks her age has nothing comparable. She writes, too, about the decline of the essay form, and it would be hard to disagree with that. Nineteenth century literature has survived into the twenty first century as a clutch of classic novels, and there is much to be said for time’s pruning of the canon, but it doesn’t hurt to go off into the undergrowth once in a while.

Like Woolf’s diaries, Table Talk is endlessly quotable (it’s not bad at quoting, either). From a novel-reader’s point of view, it often seems very compressed, piling high the kind of truths which would be scattered amongst dramatised scenes in, say, a George Eliot novel. He pre-empts this in ‘On Genius and Common Sense’:

it is rather an odd objection to a work that it is made up entirely of ‘brilliant passages’ (p. 68)

Once again, I don’t think I can do better than to pick out some highlights.

The ideas we cherish most exist best in a kind of shadowy abstraction, and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view. (pp. 7-8, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’)

A topic of this sort of which the person himself may be considered as almost sole proprietor and patentee is an estate for life, free from all encumbrance of wit, thought, or study, you live upon it as a settled income; and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital freehold house and estate as think to desire you out of it into the wide world of common sense and argument. (pp. 87-8, ‘On People with One Idea’)

If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators. (p. 110, ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’)

A great chess player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. (p. 122, from ‘The Indian Jugglers’)

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgement, so that, in short, the public ear is at the mercy of the first impudent pretender who chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or false surprises, or secret whispers. (p. 141, ‘On Living to One’s Self’)

Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. (p. 228, ‘On Vulgarity and Affectation’)

But we may be sure of this, that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage, in a writer that is the god of a nation’s idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. (p. 321, ‘On Criticism’)

I hate anything that occupies more space that it is worth. I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. (p. 355, ‘On Familiar Style’)

Such are the qualifications and the apprenticeship necessary to make a man tolerated, to enable him to pass as a cipher, or to be admitted as a mere numerical unit, in any corporate body: to be a leader and dictator he must be diplomatic in impertinence, and officious in every dirty work. He must not merely conform to established prejudices; he must flatter them. He must not merely be insensible to the demands of moderation and equity; he must be loud against them. He must not simply fall in with all sorts of contemptible cabals and intrigues; he must be indefatigable in fomenting them, and setting everybody together about the ears. He must not only repeat but invent lies. (p. 389, ‘On Corporate Bodies’)

An actor, after having performed his part well, instead of courting further distinction, should affect obscurity, and ‘steal most guilty-like away,’ conscious of admiration that he can support nowhere but in his proper sphere. (p. 399, ‘Whether Actors ought to Sit in the Boxes?’)

Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it into a little soap and water? (p. 407, ibid.)

Two from ‘On Patronage and Puffing’, puffing first:

The truth is, we like to have something to admire ourselves, as well as to make other people gape and stare at; but then it must be a discovery of our own, an idol of our own making and setting up:– if others stumble on the discovery before us, or join in crying it to the skies, we then set to work to prove that it is a vulgar delusion, and show our sagacity and freedom from prejudice by pulling it in pieces with all the coolness imaginable. (p. 431)

And patronage, from the point of view of the patronised:

It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walking on terra firma; you are required, at the risk of their friendship, to be always swimming in troubled waters, that they may have the credit of throwing out ropes, and sending out lifeboats to you, without ever bringing you ashore. (p. 439)

Professions pass for nothing, and actions may be counterfeited; but a man cannot help his looks. (p. 443, ‘On the Knowledge of Character’)

You will say, on the other hand, that there is no judging by appearances, as a general rule. No one, for instance, would take such a person for a very clever man without knowing who he was. Then, ten to one, he is not: he may have got the reputation but it is a mistake. […] The best part of his existence is dull, cloudy, leaden: the flashes of light that proceed from it, or streak it here and there, may dazzle others, but do not deceive himself. (p. 444, ibid.)

In looking back, it sometimes appears to me as if I had in a manner slept out my life in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where I have fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures, and only heard in half-murmers the trampling of busy feet, or the noises of the throng below. (p. 475, ‘On the Fear of Death’)

Virginia Woolf – ‘Selected Diaries’

2012-01-13T08:23:00.000Z

To begin the new year with a Friday the 13th. Which does not seem inappropriate, coming to the end of these diaries, which retract when all is not well, like the almost-blank pages in the bleakest section of Paradoxical Undressing. 1936 is not a fun read, as Virginia battles against mood swings to get a handle on writing her novel The Years. Gaps extend to months, indicating the absence of mind, control, awareness, identity, interest. She writes to her future self:

A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down – and Lord knows the truth. (p. 362)

Her attitude towards The Years seems to fluctuate daily between pride and despair, her critical judgement flails, becomes unreliable. Likewise the three months of 1941, before her suicide, are scant of detail, covered in just four pages in this edited version. I knew about the suicide, of course, reading books from my mother’s shelves as a teenager – To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando (I liked the first two a lot – the latter hardly at all), but that small clutch of volumes misled me, perhaps, into assuming that she had died young, rather than on the verge of her 60s. The titles of her books after The Waves are all new to me, and so – except for A Room of One’s Own – is Virginia Woolf the writer of non-fiction.

Leaving aside the sad fact which overwhelms the tail end of the diary, they are – perhaps because they fight so hard – life afirming in the main. There are even jokes; here is Virginia getting her hair cut short in 1927:

Mr Cizec has bingled me. I am short haired for life. […] In front there is no change; behind I’m like the rump of a partridge. (p. 226)

In fact, the diary is so incredibly quote-friendly, let’s not waste any more time.

all descriptions of music are quite worthless, and rather unpleasant; they are apt to be hysterical, and to say things that people will be ashamed of having said afterwards. (p. 12, 1915)

Tea at Spikings, with some of the upper classes; who looked like pet dogs threatened with a cold bath. They were talking of the scarcity of motor cars. (p. 22, 1917)

I’ve numbers of old clothes in my dirty clothes basket – scenes, I mean, tumbled pell mell into my receptacle of a mind, and not extracted till form and colour are almost lost. (p. 102, 1920)

In my heart, too, I prefer the nondescript anonymous days of youth. I like youthful minds; and the sense that no one’s yet anybody. (p. 117, 1920)

never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having. (p. 156, 1923)

On T. S. Eliot:

I am a little bored indeed, and could wish that poor dear Tom had more spunk in him, less need to let drop by drop of his agonised perplexities fall ever so finely through pure cambric. (p. 161, 1923)

I love the clutter an excitement of other people’s houses. (p. 161, 1923)

these curious intervals in life – I’ve had many – are the most fruitful artistically – one becomes fertilised – think of my madness at Hogarth – and all the little illnesses – that before I wrote To the Lighthouse for instance. Six weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece of Moths. (p. 266, 1929)

I use my friends rather as giglamps: there’s another field I see; by your light. (p. 284, 1930)

The new electric boiler in and boiling our bath water this morning. The King of Belgium killed mountaineering. (p. 349, 1934)

Tchotchke Table 3, Christmas Edition

2011-12-22T11:49:00.000Z

Without wanting to get all het up and meta about years-end lists being arbitrary and unrepresentative, because what are records even for if you can’t use them to listen to years other than the one you’re in... Here are some things I liked this year which may or may not be from 2011.

The Orchids – The Lost Star. Damn. I wasn’t going to put this list in order, but The Lost Star kind of demands it. It seeped into my bones over the course of several months, and is head and shoulders over their earlier comeback effort Good to be a Stranger.
Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. More New Order than I had really been expecting (see ‘La Danseuse’), and with songs unexpectedly familiar via Kristin Hersh (twice, with ‘Coo Coo Bird’ and ‘Drunkard’s Special’), Bob Dylan and Nick Cave (‘Stackalee’), there was some serious underpinning here to the folkier side of all that I hold dear.
Jon’s recommendations. However bookish this blog may get sometimes, the best thing about it has always been people getting in touch to say ‘I like The Pastels too’, which tends to lead in interesting directions. In the picture you can see some Django Reinhardt CDs, and one by Noël Akchoté. From this year he pointed out Azita’s amazing Disturbing the Air and from the ’90s, East Village, furthering the Dolly Mixture / Saint Etienne seam nicely. Thanks, Jon! (See also: the Brogues’ and Anneemall’s recommendations).
Tenniscoats – Tokinouta. Told you these numbers were stupid. Pared back and extended, it never breaks the spell for a second.
Laser-cut LP sleeves, specifically Bill Wells’ Lemondale and Muscles of Joy’s self titled debut. Beautiful objects, both. I don’t know either very well yet; it was only yesterday that S. said, of Lemondale’s title track, ‘“Lemondale”... “A Whiter Shade of Pale”’, and I felt daft for not getting it. The Muscles record has a great sound, not entirely un-late-Slits; the songs feel even less song-like than they do live, some interesting shapes going on.
The Slap. I watched quite a lot of TV this year, and despaired of British series (apart from The Crimson Petal and the White, which was great), but from abroad, The Killing was utterly addictive, and The Slap was the kind of psychological, social, inter-relationship drama that the BBC can no longer do. The Hour and The Shadow Line were OK-ish in isolation, but very poor in comparison. Spiral was bonkers, and great too.
Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking. Like the Harry Smith box, a tributary of Joe Boyd’s book White Bicycles. I was shocked how much I liked this, having dismissed the band years before on the basis of one pop-free album from later on. This one is so free and warm. Nico’s Desertshore (another Boyd production), so constrained and cold, can share the number seven spot.
Insides – Euphoria / Disco Inferno – The Five EPs. It’s actually DI’s Technicolour on the table, but The Five EPs finally got a real release this year. ‘The Last Dance’ is one of the best songs ever. I’d heard parts of Euphoria before (on a Guernica label sampler), but not the whole lot. These two were prompted by Neil Kulkarni’s wonderful ‘A New Nineties’ series of articles at The Quietus. Nostalgia as they used to do it in the good old days.
The Beach Boys – SMiLE. After one listen, but, y’know. There’s a hissy 15 minute cut of ‘Good Vibrations’ I have on a tape somewhere, and the 8 minute version at the end of disc 2 has at least some of those transcendently laid back moments which didn’t make it into the single. Incredible to hear it all cleaned up and shiny.
The A-Lords, Veronica Falls, Kate Bush, Brown Recluse – Evening Tapestry, Momus’ ‘Precocious Young Miss Calloway’, Viv Albertine – Flesh, Rozi Plain – Humans, Hong Kong in the 60s – My Fantoms, Vic Godard – Blackpool, The Middle Ones – It is the Rehearsal That Will Make This. That last one should definitely be higher up, actually, such a joyful, unaffected record. I nearly left it behind in the shop, too.

‘Lawrence of Belgravia’ and ‘Take Three Girls’, Glasgow Film Theatre, 4th December

2011-12-05T23:43:00.001Z

In the old days the greatest thing in the world to be was a movie star. Today the greatest thing in the world is to be a pop singer. There will never be a great star unless the greatest thing in the world to be is that kind of star. (Orson Welles, in this 1974 interview.)

‘There were a few scenes that were... set up’, said Lawrence at the Q & A afterwards, on being asked why he hadn’t kept wearing the hat he’d chosen in a charity shop to replace his old, permanently affixed baseball cap. He and Paul Kelly, director of both of Sunday’s Monorail Film Club selections, were discussing the ways in which they’d avoided the pitfalls of the talking head documentary, all those old men reminiscing about how wild it used to be. They’d used interviews Lawrence happened to be doing anyway as a kind of substitute, with great lingering shots on the bemused faces of the interviewers. One with a blogger whose site he promised to check out once the interview was up: ‘A few weeks... well, I’ll have a look in general, to see what it’s like. If you write down the address we’ll have someone in the office bring it up.’ And then: ‘You’re a teacher? You don’t get paid for this?’ [Pause for the 21st century to sink in] ‘I knew the internet was shit.’ The idea of a Lawrence office is pretty ridiculous, it’s as though this was the moment he realised that things had opened up since the days of the charts: that anyone can do what they want, and probably someone, but probably not millions, will be interested. It should be the ideal climate for a man who makes novelty rock with provoking lyrics about African wars (‘Drinking Um Bongo’), cheap drugs (‘At the DDU’) and grim cities (‘City Centre’, ‘Building Site’). The fascinating thing is, he can’t see it that way, he still thinks he’s on his way to ’70s style megastardom.

Paul Kelly said he’d thought of doing six films about overlooked bands, but had run out of ideas after two: ‘Debsey [of Dolly Mixture] is my girlfriend, and I know Lawrence well, which made access easy...’ That’s the self-deprecating way of putting it. More realistically, he may well have had enough after the Lawrence film ended up taking eight years to make. There were scenes right up to 2011 in there – Lawrence’s spot on Domino Radio, and the development of the artwork for the forthcoming On the Hot Dog Streets (almost inevitably, ‘I’ve changed it since’). Lawrence said he might like to try acting in a film after this, and Paul said, laughing, ‘I’m not directing it!’ The Dolly Mixture film, Take Three Girls, was presumably a walk in the park in comparison. More conventional in that it did opt for the talking head format, with separate interviews with all three members intercut, it had source material on its side. Little video footage of Felt exists, but Dolly Mixture were on TV (doing ‘Baby, It’s You’), and someone ‘followed them around for two years’ with a 16mm camera, as luck would have it, so you even got to see them busking for their train fare home after a £25 gig fee got reduced to £5 for ‘sound, and lights’, at £10 each. Their story is an incredibly sweet one, of naivety backed up with hard work (200 gigs a year for several years); a hostile music press; a sympathetic Undertones (who took them on tour); a big box of Dolly Mixture sweets which made Debsey ill, because it was all she lived on for a while (not through choice, they had no money); a sympathetic-ish John Peel, an unsympatheic John Waters, meaning that their Peel session went un-repeated; getting fit with a military regime, starting (of course) with the outfits; getting on to Top of the Pops with Captain Sensible, the death knell of any kind of credibility. Oh, and fading out songs by playing progressively more quietly! ‘We hadn’t realised you can do that in the studio’, said Hester. It seemed a strange decision to play out on a song by someone else (this one), but overall, it was a beautiful evocation of the poppiest of all post-punk groups, and towards the end, there was even a hint that Debsey hasn’t given up on songwriting. Yes please to that!

Given the theme of under-recognised bands, it makes sense that money should be a concern in both films. Debsey’s comment that ‘I haven’t earned my living yet – I’d like to try that’, echoed through Lawrence’s experiences. He is surely right to stand firm on the issue of not re-forming Felt, though what this actually means was brought home in a casual, sad scene when he went to an instrument shop to sell an old guitar – it had ‘FELT’ stencilled behind the bridge and under the strings. He was clear, as he tends to be, about what wealth would mean for him, talking with disgust about rich people who use the tube to get around, slumming it for a sense of connection. ‘Fuck that, I don’t want to see anyone, ever’. He is Garbo on the dole, just as unable to grasp his own context as the biggest, most shielded star. Q & A compère Stuart Murdoch asked him about times in his career which had felt good, and he mentioned signing to EMI (actually EMIDISC, Bob Stanley’s imprint), and getting a new flat after being evicted from the old one for running up arrears and – against his own legend – not looking after it properly. This extreme un-idealism made me wonder about, y’know, artistic achievement – wasn’t listening back to ‘Primitive Painters’ a good moment, for example? He talked in the film about creativity, and produced a Scooby Doo script he wrote at the age of eight. But what is it, exactly, that Lawrence wants to express through his creativity? I’m not on board with all his post-Felt output by any means, but I do like Tearing up the Album Charts a whole lot, with its flights of pretty keyboard sounds, its gentle melodies alongside the immaculately weedy pub rock moments. The soft, precious, classic sound of Felt is misleading in a way – it appears to be far more literary than it is. They were always about pop product, more about The Velvet Underground than any of that band’s bookish leanings. And more about Warhol than The Velvet Underground (I had never realised that the cover of Felt’s The Splendour of Fear is stolen from the poster for Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, until I saw Lawrence thumbing through a poster book in this film). Go-Kart Mozart can sound bafflingly ugly, but they are not vulgar, because they are out there on their own, copying no-one, waiting for all seven billion of us to come around to their marred aesthetic.

As also my Monsters, both wet and dry

2011-12-01T19:21:00.001Z

[More from the second book down, a footnote from the essay ‘On Will-Making’. It is attributed to the Tatler, vol. iv. No. 216.]

The Will of a Virtuoso.

    I, Nicholas Gimcrack, being in sound Health of Mind, but in great Weakness of Body, do by my Last Will and Testament bequeath my worldly Goods and Chattels in Manner following:–
    Imprimis, To my dear Wife,
        One Box of Butterflies,
        One Drawer of Shells,
        A Female Skeleton,
        A Dried Cockatrice.
    Item, To my Daughter Elizabeth,
        My Receipt for preserving dead Caterpillars,
        As also my Preparations of Winter May-Dew, and Embrio Pickle.
    Item, to my little Daughter Fanny,
        Three Crocodiles’ Eggs.
        And upon the Birth of her first Child, if she marries with her Mother’s Consent,
        The Nest of a Humming Bird.
    Item, To my eldest Brother, as an acknowledgement for the Lands he has vested in my Son Charles, I bequeath
        My last Year’s Collection of Grasshoppers.
    Item, To his Daughter Susanna, being his only Child, I bequeath my English Weeds pasted on Royal Paper,
        With my large Folio of Indian Cabbage.
    Having fully provided for my Nephew Isaac, by making over to him some years since
        A horned Scarabæus,
        The Skin of a Rattle-Snake, and
        The Mummy of an Egyptian King,
I make no further Provision for him in this my Will.
    My eldest Son John having spoken disrespectfully of his little Sister, whom I keep by me in Spirits of Wine, and in many other Instances behaved himself undutifully towards me, I do disinherit, and wholly cut off from any Part of this my Personal Estate, by giving him a single Cockle-Shell.
    To my Second Son Charles, I give and bequeath all my Flowers, Plants, Minerals, Mosses, Shells, Pebbles, Fossils, Beetles, Butterflies, Caterpillars, Grasshoppers, and Vermin, not above specified: As also my Monsters, both wet and dry, making the said Charles whole and sole Executor of this my Last Will and Testament, he paying or causing to be paid the aforesaid Legacies within the Space of Six Months after my Decease. And I do hereby revoke all other Wills whatsoever by me formerly made.

Kindle 3: Review

2011-11-20T18:51:00.001Z

I keep reading books and not writing about them. Which isn’t really the idea, is it? They tend to be ebooks, so maybe it’s the fact that there are many unread books waiting behind the one in hand which is distracting, like so much online activity. I don’t want to moan about that too much, because there are great books I’ve come across that I probably wouldn’t have read on paper – Terry Castle’s The Professor (still hardback only: big, expensive), and recently Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, which points in all sorts of unusual directions, as well as plenty of cannonical ones in interesting ways. I regret not reading Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles on paper, because it is so good, and I regret trying out Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse and Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies electronically because they are not good enough. Which is not fair, probably. It is great having a library’s worth of free classics seconds away at any time (I’ve found that the Adelaide University Library site formats them pretty well – Gutenberg can be quite variable), and in theory it’s good to have the Kindle Store itself always on hand (leaving aside how clumsily Penguin do ebooks, and how much they overcharge) – but it discourages meandering, replacing it with impulse.

Above, anyway, are some second hand books I picked up yesterday. Very excited to be re-acquainted with Agaton Sax, about whom I had completely forgotten.
____________________

Update from the second book down: ‘The eagerness of pursuit overcomes the satisfaction to result from the accomplishment’. That’s it, exactly.

Update two: Mrs Bookworld has a more balanced (and more positive) take.

Throwing Muses, Oran Mor, Glasgow, 7th November

2011-11-08T18:41:00.000Z

This is where I came in. That 2003 show seems a strange one to have written about, in retrospect, given that it was one of those occasions when you couldn’t actually hear the songs because they were so loud. That also happened when I saw Throwing Muses for the first time, in 1992. The opening chords to ‘Furious’ were fine, then the drums piled in and it was more or less a white-out for the duration. But I still treasure the memory of that ear-blasting: the dingy Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton, as un-glamourous a venue as you’ll find, offering up something outside glamour, mysterious, cold, real. Unrest were the support, and they were good, although I never followed up that lead. Other great gigs I saw there featured Madder Rose, The Sundays (Harriet with a cold, natch), Cocteau Twins, My Life Story (so Pop as to excite sneers, but all the more enjoyable for that), Buzzcocks, Primal Scream, Belly (smoke machine on full blast for ‘Trust in Me’). Not the most rockin’ list, possibly, but no-one else I’ve seen has deliberately blurred their sound in quite that way, not with controlled distortion but with PA overload. ‘A very emotional sound’, reckoned Andy, maybe that’s it. They did it again last night, but not too much; you could mostly make out tunes, if not words (not a problem if you know them all already). And this time the blur worked in their favour, an hour and a half passed in the blink of an eye.

They kicked off with ‘Soul Soldier’, of all the amazing ways they had at their disposal. Plunging straight into the storm. Then ‘Shimmer’ (I think I may actually come around to University one of these days), and relatively early on, ‘Hate My Way’. Balanced by ‘Vicky’s Box’ towards the end of the set. At the time my mind was paragraphs, which had gone by this morning, but the gist was ‘What is this?’, because the things those songs do to my insides are not within the gift of any other music. Chris objected afterwards that people had punched the air to ‘Hate My Way’, which I agree seems an inappropriately celebratory reaction. What’s to celebrate – the slide away from coping, the skirting of a suicidal impulse? Is it that the air punchers identify with those feelings and are glad that someone has found a way to make them as solid as song? Are they applauding Kristin’s struggle, or goading her into bleeding so they don’t have to? I guess it can help to wrap your troubles in songs, send them away. Another possibility, given that these concerts celebrate 25 years of Throwing Muses, is nostalgia for the hurt of adolescence or early adulthood – a time when they at least felt something. I say ‘they’, I mean ‘we’. Though I didn’t punch the air, I just stood still and cried, let the song pull me apart so I could be new again. It would have been a bit of a downer if everyone had done that. Kristin, it should be said, seemed to enjoy the big reaction, giggling in surprise during the opening lines. ‘That song is much less sad when it sounds like I have a lot of friends,’ she mused. ‘It’s supposed to be a loser’s song.’

Heckler: I bet you weren’t laughing when you wrote it.
Kristin: I don’t remember writing it but I bet I wasn’t.

Another heckler asked ‘Where’s Tanya?’, which must happen all the time, but Kristin had the put-down off pat: ‘I sold her’.

The set galloped past – ‘Tar Kissers’ (which reminded me, not for the first time, of The Modern Lovers’ ‘Egyptian Reggae’), ‘Limbo’, ‘Garoux des Larmes’, ‘Say Goodbye’. For encores we got ‘Fish’, ‘Pearl’, ‘Devil’s Roof’, ‘Mania’. At the end Mike turned around and didn’t say anything, but looked blissfully happy. We were a contented crowd, we got our fill of manic pop thrills. And although this was a greatest hits set to go with the current Anthology compilation (for sale, weirdly, on USB sticks at the merch stall – no CDs), we know this isn’t just about nostalgia, because of what’s coming next: a monster 38-track album of new material. Good grief, it takes me long enough to get to grips with 12 new Kristin songs at a time. But of course we’ll follow you, Throwing Muses, no matter how far. It is great to have you back.

Viv Albertine, The Creeping Ivies, Ghosts of Progress and Hookers for Jesus, at Beat Generator Live!, Dundee, 4th November

2011-11-05T16:16:00.000Z

The main thing which puzzled me in advance of this show was Viv’s image. Naked on the poster, save for a rose-patterned guitar, she stared out narrowly, daring you to think, ‘bloody hell, aren’t you from 1977? How on earth do you look like that?’ The video for ‘The False Heart’, too, shows a woman who has conceded nothing to time – but maybe something to tastefulness, as its graceful, glacial clarity supports a light, scratchy guitar sound that once meshed with altogether meatier rhythms. The white room, a victim of interior design... but I’m talking as though taste is a bad thing, and as though The Slits never had any. Whereas actually Cut is one of the most gloriously tasteful records ever made, drawing much of its appeal from the morphing of the band’s sound from falling-down-the-stairs punk (you need the Peel Sessions for that), to clipped, playful reggae. Not even their contemporary Vic Godard re-worked his songs so radically (well, maybe ‘Chain Smoking’), and it is certainly the kind of overhaul which could have gone horribly wrong. But somehow, with The Slits, tastefulness went deep. I should have remembered that when wondering if ‘The False Heart’ wasn’t a little too calm. But then, it’s been a long time.

Tastefulness has always been at the heart of Hookers for Jesus’ modus operandi, in much the same way that political correctness is at the heart of Ricky Gervais’. With the air of one not quite being able to keep a secret, Graeme told me to look out for something on his guitar, and I squinted and looked for stickers, saw nothing. Then they took to the stage and he picked it up... it has a fox’s tail! Oh my God! This is the most glamorous thing I have ever seen. It swayed from the end of the guitar as he moved, and indeed, he seemed to be moving the guitar more than usual in order to extract maximum slinkiness. Afterwards I asked him if fox hunting wasn’t a bit un-punk? ‘I am the fox’, he explained. A new version of ‘Drifting into Unthank’ was unveiled, taking it into operatic territory, with an extended intro of gloomy sound effects, and a choral preset adding gravitas / hilarity. Andy introduced them, once more, as the cabaret before the main bands, and it’s a role they fit perfectly. My favourite moment this time was their cover of The Meteors’ ‘My Daddy is a Vampire’, complete with echo effect and stupid / exhilarating vocalisations. Pure dumb fun.

Ghosts of Progress? They started up OK, with their quirky drums / guitar / singing by the same person setup (the drums operated by pedals attached to a board), but then the singing when it arrived was too Kurt Cobain, an immediate turn-off for me. Plus I thought we were in for a more angular slalom on the basis of the first (instrumental) song, and it didn’t quite materialise. The Creeping Ivies were really good though, turning in a set of short rock ’n’ roll songs, the singer in leopard print leggings which went on for miles, topped with a T-shirt reading ‘Bo Diddley is Jesus’; the drummer in a sharp suit, swinging his hips as he walloped two drums and a cymbal. They covered a Cramps song and appeared to have several big tunes of their own, I want to hear more.

Viv Albertine doesn’t believe in love, only in ‘what I can see and what I can touch’. Fortunately she believes in these plenty. She bought candles for the tables to give the room ambience, and after a brief explanation that she may have grown up a bit (which people don’t like punks to do), but probably not much, she kicked off with a one-chord, semi-chanted song setting out this agenda. Just her with that nimble, scratchy guitar, no longer pristine as on the YouTube clip, and if not actually falling down the stairs then certainly rolling down a slope. Free in the air, urgent, dynamic, unconstrained by tepid 4/4 concerns, because in the beginning there was rhythm, and it didn’t sound like a metronome. Over this the words came thick and fast, petulant, bold. A list of things which are real (wood, concrete) one of and things which aren’t (love, God). Almost child-like (I half expected Santa Claus to feature on one list or the other), but tough and adult at the same time. ‘Never Come’ was introduced with an explanation that her ex-boyfriend could never come, the stop-start structure of the song perhaps mimicking the lack of, um, fluidity. Most impressive of all was the final song, which Viv described as comprising the last four years of her life squashed into four minutes. It whirled around, punning and switching words and phrases, drawing a picture of domesticity gone wrong (courgette quiche was in there somewhere, I think), building to a frantic thump thump thump rhythm with ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Fuck Fuck Fuck’ alternately sung staccato, really breathtaking, claustrophobic. It reminded me of Throwing Muses’ ‘Vicky’s Box’, with its bitter pun ‘Home is where the heart lies / The hard lies’, and the frantic build up, ‘Home is a rage / Feels like a cage’. There are precious few songs which can do this, and we really had no right to expect someone who was brilliant thirty years ago to be able to come back and be this fresh, this raw, this compressed, this bursting. An absolute triumph.

P.S. I missed out the best slogan of the evening – ‘Couples are creepy / Couples are creepy / Couples are creepy’. And in fact here it is (via Dylan Drummond):

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Throw money at Viv here, so she can get her album pressed (there is an EP to buy too): http://www.vivalbertine.com/

Twelve quid for the lot, we pay fuck all*

2011-11-01T22:00:00.000Z

You’ll be quite aware that this blog is barely fast enough to catch reflection by the shadow of its tail; anticipation ought to be well beyond its reach. So thanks to the prompts from Andy and Mark re: two upcoming Dundee events, yours to attend for £8 and £3.99 respectively – or £12 all in, just quote ‘La Terrasse’. This Friday Viv Albertine of The Slits comes to town (I feel that sentence should flash in gold or something), which is obviously massively exciting just for that, but also here is one of her solo songs which is really nice too. Hookers for Jesus make a rare outing in support, and they have yet to be anything but unmissable. The Saturday-but-one following that sees an extravaganza from the mighty Wildhouse, in which they lock horns with Edinburgh School for the Deaf, which should be Noisy and Irreverent, and pretty damn Velvet Underground. Loads of other bands I haven’t heard pitch in too. Names are a slight improvement on last time, but Gropetown is still fairly awful.

Full details are on Facebook:

Viv Albertine / The Creeping Ivies / Ghosts of Progress / Hookers for Jesus (4th November, Beat Generator Live!)

Pensioner / The Wildhouse / Kaddish / Cosmic Dead / Edinburgh School for the Deaf / Min Diesel / Bucky Rage / The Shit Hawks / Gropetown (12th November, Balcony Bar)

* Mock punk bravado, you will actually need to pay twelve quid.

David Bellos – ‘Jacques Tati’

2011-10-26T00:01:00.000+01:00

From the book I’m reading now:

I’ve numbers of old clothes in my dirty clothes basket – scenes, I mean, tumbled pell mell into my receptacle of a mind, and not extracted till form and colour are almost lost.

So it is with this biography, which I finished last week, and didn’t get around to writing about properly. Which is annoying, because it’s very good, even if the criticism levelled at it in this Amazon review does stand up. It would have been more graceful of Bellos to have left his academic standing to one side, than to constantly express surprise at the achievements of a man with

a literary and political culture no richer than that of an average accountant’s clerk (p. 270)

Certain questions are begged here: what does Bellos have against accountant’s clerks? and, how narrow must his conception of culture be, if he thinks Tati didn’t have any? Only an institutionalised academic could think this way, but then, his linking of Playtime to Situationism is intriguing, and convincing. The way he tells it, the writers behind this movement were far too serious in their insistence that the over-convenient surface of modern life must be disrupted in order to make it human again; Tati made this point too, but he also made it fun.

Here, in any case, is what I wrote last week, when the blues were still blue:

‘Laughing together is easier than laughing alone,’ Tati explained in his dictated memoirs. ‘The oldest spring of comedy is simply the pleasure that a group of people feel on being together.’ (p. 31)

Two of Tati’s films struck me in exactly this way, years apart: Les Vacances de M. Hulot, and Trafic, watched on TV, alone, were both big disappointments. Their lack of dialogue, or story, were alienating; the jokes so slow and deliberate as to seem sub-normal. But watched in company – Trafic amongst a full and well-disposed cinema audience – both were utterly transformed on a second viewing. Longer ago still, I remember Mum’s enthusiasm for Mon Oncle, shown on TV, and a joke which consisted simply of an immaculately dressed secretary in a tight skirt and high heels trotting along, coming to a kerb, and skipping lightly up on to it, without breaking her rhythm. Can you even call that a joke? And yet it stuck. Or maybe Mum laughing at it stuck. Several times Bellos makes the point that Tati’s comedy has something democratic about it: whereas Charlie Chaplin, he argues, attracts attention and wants you to laugh at how clever his character is, M. Hulot is so self-effacing he seems to diffuse attention, and you laugh at situations in the round, joining them, almost, as a character yourself. Which may be why it is so important to experience Jacques Tati’s films as part of a crowd: so they can be met somewhat on their own expansive terms.

____________________

Footnote 1: this clip of Tati’s friend Borrah Minevitch is quite something.
Footnote 2: coincidence?

Honoré de Balzac – ‘Eugénie Grandet’

2011-10-09T10:29:00.000+01:00

In the country, people gradually cease to care about their appearance. (p. 72)

Saumur is the village where Eugénie Grandet lives, and has grown up, the daughter of a miserly vineyard owner and former cooper, who has accumulated a fortune by marrying well, investing, buying up land and crushing competition. His house is cold and dilapidated, because he won’t heat it except in the depths of winter, and he won’t pay for repairs to be done. As a special treat, on Eugénie’s birthday, he gets out his tools and mends a broken stair himself. Food is provided by the tenants on his estate, so he doesn’t have to pay for that, but he jealously rations sugar, which has to be bought in, and won’t allow wax candles in the house; instead they use candles made from tallow, a by-product of farming. But still, his wealth is known about, and so Eugénie attracts suitors. A grim game of attrition is played out between two families, the Cruchots and the des Grassins, each with an eligible son or nephew, who lay siege to the Grandets’ home, visiting regularly (together) for games of lotto, and bringing the occasional bouquet. Who will win her hand? It’s the countryside, there can’t possibly be a third option, surely? Enter Eugénie’s cousin, the elegant Charles, from Paris. He casts an astonished eye over the grotty interior of Grandet’s parlour, and

the lotto players immediately raised their noses to examine him, with as much curiosity as they would have shown if he had been a giraffe. (p. 73)

I’m not sure where I picked up the idea that Balzac was the French Dickens, but this is the only moment in Eugénie Grandet which invites a direct comparison. It is true that Balzac is drawing caricatures, but his humour is much more muted. He criticises society, as Dickens does, but without the zeal to change it. Dickens’ caricatures are funny because they are ridiculous, and who in their right mind would behave like that? Balzac’s – on the evidence of this novel – are serious because they are ridiculous, and they represent how people actually do behave.

Though it is a long time since I read it, it occurred to me that George Eliot’s Silas Marner is a better point of comparison, if you are looking for an English take on a similar situation. There, a miser lives alone with his gold, unloved, avaricious, until one day he finds he has been robbed. Simultaneously, a baby is left abandoned on his doorstep, and over the next twenty years Silas is rehabilitated by his love for this child, whom he brings up, becoming part of the community as he does so. An altogether softer, more redemptive tale. It never seems likely that Grandet will reform. He fails in every single moral duty that comes his way, and his monomania for gold is such that the right choices never even occur to him. Here are is thoughts as he wonders how best to tell Charles that his father – Grandet’s brother – has died a bankrupt:

‘You have lost your father!’ It was nothing to tell him that. Fathers usually die before their children. But: ‘You have no money at all!’ All the woes in the world were summed up in those words. (p. 115)

This is pity, of a kind, but worthless, because he has no more intention of bestowing money on the boy than he does affection. He sends him packing to the West Indies, at the lowest possible cost, and no more is heard of him for seven years (he turns out to be a ruthless businessman too, making a packet in the slave trade). Meanwhile, Eugénie’s twenties ebb away as she pines for him, her intense love prompted by the short time he spent at Saumur, when she stood up for him against her father’s brutality. She gives him her own store of gold coins, at which Grandet, when he finds out, confines her to her room on a diet of bread and water for months on end. It is only when it is pointed out to him that Eugénie, and not he, will inherit his wife’s wealth when she dies, that he relents. He is a tyrant, with not much else to him.

And Eugénie? Is she more than his opposite, the affection to his avarice? Her strong, silent love is a little hard to believe in. Even in the days before email, seven years without a single letter can’t have been a good sign. She seems to fall, too, as much for Charles’ refined clothes as for the man himself, which doesn’t seem consistent with her humble, un-grasping nature. But all the same – yes, she is more than her father’s opposite, she is also his daughter, and a member of a society with a tyrannical conception of rank and refinement. The saddest moment comes when she stops fighting:

Her unhappiness was concealed beneath a mask of politeness. (p. 240)

Eastern Promise: To Rococo Rot, The Pastels and Silje Nes at Platform, Glasgow, 1st October

2011-10-03T19:24:00.000+01:00

With admirable hyperbole, Monorail’s last call for Eastern Promise invoked krautrock, laying down the challenge: ‘you wouldn't pass up a chance to see Can or Harmonia in 1974, would you?’ To Rococo Rot and Tarwater flew in from Berlin for the occasion, you see. It is something of a surprise that they – Alun Woodward and Easterhouse’s Platform venue – have managed to get the sponsorship to do this kind of thing. Isn’t the lack of funding what did for Triptych and Le Weekend? Serious times call for slashed arts funding, and all that. But maybe that’s too simplistic. Whatever the reasons, it is great to have an event like this back on the calendar. I must admit I’d thought we were in for a community hall experience, of the kind Tracer Trails put on, but no, Platform’s auditorium is pretty similar to the Tron or the Tolbooth – big, with theatre seats and a great sounding PA. Also Le Weekend-like was the splitting of performances between the main stage and the bar*, and the box office area was dotted with record stalls, which was a nice touch. Much vinyl and gimmickry (e.g. an Aidan Moffat bottle opener and, for no obvious reason, Jesus and Mary Chain T-shirts – which were rather tame, just saying the band’s name in big colourful letters. Actual Jesus and Mary Chain T-shirts, if you remember, used to say things like ‘Jesus Fuck’ on them).

Silje Nes kicked off proceedings. A thin blonde Norwegian in a black and white smock-like dress, she knelt in a circle of effects pedals, looping noises from a guitar and a small keyboard. After the opening instrumental she stood up to sing, making me think of a livelier Taken by Trees. She was excellent at conjuring up entire arrangements from the looping kit, hitting the guitar for rhythms and seemingly able to drop in chord changes at will (usually a limitation of looping musical phrases – as opposed to rhythmical ones – is that this can’t happen). There was a section in the penultimate song of really interesting noise, involving more kneeling and pedal work. ‘Interesting’ as in pulsating, MBV / Fennesz white-but-not-blank noise. Then the last song was pretty and quiet again. Warm reverb with icy delay.

‘We’re in the middle of recording an album,’ said Stephen Pastel, before correcting the collective consternation (‘2023? You’re kidding!’ is certainly what I was thinking) by saying that actually they are closer to the end. 2012 is the year to watch, apparently. The set would consist of songs from it, once they had limbered up with ‘Charlie’s Theme’: the long instrumental ‘Slowly Taking Place’, Katrina’s ‘Secret Music’ and ‘Ballad of Two Elms’, Stephen’s ‘The Wrong Light’ and the re-invented ‘Thru Your Heart’ (which, in my head at least, seeped into Teenage Fanclub’s song ‘Sweet Days Waiting’ last year). A recorded version would be a good thing, I think. Like Vic Godard going back to ‘Chain Smoking’ or ‘Stop that Girl’, some songs are worth a second look. There was nothing new in the set, but it sounded really wonderful, warm, together. Katrina’s drumming made me think of blaxploitation again (they have a brilliant song about ‘aeroplanes in the summertime’, which once did the same), by which I probably mean Superfly, slowed down to Isaac Hayes pace. ‘The Wrong Light’ sounded heftier and more alive than before, I almost forgot its debt to Galaxie 500’s ‘Temperature’s Rising’. It’s tricky – I wouldn’t say that their slow song turnover has been good for The Pastels, but the songs they do have are becoming gradually enriched. Maybe this is how music evolved before records, before Hollywood. We await, of course, eagerly, automatically yours.

I’ve never been To Rococo Rot’s before, automatically or otherwise. Except for once, when Katrina sang ‘Secret Music’ with them. I had half hoped that they might revisit this moment, being together on the same bill, but it didn’t happen. Aside from their Pastels collaborations, they always sounded too dry to me – not objectionably so, but enough to distance. So it was a nice surprise when they took to the stage and, unassumingly, with due care and diligence, tore the roof off the sucker. Stefan Schneider centre stage, swaying in tight circles, from the hips, to the feel of the bass guitar. Robert Lippok to the right, twisting his laptop stand to all angles as though to get feedback from an amp right, poring over the touchpad and his table of gadgets, including one that sparkled gold with hundreds of illuminated dots, visualised glitches. Ronald Lippok to the left at his kit, swinging his sticks down in great loose arcs. A group of fans gathered just in front of him, eschewing the theatre seats to dance the hour away. A voice behind me spectacularly failed to capture the mood: ‘Security should throw them out’, but at the end, taking bows to rapturous applause, Ronald mimed giving his heart to the dancers. I picked up a beautiful vinyl copy of Speculation from Monorail the following day (I love how Pet Shop Boys that title is), and will revel, I am sure, in finding out how wrong I was about this band.

* The bar wasn’t a very forgiving place to play – Animal Magic Tricks especially were not the kind of thing which works well above chatter, but Conquering Animal Sound were more fun, more slinky. It was just a pity I’d picked last week of all weeks to re-visit Björk’s Vespertine.

Slow down, honey

2011-09-17T09:30:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, I am not very good at reading. I have all sorts of strategies for blaming this on things: the internet, ebooks, the half-painted bathroom, the attendant mess in the living room, work, coffee, S. (sorry, S.), TV. I don’t blame records, of course – it’s the other way around, books take the flak for not leaving enough time for listening. S. aside, you will have noticed that the common theme here is flitting, distraction, the scarcity of time. It makes me think again about slow blogging, whether it is just reactionary or whether there is a point there. It makes me think of Drugstore’s song ‘Accelerate’, and the drawled, dread-filled line ‘slow down, honey’; and this makes me think how brilliant it is that Drugstore are back!, back!!!, etc. Thanks to Unpopular for the alert, I don’t think I read about it anywhere else. I had a plan to read Walter Scott’s Waverley followed by Unpopular / Alistair’s Big Flame, because it uses Brogues’ Waverley steamer pen on the cover (I can’t find the link, but I think that’s right). Then Waverley began to seem like a chore... and I’m not saying it is, necessarily, but one week its digressions and meandering seemed quixotic and charming, the next infuriating. Roughly coinciding with the first appearance of poetry, which is a dead giveaway that my impatience is the key factor here, not the quality of the book.

The perfect antidote to all this nineteenth vs. twenty-first century fretting is the new LP by The A-Lords, pictured above. A collaboration between Directorsound and Plinth, it is less deliriously wonky than Directorsound’s amazing Two Years Today, but it is gentler, with bits of organ playing and even some singing. As it says on the back, ‘The birds play themselves’, and you can melt into it, into the outside air of Dorset, it’s as bucolic as you please. To its left, a pretty cover for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, 80p from a Debra shop.

Olivia Manning – ‘School for Love’

2011-08-24T22:10:00.002+01:00

The other thing to say about wetness is that it is the flipside of tenderness and receptivity. Not the same thing exactly, but which side of the line any given behaviour falls is very subjective, and where art is concerned, I’m not sure I’m interested in strength which doesn’t include weakness, or weakness which doesn’t include strength. As it happens, School for Love walks this line: its protagonist, the teenage boy Felix, is pretty wet. He has reason to be, having recently been bereaved of a mother on whom he doted, and, after the interval of a few months, pushed out of the house of her friends to live with his maiden aunt in Jerusalem, where he doesn’t know a soul. It is 1945, the Second World War comes to an end during the novel’s action (which covers less than a year); this is a story of expatriates hanging around waiting to go home, clinging to identities from which they have become disconnected. The English, of course, excel at this. Here is Felix’s friend, Mrs Ellis, who, pregnant and widowed, is unlucky enough to find herself an anomaly:

‘Friends!’ she echoed and smiled acidly: ‘what makes you think they are friends? I came up with some introductions. Each person invited me to a party. I met the same people at each – then things came to a standstill. They all knew instinctively that I wasn’t one of them. The Government people here are graded and each knows what he can and can’t do inside his grade – or, rather, his wife does – and who he can invite to his home, and who’s going to invite him. It makes things easy for them. You see, they’re all people from a small world and things have to be made easy for them – so they can’t afford to admit strangers, anyway not strangers who probably won’t follow the rules. It complicates things too much.’ (p. 234)

Mrs Ellis and Felix are both lodgers with Miss Bohun, the maiden aunt, an extraordinary and oppressive character, who runs the local branch of a Christian sect always referred to as the ‘Ever-Readies’ (short for ‘The Ever-Ready Group of Wise Virgins’), and regards herself as something of a martyr to their cause. As befits a pillar of the community, she refuses to buy food on the black market, and feeds her tenants tiny portions of mashed beans, and aubergines as a substitute for sardines. She won’t allow any room to have more than one light bulb lit at the same time, and there is minimal heating through the winter. Though housing is at a premium because of the war, she keeps a room at the front of the house empty and immaculate, in preparation for the Second Coming. Throughout – and this was rather distracting – I heard her voice as Linda Snell’s from The Archers. Still, her consistent awfulness gives Mrs Ellis and Felix some common ground, and the scene in which they trade stories over drinks at the Innsbruck café has a wonderful feeling of release and is very funny. She does have some great lines:

‘I know what we’ll do,’ she said in the manner of someone promising a treat to children, ‘to-morrow we’ll all go together and pay the rent.’ (p. 111)

And, giving Felix the doctor’s address at a moment of crisis late on in the novel:

‘Here, I’ll write it down.’ She pulled open the writing-desk drawer and snatched up an envelope; it was a new one. ‘Not a new one – an old one will do.’ (p. 240)

Through all this, Felix makes slow progress. He watches Miss Bohun’s penny-pinching schemes and tenant-politics (she is always trying to evict people whilst appearing not to), and is swayed one way and another by the opinions of others, eventually arriving at nothing stronger than distrust. He is desperately needy, at first viewing Mrs Ellis with dumb adoration, moving on to an unequal friendship. He achieves an indifference to her near the end, transferring his affections to Miss Bohun’s Siamese cat, Faro (I groaned when I realised his name is probably a reference to Felix the Cat). He loves this cat so much he takes her with him when he finally gets a passage back to England. It would be cloying if he were meant to be taken seriously, but none of the book’s characters prompt that suspicion. Yet the situation is engaging; little of any dramatic consequence happens, but little by little, with more or less satire from the third person narrator, everybody is put in their place. As in this snippet of café chat from a gloomy Pole:

‘in my camp we had to eat only potatoes! Frost-bitten potatoes. Day after day, potatoes. Believe me, my friends, that is to suffer.’ Mrs Ellis shook her head slowly in sympathy: ‘And what did the Russians eat?’ she asked. ‘They also ate potatoes. There was a famine. But that was their affair. You cannot treat a Polish officer as if he were a Russian.’ (p. 179)

Since K Got Over Me

2011-08-21T20:37:00.005+01:00

This last week has been Kristin Hersh Week over at Manic Pop Thrills (expect an interview there soon; I am not insanely jealous, I am not insanely jealous), and in Edinburgh generally, where she’s done a performance or book signing almost every day. She’s up amongst all the other wacky author portraits that line the inter-tent walkways of Charlotte Square – A. L. Kennedy with a plastic duck on her shoulder, Alasdair Gray gurning and in his element – and even if they have spelt both her names incorrectly under the photo, there’s definitely a feeling that Paradoxical Undressing has arrived, and with it, Kristin as author. Having a hastily-bought second copy signed after the book reading, I told her how much I liked the fact that she describes her songs as happy, towards the end of the book. ‘But I’ve always said that,’ she said, before suggesting that there is an element of sexism in the contrary assumption: that a female vocalist screaming can’t also be having fun. I pondered this for a while afterwards, but couldn’t get myself to agree – the woman on the first Muses record is practically bursting out of her skin, there’s no way she could be mistaken for someone having a good time.

All the same, I do like the idea that those early recordings can’t be pinpointed neatly on a happy / sad graph. At seventeen, this wouldn’t have occurred to me – I was blown away by them in much the same way that I was by Closer and California, and became convinced that all the best music was fraught, on the edge, and deeply unhappy. Which is seventeen for you, I suppose. At seventeen so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which thirty-five sees are nothing but disappearing miasma; and seventeen can only find out by getting to thirty-five¹. The album actually loses out to its own demo by dropping the rollicking ‘Sinkhole’ – you can see why 4AD might not have wanted to include something that sounded so much like a hoedown, but the upshot is that the playful ‘Rabbit’s Dying’ is badly outflanked. And anyway, ‘Sinkhole’ is a clue, but it’s not about the numbers – the question is, can you look ‘Hate My Way’, ‘Vicky’s Box’, ‘Delicate Cutters’ in the eye? Are you still OK? I know you’re on the floor in a pool of your own tears, but do you feel strengthened in some way? It snapped you like a twig, this monster of a record, but the chances are it fixed something too. Kristin can be as annoyed as she likes that Black Francis got to be the fun screamer, but the Pixies never did that.

It was interesting talking to N. afterwards, in provocative mode, about what the reading was like for a non-fan. Too many cloying words like ‘goofy’ was the verdict, and also she once had a flatmate she disliked who played ‘Your Ghost’ to death on guitar. The whole thing was so needy and wet, the questions were all from ardent worshippers or the clinically depressed (there was one question about lithium and acupuncture which verged on intrusive). ‘If you didn’t grow up with the songs…’ ‘But we did’, was the best counter-argument I could manage at the time. A younger me would probably have muttered darkly and intensely about darkness and intensity, but now I feel more inclined to defend those songs in terms of vitality and, yes, thrills. The cut that kills the knife.

Edward McPherson – ‘Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat’

2011-08-06T12:22:00.000+01:00

‘This book is a fan’s notes’, we are told. It aims to ‘avoid the pitfall of the Stone Face’ which has claimed other biographers, who ‘get bogged down in a sort of psychoanalytical quagmire – marking with relish each absent father that appears in his work, each instance of paternal abuse.’ Marion Meade appears to be the main target of this criticism – just look at the outrage her 1995 biography has attracted on Amazon. Whether or not Cut to the Chase deserves this kicking (I remember really enjoying it), Tempest in a Flat Hat runs in the opposite direction, away from scandal and psychological analysis. It has a light touch, and a firm grasp of what it is that makes Keaton great, but its refusal to contemplate any kind of dark side to his childhood is a little frustrating. The Three Keatons were a vaudeville act, consisting of Buster and his parents Joe and Myra, and he was ‘The Little Boy Who Couldn’t Be Damaged’. A high kick from Joe once left him unconscious for 18 hours, aged eight, so that wasn’t entirely true. But mostly, it seems to have been:

The Keatons were playing to a packed Syracuse house when Myra’s saxophone solo aroused the ire of a particularly vociferous critic. Joe immediately hoisted Buster by the handle under his overcoat and threw him – feet-first – at the heckler, breaking three of the offender’s ribs and smashing two of the adjacent man’s front teeth. Buster, naturally, was just fine.

Not the kind of thing which would amuse Social Services, but a good anecdote, nonetheless. And given the extent to which Keaton would draw on vaudeville slapstick for his films, it seems reasonable to conclude that McPherson has a point: ‘what boy doesn’t enjoy playing rough?’

The abuse angle isn’t purely a modern one. At the time, the Keatons worked hard to avoid the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who attended performances in New York to ensure that the law was being followed (no children under seven were allowed on stage; none under sixteen were to actually perform). They succeeded for an amazing nine years, beginning when Buster was five (rounded up to seven in publicity). Joe’s argument ‘that what Buster did didn’t really constitute a performance – he was merely a prop being thrown about’, seems calculated to inflame their ire. It wasn’t true – an instance is given of Buster knocking Joe unconscious in turn, with a broom handle. Then, in 1907, they got caught out, and were banned from performing in New York for two years. They could still work in other states, but it meant exile from the big time. After this, they relaxed in the off-season at Bluffton Actors’ Colony, formed by Joe and others in 1908, described as ‘vaudeville’s bucolic playground, a vibrant fellowship of the performative spirit that lasted the span of a summer, and it was one of Buster’s favourite places in the world’. Here something seemed to click, and Buster began to perpetrate elaborately witty practical jokes, such as throwing pots, pans, then himself and his siblings from the porch onto an unseen sand hill in order to alarm people passing by on the lake, or:

Buster’s pièce de résistance was Ed Gray’s hilltop outhouse. The facility was being strained to the limits of its capacity by uninvited visitors too prim to do their business in the woods and too rude to knock and ask permission. So Buster dismantled the wooden structure and attached spring hinges to each of the four walls. He split the roof down the middle, nailing the halves to opposite walls. He then buried a pipe under the outhouse. What appeared to be a clothesline emerged from one end of the pipe and stretched to Ed Gray’s kitchen window; underwear and shirts hung on the line. It was an inspired setup. When someone was bold enough to make himself at home in the outhouse, all Gray had to do was tug on the line and the roof and four walls fell outward, revealing the interloper, in all of his enthroned glory, to the town below.

This is typical of the kind of technical gag which was to populate his films, and it took place years before he got near a movie camera.

Once the films start, there are excellent pieces on many of them, but the book falls into the trap of recounting film-after-film, and the momentum becomes a bit staid. The ’20s are jam-packed, as you’d expect, the ’30s are awful (Buster drifts into alcoholism, a casualty of the sound era and of MGM’s production line), and the ’40s to the ’60s are skipped over much too quickly. The reasons are understandable, but I think McPherson takes this business of not getting bogged down too far – he accentuates the positive, which means writing mostly about the ’20s, and ignoring the decades during which Buster was bogged down. His attitude to this fall, from star to jobbing comic, was nearly always impressive. Aside from the bleak years of the mid ’30s, he always worked, as a gag writer for MGM, in short films (never a patch on his ’20s work, but often amusing), in television. He didn’t complain, he just got on with the here and now, which wasn’t common amongst faded silent stars: ‘he said talking to his peers – many of whom had never heard the Beatles – made him sad’. It’s a sad story – but not tragic, exactly. It reflects badly on the times, rather than on Buster, that his enormous talent was allowed to go to waste for so long. He didn’t die unappreciated – there was a resurgence of interest in his silent films from the ’50s onwards, which he allowed himself to say was ‘great, but it’s all thirty years too late’.

And what was all the fuss about? Here is an extended quote from the wonderfully enthusiastic chapter on Sherlock, Jr., which says it all:

Most aspects of the film could support a chapter of their own: the Chinese-box structure (Buster has wrapped a movie within a dream within a movie), the mixed bag of camera and stage tricks, the seductive, uneasy tilt-a-whirl of movement. Sherlock, Jr. is a true masterpiece, which again, for all my protesting, has to be seen to be believed. I have never watched it – including the time at a hip downtown Manhattan theater – without hearing someone gasp. It is that kind of movie. (Those who have seen it before are marked by their erratic murmurs – to them are left quieter idiosyncratic pleasures. Like the odd way Ward Crane buffs the tops of his shoes by rubbing them against the back of his calves before entering the girl’s house – the sort of strange, authentic, and inexplicably coalescing detail that reaffirms your suspicion that you’re in the presence of workaday greatness.) Take, as another instance of offhand merit, Keaton and McGuire’s sheepish courting. Sitting in a loveseat, each makes aborted feints for the other’s hand; when Kathryn suddenly slaps her palm down on the bench, Buster grabs it with equal ferocity – they both jump, the look on their faces priceless: they are at heart determined to hold hands and terrified by that determination. It is a twelve-second primer on romance, how it is wonderful, stilted, and arrives in fearful bursts. Like the very first title says, Sherlock, Jr. is a story about being able to do two things at once: move and entertain, dream and wake, negotiate between our real and our better selves – how we are all, in the end, projectionists and detectives. That art inflects life and vice versa is not a new statement, but a celebration of that fact perhaps bears repeating. Sherlock, Jr. is a testament to the imaginative impulse, the creative wish – the amount of ourselves that we put into the movies, and what the movies give back to us. For when the lights come up and we’re shoved rudely back into our misfit selves, we find we’re a little better off. Our ghostly flights sustain us. And then it’s time to kiss the girl.

One more song and it’s over

2011-08-02T17:45:00.001+01:00

In an interview once, Robert Forster answered the question ‘Which living person do you most admire?’ by saying ‘I am fond of Peter Falk’. I love that answer, mostly because I, in turn, am fond of Robert Forster. Although I’ve never seen an episode of Columbo all the way through, I do remember enjoying his performance in Wings of Desire, which is what I thought about when he died recently. I watched it again at the weekend. He plays himself, kind of – people are always pointing him out, ‘Look, there’s Columbo!’ – but he is also a fallen angel, and occasionally speaks to other angels whom no-one else can see. In the film, angels are all around, listening in to the private thoughts of Berlin’s citizens, trying to comfort them in times of distress (though literally imperceptible, they can somehow connect emotionally), but also comparing notes about the more unusual things they think. Near the end Bruno Ganz’s character Damiel, another fallen angel, wanders into a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds gig. They’re playing ‘The Carny’. Damiel is trying to find the woman for whom he has given up his angelhood, who is there too, in the crowd. His friend Cassiel stands onstage next to Nick, unseen. In the pause between songs, this is what he alone can hear:

One more song and it’s over. But I’m not going to tell you about a girl, I’m not going to tell you about a girl.

Cut from black and white to colour, Cassiel becomes invisible, and...

Ah wanna tell ya ’bout a girl

Staccato piano and bunched up, tense drums plunge us into ‘From Her To Eternity’, the rawest of Cave’s many absolute classic masterpieces. Blixa looks like death, there are chandeliers. It’s a breathtaking moment.

Cynthia Ozick – ‘Foreign Bodies’

2011-07-17T10:02:00.001+01:00

Paris in the 1950s. An American family settled in California, the father having made a fortune by marriage and then business. Marvin Nachtigall is practical, a scientist by education, and doesn’t hold with music, novels, or anything that doesn’t advance one in some solid, demonstrable way. He is intolerable both as husband and father, driving his wife to an asylum, and his two children to Paris, which as far as he is concerned are roughly equivalent. Because Paris in the ’50s, as everyone knows, was not so much a city as a playground for American rich kids who wanted to forget about the hard work that earned their money and indulge their artistic side. Julian, the son, has this chat-up line, ‘So which one are you, Gertrude or Alice?’, and at first inspires the contempt of Lili, who will soon become his wife:

Paris was infested with these imitation baby Sartres and Gides sitting in cafés over their inky manuscripts, an apéritif placed just so at the nearest knuckle to authenticate the parody (p. 101)

Just like The Magnetic Fields’ ‘I Don’t Want to Get Over You’ – ‘I could dress in black and read Camus / Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth’. It’s a cliché, as both song and novel know, and the problem with the novel is that it coasts along on this cliché, describing but never escaping it.

In The Guardian recently, Ozick was candid about the inspiration for Leo Coopersmith, the composer and ex-husband of Marvin’s sister Bea. ‘“Yes, it’s a snow job,” she says. “Bullshit. It’s just a transposition of one kind of passion to another.”’ Some kind of false modesty double bluff, perhaps? But it turns out to be entirely accurate. There is some mighty clunky imagery, for a start – a grand piano left by Leo in Bea’s New York apartment after their brief marriage, which takes up practically all of the living room, for twenty years. Bea herself can’t play, has no musical aptitude at all, but has the piano tuned regularly, keeps it polished. She never touches the keyboard. Her niece, Iris, staying with her overnight before going on to Julian in Paris, hits a single key, causing consternation and reverberations for her aunt. She, in turn, hits a larger selection of notes on Leo’s current piano, improbably opening his ears:

How had she done it, how exactly had those polyphonic antiphons, if that’s what they were, come into being, and from no recognizable system – what could you call that sound? When he tried to imagine it (he was always trying), it was scarcely stable, it was a fleeting exultation, or else a hideous hollow, like an anus, or a growly scrabbling of animal claws. (p. 179)

I don’t think there is a musical version of the Bad Sex in Fiction award, but if there were, Foreign Bodies would do pretty well. The bit about the ‘tender secret testicles that lurked like darkened planets between his legs’ might win both. The resulting symphony, The Nightingale’s Thorn, is in B minor, causing Bea to wonder, ‘Bea minor, is that what he meant?’ I am not making this up.

Of course, I could be missing the point*. Foreign Bodies is a re-imagining of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, which I haven’t read. Bea is Marvin’s ambassador in the sense that she is supposed to bring Julian and Iris home from Paris. She is always hiding bits of information in both directions, which sounds like good ambassadorial behaviour – sometimes to keep the peace, and sometimes in accordance with her own agenda. It isn’t much of an agenda really – she wants to keep Marvin at a distance (just as Julian and Iris do), and she wants some kind of re-acquaintance with Leo, though she doesn’t want him back. The grand piano finally gone from her apartment, and his symphony on her table (she can’t read it, of course), she ends the novel in a better position, psychologically speaking, than she started out with. But it isn’t nearly enough.

____________________

* From the Guardian piece, here is the point I missed: ‘Foreign Bodies is, Ozick has said, a sort of inversion of James’s The Ambassadors, in which Americans in Paris are charmed and restored by the European sensibility. In Ozick’s telling, they encounter a postwar city of dark, grim truths.’

Terry Castle – ‘The Professor and Other Writings’

2011-07-09T17:29:00.000+01:00

I came to this via a review in n+1 magazine, which first published some of the chapters which make up Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. Grouped together with a couple of populist manifestos defending the humanities disciplines and their currently imperilled funding, it was recommended as a ‘less abstract’ take on the same subject, demonstrating ‘in intimate terms why one studies in the humanities, what it feels like to do so, and how doing so changes the way one feels.’ That sounded a lot like The Possessed itself (is academic memoir a new genre?), but actually there are more differences than similarities. Castle, in her fifties, is looking back from a later stage in her career than the thirty-something Batuman; the focus is much more on the personal, with academia a necessary backdrop (lesbian social trends join it here); Castle is a more nervy presence, Batuman’s languor is replaced with an urgency which is less charming, but – here’s the trade off – more vital. I was pleased to note that she is a fan of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, but when her boom box fails to work during a long drive home to San Diego for Christmas, she doesn’t react well to not being able to play it (or any of her other CDs). Bev, her ex, is driving, and all she has are...

Tapes! I glared at her and peered into the shoebox of dusty old cassettes in the trunk. Could I survive for ten hours solely on Sylvester, the soundtrack from The Crying Game, and The Greatest Hits of Etta James? Now, “Down in the Basement” is a major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an infuriated baby vulture.

Whilst is undeniably decent of Bev to have undertaken this long drive, my sympathy here is with Terry, and the lost oasis of ten hours spent listening to music. The list of silenced CDs is interesting, but too long to quote in full (sample: ‘…the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walkurie, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars…’).

The first half of the book contains essays on seemingly unconnected topics (World War I, Art Pepper, Sicily, Susan Sontag, shelter magazines, Georgia O’Keeffe vs. Agnes Martin), but which are also autobiographical, and leave the reader with a pretty good idea of how Castle spent her early life, and how she lives now. Her family was messed up enough to give her something to run from, into the arms of academia, and ultimately Blakey, whom she married in the brief window allowed by California state law (how crazy is that?). The essays get progressively less edgy, at least after the Sontag one, and my enthusiasm began to wane a little; I wondered whether their chattiness wasn’t overdone (e.g. referring to Wikipedia as ‘the Wikster’, or the bit about rubber stamp collecting), and whether I was after all going to follow up reading The Professor with Art Pepper’s Straight Life, Castle’s favourite book, which had certainly been the plan during the chapter about him, ‘My Heroin Christmas’.

This tailing off – or settling down – strikes me now as deliberate: Castle wants to ease the reader gently into the long final chapter, ‘The Professor’, a reminiscence covering what has hitherto been skirted around, an episode which was plainly the most painful part of her early life, notwithstanding the broken home; the unsettling migrations between England and the States after the parental break-up; the suicide of her half-brother, the violent, unknowable Jeff; the loneliness of bookish teenage years (she is merciless on her younger self’s delusion that hard work would make her popular). It’s a love affair, and it is messy. It is with one of two gay professors at the college Castle attends to do her Ph.D. on eighteenth century literature, one of whom, Jo, is openly gay, unmysterious, approachable, involved in local women’s groups. The other – unnamed here, always ‘the Professor’ – hides her sexual orientation, and has no truck with the politicisation of sexuality. Which has its appeal: ‘The Closet, all of a sudden, turned out to be fantastically exciting – far more so in fact than Destroying the Patriarchy’. The trouble is, the relationship is too exciting: the disparity in age, confidence and social position between the two women mean that the one with the power would have needed to secede it – would need to be as kindly as Jo – to give them any chance of staying together.

The Professor had problems of her own, it would turn out – manifest above all in a steely, seemingly insatiable appetite for emotional control. Combined with my own equally insatiable desire – to be taken care of – the result was near-instant psychic mayhem. The Professor became cruel; I succumbed to a kind of Sapphic Stockholm syndrome.

So Terry quickly becomes a doormat, the Professor begins to take other lovers within weeks, and it is all hopelessly sad. I guess – though it’s been a long time – I recognise the feeling of being completely seized up and devoted, fighting against the influence which is all that seems to matter. How could you be so cruel? Is the wrong question. How do I get away? The one you’re too blind to see. This is Terry’s nadir:

once or twice I couldn’t help it: I blurted out that I felt bad when the Professor slept with Molly. My own failing, of course, but yes, okay – I do feel a tiny bit hurt…. Such dazed admissions typically prompted indignation in her, followed by self-recrimination on my part. (I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry, etc., etc.)

Poor, poor thing. But what an incredible book.

Welcome to Japanese New Music Festival!

2011-07-03T19:12:00.000+01:00

It is possible that the picture in this post isn’t typical of how tidy my flat usually is. That may even be true of the table itself, actually. But I do tidy up sometimes, and today I’ve been going through some minidiscs, with the idea that if I put the recordings on a hard drive I’ll claw back half a drawer of storage. The recordings I’ve copied today all come from a 2003 music / film event at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and whilst I was expecting to – and did – enjoy Ira Cohen’s gonzo poetry rant (it turns out he died recently, sad to hear that), I’d forgotten all about Ruins’ set, which began with some sample based songs about a zipper, a toothbrush, a camera, and a wine cork. After that they did some longer songs which were also great, if less obviously conceptual. Here is the first third of the set – I’ve never heard anything else like it.

Ruins at Kill Your Timid Notion, DCA, Dundee, 19th Oct 2003 by steamboatbill

Deaf, Dumb, Blind

2011-06-25T18:17:00.002+01:00

Eighteen months ago, I got excited about the debut gig by Hookers for Jesus, a duo consisting of my friends Andy and Graeme, who used to be in the Candy Store Prophets. Beleaguered by a cold night, an unhelpful venue and a paper-thin crowd, they pulled out an urgent set which had S. and I slack-jawed with amusement. I mean amazement. No, I mean both. Things were slightly out of control, and something mighty fine emerged as a result. I didn’t see them play again until this February, at a Dylan tribute night, and they confounded me again. Thoroughly in control this time, and granted a packed house, they turned in a ramshackle burlesque of Dylan’s earlier, folk-singer style (‘I’m a poet / Don’t you know it / And the wind / You can blow it’), and a ridiculously assured full text version of ‘Hurricane’. About as ambitious a cover as could be attempted, I’d have thought, in terms of maintaining momentum through the corridors of its (potentially) interminable verses. They return to a Dundee stage this Thursday, I can’t wait to be surprised by them again.

Edinburgh School for the Deaf are the headliners. They put in an anarchic rumble of a set in support of Vic Godard a few months ago, spilling backwards off the stage with their wireless guitars like itchy zombies, and making a pop-inflected scuzz racket which seemed a million miles from their more earnest parent band, Saint Jude’s Infirmary. It will be good to see them again too.

All this and more at Dexter’s, Dundee, Thursday 30th June. Doors 7.30, tickets here or from Groucho’s. Hookers For Jesus’ full Dylan Uncovered set is below, and there is also an interview over at Manic Pop Thrills, along with a review of Edinburgh School for the Deaf’s new album.

Hookers for Jesus at Dylan Uncovered by steamboatbill

Tenniscoats, Muscles of Joy & Tangles, Garnethill Multicultural Centre, Glasgow, 18th June

2011-06-24T06:22:00.005+01:00

Six days is far too long to have left it, but here are some things I remember about last Saturday’s gig by the Tenniscoats.

True to the (Tracer) Trail, it wasn’t in a conventional venue, but a community hall with chairs stacked for if you wanted to use them, and a wooden floor if not.
Brogues nearly couldn’t make it, but then J. insisted (phew!)
Tangles, on first, was a chap dressed exactly like the rockabilly one out of the Sexual Objects, making strung out Robin Guthrie-isms from a guitar and a loop pedal. Brogues winced and said ‘King Crimson’, but I thought he was very good.
A.’s new-ish fella W., whom I hadn’t met before, was taken aback by Muscles of Joy, asking ‘you liked them?’ Chris agreed, conceding good rhythm but accusing the one on the left of drowning out everybody else’s good bits.
There was, for the first time, a male member in Muscles of Joy. Ahem.
High up on the wall opposite the stage area was a shelf of large Chinese dragon heads. To the right were the Tracer Trails banner, and a board filled with Chinese writing.
There were no stage lights, hence the lack of photos. There was a stage, but Tenniscoats were the only ones to use it, and then only to sit on the edge before wandering forward.
Because they are wandering minstrels, after all.
They played with no amplification, just the two of them, opening with ‘Mou Mou Rainbow’ and ‘Baibaba Bimba’.
Ueno played a Spanish guitar, of which I approved, because I have one of them. He shook it and raised it and moved to the left and right to get tremolo and stereo panning effects, except that they weren’t effects at all, but real.
Saya stood and sang, with a smile and a slight forward movement. This, somehow, was love.
She sang ‘(They Long To Be) Close To You’ from an exercise book.
She introduced ‘Tamashi’, from new album Tokinouta, in halting English, as being ‘about spirit’. Ueno sang too for this one, it is my favourite song at the moment.
They faded out the last song, slowly reducing the volume of the singing and the guitar playing, to a whisper and a caress of the strings. It was hard to tell when the song finished and silence began. Maybe it is still playing somewhere, maybe it always will be.

Simon Reynolds – ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past’

2011-06-18T11:17:00.001+01:00

Excuse me for giving away the ending, but here is Retromania’s final sentence:

I still believe the future is out there.

It jars because it is at odds with virtually everything else in this book, which takes on the vexed question of what is happening to what used to be called pop music, in an age when anyone who wants to can access practically all of it (if ‘it’ is the recordings), and anyone who doesn’t can ignore it completely. Tom Ewing wrote in a Guardian piece this week, ‘With pop I think the hidden article of faith is that music can take over public space, stamp itself on a moment. If a pop single can't do this, then what is it?’, and Reynolds would be unlikely to argue. He provides many examples of the way in which pop’s past has been recycled in the last decade, but readily admits that there has been no surge forward; nothing, content-wise, to challenge the iconography of the technology through which it is distributed:

Napster Soulseek Limewire Gnutella iPod YouTube Last.fm Pandora MySpace Spotify … these super-brands took the place of super-bands such as Beatles Stones Who Dylan Zeppelin Bowie Sex Pistols Guns N’Roses Nirvana …

Note the decade-proportions there: ’60s – 4, ’70s – 3, ’80s and ’90s – 1 each. Reynolds has written about this before, arguing that fragmentation is responsible both for the disappearance of these super-bands, and the creation of a lot of great music, increasingly consumed by niche audiences. In the book, he puts in a stirring section on his beloved hauntology (littered with bad puns – ‘Seance Fiction’, ‘The Groove Robbers’), which is the closest he can find to an era-defining genre, but admits finally,

in lots of ways figures like Ghost Box, Oneohtrix Point Never et al., are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation.

Hauntology sounds like the dying gasp of pop, even as it fascinates.

Though it trips up a little trying to see a vital future in a backward-looking present, Retromania spends most of its time charting how we got to this point. Divided into the sections ‘Now’, ‘Then’ and ‘Tomorrow’, it kicks off with a visit to the ghastly-sounding British Music Experience museum (predictably light on the ’90s / ’00s), and ponders the appropriation of the word ‘curate’, which has now made it all the way from ATP to the Oxford Dictionary of English* (‘select to perform at (a music festival)’; a decade ago, it would have applied only to exhibitions). How does all this gentrification sit, he wonders, with Julie Burchill’s 1980 snarl, ‘anything that can fit into ROCK’S RICH TAPESTRY is dead at heart’? But it turns out that old punks aren’t immune from curation, and his next stop is Mick Jones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Public Library, a ‘cosy clutter of souvenirs and keepsakes, the detritus of a life spent rock and rolling’. It sounds, simultaneously, as though it might be worth a visit, and as though it should not be there at all.

Just as he is detached enough to encompass Burchill and Jones without getting polemical, Reynolds’ comments on the way the web changes the behaviour of music fans are well balanced about some fairly unbalanced tendencies. He coins a word, ‘franticity’, which is a ‘brittle mood of impatient fixation’, in the context of the internet and its unencompassable content. All the music’s there, but when are you going to find the time to listen to it? ‘I think my record was to have thirty simultaneous downloads streaming into my computer at once’, he admits. ‘Like the proverbial kid in the candy shop, […] I got lost’. It is interesting to compare this to the later section on Northern Soul, of which he is refreshingly un-enamoured: ‘Motown itself – yeah, fabulous … But fetishising the sub-Motown wannabes?’ There is certainly something frantic in the movement’s quest ‘for new old songs’, and the way DJs would disguise their rarest records by covering the labels (with other, misleading ones) in order to stop others identifying them, either to play in their own DJ sets, or to devalue by re-pressing.

There is a surprising comparison between Northern Soul fans and Grateful Dead fans, both being ‘style tribes whose members travelled to particular clubs or one-off events’, with a ‘fixation on a particular moment in the sixties’. Retro is shown to have sprung up in many places at once in music, and in other areas of culture over a longer period (the foundation of the National Trust in 1894, and English Heritage in 1983). Fashion’s interest in retro and vintage is noted, along with an accusation of change without progress. But then what does progress mean?

There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment, something that should never have been transposed from science and technology, where it does apply, onto culture.

Maybe people don’t want culture to progress ‘in the face of capitalism’s reckless and wrecking radicalism’. This fits with the ’80s indie scene in general (and with Lawrence-from-Felt’s career path in particular), described here as

a retreating edge, looking to the sixties and rejecting synthesizers and sequencers for the traditional line-up of guitar–bass–drums.

It is easy to forget that.

____________________

* Turns out I actually mean the New Oxford American Dictionary, which had somehow crept back to ‘default’ on my Kindle. The British one doesn’t have this definition.

Tchotchke Table 2

2011-06-12T12:15:00.001+01:00

Following up on last year’s post, here is what my table looks like at the moment. Mostly this is stuff accumulated this year, going back to last December. Quite a bit of back-filling going on, really I haven’t even dipped a toe in 2011 yet, which is pretty terrible. Or is it? My big ‘discovery’ lately has been Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, via Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles, which I got non-tangibly from Emusic, but related to that is the Boyd production, Nico’s Desertshore, at the bottom. Next door, illegibly, is Panda Su’s I Begin EP, which I like a lot, having found its predecessor Sticks and Bricks a little humourless compared to their gigs. I Begin isn’t stuffed with jokes, but it has a lovely light feel to it, and captures their charm much more effectively.

Top right is a Kate Bush single my sister didn’t want, and her new Director’s Cut album, the only thing I have managed to buy from HMV this year (suggestion: make that temporary Scottish indie section you did last year permanent), about which I was deeply ambivalent to begin with, and which I’d have avoided entirely had I seen the new ‘Deeper Understanding’ video first. But I love the new versions of ‘This Woman’s Work’ and ‘Moments of Pleasure’, almost as much as I’ve loved going back to The Sensual World, thoughtfully included in this edition, along with The Red Shoes. Obviously Kate has steered clear of re-interpreting the latter’s ‘Big Stripey Lie’, in the light of Planet Sunflower’s definitive reading. Beneath the single is a book of William Henry Fox Talbot’s photographs, bought mostly because I remember my grandfather taking me to a museum about him sometime in the ’80s. I don’t remember very much, just this enigmatic image and the name, but it is a beautiful book. Travel down and to the left as far as you can go to find The Orchids’ The Lost Star, which is quite brilliant, and well worth the trip.

Elif Batuman – ‘The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them’

2011-05-28T17:01:00.000+01:00

The version of War and Peace I read a couple of years ago wasn’t the one I’d grown up staring at on my mother’s book shelves. That one came in two volumes, with black spines, and their ‘WAR AND PEACE 1’ and ‘WAR AND PEACE 2’ seem iconic to me now. The edition of ‘The Cossacks’ in the picture to the left is in the same format, and Anna Karenin turned out, when it arrived in the post this week, to be a ’70s TV tie-in. There is a soft focus photo on the front of a woman in furs standing next to a locomotive wheel which is as tall as she is (it missed her that time, anyway). This was pretty disappointing, I wanted the black expanse and the small, white lettering of the non-TV version. The text is the same, Rosemary Edmonds’ 1954 translation, and that is probably the main thing. I want to get away from the too-modern feel of Anthony Briggs’ War and Peace (very readable and energetic though it was), and what I read online of the modern Pevear / Volokhonsky Anna Karenina doesn’t sound promising.

Elif Batuman wrote a really great article for the London Review of Books a while back, about something I’d never heard of (but which seemed to explain a lot) which she calls American programme fiction. She said something which chimed with an idea I’m not sure I’ve really expressed on this blog, but which has always lurked in the background: that nothing is achieved by striving for it. You have to strive for something else, and the thing you didn’t know you wanted will come along en passant, as if by magic or by accident. Why do I write about all these books? Partly to keep a record, and to be able to compare new reads to books whose contents I would otherwise have mostly forgotten. And partly in the hope that something unexpected will cohere. In the article, Batuman says:

The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of pre-existing literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against.

Her ideal is for fiction to ‘capture real life by describing the disjuncture between pre-existing literature and the historical present’. Culture talks to itself, reacts against itself, it is constantly on the move.

The Possessed brings together previously published articles about being an academic studying Russian (and sometimes Uzbek) literature. It reads like a single work though, largely due to the three long ‘Summer in Samarkand’ sections, in which Elif and boyfriend Eric spend the summer in Uzbekistan, she to study the Uzbek language and what has been designated (which turns out to be not so straightforward) its national literature. They are at the mercy of their host, Gulya, who is both over-protective and cynical – late on in the stay the couple realise that the ant-infested vat of marmalade they get to use for their toast is used only by them: there is another kitchen which the family uses, and which has a sealed vat of marmalade. Incidental details of this sort are mixed in with academic activity – reading books, in other words, slots into life here much as it actually does. It’s a very engaging approach, and useful in the opportunities it gives for parallels. For instance, the character Stavrogin from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (AKA Demons AKA The Devils) is ‘unspeakably elegant, irreproachably dressed, eerily handsome’ (p. 256) – everyone falls in love with him, he couldn’t care less and his whole circle ends up destroying itself in one way or another. This is neatly tied to a period of study under adherents of René Girard’s notion of ‘mimetic desire’, and to the similar effect that one of the students, Matej, has on Elif and the rest of the class. They can’t resist the stare. Via the study she works out why The Possessed makes more sense than its disordered emotional carnage would initially suggest, and via Matej she sees the effect this kind of charisma can have on a group. A combination of intent and accident gets her where she didn’t know she wanted to go.

Émile Gaboriau – ‘Monsieur Lecoq’

2011-05-21T23:55:00.003+01:00

A book which made Sherlock Holmes ‘positively ill’? Let’s see:

Quick in his motions, and understanding how to maneuvre the lantern in accordance with his wishes, the young police agent explored the surroundings in a very short space of time. A bloodhound in pursuit of his prey would have been less alert, less discerning, less agile. He came and went, now turning, now pausing, now retreating, now hurrying on again without any apparent reason; he scrutinized, he questioned every surrounding object: the ground, the logs of wood, the blocks of stone, in a word, nothing escaped his glance. For a moment he would remain standing, then fall upon his knees, and at times lie flat upon his stomach with his face so near the ground that his breath must have melted the snow. He had drawn a tape-line from his pocket, and using it with a carpenter’s dexterity, he measured, measured, and measured.

Odd though it is to think of Holmes settling down to a good read, it is obvious that he would recognise himself in this. He may also have traced the source of his own axiom,

when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth

to Lecoq’s more flamboyant

Always suspect that which seems probable; and begin by believing what appears incredible.

Improbable though it seems, he suspects that he is not a real person at all, but a character whose author has borrowed liberally from this earlier book, and given him an awareness of it. Enough to make any character queasy. So he lashes out, labelling Lecoq a ‘miserable bungler’, implying that the tenacious energy he brings to bear over months of detective work is largely wasted. ‘The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours.’

It turns out that this is fair criticism. In the early chapters, Lecoq is brilliant, reconstructing the events which led up to the triple murder in Widow Chupin’s tavern: two men shot dead, and a third with a fatal wound to his neck; an armed man found barricading the way to the back exit with a table. The police burst in, catching him red handed. Lecoq steals around to the back and cuts off his escape, and the man exclaims, ‘Lost! It is the Prussians who are coming!’ This is the first of Lecoq’s clues, and one of many which lead him to suspect that the prisoner is hiding his position in society, a crucial point in establishing his crime as murder (he claims self defence; Lecoq needs to establish some political motive). Once the man, May, has been taken away, Lecoq and his simple but loyal assistant Father Absinthe stay behind overnight to look for further clues. They follow two sets of footprints from the back door over the snow covered ground, Lecoq demonstrating that the purpose of May’s barricade was to cover the escape of two women, whose movements he is able to describe with uncanny accuracy. The prints of a male accomplice are also identified, and the height of this man, and the colour of his coat, emerge from the smallest of clues.

But Lecoq is not free, as Holmes is, from the procedures of justice. When it begins to rain, he frantically looks about for a method of preserving the footprints in the snow, eventually scraping some plaster from a wall and fashioning moulds from boards and boxes. Holmes would not have bothered with this, nor with the long interrogation to which May is submitted, and during which he is unhelpfully kept informed of the police’s suspicions by an insider (Lecoq suspects his jealous boss, Gevrol), allowing him to avoid all the traps set for him. The internal politics of the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture de Police come ever more to the fore, and slowly but surely the case which had started so promisingly gets bogged down in bureaucracy and deliberate obfuscation. In this, it reminded me of the recently screened third series of French cop / law TV drama Spiral: for both stories, the identity, character and connections of the all-powerful investigating magistrate are the most important feature of an investigation. It’s remarkable that the such similar stories can be told about 1869 and 2010. M. Segmuller is on Lecoq’s side, but their position becomes more untenable the longer the interrogation goes on. Lecoq is sure that May can’t be who he says he is, a wandering circus showman, because such a man would not have had the education necessary to make the remark, ‘It is the Prussians who are coming!’ (a reference to Waterloo, apparently). It is a weak argument, which smacks of snobbery.

In increasing desperation, Lecoq first spies on May from a cavity above his prison cell, then allows him to escape and spends days doggedly tailing him, Father Absinthe in tow, chalking walls when they get separated. Both men wear ridiculous disguises, and take great delight in trying them out on their unsuspecting colleagues. Maybe the twists and turns do get a bit much, but the revelation of the truth is beautifully managed, and you realise the clue was there all along. It comes, at last, from a Mycroft Holmes-like figure, Tabaret, laid up in bed with gout, able to pick out the true explanation from Lecoq’s narrative without getting up. Despite the similarities, this is a different kind of story telling to Conan Doyle’s, one in which the detective is as much involved in the whirlwind of doubt as the reader, and follows up every false trail, energetically, exhaustively, as though it were the true one.

‘Most preposterous!’

2011-05-15T11:50:00.001+01:00

Re-reading A Study in Scarlet this week didn’t change my opinion that it is the weakest of the four Sherlock Holmes novels, but there was a passage that surprised me. Explaining how he is able to tell that his prospective flatmate is an ex-army doctor who has served in Afghanistan just by looking, Holmes reminds Dr Watson of Edgar Allen Poe’s character Dupin. Holmes is sniffy:

No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin […]. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial.

Watson responds by throwing another literary antecedent in his face, Émile Gaboriau’s Lecoq. Holmes’ reaction this time breaks the confines of the story, and speaks, irritably, mischievously, from A Study in Scarlet to Monsieur Lecoq, facing it down, book to book:

‘Lecoq was a miserable bungler,’ he said, in an angry voice; ‘he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill.’

The trick Holmes mentions in the first quote is one he uses himself, in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, and it certainly impressed me enough as a boy to stick in my mind long after the references to Dupin and Lecoq were forgotten. I am slightly outraged to find that it is stolen from Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, even if the debt is acknowledged on both occasions. The moral of A Study in Scarlet is anticipated by Poe, too:

They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. (Dupin to the narrator in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’)

I have already explained to you that what is out the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. (Holmes to Watson, in A Study in Scarlet)

It even turns out that the idea of a character acknowledging the sources involved in his own creation is borrowed from the same Poe story, with Dupin saying that ‘Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man.’ Here again the reference is disguised as criticism: ‘He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in doing so he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole.’ Presumably this chain of influence stops with Eugène François Vidocq, as he was a real man rather than a character in a book.

Calling Orson

2011-05-10T18:56:00.000+01:00

at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. (Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons)

At eighteen or nineteen I saw Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time. You know, the greatest film ever made, and the greatest film ever destroyed by studio cuts. Neither really helped to explain their creator: Orson Welles swaggered in the first, fully in control of a new, wildly ambitious kind of film, bristling with virtuosity and confidence. The second seemed, at the time, a third rate melodrama, mitigated only slightly by its nice camera angles. Soon afterwards I saw him again, on a repeat of Michael Parkinson’s 1974 interview, the 26-year-old boy wonder of 1941 inflated into an unrecognisably grey, podgy 59 (only 59! He looked much older). The interview was fascinating in a way neither film managed, Orson emerging as a vulnerable, infinitely generous raconteur, modest to a fault, and expansive in a thoughtful and endearing way. As he spoke the mannerisms and expressions of Kane lit up the face of this prematurely aged man, it was very moving. I wrote a song about it, which you can hear near the end of Pomp and Circumstance. In the midst of some recent Welles-related repeats on BBC4, I thought to look up the 1974 interview on YouTube, and the whole thing is there. I thought you should see it.

Also more highly recommended than I know how: Orson Welles – The One Man Band

Sarah Bakewell – ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’

2011-05-03T19:42:00.000+01:00

Stoics and Epicureans […] thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right – controlling and paying attention – most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. (p. 110)

From chapter 6, ‘Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks’. It rings true: the things that are worth doing cannot be approached directly, you have to trick them into happening. The Sundays’ song ‘When I’m Thinking About You’ says much the same thing:

When you’re searching your soul, when you’re searching for pleasure
How often pain is all you find
But when you’re coasting along and nobody’s trying too hard
You can turn around and like where you are

I’ve always thought, too, that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless embodies this kind of insouciance, in the way it manages to be so overwhelming with apparently no physical effort. And – last ’90s music reference point – Momus seems supremely Montaignian, for his insatiable but detached curiosity. It isn’t that things don’t matter to him, they just generally don’t matter too much. What an efficient, interesting way to live that must be. So how’s it done?

The twenty chapter titles of this book give various answers, including ‘Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted’, ‘Philosophise only by accident’, ‘Reflect on everything; regret nothing’ and ‘Do a good job, but not too good a job’. Montaigne’s father, an energetic man given to half-completed projects, would not have been sympathetic to this goal-free (or trick-goal) outlook, but his decision to have his son brought up with Latin as a first language nonetheless fitted in with it. Montaigne absorbed the language from a tutor before he knew what was happening, and so was perfectly placed, once he had rejected the school curriculum Horace and Cicero, to wander off into the richer pastures of Ovid and Plutarch, in distinctly un-academic fashion:

he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family. […] He collected unsystematically, without considering fine bindings or rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father’s mistake of festishising books or their authors. (p. 67)

The man who venerates literature doesn’t appreciate it; the man who loves it knows that veneration is not a fertile attitude to take. It’s a dead end, a goal, and why bother with those when there are so many interesting digressions to explore?

How to Live doesn’t just tell you how Montaigne thinks you should live, it is also a biography (as advertised); a history of the times, covering the Catholic / Protestant civil wars that ran from 1562-98; a history of the philosophy which led to Montaigne’s book, the Essays; a history of the book itself, as attitudes towards it shifted. The Essays influenced Descartes and Pascal (who fought against its insights into human fallibility) and Rousseau, in contrast to whom Montaigne

does not want to show that modern civilisation is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature. (p. 192)

In its own time, the Essays met with the approval of the Catholic Church, which in its antipathy towards Protestantism wanted to discourage enquiring thought in favour of faith. Montaigne’s undermining of reason, as long as it was not applied to the Church itself, could be interpreted as support for the elevated position of priests, cardinals, the pope. A century later, in Pascal’s time, attitudes were different: doubt ‘belonged to the Devil’ (p. 143), and Montaigne’s insurmountable insistence on it, and the ‘disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, sceptics and rakes’ (p. 152) which constituted much of its seventeenth century readership, meant that it was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1676, where it remained until 1854.

Montaigne did not see doubt this way, of course. For him it was a constant pleasure to be able to re-examine subjects from different angles, which may have been inconsistent but which could never be wrong. Doubt was liberating, and liberal:

The qualities he valued were curiosity, sensibility, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and ‘goodwill’ – none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration. (p. 200)

Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.

Recent Reading

2011-04-23T16:58:00.002+01:00

I seem to be having some time off from blogging at the moment, but here are the books I haven’t been writing about:

Peter Carey – Oscar and Lucinda

Part three in a book chain, if such a thing exists. Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy biography recommended Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which forms the basis for much of the early portion of Oscar and Lucinda. If the chain were to extend further, it would loop back and take in Philip Henry Gosse’s A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, which makes an appearance here. Chunky and satisfying, with a neat line in justifying gambling from a clergyman’s perspective: ‘Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier’.

Honoré de Balzac – At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, The Ball at Sceaux and Letters of Two Brides

Two novellas and an epistolary novel, the first three stories in La Comédie humaine. I was feeling ambivalent about caving in to gadgetry / consumerism and buying a Kindle, so this is my justification. Now, I know almost nothing about Balzac except that Proust rated him highly, and that he is associated with the French branch of nineteenth century realism, so I was surprised by how rarefied these stories are. All turn on love, and all ooze money. In The Ball at Sceaux the aristocracy, having spent a fortune repelling Napoleon, is engaged in clawing back its affluence through marriage with rich commoners, and the elegant, spoiled Emilie de Fontaine refuses to play along, eventually throwing over the man she loves when she finds him behind the counter in a draper’s shop. The novellas are both beautifully plotted, fairytale-like in their twists and comeuppances. The novel went on for rather too long about the greatness and perfection of love vs. the greatness and perfection of family life (because obviously you can’t have both), but it hasn’t put me off wanting to read more. A thin, elegant soup.

Joe Boyd – White Bicycles

The best music memoir I’ve read in a long time, if not ever. Tied with Bill Drummond’s 45 and Julian Cope’s Head On, and closer to the former for the behind-the-scenes manager shenanigans. Boyd’s producer credits include Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day, which I knew about; Nico’s Desertshore and Pink Floyd’s Arnold Layne, which I didn’t. He was there at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan invented the modern world (or at least annoyed a lot of folk fans), running between factions during the short, cacophonous set. The anti-Dylan faction included Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger; the pro- had Albert Grossman (Dylan’s manager) and, oddly, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary. It was Yarrow who said no, they weren’t going to turn it down. That is just one example of how absurdly well placed Boyd is to tell the tale of a certain strand of ’60s music, and he does it with self-deprecation and wit (it is his tone, more than anything, which reminds me of Drummond). The sections on Nick Drake are fascinating, and it was a surprise to discover just how much Bryter Layter is the product of him as a producer and Witchseason as a label, from whose other bands it took its musicians. Once it was done, Nick told Joe he wanted to make his next album much more spare, with no arrangements, and Joe took a job in America, feeling that the acts he cared for most (Nick and Fairport Convention) no longer needed him.

Further listening: Joe Boyd’s ‘Lucky 13’ podcast, for Resonance FM.

Edmund Gosse – ‘Father and Son’

2011-03-19T20:50:00.000Z

Mentioned by Claire Tomalin in her Thomas Hardy biography as ‘one of the most powerful autobiographical books ever written’, and I can never resist a tangential recommendation like that. It is a surprising conclusion to a paragraph that otherwise depicts Edmund Gosse as a socialite with literary pretensions which his talent did not justify. It tells the story of Edmund’s childhood, spent mostly in rural Devon, and dominated by his father’s attempts to bring him up in accordance with his own Christian faith (he was a minister with the Plymouth Bretheren, who were / are Baptists with some sort of doctrinal difference or other). The Wikipedia entry on the father, Philip Henry Gosse – somewhat longer than his son’s page – gives several examples of critics doubting the truth of Edmund’s account, implying that it is self-serving. It also reports that Ann Thwaite, biographer of both men, ‘argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father’s superior abilities, by demolishing the latter’s character’. I’m not sure he quite does that, though. By the end, Philip Henry has certainly become a suffocating presence, and one that Edmund needs to escape in order to grow up himself, but that is hardly unusual, at the end of adolescence. There are plenty of moments, too, during which he forgets to be godly and is very charming:

Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was murders. I wonder whether little boys of seven or eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa?

A potent anecdote told just before this has Philip Henry singing a folk song, delighting his son with his ‘strange, broad Wessex lingo’, when some carpenters overhear and comment on the contrast between the song and the minister’s station. ‘I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life.’ Christianity is always a limiting factor in this book. It gets in the way of life (and especially social life) as it should be lived.

It also gets in the way of Philip Henry’s professional life as a natural scientist. He is a man very specifically out of time. Towards the beginning of the book, after his wife’s death, he nobly rises to the financial challenges which ensue by undertaking a lecture tour: ‘The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin’, is how Edmund dramatises it. The lectures were a success, and had their audiences fascinated by the new possibility of being able to observe marine wildlife in aquariums. In any earlier age, this interest would not have been incompatible with religious faith, but this was 1856: Lyell and Darwin were in the process of changing the way the public thought about the creation of the world, and humanity. Gosse’s response was characteristically brave, misguided and bloody minded:

My Father, after long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell’s sails, and justify geology to godly readers of ‘Genesis’. It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

This was the subject of his book Omphalos, which did not sell well, being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.

A similar rigidity runs through Philip Henry’s entire approach to bringing up Edmund, who acknowledges, ‘It was not in harshness or in ill-nature that he worried me so much; on the contrary, it was part of his too-anxious love’. Which makes sense: you don’t want the people you love to be eternally damned, after all. He eagerly rushes his son into baptism in his early teens, and Edmund complies, takes it seriously, becomes quite big headed about it. Gradually, though, he lets his natural inclinations take him upon a more sociable, and a more literate path. The sad thing is that you feel that these would also be Philip Henry’s inclinations, were it not for his faith. He delights in reading a poem of Scott’s out loud to Edmund, but will not allow him to read any of his novels. Relenting a little he allows him The Pickwick Papers, on the grounds that Dickens ‘exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light’. On the subject of his second marriage, Philip Henry has to endure the fruits of his advice to Edmund to ‘testify “in season and out of season”’, and his son grills him about Miss Brightwen’s religious unsuitability – which he does purely as a duty, being fond of her personally. His father fudges the issue for once, an admirable exception to ‘his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every compromise that makes life bearable.’

Vic Godard & Subway Sect, Edinburgh (Citrus Club) and Dundee (Dexter’s), 12th and 13th March

2011-03-14T18:22:00.001Z

Story #1: We last saw Subway Sect in December 2009, though I didn’t write about it, as the set was much the same as the previous one, in 2007, and two years on from 1978 Now there were still no new songs. (Apart from ‘That Train’. Like most songwriters ever get near to a ‘That Train’). At the end, being pushed for time, Vic asked what we wanted for an encore, giving a list of three or four Sect Mark One incendiaries. One was ‘Chain Smoking’, a song S. and I love, and, positioned at Vic’s feet, we screamed ourselves hoarse in its favour. Chris joined in with the screaming; I think A. might have been a bit embarrassed. And we got our ‘Chain Smoking’ – the punk version, obviously, given the context, though I admit I’d been hoping for a dramatic switch of register at the last minute, to the tender, world weary lounge version. I still think those switches are the key to Vic.

This time the circumstances were, wonderfully, quite different. Apparently from nowhere, but perhaps drawing on the momentum of 1978 Now and its attendant shows (Vic suggests as much in Andy’s interview for Manic Pop Thrills), We Come as Aliens is the perfect contemporary Subway Sect record. Drawing on their earliest sound, but not slavishly, the album is brim full of joy with its own clatter, and brings its wayward voice (© Brogues) to bear on just the kinds of thing you’d think a fiftysomething punk turned postman would be concerned with. It is not trying to relive adolescence, it is very much a logical progression, a bemused but uncompromising survey of now. Before they came on in Dundee, Chris remarked that, enjoyable as Edinburgh School for the Deaf and Spectorbullets had been, they were also supremely ridiculous, which made them an odd choice to support the most sensible band ever. Make that ‘grounded’, and I agree.

Story #2: Support at the Edinburgh gig came from the Sexual Objects, another ridiculous band, of course, and a great one. Davy Henderson paid tribute to Vic’s parents for giving birth to him, ‘what a beautiful thing’, his mid-Atlantic, intergalactic patter perfectly pitched as always. Their set was raw and crunchy, especially the heavy opening instrumental, I wanted to dissolve into the PA. There was an aftershow party just down the road, at which Spectorbullets played, oddly mannered, but with interesting rhythmical shifts and some killer guitar lines (others admired the bass playing, but I don’t think I’m capable of admiring slap bass). They were followed by a thin blonde Swedish woman who pounded an acoustic guitar, bright-eyed and relentless, looking as though she would have been better placed in a workout video. That was exhausting. And it was hot, humid, late. I sat down, but that didn’t help. Finally giving up, I rushed to the toilets and threw up. Freshening up at the sink afterwards, I rested on my hands, looked in the mirror. Probably I have looked better. As if by magic, looking immaculate, and a good fifteen years younger than he had any right to, Davy Henderson was at my side, with some sage advice: ‘Hey, don’t snort the Carex’.

There was nothing wrong with the Edinburgh gig, nothing at all. It had the Sexual Objects in it, after all, and Subway Sect were enjoying themselves enough by the end to edge gently past the 10 PM curfew (in place to make way for a club night), delivering a playful stop / start version of ‘Music of a Werewolf’, and a rollicking ‘Chain Smoking’. But the Dundee show was better. Kicking off with ‘We Oppose All Rock and Roll’ roughly twenty four hours after leaving the stage in Edinburgh, they soon settled into a far more relaxed set. More chatty, too: Vic gleefully explained that ‘my missus’, who had gone home the previous day, doesn’t like him talking too much on stage, because ‘people want to hear your songs, not a comedy routine’. With her out of the way, he was free to tell us all sorts of nonsense, beginning with a malign hint (connected with this, I expect) that he walks past Vince Cable’s house twice a day on the way to his round, and that unlike his office, it has no police guard. We also heard of his plans for a 1982 Now album, to coincide with his retirement (still quite a way off, surely?) so that he can book a world cruise and croon the days away, with all the Songs for Sale material (but what is wrong with Songs for Sale as it is? Wonderful record. Newly re-available too, if only digitally).

We got a new song, with both the riff and the words from The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, one or both of which might need to go when they come to record it; we got ‘That Train’, ‘Nobody’s Scared’ and ‘Ne’er’, none of which graced Edinburgh, and ‘Ambition’, which did. After SP’s recent comment about ‘Ne’er’, I went and checked out the lyrics, and was pleased to find the content as wayward as the delivery:

Oh ne’er, I never wanted it
And suddenly look hey presto
But ne’er, I never wanted to be
Floggin’ me own fake pesto

It was a delight to hear him singing that, and to wonder how many of those listening unprimed noticed the line about pesto, another of those switches I was talking about. As, more overtly, was ‘Blackpool’, which has barely left my head since the EP arrived, and which shows Vic conquering another genre (music hall) with barely a second thought. The main set ended with ‘Chain Smoking’ again, S. and I dancing joyfully by this time, and continuing through ‘Et Même’ and others. Then she shouted out for ‘Chain Smoking’ as an encore, which I thought was a bit odd. Other sections of the crowd were equally enthusiastic, and though the turn out wasn’t quite what we’d hoped, actually there were plenty there to respond warmly to Vic’s songs (especially ‘Ambition’ and ‘Nobody’s Scared’, which had a few old punks throwing great shapes), and to his chat, and to get him back for two encores even though they’d gone through all their material. A very special night, many thanks to Andy and Mike for putting it on, and to Vic for coming to Dundee and making us all feel at home.

Story #3: Walking towards the taxi rank afterwards, S. realised, fifteen months on, that the beserk rumbling thing which goes ‘CHAAAAAAAIN, life is a CHAAAAAAAIN’ is the same song as the elegant ‘Chain Smoking’ she thought she had been requesting, in 2009 and half an hour previously. ‘I’m so stupid!’ Well, not really, they do have completely different tunes, and the words are pretty indistinct on the loud one. But you see what happened there? Vic switched things around on you.

____________________

Chris’ photos.
Some reflections on the Glasgow show.

Claire Tomalin – ‘Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man’

2011-03-06T11:41:00.001Z

On the preface of Late Lyrics and Earlier, published in 1922:

he refused to be labelled as a pessimist. He was an ‘evolutionary meliorist’, he insisted, who believed that the world needed both religion and rationality, and that they might be reconciled and interfused through poetry. His theories are less interesting than his poetry, and Late Lyrics is not read for its ideas. (p. 342)

I’m glad she said that, because I had been wondering. Hardy is best known, perhaps, for bucking against the trend of Victorian fiction to give characters their moral due. The good rewarded, the bad punished, the good-but-fallen conveniently killed off, to the laments of those left behind. He doesn’t shirk from the third category, of course, but the other two? In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the plot seemed to spring from character: Farfrae rewarded for being easy going and level headed; Henchard punished for being short tempered and easily flustered. Tomalin suggests there is something else at work, citing a passage at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which Hardy ‘invoked the idea of the President of the Immortals sporting with her’ (p. 221). There is a guiding hand, in other words, though not that of the Christian god:

Later still he saw the Cause of Things as ‘neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral’. (p. 223)

I can’t see how this is different from there being no guiding hand at all, but it is the closest the book gets to explaining the consistently bleak turns of event in Hardy’s plots in terms of an ideology.

The implication is that the ideology is flawed, and that it is pessimism which guides him, after all. Tomalin disapprovingly quotes a moment from Jude the Obscure, in which Jude is sorely in need of encouragement in the studies which have so little precedent amongst his class: ‘But nobody did come, because nobody does’. This, she says, is an instance of him ‘generalising falsely’ (p. 222), because sometimes helpful people do turn up (Hardy is the anti-Micawber). Jude’s position is roughly the same as Hardy’s was, as a boy, coming from a rural labouring family, harbouring scholarly ambitions. Hardy’s parents, seeing that he wasn’t cut out to be a builder, got him started as an architect, which was a step up, socially, and allowed him the move to London from where he launched his writing career. He found people who encouraged him, even before moving away, and the firms to whom he submitted his first book were not discouraging, though no-one liked it enough to publish it. And yet, ‘Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again.’ (p. 254). A character willing to work hard, but dragged down by a lack of opportunity which was not his creator’s experience. Which is OK, it’s fiction after all. But what, besides drawing attention to the plight of the intellectually-inclined poor, is all this bleakness for?

The Time-Torn Man opens dramatically with the death of Hardy’s wife, Emma. ‘He was not expecting her to die, but then he had not been taking much notice of her for some time.’ (p. xvii). She had taken to sleeping in the attic; the two were estranged without either having moved out. Her eccentric behaviour seems to have been partly responsible for this, and there were suggestions by contemporaries (which Tomalin does not accept) of insanity. The estrangement seems to have been partly cultural – it is when entertaining distinguished literary guests that her odd behaviour (which might mean no more than talking too much about their dog) is most excruciating. Her own poetry is dismissed out of hand, and the novel she wrote, The Maid on the Shore, is assessed as ‘not entirely unreadable’. (p. 157)

She made no progress with her own writing and became one of those wives who regards her huband’s work as ‘our work’ and refers to it that way in public. (p. 179)

Jealousy is part of it, then. Family loyalties too – Hardy’s mother hated Emma, the reason given is that she brought him ‘neither youth nor wealth, small intelligence and no children.’ (p. 172). From 1893, Hardy began to fall in love with other women – first Florence Henniker, then Florence Dugdale, the latter becoming his wife after Emma’s death in 1912. A triumph of sorts for Dugdale, after years of sneaking around, but the death marked the point at which he began to write poems about the early days of his life with Emma. Tomalin sees in the poems Hardy wrote about her in 1912-13 a tenderness and a strength of imagination which was new in his work, and which offer a perfect illustration of the gap between life as he lived it and as he imagined it. Ironically, Emma had been aware of this gap, far more so than Florence was (she hated these poems):

Emma complained that he cared more for the women he imagined than for any real woman, a remark that suggests she understood him better than she is usually given credit for. (p. 197)

Tomalin’s enthusiasm for the poetry is infectious, and makes me want to read more of it (generally I’m not good at reading poetry, but we’ll see). It is in this gap of Hardy’s, between life and imagination, that the reason for Jude the Obscure’s suffocating trajectory can be glimpsed: temperament and pessimism are certainly factors, but really he is just being true to his art. The situation repeats itself in miniature later on, and his future second wife has a veiled warning of what is to come:

[Florence was] further exasperated by the poem he was writing on the death of his cat, described as his only real friend. When she objected that the cat was not by any means his only friend, he explained that he was ‘not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation.’ (p. 304)

A dissenting clique, a subway sect

2011-02-18T18:55:00.004Z

Vic Godard made a record last year, did you notice? His first set of new songs since 2002’s Sansend, and his best since The End of the Surrey People. The artwork is so bad, it’s a puzzle: if this is what it looks like, how much care can possibly have gone into its creation? The songs are so good, though, they make the cover look like sabotage. Which might be a recurring theme: the back cover of What’s the Matter, Boy? is light years ahead of the front, for instance. This week I ordered Vic’s Blackpool EP: the cover is lovely, and a couple of well-designed postcards accompanied it. It’s not like Subway Sect have got no style, but maybe they think it’s worth more when no-one’s looking. Because no-one’s looking? Look up ‘sect’, I guess. Faction: a dissenting clique. We come as aliens. The new album is a rough ’n’ tumble state of the nation address (‘Back in the Community’, ‘Rhododendron Town’) interspersed with joyously offbeat interjections from other planets (‘That Train’, ‘Et Meme’), winding up with the Sansend recap ‘Music of a Werewolf’, which sounds more like vindication than apology. Not that Sansend is anything to apologise for (e.g. ‘Americana → Fire’ is one of Vic’s best songs), but I’m guessing its clunky beats didn’t go down well with all those old punks. A typographically obtuse note on the back of the Sexual Objects’ Cucumber reads:

"6 "WIPE YOUR TAPES WITH LIGHTNIN'%, ...Paul Reekie said that..,.

Maybe that is a tribute (Reekie died last year), or perhaps it takes in the Sect too, because another note quotes ‘Stool Pigeon’:

WE CAN STILL PICNIC
we can still picnic

It also turns out that Reekie’s is the Scottish voice running through Sansend, conjuring up in a few brief clips some kind of radical hard as nails poetry discussion in the pub group. A dissenting clique, a subway sect. The kind of thing Hugh MacDiarmid probably went in for.

What I am getting at is this: Vic Godard and Subway Sect play Dundee at Dexter’s, Castle Street on 13th March. Doors 7:30PM, tickets from Groucho’s. Spectorbullets are supporting, and a couple of plays of their album suggests they are very much worth turning up for too.

____________________

Update: I’ve added the gig poster above (thanks Andy), and should point out that tickets are also available from We Got Tickets.

Garen Ewing – ‘The Rainbow Orchid, Volume Two’

2011-02-13T23:01:00.003Z

It seems a long time since volume one of The Rainbow Orchid, but actually it is only eighteen months since I read it. The branch of Borders just down the road used to stock it, along with other comic albums in the same vein, and I had fun for a while (until Borders collapsed, three months later) catching up with Cinebook’s reprints of Lucky Luke and Iznogoud. There is an interesting interview with Garen I heard around the same time, which shows the range of his influences. It led me to Edgar P. Jacobs’ The Yellow M, and a volume of Chaland’s Freddy Lombard stories, which was much cheaper in the French edition, and a bookmark reveals that I only made it to page nineteen. But that was far enough to notice that, although the style of art is looser, Freddy looks just like Tintin. There is nobody like him in The Yellow M, but there the art is very close to Hergé’s. The plot is pure hokum, Sherlock Holmes meets Scooby Doo (taking in the crown jewels, ancient Egyptian iconography and mind control), but the artwork is meticulous, delighting in architecture and tailored clothing. T., who is involved in publishing The Rainbow Orchid, was careful to describe Garen’s influences in terms of the ligne claire style, rather than Hergé alone, which I went ahead and ignored in my post (which, er, isn’t very good, is it?) but he was right, of course. The Rainbow Orchid is a bid to broaden British interest in this French style of comic book beyond Asterix and Tintin. It would be lovely to see it happen. You want to help out with that, Waterstone’s?

Volume one ended with our heroes, Julius Chancer (‘historical research assistant’), Lily Lawrence (‘silent film actress’) and Nathaniel Crumpole (‘movie publicity agent’), being flown from France to Karachi in a small biplane by a stunt pilot. They have narrowly escaped the clutches of Urkaz Grope’s henchmen, who must stop them from finding the impossibly rare rainbow orchid. Lily’s father, Lord Reginald, has foolishly bet his title and estate on the result of an orchid competition, and Grope already has a black orchid in his possession. Lord Reginald may have been drugged before he agreed to the bet – there is plenty of hokum in this story, too. With the scene already set, volume two is free to concentrate on the thrill of the chase, and plot developments are more subtle. It is suggested that the military want the rainbow orchid for their own purposes, and there are various dark hints about Grope’s ultimate goal. He doesn’t need the money – crates and trucks emblazoned ‘Grope Bananas’ and ‘Grope Grain’ in Europe and India indicate that he has business interests everywhere. He has the journalist William Pickle kidnapped, then has his growing army of guards dress up in knights’ tunics and gold-coloured masks, like he’s accumulating an army of medieval cybermen. There is some nice character development too – a slight hint at flirtation between Julius and Lily, and Nathaniel Crumpole’s burgeoning interest in animals. He buys a camel, rides an elephant and sneaks a snow leopard cub into his knapsack, antagonising its mother somewhat. No longer the cynical Hollywood opportunist of volume one, he has become an endearingly loopy presence.

The artwork is beautiful, as before, maybe more so. The first few pages take us to the Natural History Museum, where the architectural grandeur of the first two panels slips without dialogue into an awkward meeting between a spy and the man he is following. Stuffed gorillas, fish and dolphins appear to gaze out from behind glass, irrelevant to the sense of the scene but giving it an edgy absurdity whilst gently plugging curation (if the subtext of the last volume was the media creating its own story, this time it is the folly of failing to preserve historical artefacts). The palette, surprisingly, sticks to its muted browns and dark reds across the shift from Europe to India. Most of the Indian action takes place outside, and architecture is replaced with craggy mountains which remind me of nothing so much as King Ottokar’s Sceptre (sorry!) There is a train in India, too, which seems to be a favourite subject of Ewing’s, but here it is shown piecemeal, and from all sorts of interesting angles. Volume one’s monolithic panels of A Train, A Ship, A Car, An Aeroplane, have largely been phased out in favour of smaller panels which do more than one thing at once, and are better at moving the story on. I wonder where it will go next?

Kristin Hersh – ‘Paradoxical Undressing’

2011-02-07T23:01:00.000Z

Night swimming is mania, wanting to learn everything and live everywhere is mania, feeling warm all the time (the poor band must’ve been so cold), hearing songs, restlessness (my inability to lie on a floor or sit in a chair), a disregard for the future, seeing things that aren’t there, insomnia, racing out into storms, needing to fuzzify the world in order to focus, the Doghouse episode, hating buildings, ranting all night about how bad bad radio is (the poor band must’ve been so tired), thinking I have a calling, that I’m on a mission… these are all symptoms of a long-term manic state. How embarrassing. So what’s left? What’s ‘me’? Anything? (p. 150)

This list, halfway through the Kristin Hersh memoir some of us have been dying to read for several years now, is a pretty good summary of her activities up to this point. It’s 1985, and she’s at college in Providence, where her father teaches, and where he introduces her to the ex-movie star turned mature student Betty Hutton. Betty is 64, slightly lost in the past, and her stories about Judy Garland and Cary Grant could easily be taken for delusions. Kristin is 18, drifting between college, a squat, friends’ floors, and the rock clubs her band have been playing at for several years already. With an endearing lack of tact, her father crows, ‘It’s perfect! Kristin, you’re too young to make any friends here and Betty, you’re too old!’ (p. 16). He turns out to be right: the two are inseparable, studying together (more chatting really) for entire afternoons in the library, locked in the toilet and shouting ‘Occupied!’ in response to every knock. Betty remarks, ‘Singing on the toilet! If Mr DeMille could see me now!’ (p. 17) and it’s pure Sunset Boulevard.

Betty is overbearing, if fond, and her criticisms of Kristin’s lack of ‘sparkle’ provide an illuminating contrast to Kristin’s actual intention as a performer: not to entertain, but to disappear, to make way for the songs. It is a staple of her interviews that the songs come to her from outside, sometimes as unwelcome physical manifestations, and that all she does is transcribe them – which she must, to get rid of the wolves (‘Mania’), mechanical bees (‘Buzz’), and especially the snake (she doesn’t say, but – ‘Cottonmouth’?). She takes a detour backwards from 1985 to explain how the songs came about. A car knocked her off her bike and drove away; Kristin ended up in hospital. The accident sounds horrific, and is described… dispassionately? Not exactly. It’s hard to describe the description. There is a weight to it, at the same time she’s cracking jokes, taking notes: ‘Flying through the air in vivid slow motion, thinking, so this is what this feels like.’ (p. 74), or ‘I’d never seen blood pour into a sewer before (it looks really cool)’ (p. 75). Zero self-pity, but all the same an unblinking acknowledgement that she is messed up: ‘The front of my head was hamburger and blood with two blue eyes staring out.’ The same balance applies later on to a breakdown that leads to a suicide attempt, and medication. But those terms are crude, I feel bad for using them. Kristin’s account is precise, it is only what it is. She won’t even allow that suicidal people are necessarily sad: ‘Couldn’t we just be finding solutions to our own personal equations? Writing the end of our stories?’ (p. 149). The songs, anyway, began after the car / bike crash, like this:

A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. (p. 76)

For days she’s sure the sound is external, from the TV next door. It’s only when she goes next door and hears the TV making a completely different noise that she realises, ‘The noise is mine’ (p. 77). It brings colours with it, too. The songs are intensified by the ‘Doghouse episode’, a brief stay at an apartment with ‘Doghouse’ painted on the door. The building is normal, but somehow evil, and it infects Kristin’s songs. She doesn’t live there long, but carries the experience with her. And then one day, walking down Angell Street in Providence, she is accosted by a mohawked student with pamphlets, who ‘stopped me to talk about “killing God”. I was intrigued. Killing God is way better than saving whales.’ He continues:

‘Did you know that religious wars kill more people than political ones?’ I didn’t answer; I wanted him to hurry up and tell me how to kill God. ‘Well… they do. Historically, that is. And it’s because we as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions.’ I waited. Kill God, c’mon. ‘For example, say you’re a smack freak –’ (p. 118)

So this is how my favourite song got started! A ‘fake song’ at first (I think this means a consciously-written one), that was supposed to be funny. ‘The fake part attached itself to a piece of Doghouse evil and took off, came back horrifying’ (p. 129). Presto, ‘Hate My Way’. Come the recording sessions at the end of the book, Gil Norton is similarly astonished at the genesis of the only song in the world which could possibly follow ‘Hate My Way’:

‘My roommate, Vicky, painted some cool stuff on a box when she was moving and some of it turned up in a song.’
He looks stunned. ‘Really? “Vicky’s Box” is a song about Vicky’s box? A box owned by someone named Vicky?’ (p. 290)

Gil is lovely, and goes to great lengths to get the astonishing performances of Throwing Muses out of Kristin (comforting, understanding lengths). Gary, who produced the demo which interested Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD (AKA The Doghouse Cassette), is lovely too, providing support, transport and sustenance through the post-breakdown days of lithium-shaky performances and then pregnancy. Loveliest of all though is Muses drummer Dave Narcizo, who enters into all… well quite a lot of Kristin’s foibles (not wearing glasses in order to ‘fuzzify the world’, not wearing a coat because she was ‘warm all the time’), and tries sometimes to reign her in:

Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. ‘See? We can still wear T-shirts but if we wear our T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!’ (p. 93)

I was trying to imagine what this book would be like for someone who doesn’t love the songs. Then I stopped because I wouldn’t want to be that someone. Thank you, Kristin. Keep them (and the books) coming.

____________________

Newly-performed Throwing Muses songs to accompany the book are here.
See Betty Hutton in The Perils of Pauline.

Thomas Hardy – ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’

2011-01-29T11:31:00.000Z

Reflecting on The Woodlanders a few years ago, I wrote: ‘unlike Richard Yates, who writes about impossibilities, Hardy gives us missed possibilities’. That book left such a rich impression – not for its plot, which I’ve completely forgotten (having carefully avoided spoilers in the post, it doesn’t help much), but for its textures, in terms of both landscape and portrait. The Mayor of Casterbridge doesn’t quite live up to it on those terms, being so packed with event and exposition, but that is also its strength: a plot so tight and self-perpetuating, yet which also keeps the reader guessing. Things are obviously going to end badly, but how? – and how is it going to remain interesting? This novel does deal in impossibilities: its events might have unfolded in a different way, but they are driven by the flaws of its central character, and the same end must be reached. The stunning opening chapter, during which Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser with a young family in tow, gets drunk at a village fair and sells his wife to a passing sailor, sows the seed of all that is to follow.

Years later the wife, Susan, believing the sailor to be dead, tracks Henchard down to Casterbridge, where he has risen to be mayor, and the town’s dominant corn trader. Her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, is now grown up, and remarkably well adjusted, unlike Henchard himself:

It was an odd sequence that out of all this tampering with social law came the flower of nature Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies – of nature’s jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles. (p. 296)

The notes to this (Oxford World’s Classics) edition point out Henchard’s physical resemblance to the devil (e.g. ‘his red and black visage kindled with satisfaction’ (p. 78)). It is an effective device, and put me in mind both of James Hogg’s Justified Sinner and Roald Dahl’s The Witches, but it did seem to quash the moral ambiguity of his character, at least for a time. And yet, he is more misguided than bad: he fights against the hellfire in his constitution, generally with more hellfire. The day after selling Susan, he realises his mistake and, being 21 years old, pledges solemnly to drink no more alcohol for another 21 years. He also makes some attempt to find her, but without success. The pledge is telling. Henchard clearly believes in a moral order, in transgression and atonement. He knows he has behaved unacceptably, and the pledge is a way of controlling his punishment, of forestalling fate. His resolve is almost autistic, in that it is totally autonomous: he doesn’t see that the way to avoid similar behaviour in future is to become more open, less fierce, less guarded. Also – perhaps this is the rub – more charming. At one low point, he calculates:

Henchard’s wife was dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper Farfrae by estrangement; Elizabeth-Jane by ignorance. It seemed to him that only one of them could possibly be recalled, and that was the girl. (p. 114)

It is as though he doesn’t care whom he is close to, as long as he is close to someone.

There is another character with this failing: Lucetta Templeman. One of the book’s many parallel events occurs when she arrives in Casterbridge, ostensibly a stranger, and takes up residence at High Place Hall (grand but conveniently central). She has come to marry Henchard, to whom she had been secretly engaged before Susan’s re-appearance. They met and courted in Jersey, where Henchard used to travel on business, so she is not known in Casterbridge. When she arrives, her plan is to pretend to court Henchard again, before marrying him and thus preserving her honour (both parties share a sense of obligation to this Victorian moral code, though neither can live up to it). Although it is not her plan in advance, this is exactly what Susan does, under Henchard’s guidance, and in a humbler – but not too humble – cottage. Her death a few years later re-introduces the possibility of a respectable alliance between Henchard and Lucetta. On arrival, Lucetta, newly genteel thanks to an inheritance, employs Elizabeth-Jane as a companion, and the two of them gaze out from High Place Hall on to the market place, and Donald Farfrae. The stage is set.

Donald Farfrae is Henchard’s nemesis, and his opposite in many ways. He is young, charming, ambitious and, as a Scot with a full song book, a welcome novelty in the West Country. He is also canny:

the curious double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life – the commercial and the romantic – were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord these contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling. (p. 149)

Farfrae courts Elizabeth-Jane to begin with, but with Lucetta’s arrival his attentions move towards her, and the plot begins to seem unduly cruel. Farfrae, whilst challenging Henchard in trade, unwittingly prevents his marriage to Lucetta and casts aside his step-daughter (as she is presented at the time). Things move quickly, and Henchard is driven by Lucetta’s aloofness to extort a promise of marriage under threat of revealing their former relationship. Elizabeth-Jane is horrified, and he snaps:

Don’t be a no’thern simpleton! […] This promise will leave him free for you, if you want him, won’t it? (p. 184)

The favour is so brutal that she cannot possibly collude in it. The odd thing is, that Henchard is right, in one sense at least. It has already been shown that Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae share an easy compatibility, and an intellectual seriousness wholly absent in the rest of the novel’s cast. Lucetta is frivolous but dazzling, more anxious for status and being important to someone important (and lively, exotic, charming) than she is concerned with being important to a particular person. Her over-hasty marriage to Farfrae shows the extent to which she views him as a commodity. Both are fickle, but only Lucetta is congenitally so. Elizabeth-Jane’s influence would be sufficient to compensate for Farfrae’s flaws if only he would let her. She is studious, affectionate and true, and she is willing to allow other people and events to shape the course of her life without feeling undue bitterness:

She had learnt the lesson of renunciation […]. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished for thing Heaven might send her in place of him. (p. 167)

Henchard’s devilishness turns out to be a red herring, as it must for the novel to remain engaging. His rough idea of the bonds of affection as so many (or so few) title deeds, is bound to lead him to loneliness, especially when he insists on shoring them up with lies and blackmail. ‘This man of strong impulses’ (p. 62) is ultimately to be pitied, though the impulses lead to some pretty terrible behaviour. His paternal love for Elizabeth-Jane, absent for much of the novel, is the driving force of its closing chapters, and I won’t say how he manages to destroy it in one last moment of madness, but he claws a little of it back in death with what must be the saddest will in literature.

Colour Me In

2011-01-18T21:37:00.002Z

I am grey, still on the page, oh colour me in

When I first heard that line, I felt I had been fixed on a pin. It was early 2004, S. had given me the heave ho, and I felt drained of any possibility of being myself without her there. I’ve always been a bit like that – dependent on just the right people, a few close friends, and if they aren’t there I disappear. Become

Just an outline, sketchy but fine, oh colour me in

It was always something I’d been rather ashamed of, and to hear Broadcast’s ‘Colour Me In’ catch this frailty, clear as a bell, and lift it up, was a joy. I played the song on my guitar for months, lived and breathed it. The chords were beautiful: crystalline, precise, un-fussy. Trish Keenan’s delivery had not a drop of sentimentality about it, she gave a calm strength to what would seem like weakness to most. There are many reasons to love Broadcast, but this is mine. It is hard to believe she is gone.

(Click the image above for the chords to the rest of the song.)

Charles Dickens – ‘The Pickwick Papers’

2011-01-13T20:36:00.000Z

I wish I wasn’t always so sceptical about Dickens. The more I read, the less justification there is for it. And sure, it’s a slow process – this is the first of his novels I’ve read during the run of this blog – but he never lets me down, though I always think he’s going to. Prior to this I found Barnaby Rudge surprisingly menacing, and Nicholas Nickleby surprisingly hilarious. Lo and behold, The Pickwick Papers is surprisingly Quixotic. There are flaws. The pacing early on is all over the place, and the plot, when there is one, is as light as can be. Only a handful of characters achieve any kind of presence, but when they do – first Alfred Jingle, and then Sam Weller – they are gripping and magical (see Sam’s way with a fable), and it is thrilling to feel the force of Dickens’ imagination as he conjures them up. Mr Pickwick himself is slightly more than a cipher, developing into a lovable, obstinate patrician by the end, but his companions in the Pickwick Club (a group of men who are interested in things generally, and who travel about writing them down) are as flat as pancakes. This is not necessarily a problem, as there are other strings to Pickwick’s bow. There is an elopement chase scene early on which temporarily reverses the novel’s desultoriness. There is bonhomie as only Dickens can write it, which is generally a good thing (though mixed with Christmas at the halfway mark it became much too sweet, and I put the novel down for several months as a result). Most surprising were the bold satirisation of the legal system and the fierce indictment of debtors’ prisons, strands later picked up as the central themes of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. So in this great comic novel, there are moments of real anger:

we still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. (p. 565)

Scenes in town are noticeably more vivid than their rural counterparts, which is a disadvantage for a novelist writing in the picaresque tradition, but the contrast makes it obvious how alive Dickens feels London to be. Here he is on inns in the borough:

Great, rambling, queer, old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and stair-cases, wide enough and antiquated enough, to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any. (p. 129)

It is a nice irony that the author of the most famous ghost story in English had, at this early point in his career, such a low opinion of the form. The criticism feels like knee-jerk snobbery, though; in the first half of the sentence, the marvel expressed at the character of ramshackle, densely populated urban areas is real.

The plot: Mr Pickwick’s landlady, Martha Bardell (her name a sound-a-like for Dickens’ first love, Maria Beadnell), takes it into her head that he has proposed marriage, which he hasn’t, and sues him for breach of promise. Pickwick loses the case, but refuses to pay the resulting fine or any costs. In due course, this lands him in the Fleet debtors’ prison. Eventually Bardell’s lawyers, Dodson and Fogg, have her incarcerated there too because of the non-payment of costs, for which she is ultimately responsible. Pickwick is prevailed on to pay up, at last, in return for a signed apology from Bardell, which is the closest he is going to get to clearing his name. Much of the novel has nothing to do with these events, but they do provide a loose framework for the passages on law and prison which draw on Dickens’ own journalism and childhood respectively. The lengthy stay in prison, especially, helps with the pacing, and somehow the second half of the book feels much more coherent than the first, though an account of its events wouldn’t suggest so. There are marriages at the end, and a spectacular drunken trip to Birmingham (pictured above) to inform the father of one of the bridegrooms after the fact. There is a further satire, of the medical profession, with a chemist who leaves prescriptions all around town with the wrong people just to get his name more widely known. There is the Eatanswill Gazette, proprietor Mr Pott, mortal enemy of Mr Slurk and his Independent newspaper. And there is Pickwick, who is rich enough and big hearted enough to protect everybody, because nobody really means any harm, and everything is ultimately for the best, and in any case it is the journey, not the destination, which matters.

‘The man as killed his-self on principle’

2011-01-07T18:00:00.000Z

[This shouldn’t be too hard to place, but it can be semi-secret until the next post comes along. It made me laugh today.]

He was a clerk in a government office […] and a wery pleasant gen’lm’n too – one o’ the percise and tidy sort, as puts their feet in little India-rubber fire-buckets ven its vet veather, and never has no other bosom friends but hare-skins; he saved up his money on principle, vore a clean shirt ev’ry day on principle, never spoke to none of his relations on principle, ’fear they shou’d want to borrow money of him; and was altogether, in fact, an uncommon agreeable character. He had his hair cut on principle vunce a fortnight, and contracted for his clothes on the economic principle – three suits a year, send back the old vuns. Being a wery reg’lar gen’lm’n he din’d ev’ry day at the same place, vere it was one and ninepence to cut off the joint; and a wery good one and ninepence worth he used to cut, as the landlord often said, vith the tears a tricklin’ down his face, let alone the vay he used to poke the fire in the vinter time, vich wos a dead loss o’ four-pence ha’penny a day, to say nothin’ at all o’ the aggrawation o’ seein’ him do it. So uncommon grand vith it too! ‘Post arter the next gen’lm’n,’ he sings out ev’ry day ven he comes in. ‘See arter the Times, Thomas; let me look at the Mornin’ Herald, ven it’s out o’ hand; don’t forget to bespeak the Chronicle; and just bring the ’Tizer vill you?’ And then he’d set vith his eyes fixed on the clock, and rush out just a quarter of a minit afore the time to vaylay the boy as wos a comin’ in with the evenin’ paper, vich he’d read vith sich intense interest and persewerence, as vorked the other customers up to the wery confines o’ desperation and insanity, ’specially one i-rascible old gen’lm’n as the vaiter wos alvays obliged to keep a sharp eye on in sich times, ’fear he should be tempted to commit some rash act vith the carving knife. Vell, Sir, here he’d stop, occupyin’ the best place for three hours, and never takin’ nothin’ arter his dinner but sleep, and then he’d go avay to a coffeehouse a few streets off, and have a small pot o’ coffee and four crumpets, arter vich he’d valk home to Kensington and go to bed. One night he wos took very ill; sends for the doctor; doctor comes in a green fly, vith a kind o’ Robinson Crusoe set o’ steps as he could let down ven he got out, and pull up arter him ven he got in, to perwent the necessity o’ the coachman’s gettin’ down, and thereby undeceivin’ the public by lettin’ ’em see that it wos only a livery coat he’d got on, and not the trousers to match. ‘Wot’s the matter?’ says the doctor. ‘Wery ill,’ says the patient. ‘Wot have you been a eatin’ of? says the doctor. ‘Roast weal,’ says the patient. ‘Wot’s the last thing you devoured?’ says the doctor. ‘Crumpets,’ says the patient. ‘That’s it,’ says the doctor. ‘I’ll send you a box of pills directly, and don’t you never take no more o’ them,’ he says. ‘No more o’ wot?’ says the patient – ‘Pills!’ ‘No; crumpets,’ says the doctor. ‘Wy?’ says the patient, starting up in bed; ‘I’ve eat for crumpets ev’ry night for fifteen year on principle.’ ‘Vell, then, you’d better leave ’em off on principle,’ says the doctor. ‘Crumpets is wholesome, Sir,’ says the patient. ‘Crumpets is not wholesome, Sir,’ says the doctor, wery fiercely. ‘But they’re so cheap,’ says the patient, comin’ down a little, ‘and so wery fillin’ at the price.’ ‘They’d be dear to you at any price; dear if you wos paid to eat ’em,’ says the doctor. ‘Four crumpets a night,’ he says,’vill do your bisness in six months!’ The patient looks him full in the face, and turns it over in his mind for a long time, and at last he says, ‘Are you sure of that ’ere, Sir?’ ‘I’ll stake my professional reputation on it,’ says the doctor. ‘How many crumpets at a sittin’ do you think ’ud kill me off at once?’ says the patient. ‘I don’t know,’ says the doctor. ‘Do you think half a crown’s vurth ’ud do it,’ says the patient. ‘I think it might,’ says the doctor. ‘Three shillings vurth ’ud be sure to do it, I s’pose?’ says the patient. ‘Certainly,’ says the doctor. ‘Wery good,’ says the patient; ‘good night’. Next mornin’ he gets up, has a fire lit, orders in three shillins’ vurth o’ crumpets, toasts ’em all, eats ’em all, and blows his brains out.

Monorail Poll 2010, part 2

2010-12-20T09:30:00.001Z

The results of this year’s Monorail Music albums poll have now been added to the comments of this post, many thanks to SP for that. If you prefer there is also a pdf, to print out and put up on your wall. Or you could just go and look at the one in the shop, not forgetting to buy lots of records while you’re there.

Pictured above: Dep and David Quantick on BBC 2’s Review Show last Friday.

‘Fallin’ ditch ain’t gonna get my bones’

2010-12-18T11:59:00.001Z

The Yummy Fur played one of their reunion shows last week in Glasgow. It sounded great, even if the band are a whole different proposition now with the de-geeked, rockin’ out John / Jackie McKeown. Maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I’m sure he used to rock in. Before the show I played The Fire Engines’ ‘New Thing In Cartons’ to A., and watched the same bemusement I felt when I first heard it a year or two ago. ‘It’s the same!’ she exclaimed, meaning that as well as ‘New Thing In Cartons’ by The Fire Engines, it is also ‘Sexy World’ by The Yummy Fur. As far as I know, it isn’t also a Captain Beefheart song, but it is certainly true that without him The Fire Engines (and Big Flame) couldn’t have sounded like they did. That guitar sound, regimented to within an inch of its life but in directions which make no obvious sense, until they get inside your head and take it apart. I hated Trout Mask Replica when I first heard it. ‘China Pig’ was funny, but the rest... there was nothing to hold on to. Annoyed at having shelled out £15, I thought I may as well use the damn thing for samples, which you can hear at the end of Planet Sunflower’s ‘The Black Hole’ (drums from ‘Ant Man Bee’, saxophone from ‘Wild Life’). A few years later I fell for Doc at the Radar Station, still one of my favourite albums, and worked my way back.

An image for you: Chris and I on holiday in Salzburg, at the end of the ’90s. A. had been surprised that he would want to read Hitler’s Willing Executioners on such a trip (which also took in Munich), and was herself a little embarrassed to be seen with Slaughterhouse 5, which she was reading for Uni. Bladdered on weissbier served by an over-doing-it Scot in a kilt at the backpacker’s hostel (he stood on one leg to pour, and made a big deal of swilling the dregs), we staggered across the city, bellowing the words to ‘Dachau Blues’, he dressed in a Remembrance Day wreath acquired en route. What he was really after, though, was the Austrian flag which flew high up on the bridge over the river Salzach. He could just touch it with his fingertips if he stood on tip toe on the hand rail. And – he didn’t die! Or get the flag. We already miss you so much, Don.

Many fond tributes (including that ‘Fallin’ Ditch’ quote) here.

Barry Lopez – ‘Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape’

2010-12-12T10:05:00.001Z

A recommendation from Jay Griffiths’ Wild, Arctic Dreams gives a more balanced account of somewhat similar ground: the profusion of life in what appears to be wilderness, and the conflict between cultures when west meets north. Lopez does look with regret at what industrialisation has done to the wildlife and people of the Arctic, but he is careful not to dismiss everything that white man has done. Some statistics:

The Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross cautiously suggests that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. A sound estimation of that population today [1986] is 200. There are no similar figures for the number of native people in the region who fell to diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and other diseases – historians have suggested that 90 percent of the indigenous population of North America is not an unreasonable figure. (p. 10)

Confronted with this, Griffiths’ rage does seem entirely reasonable. But Lopez refuses to ignore the point of view of the perpetrators:

The desire to understand what is unknown is great. And the wish to create some human benefit out of new knowledge, however misconstrued, is one of the graces of Western civilisation. Few historians can say precisely where the special interest of a [John] Barrow or a Robert Peary ceased to serve society and served only the man; or where plans for industrialization cross a line and become of greater service to a nation’s economy than the wellbeing of its people. (p. 357)

It’s not a ringing endorsement, but it is an attempt to understand the motives of explorers and entrepreneurs, and even to allow that they may include (alongside fame and fortune) a kind of altruism.

This moral complexity gives Arctic Dreams a novelistic feel, though there is no plot. Like Wild, it is divided into long, themed chapters which take a single aspect of the subject (the seasons, musk oxen, polar bears, explorers), which cross-pollinate to some extent, and which build into an overview. Lopez moves through environment and wildlife before he gets to people, and as with Wild, western cultural references (Rockwell Kent, Frederic Edwin Church, the Irish imramha) are dotted throughout: personal and artistic responses are almost as important here as the geography. ‘To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task’ (p. 21) he says, then undertakes it by suspending time at the summer solstice, and taking an imaginary walk south from the pole, where ‘the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon’. As he proceeds down the 100th meridian, the sun’s orbit tilts, until it touches the horizon (at the edge of the Arctic Circle), and ‘You would say, now, that the sun seemed more to move across the sky than around in it.’ He takes us right down to the equator, then back again. ‘Virtually all of the earth’s biological systems are driven by solar radiation’ (p. 29), he says, contrasting rainforest and tundra.

The musk ox (pictured above) and the polar bear get a chapter each. I was delighted to find that ‘oomingmaq’ is the Eskimo word for a musk ox, and dug out the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand to give ‘Oomingmak’ a spin. These were my favourite chapters: lively, detailed descriptions of behaviour and physical characteristics, taking in the odd bit of personal observation. Lopez describes the musk oxen’s layers of insulating hair, their horns, their ancestry, their behaviour when rutting or when protecting their young. As no other species do, they sometimes form a ‘rosette, rump to rump, with calves and yearlings wedged between the adults’ (p. 61), which was a problem when zoos became interested – ‘the only practical way to secure a calf was to kill all the adults in a defensive formation’ (p. 74). Lopez doesn’t hesitate to condemn this, his fairness is not neutrality. Female polar bears build maternity dens of snow, designed to allow good air flow with an ‘upward-sloping tunnel’ (p. 89) for an entrance and a ventilation hole in the chamber. They keep it warm (-ish – 32°F) by ‘radiating a small amount of heat, about as much as a 200-watt bulb’ (p. 90). When the cubs are three months old, they and their mother will emerge – she to hunt and eat for the first time since entering the den. And here they come, from a den way up on a slope:

They learn to imitate their mothers, who slide down rump first, looking over their shoulders and braking with their claws; or on their sides, leading with all four feet; or headfirst on their bellies. Mothers at the bottom catch cubs veering out of control. (p. 92)

Monorail Poll 2010

2010-12-06T00:05:00.001Z

I don’t think it’s just me being lazy with my record buying. This year it seemed as though almost every once great band was great again. The Vaselines and the Television Personalities put out brilliant singles, Tender Trap were better than they’d ever been before, and Edwyn Collins was properly back. I’m still making my mind up about the guest vocals on Losing Sleep, it’ll be March before it hits, probably. I believe there were new bands too, but I didn’t really take to the Dum Dum Girls, and in general there seemed too many records with boring four four beats pushed to the fore, like a fringe and a pair of shades. This made Directorsound’s wonky Two Years Today all the more delightful, you could see the whites of their eyes and their flecked irises. Three four lurching is where it’s at in their world, and they have refined it beautifully in the years since Redemptive Strikes, there is no one quite like them. Crooked feels like the record Kristin Hersh has been building up to for a decade, and Grinderman 2 is everything Grinderman and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! strove (too hard) to be but (therefore) weren’t. She & Him made a record Nancy & Lee would have been proud of, but they were never going to steal The Sexual Objects’ crown. ‘There’s ice cream on the tissues / Get your ponchos out’. Filth.

Thanks to Monorail for a) being Monorail and b) asking for our votes again. Here is my list:

The Sexual Objects – Cucumber
She & Him – Volume 2
Vic Godard & Subway Sect – We Come As Aliens
Directorsound – Two Years Today
Spare Snare – Victor
Grinderman – Grinderman 2
Teenage Fanclub – Shadows
Kristin Hersh – Crooked
Bill Wells / Annie Whitehead / Stefan Schneider / Barbara Morgenstern – Paper of Pins
Allo Darlin’ – Allo Darlin’

Single:

Jo Mango – The Moth and The Moon / The Black Sun

Reissue:

Charles Douglas – The Lives of Charles Douglas

____________________

And here is Chris S.’s list:

The Sexual Objects – Cucumber
Oneone – Aoooo *
Real Estate – Reality
Beach Fossils – Beach Fossils
Teenage Fanclub – Shadows
Nikasaya – One Summerheim *
The Liminanes – The Liminanes
Pantha du Prince – Black Noise
Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be
Directorsound – Two Years Today

* Two of these records were, strictly speaking, 2009 records, but I didn't get them until 2010... I'm not sure what the rules are or how tightly you're applying them... if Oneone / Nikasaya have to go, then please add in:

To Rococo Rot – Speculation
Moon Duo – Escape

Single:

Deerhoof / Oneone – Sealed With A Kiss / Oneone Theme

Reissue:

Spare Snare – Live at McGonagalls, Dundee, 28.10.95

If I Had A Hi-Fi

2010-11-28T11:17:00.002Z

It felt almost like a betrayal. Hi-fis were what adults had, to play their adult oriented rock and their opera. Kids had Walkmans in their ears, ghetto blasters in their bedrooms, and it was there that pop music belonged. A household’s secondary aesthetic, under the radar, secret but for the racket it made. Siblings meant opposing secondary aesthetics, related but independent sonic strands. In her first year at university, the elder of my two sisters went crazy for the Manic Street Preachers, and this caused tension with the younger when Nicky Wire said in an interview that he had ‘never seen the point of Nick Cave’. I loved both, of course, it was easier that way. And I would have listened to Murder Ballads and Everything Must Go on a Walkman, on tapes made from CDs, or on a pre-CD ghetto blaster with a portable CD player perched on top (it wasn’t very portable – movement made it skip). The tape A. made for me of Everything Must Go had ‘A Design for Life’ missing, because it had been on the radio so much and she thought the other songs should be given the chance to catch up. Any records which came my way were swiftly transferred to tape, too, for the actual listening part of the process. It wasn’t until the record player across the hall disappeared, along with the flatmate and student life, that I began to think that it might be good to own one.

I found an old Sony hi-fi in King Buyer on Albert Street (King Buyer sold all sorts of second hand household goods – fridges, sofas, TVs, and stereos. It’s gone now). It was one black block, almost a cube, designed to look like a stack of separates. It was £40, which was all I could afford and so, not wanting to make a rash purchase, I went to fetch N. from his flat nearby for a second opinion. A man in his late fifties or early sixties sat in an armchair amongst the bric-a-brac and gave us a demonstration. It took the three of us a while to work out that to get the turntable to spin you didn’t press a button, but moved the stylus arm towards the record. The record he had chosen was a 7" single by The Associates, Dundee’s only real claim to 1980s pop stardom (unless you’re going to count Ricky Ross, which I presume you’re not, or Edwyn Collins, who went to school here, and dreamed of adulation). We said how much we liked them, which was true – this was a few years after Billy Mackenzie’s terribly sad death, and there had been some recent re-issue activity, plus a biography, The Glamour Chase, which N. happened to be reading at the time. What happened next I can’t remember exactly – he didn’t come out and say, ‘I’m Billy Mackenzie’s dad, you know’, but he made a few quiet, proud comments which led us to this tentative conclusion. I mentioned a copy of the Perhaps album I’d picked up in Groucho’s, and this annoyed him a little – they were supposed to give him first refusal on any Associates records which came in, he said. He knocked a fiver off the price in exchange for Perhaps, which I dutifully handed in at the next opportunity. His daughter gave me a lift back into town with the stereo, and she said it was ‘always a pleasure to meet people who appreciate Billy’s music’. It was so touching, this brief impression of a family determinedly committed to his memory.

In truth, I was still a little ambivalent about The Associates at that stage. Sulk is a record which grew on me very slowly indeed, maybe a decade went by before it really clicked (the same thing happened with David Bowie’s Station to Station, thank goodness for regular re-issues). The first time around Billy’s voice was probably a bit much, and I only took to the more tuneful songs. But that is wrong-headed, it is a masterpiece for the taut yeowling miasma of side one, as much as for the energised hits which whip up an impossible peak on side two. These days I love every last note.

Sad to say, the stereo has been showing its age recently. Loose connections plague the panel at the back, half the time the turntable won’t turn and it takes a delicate massage of the electronics to get any sound out of the right hand speaker. It’s time to say goodbye.

____________________

Spare Snare – If I Had A Hi-Fi

Jay Griffiths – ‘Wild: An Elemental Journey’

2010-11-07T13:45:00.001Z

William Beebe ‘brought the underwater world right into the public
consciousness with his invention of the bathysphere’ (p. 188)

Appropriately I suppose, this book, an element-themed account* of arduous travels amongst the communities and landscapes of the world’s least western-civilised countries, was a struggle to get through. For several hundred pages in the middle I actively disliked its righteous / chummy style, which seemed needlessly egocentric. It felt a little like a bad Everett True book – just as his tendency to write about music only by writing about himself grates as often as it inspires (and it does inspire, of course), Griffiths’ highly personal take on what she calls ‘wildness’ relies heavily on having the reader onside as she combines sex, land, time, culture, language and religion into one tightly wound didactic ball. For instance:

While the untamed have ears for poetry – all kinds of poetic voices – the tame are trained only to hear the voice of the tamer, having ears only for command. The tamed know only the plumpness of convenienced asexuality: wild creatures smoulder in the groin, thighs slippery with juice, raw hormones, pheromones glowing in the dark. But the Christian god will never win, for still, still proudly anarchic, in thunder and cunt, cock and lightening, the raw core of our human spirit is still untamed, full of will, eloquent, kinetic and fleetly wild. (p. 376)

The good: wildness, poetry, exciting sex, exciting weather, spirit, polytheistic indigenous religion. The bad: tameness, the tamer, Christianity, complacency, dull sex. By implication, too, comes Griffiths’ central argument about the importance of a strong connection between a people and their land. How do you separate thunder and cunt, cock and lightening? You build walls and a ceiling, you put in double glazing and central heating. You move away from the land and you no longer understand the land, and then you exploit it in order to maintain your lifestyle. Alienation is a necessary result of western-style civilisation. The carrots in my fridge are there because I bought them from a supermarket, which I was able to do because I went and sat in an office all week. I could hardly be further from the carrots, and the land in which they grew. Or the land which somehow produced and continues to power the fridge.

Though couched in western terms, Wild is 100% anti western, or at least 100% anti western expansionism. There is no bright side to this, in its narrative. An Inuit elder may admit that life was harder before the arrival of capitalism, but this is in the context of the younger generation’s utter loss of knowledge, motivation, peace of mind, way to be, as a result of buildings, jobs, shops, schools. Modern home comforts may be OK if your character is already formed, is the implication, but if not, they will prevent it from developing. Western culture is male, linear, unbending and obsessed with conquest, which Griffiths explicitly links to the taking of virginity. It wants to measure, quantify, lock everything to the clock, the map and the calendar. Wildness is female, cyclical:

Women’s conversation ‘rambles’. We don’t get to ‘the point’. We don’t ‘think straight’. We make excursions off the subject, digress, think circuitously, and our free linguistic nomadism infuriates the overmasculine mind. (p. 306)

Perhaps this is the closest she comes to stating that in positive terms:

The purpose of indigenous law throughout the world is essentially to ensure that the natural world remains the same. (p. 276)

The first quote is from a section called ‘Nomads All’, in which nomadism is identified as the pet hate of European men, ‘heterosexual, Christian and adult’ (p. 305) – you can almost hear her spit here. Surprisingly, given many of the literary reference points (e.g. Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew – you can probably guess the uses they’re put to) and the frequent excursions into etymology, Griffiths is also anti-literacy, because it ‘profoundly alters people’s relationship with the wild world’ (p. 334) (and because the west ‘refuses to recognize indigenous wisdom even as it steals it’ (p. 98) – so, introducing literacy in no way complements the knowledge that is already there). This is a book to which it isn’t really possible to have a calm reaction. It is not new to disparage colonialism, but it is hard to imagine a book throwing its ongoing negative consequences in your face to quite the extent that Wild does. It is not subtle, but it is coherent and heartfelt and it gets under your skin. I’m glad I read it.

* Not real elements. Section titles are, ‘Wild Earth’, ‘Wild Ice’, ‘Wild Water’, ‘Wild Fire’, ‘Wild Air’ and ‘Wild Mind’.
____________________

Update: post edited 23/12/10 after a comment left and then deleted, by, so it said (and I have no reason to doubt it) the author of the book. She made several objections, and I have removed a paragraph and a quotation because I agree with most of them. One point puzzled me – the rebuttal of the charge of anti-literacy on the basis of oral traditions. I should clarify that by ‘literacy’ I meant reading and writing, not literature. Apologies for any misrepresentation – these are the impressions I picked up from the book, and are not based on any other background knowledge or reading.

Meursault at Dexter’s, Dundee, 4th November

2010-11-06T12:17:00.001Z

        ‘So are you coming?’
        ‘Who are they again?’
        ‘You keep making me say it! I don’t know, Meuuuurseoooo. Merso. M-E-U-R-S-A-U-L-T. They’re really good, or at least their first album was. I’m not so sure about their second, it’s a bit buried in reverb. But they’ll still be good live.’
        [S. continues to play smartphone sudoku]
        ‘The first one was all punchy drum machines and sharp acoustic guitars. They’re quite anguished.’
        [Giggles]
        ‘What’s so funny about anguish?’
        [Assumes straight face] ‘Poor things.’

S. has a point there: anguish is the easiest route to a certain type of credibility, and as such is automatically suspect. Singing about trauma is like standing on a window ledge and threatening to jump: a demand for attention, cutting through inattention and apathy, but not, ultimately, endearing yourself. Maybe when you’re 16, the most important thing music can do is to say ‘I’m so, I’m so dissatisfied’, but pretty soon this can start to seem like a limited outlook. It’s also a trick increasingly difficult to pull as time passes. Are you really going to jump? You didn’t last time. Couldn’t you do something that would cheer yourself up more than singing about being miserable? After a Faith and a Pornography, you need a ‘Lovecats’.

Meursault use banjos, samplers, gentle acoustic and overdriven electric guitars, a cello (though sometimes not), harmonies, and a mixture of live and synthesised drums to give their anguish the urgency it needs, and it is not in danger of becoming stale just yet. Live, the distance that the production gives to this year’s All Creatures Will Make Merry album is instantly quashed, and you’re there on a bed of nails with them, uncomfortable but alive. Neil Pennycook’s howl of hurt is sometimes barely audible above the slabs of anachronistic noise, and sometimes it sinks to a caress above the simplest of banjo accompaniments. Before Meursault came along I’d forgotten how effective music which takes itself this seriously can sometimes be.

H. P. Lovecraft – ‘At the Mountains of Madness’

2010-10-25T11:39:00.002+01:00

        ‘It’s no good, I can’t carry on.’
        ‘Then don’t – I wasn’t going to read it either.’
        ‘It just keeps repeating itself, without ever coming to the point. Or at least... Do you think there are psychological insights in store, or...?’
        ‘No, it’ll just turn out to be something horrible.’
        ‘There’s all this shitty mythology, this made-up book, what’s it called? The Necronomicon.’
        ‘I’ve heard of that. Terry Pratchett’s Necrotelicomnicon refers to it.’
        ‘Why would you refer to it? Why not just completely ignore it?’
        ‘He’s taking the piss.’
        ‘Well, that’s better than nothing. Or, it isn’t better than nothing, but it is better than taking it seriously.’

S. and I may have our differences about Terry Pratchett, but it seems we do agree about H. P. Lovecraft. For thirty pages I was relatively intrigued, having decided to overlook the fact that the opening sentence doesn’t make sense (‘I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why’*). Mostly this was because the story is set in Antarctica and it reminded me of a biography of Shackleton I quite liked. The place names – the McMurdo Sound, Mount Erebus, the Ross Sea – were enough on their own to impress, I was up for an Antarctica story. What I was not up for was a story that belittles Antarctica by pretending that it is actually the back of a gigantic stegosaurus from space**. After sixty pages I couldn’t take the plodding build up any more. Why is there a Vaselines song about this man? Awful, awful.

* Oh, hang on, maybe it does. But it’s still a horrible way of putting it.
** This is a guess, and, so I am told, wrong. But still, it is a story without any interest in character.

Tove Jansson – ‘A Winter Book’ and ‘Fair Play’

2010-10-09T21:55:00.002+01:00

It wasn’t until quite late on in Fair Play that I realised I had the characters the wrong way around. Coming to it after the childhood reminiscences of A Winter Book, it was easy to interpret as lightly amended autobiography, with the names changed. Instead of Tove and Tooti, they are Jonna and Mari, living in a pair of nearby apartments in autumn and winter, on a small, isolated island in spring and summer, and travelling Europe and America between times. They spend the daytime apart, working (on printmaking, illustration, painting, writing), and the evenings together watching films (‘Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder’ (p. 28), though they also run to Chaplin and westerns). Jonna’s is the more forceful personality, the more acute judgement. So intent is she on a discussion about the superiority of watching films to socialising, that she barely registers the phone call she answers from a distressed friend whose cat has jumped out of a window in pursuit of a pigeon. Avoiding any attempt at sympathy, she gives out the number of a vet, and leaves it at that. Mari is soft hearted enough to be a little shocked at this, but Jonna’s argument applies to so much of Tove’s own work that it didn’t click that she is the Tooti character:

make no mistake: great directors know all about the irrational. You talk about things that don’t fit – they use such things, with a purpose, as an essential part of the whole. Do you know what I mean? Apparent quirkiness but with a point. They know exactly what they’re doing. (p. 31)

There are biographical clues later on which confirm this: Mari’s father was a sculptor called Viktor, and her mother founded the Swedish branch of the Girl Guides; she also receives fan mail.

[And here, I want to dart off into A Winter Book because of the wonderful ‘Messages’ chapter, which consists of short extracts from letters received by Tove from fans. My favourite is this:

Insufficient address
Father Christmas Moomin Valley.
Please give current address and surname (p. 167)

Also good is:

Dear Miss Jansson,
I have produced Moomin pictures for my home and also for profit and pleasure and placed them for sale in art galleries and kiosks bordering busy traffic routes. Now, one of my friends is saying one ought to ask permission, can this be true? If I don’t hear from you before week 5 shall go on as usual (p. 166)

A Winter Book is largely made up of chapters from The Sculptor’s Daughter, an account of Jansson’s childhood, split up, like The Summer Book and Fair Play, into short stories or episodes which are not obviously part of a single narrative, but which add up to a sense of place(s), and of character. It is rather unfair of Sort Of Books to have included the majority but not all of The Sculptor’s Daughter’s chapters, and to have re-ordered them into winter stories (set in the city) and summer stories (on – guess what? – an island). I don’t know what order they were in originally, but if Fair Play is anything to go by, they should probably be mixed in together, with an apparent quirkiness which nonetheless has a point.]

Fair Play is playful with its clues, though. During one chapter, Jonna and Mari’s precious boat Viktoria, moored near their house, is in danger of being dashed on the rocks by a storm. They no longer have the strength to drag it up on to the shore out of harm’s way. It is the late 1980s – soon they will be too old to keep up the island house. Storms in Jansson’s fiction are brilliant because they are exciting (there are some strangers in A Winter Book’s ‘High Water’ who don’t understand how much fun storms are), and the ebbing of this pleasure is a subtly drawn tragedy. The two women talk about their fathers for comfort, and they are both called Viktor. Each talks about her own father as though they were both talking about the same man, and there is a curious blurring of their personalities.

Even in the midst of this storm, less fun than its predecessors, Jonna is able to remind Mari of what use she should put it to. Mari remarks the storm’s ‘long, humming tone’, and Jonna steps out of the moment to say:

You can use that acoustical stuff. […] You seem to work a storm into almost everything you write. Did you check the stern lines? (p. 112)

And although these two books feel utterly familiar, absolutely of a piece with The Summer Book and any Moomin story you could name, there is a difference. Art looms large in the background of both – for Tove’s parents in A Winter Book, and for Jonna and Mari in Fair Play. You have the same insistence on a certain attitude to life – non-judgemental yet critically alive, with that ‘mysterious blend of perfectionism and nonchalance’ (Fair Play, p. 22), compassionate and capricious, interested and fun. In the other books, these qualities are ends in themselves, but here they have a reason to be: work. All that matters is work.

____________________

Bits and bobs:

A Guardian interview with Sophia Jansson, star of The Summer Book.
Convolvulus (1931) by Viktor Jansson, modelled on Tove (from this page).
Tuulikki Pietilä / Tooti’s Super 8 films of most of the above are available on two DVDs.
I’m half convinced this is a practical joke, but apparently the UK premiere of Moomins and the Comet Chase is in Dundee next Saturday. Be there if you can.

Update: Moomins and the Comet Chase kept a cinema full of young folk reasonably quiet, so I think they enjoyed it, but it ditched much of the characterisation which makes the Moomin books enjoyable for adults. It wasn’t bad, by any means, but I can see why they wanted to let it tour the provinces before its west end run.

Claire Tomalin – ‘The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens’

2010-10-01T19:07:00.001+01:00

This paperback edition has a ‘new postscript’, after the final ‘Myths and Morals’ chapter, called ‘The Death of Dickens’. He has already died once, 76 pages previously, as the result of a stroke suffered at his home, Gad’s Hill, over dinner with his sister-in-law Georgina in June 1870. The remainder of the book deals with Nelly’s fortunes afterwards, and the afterlife of the story of her association with Dickens, which continues into the 1930s and beyond, having an especially unfortunate effect on her son Geoffrey. Three months after the book’s publication, the postscript tells us, its author received a letter from the grandson of a Nonconformist minister, who had worked at a church in Peckham from 1872, and had heard from the caretaker that

Charles Dickens did not die at Gad’s Hill, as was generally supposed, but at another house ‘in compromising circumstances’. (p. 271)

Although the minister would not have known this, his church was ‘almost opposite’ Windsor Lodge, the house in which Nelly Ternan lived in 1870. From this interesting but unverifiable claim, Tomalin imagines an itinerary for Dickens’ penultimate day alive (he didn’t die until the evening of the day after the stroke), following him from breakfast at his home, via Higham station to New Cross, catching a cab from there, and spending time with Nelly, ‘perhaps [giving] her the Windsor Lodge housekeeping allowance’ (p. 277), before falling ill between one and two in the afternoon. After he had collapsed, Nelly, it is suggested, colluded with Georgina to get him secretly back to Gad’s Hill, with the help of the caretaker from the nearby church, to prevent scandal.

Tomalin makes it clear that this story is mostly supposition, but it is simultaneously, deliciously convincing. It is typical of the way the book as a whole works: facts are scarce, and gaps can be equally important. For nearly a whole year, 1867, there exists a pocket diary which Dickens kept of his day-to-day movements, and this is used to show how he divided his time into equal thirds, spending it with Nelly (using the alias Charles Tringham), with his public (he performed many readings that year), and with Georgina at Gad’s Hill, keeping up appearances. Rather odd appearances, one might think, Georgina being the sister of his estranged wife, but still, this is the version of himself he wished to project. At an earlier period, Nelly disappeared from the record for four years, during 1862-5. Tomalin’s explanation is that she was abroad, somewhere near Paris, and that she gave birth to a child who died in infancy. Michael Slater’s biography steers clear of this interpretation, and he points out that it is not known for certain whether Dickens’ relationship with Nelly was ever consummated. He’s right, but what does he expect – witnesses? (there are witnesses who confirm the existence of a child, including Dickens’ son Henry). Tomalin puts the affair in an interesting context: several of Dickens’ friends also kept mistresses, but far more openly than he was willing to do. Wilkie Collins, for instance, gave his two mistresses ‘simultaneous seaside holidays in adjacent resorts’ (p. 169). George Cruikshank and William Frith are also given as examples, not of men who indulged in dalliances, but who maintained long term relationships (and had children) with more than one woman at once. We hear about Dickens’ ‘dandy’s streak’ with a moustache and beard of which

there was nothing patrician […], rather a hint of the raffish and piratical; he didn’t look or seem old. (p. 83)

But his behaviour belied this easy going appearance. When he fell in love with Nelly, he had ‘the door between his dressing room and what had been the marital bedroom’ blocked, and we are offered this conclusion:

This is the action of a romantic, not a worldly man, who would see no harm in continuing to sleep alongside his wife, however many mistresses he might pursue or take. (p. 108)

And what of Nelly? She came into her own, briefly, in the years after Dickens’ death. Knocking 12 years off her age, she started a family and ran a school with George Robinson, a history student at Oxford ‘destined for the church’ (p. 205) until Nelly persuaded him otherwise. Here she was able to put her theatrical background to good use, for school plays and prizegivings, and for a few years she seemed to have found her niche at last. It is in the chapter ‘The Schoolmaster’s Wife and the Foreign Correspondent’ that she is happiest, and in which she comes across most vividly. For the rest of the time, there is not really enough of Nelly to justify a biography, and even here her story is bolstered by that of her sister Maria,

the merry and gentle sister, [who] emerges as the most unorthodox, both by leaving her husband and by becoming a successful career woman as a foreign correspondent. (p. 224)

The other Ternan sister, Fanny, married Anthony Trollope’s brother Tom (twenty-five years older than she was), and wrote novels. The book’s focus flits between the three of them, giving a family history more than an individual one. An earlier, pre-Dickens chapter gives the history of their theatrical careers, which never quite rose to the first rank (Nelly’s was nowhere near, but Fanny came close), and were consequently a struggle. So they didn’t object as much as they might have done to the benefactor who enabled them to become less dependent on, and eventually to leave the stage.

Jo Mango – ‘The Moth & The Moon / The Black Sun’

2010-09-21T19:12:00.003+01:00

One song stood out from Sunday’s BandStAnd gig at St Andrews’ diminutive (and cosy) Barron Theatre. It was about books, and the most striking line was this:

imagining touching was reading and reading was knowing and knowing was possible

Half sung, half whispered, dead simple. It made me want to get back to some kind of reverence for the physical form, the tactility of books, which was originally something I wanted to explore with this blog, though I don’t think I have, much (the post on Saint Joan is an exception). Allen Ruppersberg’s 2006 show One of Many had a lot of this idea in it, too. Impressed by the song, and always a sucker for packaging, I couldn’t resist buying the record afterwards. Which comprised: two etched 10" singles, one black, one white, a large two-sided poster, and a sleeve. The etchings and the poster illustrations were of moths, for ‘The Moth & The Moon’ (the books song) and, more impressively, a circular ball of airborne starlings for ‘The Black Sun’. These were the only songs included, meaning that, at £15 for the set, they averaged £7.50 each. I haven’t quite worked out whether they are worth such an outrageous outlay (it’s possible – both are slow, delicate, trance-like), but I prefer them to the album I downloaded afterwards for about £1.50, which seemed on first listen a bit over-tasteful. Maybe I am becoming a capitalist, at last.

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Update: the songs definitely are worth it, and you can hear or buy them here:

George Herriman – ‘Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut: Krazy & Ignatz, 1916 – 1918’

2010-09-18T17:10:00.001+01:00

And so Fantagraphics’ Krazy Kat reprint series, having picked up a previous, stalled attempt with the 1925-6 Sunday strips in 2002, finally loops back to the beginning. Now, there is no period of Krazy Kat which is not worthy of attention and love, but I’ve been looking forward to this for ages, because of the larger cast of characters who populate the earlier strips. Here are some of the regulars in a grocery store:

The Krazy of these years is so gallant, forever dashing hither and thither to help out some creature in distress (Mexican jumping beans which have bounced illegally over the border, a hen’s unguarded eggs, orphan kittens hungry for ice cream), but the help itself is often more the result of luck than judgement. In the above strip, the potatoes are saved from a hungry Ignatz because Krazy has nephews and nieces staying over in the cellar, and their luminous eyes in the dark (‘the eyes of the potatoes?’, you are supposed to think) scare him off. Between gallantries, Krazy is curious and whimsical, refusing to operate at anyone’s pace but his own.

(The middle panel there makes more sense once you know the phrase ‘rush the growler’ – it means ‘to take a container to the local bar to buy beer’.)

In Bill Blackbeard’s brief epilogue to this volume, he compares Herriman to Dickens, amongst others (Lewis Carroll, W. C. Fields, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce – I love the extravagance of these claims), which I suppose is true in the way he uses great dollops of colloquial language as texture, but there is no overbearing moralising. Krazy is tender hearted, lovable and off his head (just as Ignatz is sensible, devious, avaricious and somehow lovable too), and readers are free to do with these examples what they will.

One more thing – did you ever wonder how birds and fish take their offspring out for an afternoon stroll?

Tiger Hook of a Tender Trap

2010-09-13T18:48:00.004+01:00

When I woke on Monday, I was too happy to see

By and large, I don’t get obsessed with individual songs all that often. There have been a few this year – Spare Snare’s ‘And Now It Is Over’, The Nectarine No. 9’s ‘Susan Identifier’ – but it still feels like An Event when it happens.

And then on Tuesday there were doves flying round me

Which is exactly as it should be, of course. A song which is not also An Event is not really a song at all.

On the Wednesday, chapter third

It was bad timing, perhaps, that when I belatedly caught up with the amazing back catalogue of Amelia Fletcher a few years ago, her current record was Tender Trap’s 6 Billion People, as unmemorable a piece of plastic as she has put her name to.

On the Thursday, all alone

This time though, it’s different. In ‘Counting the Hours’, she is amazing once more, gloriously teetering on the brink of love or more likely heartbreak, because the highs of wishing are worth any comedown, the not knowing an infinite warmth inevitably and quickly cooled by dread and then disappointment. The melody spirals upwards on rails, following its own logic, underpinned by two chords so ordinary you wouldn’t have thought they could support its urgent luminosity. And unlike, say, Tracyanne Cambell on similar territory, with Amelia it is the happiness which lingers. How does she do it?

On the Friday I just sat, counting the hours

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Tender Trap’s Dansette Dansette, which has plenty of other delights besides ‘Counting the Hours’, is out on Fortuna Pop!

Michael Slater – ‘Charles Dickens’

2010-08-27T22:11:00.000+01:00

Michaelmas term lately begun (and the school I went to was pretentious enough to have a Michaelmas term), my A-level English class was presented with Penguin paperback copies of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. It was explained that we would read one of its twenty monthly parts each week, that this would not be done during class time, but that we would be discussing the novel as we progressed (sample discussion: ‘Now that we have finally encountered the house, did you notice anything about it? No? Well, it’s not very bleak, is it?’). This being the era of Neighbours (early ’90s) it was suggested that we might like to think of it as a soap opera. That didn’t wash, of course. We were horrified at the thought of being made to read such a large novel: English was supposed to be easy, and this had an uncomfortable ring of work to it. Had it been a bad, or a more difficult book, or less to my taste, I’m sure I would have remained horrified and joined in the chorus of protest which was the undercurrent to those twenty weeks (including holidays, mind). But it didn’t turn out that way: Bleak House probably remains the book which has done the most to enlarge my conception of what a novel can be, with its massive, squalid, impenetrable version of London and its host of unapologetically good and brazenly bad characters trying to make their way through it.

Since then, my estimation of Dickens has soared, dipped, fallen through the floor and finally – or at least currently – stabilised at around 30,000 feet. The reasons are standard issue stuff: he’s too sentimental, and all his characters are caricatures. Both charges could be laid against Bleak House, whose narrator Esther even our Dickens superfan teacher admitted was ‘a drip’, and many of whose characters revolve around a single idea (Mr Smallweed, Mrs Jellyby, Mr Turveydrop, Miss Flite). But the accompanying third person narrative, which imperiously delivers the non-news regarding the intractable Jarndyce & Jarndyce court case, and the stasis at the weary country seat of Chesney Wold, is as tactile as language can be, and it holds the novel’s characters suspended in its miasma, making them add up to something after all. Characters from other novels are genuinely endearing – a mention of Wemmick on the radio the other day made me smile, though it is years since I read Great Expectations. Once you’re caught, it is impossible not to engage with Dickens’ fictional world through feelings rather than thoughts, and the great strength of Michael Slater’s biography is that it is dispassionate enough to lay out the facts as we have them, without getting bogged down in emotional reactions to the writing itself.

As a writer, the key thing about Dickens is his commanding authorial voice. Slater makes the point that he was equally capable of using this satirically and sincerely. His 1842 trip to America brought out his devious side: every speech he gave was at least partly about the lack of an international copyright agreement, which meant that he didn’t earn any money from sales of his books there. It is easy to understand his frustration, but what is underhand is the way he distanced himself from his own argument. Walter Scott’s financial collapse was his chief example of why such an agreement was necessary (Scott was eight years dead at the time he was speaking), and he also organised a petition amongst literary Brits – including his friend and biographer John Forster – which he presented in the States as though he had nothing to do with it. What makes this especially interesting is that it directly preceded the creation of arch-hypocrite Seth Pecksniff, in Martin Chuzzlewit. The way Slater charts events, Pecksniff may not have been simply a reaction against hypocrisy, he may also have embodied Dickens’ recent experience of that condition.

Much later, Dostoyevsky (!) reports:

He told me that all the good simple people in his novels […] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. (p. 502)

This ‘causeless enmity’ is most apparent in the treatment of his wife Catherine, whom he gradually excluded from his life during 1857-8, after having fallen in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior. There is something deeply unpleasant in Dickens’ withdrawl from his responsibilities as a husband. One could forgive him for admitting to his changed feelings and moving on to a new relationship, but instead he constructed a revisionist narrative in which he never cared for Catherine at all. He could have mitigated an unfortunate situation by treating her as an adult, explaining things, according her some dignity. Instead he undercut her whole existence, using his great rhetorical skill as a weapon. Completely out of his league in conversation, she was also a mother without affection, who had somehow borne him ten children before he noticed anything was wrong. Catherine doesn’t emerge as a strong personality, but equally there is no indication that she deserved this treatment. Friends of the couple (including Forster) seem to have been fond of her, and the saddest moment in the book, appropriately in parentheses, is this:

During the two weeks that he and [Wilkie] Collins were away his only letters home were to Georgina (we can infer this from the fact that Catherine seems to have kept every letter he ever wrote to her and when dying asked her youngest daughter to deposit them in the British Museum ‘that the world may know he loved me once’). (p. 436)

Dickens fell out with his publishers over their refusal to print a statement about his marriage in Punch, and moved swiftly to put an end to Household Words, the weekly journal he edited for them. His first idea for the title of a succeeding publication (eventually All The Year Round) was ‘Household Harmony’, which beggars belief somewhat.

Duplicity is something of a theme, though: his whole life long, Dickens kept his early history secret. His father’s imprisonment for debt, and his own time spent working in a blacking (shoe polish) factory as a child labourer, only became widely known with the publication of Forster’s posthumous biography. He played a game with his public, telling and not telling them of these experiences, which appear, slightly fictionalised, in Little Dorrit and David Copperfield. Many times Slater makes the point that the most important relationship of Dickens’ life was not with Nelly Ternan, or Maria Beadnell (an early, unrequited love), but with his reading public. Towards the end of his life, his wildly popular public readings build to a crescendo as his health fails, and his introduction of a ‘Sikes and Nancy’ reading late on (which causes audience members to faint, in Dickens’ own account) leads to a deepening of his obsession with murder, and eventually to his last, unfinished novel.

Daniel Defoe – ‘Robinson Crusoe’

2010-08-15T23:26:00.000+01:00

Just imagine, what if you were to be cast away on a desert island? Could you cope? Would you thrive? Would you discover things about yourself that you never would in civilisation? Which eight records would you take? Why didn’t you die in the plane crash? It’s a persistent myth, Robinson Crusoe. Maybe its allure is obvious: it strips things down, removes all the excuses you might have for failing to live up to your ideals (just as long as your ideals don’t involve other people). On the island, there is nothing and no-one in the way. There are goats, wild cats and parrots; there are streams, beaches, hills and caves; there is fertile soil, grapes, and all the trees you can cut down; there is the equatorial sun, and there is the rainy season. On one of the beaches, near where the storm that engulfed your lifeboat spat you out, the wrecked ship your shipmates abandoned sits, almost in tact. You have until the next storm blows to equip yourself with guns, ammunition, food, drink, clothes, shoes and tools to last the next twenty eight years. An umbrella? No, you’ll have to make one. A spade? Why would a ship have one of those? But you can have a pipe... oh, you forgot the pipe. Never mind. There’s a bible in one of those trunks you saved, try reading that if you’re feeling low.

After a nightmare brought on by fever, Crusoe reflects on the eight seafaring years which preceded his arrival on the island:

a certain stupidity of soul, without desire of good, or conscience of evil, had entirely overwhelm’d me, and I was all that the most hardned, unthinking, wicked creature among our common sailors can be suppos’d to be, not having the least sense, either of the fear of God in danger, or of thankfulness to God in deliverances. (p. 71)

This is an early indication of the shape the novel is going to take. During the account of his time at sea, Crusoe is constantly berating himself for the stupidity of his actions, which always tend to the adventurous over the sensible. His father commends to him ‘the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life’ because it is

not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrass’d with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind. (p. 6)

Crusoe always remembers this advice, but never acts upon it – at most, it leads to interludes of self loathing like the one above. It is noticeable, however, that the self loathing wears off after some time spent on his island. Between page 38 and page 122 in my edition (Penguin Classics, 2001), he is entirely alone, and devotes his time to learning how to live from scratch. He builds a habitation by encircling a shallow cave with stakes; he learns first how to hunt goats (they don’t look up, apparently), then how to farm them; by chance a few grains of barley from a sack fall to the ground and begin to grow, which is the beginning of his arable farming. He builds a boat from a massive tree by hollowing it out, then can’t move it to get it into the water; he makes a smaller one and sails around the island until a current takes him too far out. This sort of life suits him very well, and it suits the novel very well: early fiction often appears too event-packed to the modern reader, and here we have an enforced stasis, where although plenty gets done around the island, and years pass, no interaction occurs between characters for 84 pages and more (page 122 is when he finds the footprint; he won’t meet Friday for another 30 or so pages). During this time, he grows more competent and more content, and that, really, is the beauty of the book.

Seeing the footprint – an isolated footprint – on the beach at the far end of the island from his home, is the turning point, at which action begins to be possible again. Crusoe ‘tremble[s] at the very apprehension of seeing a man’ (p. 124) after so long in isolation. It is the first indication he gets of the cannibals that periodically come to use his island to cook and eat their prey, who are men they have conquered in battle. They use the side of the island he never visits, which the current prevented his boat from reaching. The action that follows is slow and involves a lot of waiting (the defences he builds take several years to grow from stakes into closely-knit trees), but Crusoe realises that he must leave, and that he will need help to do it. He dreams of saving a captive from being eaten, and thus earning his loyalty, and this is exactly how he meets Friday, who becomes his slave. The similarity of the dream to the event made me wonder if Crusoe had gone crazy by this point, but there is little else to support this idea. His assumption of power during the rescue (which involves winning back a ship on which there has been a mutiny – the mutineers plan to leave the captain on Crusoe’s island until he and Friday intervene) has quite a regal ring to it, but this is justified by the high spirits he must feel at being on the verge of deliverance, and also the importance of fooling the mutineers that he has more men under his command than is actually the case. By this stage, we are back in the realm of the adventure story, and it is a good one, but it can’t touch the isolated Crusoe, working his way single handed from shipwreck to smallholding. Can you imagine?

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Thanks to Mum for the illustration, which is from a children’s edition she has.

Calvin Johnson & Muscles of Joy, Hyndland Community Hall, Glasgow, 3rd August

2010-08-04T18:11:00.002+01:00

An unplanned early morning train ride home. Too early. I keep expecting to catch the 11 o’clock bus back, which sometimes happens, but more often the band are still on at decision time, round about half ten, and the bus almost never wins. Certainly it stood no chance against Calvin Johnson, while he had songs left to sing. With his pink shirt, his eyes that looked round and his gesticulations which had their campness sonic boomed out of them by a voice as low as blood and smooth as sleep, unamplified except by the acoustics of the church hall. Though actually, leaving would have been inconspicuous given the number of people who disappeared to the toilet after every song and returned at the start of the next (‘Can’t you hold on?’ I wondered. ‘Has Calvin found your resonant frequency?’) He even suggested pausing the set for a comfort break but thought better of it, moving on to musings about a Belfast open-topped tour bus and its guide’s well rehearsed tales of civic woe, and this sentence if I remember: ‘So you’ve got this island called Ireland, and this place which is part of the island of Ireland but not the country of Ireland – too complicated,’ between songs which slipped sweetly by, mostly accompanied by finger pickin’ and one a capella about going to the cinema on your own and looking around to see the couples doing what they are doing, laden with a tension that only pretended to reprove. The expressions and gyrations, the looking rounds and the strokings of his own thighs that he managed to get into that song! I feel bad for not remembering more about the less theatrical songs in the set, but at time they slipped down easy, and anyway it was the atmosphere that mattered. Afterwards I asked Stephen Pastel if he remembered selling me – many years after it came out – the first Beat Happening album in the record section of John Smith’s, but it seems it wasn’t such a pivotal moment in his life as it was in mine (‘Maybe if you’d bought it AND there had been a bolt of lightning…’). Then I bought some compilation tapes from Calvin at his table of K stuff: ‘Everybody Hustle’, ‘West Coast Country’, ‘Natty Chariot’ and ‘Baby Be Mine’. I don’t doubt that he will cherish the memory.

Muscles of Joy put in a great support slot. More polished than when I last saw them (at Le Weekend 2009), they dealt this time in a more controlled and more effective chaos, with a twin emphasis on rhythm and harmony, the former delivered by mini marching machine and – you know those small paper bangers you can get from joke shops? Katy (I think) threw those at the floor every so often, making a gunpowder bang where a snare hit might otherwise have gone. Harmonies came from the whole band, though more for texture than melody. Chris, fresh from capturing the most surprising politician / indie pop juxtaposition since, um, Monday, remained unimpressed, but pointed out that we do disagree about The Ex. He also spotted a reference to ‘Death Valley 69’ that passed me by. ‘This next one’s a bit bananas’ vied with Calvin’s ‘sitting down ain’t rock ’n’ roll’ patter for best song intro of the evening. Set closer ‘Water Break Its Neck’, with its crisp maracas and insistent high pitched refrain (‘The way I am made’) was my favourite song of theirs. It may have been the only song they repeated from the Le Weekend gig, which was intended as music to accompany Norman McLaren’s animations. Asking around a bit before they played this time, I got the impression that McLaren isn’t as well known as he might be, may I direct you again to the Click Opera post about him by way of introduction. He is fab.

Calvin’s mixtapes – all 28 of ’em! – are available here.

Oliver Goldsmith – ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’

2010-08-01T17:37:00.000+01:00

Robert L. Mack, in his introduction to this edition (Oxford World’s Classics, 2006), puts the case for the prosecution of The Vicar of Wakefield’s various strands:

The narratives of seduction drew in almost every detail from novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740-1) and Clarissa (1747-8); the prison scenes had already been ‘done’ – and to far better effect – by Henry Fielding in his Amelia (1751), and the picaresque adventures of Dr Primrose and his son owed more than a little of their colour to those of that same author’s Joseph Andrews (1742); in tone, Goldsmith had failed in his obvious attempts to imitate the successful ‘sensibility’ of which Sterne continued to demonstrate himself a master, to capture the epigrammatic brilliance that Johnson had displayed to such fine effect in his Rasselas, or even to reproduce some of the anecdotal appeal of which he had demonstrated himself capable in his own ‘Chinese Letters’. (p. xxiv)

He argues back out from this position too, but with nothing stronger than an admiring acknowledgement of the book’s charm. It is the story of a homely man who ‘unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family’ (p. 3). A vicar with a wife and six children, he takes great pleasure in maintaining a cheerful household into which guests are welcomed and offered home-made gooseberry wine. He even has an easy-going approach to undesirables:

However, when any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house, I ever took care to lend him a riding coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes an horse of small value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them. (p. 10)

Dr Primrose doesn’t quite achieve this (‘an horse of small value’?) or his other, more genuinely charitable acts, on his vicar’s salary of £35 per annum, but relies on ‘a sufficient fortune of my own’ (p. 12). In chapter 2, this fortune is lost due to the unscrupulous merchant in whose care it is placed, and the Primrose family move 70 miles from Wakefield for the vicar to take up a curacy worth £15 a year. In financial terms, this obviously makes no sense, but nevertheless it is the primary reason given. There is a second reason, which is the vicar’s unpopular opinion, vented in pamphlets and in person at the drop of a hat, that lifelong monogamy is the only moral course (in chapter 14 he complains of ‘the deuterogamy of the age’ (p. 61)). Whilst still in Wakefield, he hotly debates this topic with his son George’s prospective father-in-law, Mr Wilmot, on the eve of the wedding. The father-in-law being ‘at that time actually courting a fourth wife’ (p. 14), is unsympathetic, but the debate is not allowed to come to a head, being interrupted by the news of Primrose’s supposed ruin. He isn’t quite ruined, in fact, still having £35 a year plus £400 of the original £14,000 fortune, at least until he gives up the salary for a lower one. The only way the relocation could possibly make sense would be if Mr Wilmot had the living of Wakefield in his gift, and withdrew it from Primrose after the argument. If this is the case, it is never stated.

Another odd moment comes with the introduction of the novel’s villain, Mr Thornhill. He is much in the vein of the anonymous ‘my lord’ from Fielding’s Amelia, and is described by Mr Burchell, at the outset:

He observed that no virtue was able to resist his arts and assiduity, and that scarce a farmer’s daughter within ten miles round but what had found him successful and faithless. (p. 17)

The warning is completely ignored by Mrs Primrose, and given only lip service by the vicar, when Thornhill begins to make advances to their daughter Olivia. This is the second and more serious step in the decline of the family’s fortunes: Thornhill will drag them all into poverty and disgrace. Single minded and devious, he has designs on Olivia’s younger sister Sophia, and in loaning Dr Primrose the money to buy George an army commission, he coerces the latter into leaving the country, giving him the chance to seduce his fiancée, and allowing the imprisonment of the vicar for debt. The vicar lacks the worldliness and tactical intelligence he would need to deal with this onslaught, and sinks under the burden. Indeed, his triple role as ‘priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family’ confuses his reaction to it. Here he is after Olivia’s elopement with Thornhill:

‘Now then,’ cried I, ‘my children, go and be miserable; for we shall never enjoy one hour more. And O may heaven’s everlasting fury light upon him and his! Thus to rob me of my child! And sure it will, for taking back my sweet innocent that I was leading up to heaven. Such sincerity as my child was possest of. But all our earthly happiness is now over! Go, my children, go, and be miserable and infamous; for my heart is broken within me!’ – ‘Father,’ cried my son, ‘is this your fortitude?’ – ‘Fortitude, child! Yes, he shall see I have fortitude! Bring me my pistols. I’ll pursue the traitor.’ (p. 79)

Though he will later have the strength of character to subdue and to organise his fellow inmates in prison, here he is unable to find consolation in his own faith. He takes an inappropriately vengeful tone, and almost immediately forgets he has done so (‘I did not curse him, child, did I?’). He finally arrives at the correct decision – to pursue Olivia and Thornhill without the pistols – more by luck than judgement. The pursuit itself is likewise ineffectual and full of distractions, and resolution comes only via coincidence. All of this is tremendous fun to read, but difficult – as Mack suggests – to make much sense of in retrospect. The vicar has an absolute loyalty to his family, and a genuine, practical faith which can be put to good use in a community. It is unfortunate that he is unable to take seriously any authority (or any threat) between the ranks of wife and God. Perhaps the key to the man lies in his wonderful but useless take on politics:

some are born to command, and others to obey, [and] the question is, as there must be tyrants, whether it is better to have them in the same house with us, or in the same village, or still further off, in the metropolis. Now, Sir, for my own part, as I naturally hate the face of a tyrant, the farther off he is removed from me, the better pleased I am. (p. 86)

Spare Snare – ‘Victor’

2010-07-16T19:03:00.000+01:00

No matter what I did it never seemed enough
He said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, how many songs did you write
I'd written zero, I’d lied and said, ten

You won’t be young forever
You should have written fifteen
It’s work

(Lou Reed & John Cale, ‘Work’)

It would be wrong to read too much into this, but Spare Snare have just put out their second album in two years. That hasn’t happened since their first two, Live at Home (1995) and Westfield Lane (1996), after which a further three took them all the way to 2004’s Learn to Play. Which is a great name for an album by a decade-old band, and not unjustified by the subtle sound of its contents. I love Learn to Play to bits, but everything they have done since has been a process of unlearning, from the fumbling-acoustic Garden Leave (2006), through the noisier but still sentient I Love You, I Hate You (2009), which actually sounded pretty radically messy when it came out last year, its drums hard-panned like Krautrock, Barry’s bass back from politeness, metallic and super slinky. It was a lot like the thrillingly scuzzy live band who transformed Garden Leave’s quiet contemplation into out and out pop glory when they played in support of it at the end of 2006 and blew it out of the water. Helped a little by a revisited ‘Bugs’ which segued into New Order’s ‘Temptation’ so you couldn’t even tell which was the better song.

Victor ups the momentum and accelerates the decay. Now, Spare Snare never gave a fuck, ever, but this is unbelievable. To ease the listener in gently they begin, at least, with a song which sounds like it was written. ‘And Now It Is Over’ is a fight between Jan’s two-string guitar and Barry’s bass to see who can make the most noise, but it is a fight with rounds and a referee. Beginning: ‘What have we done? / How do you [something]? / How do you [cease? seize?] / You’ve got all that I see / And now it is over / And now it is over’, and though you can’t hear half the words this is solid stuff. Too solid, too sullied. This is a sound you have to climb inside, an agony you want to share. All the tunes of all the parts are such basic units but they mesh and they tighten and they explode. Three quarters of the way through is the sweetest prettiest reverb guitar solo. And then it is over. Except in your head (that solo can echo for days), and you’re drawn back to another play, and the sound, which drives it further home. Very possibly the Snare’s greatest three minutes, right there.

The rest of the album doesn’t even try to live up to ‘And Now It Is Over’. Not in terms of tunes, anyway. ‘Zappa is Sound’ is a sort-of instrumental, a muscular bass riff, textured, whacked out drums and synth blips and splurges, and Jan contributes deadpan ‘Na na na’ backing vocals and close-mic’d vocal sketches for places where words and tunes might have gone, given a bit of honing. ‘Gold in her Hands’ has impressively manic rhythm guitar clanging away stage left, a dead-ringer for Low Life era New Order. ‘All The Little Things’ has more not-quite-finished singing, but in more of a yowling register. The record lurches through these rough sketches which reveal snatches of song only fleetingly, but which build up into a big black storm cloud. ‘Didn’t Know Much’ – which is still really moody – pricks the tension bubble with some ukelele, and paves the way for two songs which share a childhood theme. ‘In A State’, anxious and paranoid, casts its eye on a sleeping child ‘clutching your soft toy, it doesn’t disappoint’, and broadens out to observe ‘people come and go / quiet is not wrong’. ‘My Mister Men’ is one of those split-stereo vocal affairs, with Jan listing Mr Men book titles in one channel, and someone I mistook at first for Paul Daniels talking in the other about how such apparently simple books can provide a challenge to a child’s imagination, though they are limited by their reliance on magic.

‘Excuse My French’ rounds things off nicely, in a purposeful monotone. The cloud has lightened to grey, and the Snare ride off in sou’westers. I don’t exactly know what it is they have done here, and it doesn’t work all the time (which might be part of the point), but I know that it is something which no-one else would even think to attempt. Most unfairly ignored Scottish band of the nineties / noughties? It’s not unfair, they encourage it. Clap your hands. Shake your fists.

Victor is a bit of a bargain at £5, from here. None of it is on their MySpace page.

Tchotchke Table

2010-07-11T10:36:00.000+01:00

Last year, as a kickback against all the digital-only music I was accumulating, I began to lay out purchases with a more tangible physical form on a desk. It is so easy now to find music one day, chuck it into iTunes, and forget that it was ever there (note to self: this almost certainly deserves better). The table was a way of creating a visual context. This week I found a name for it that doesn’t refer to coffee, via an article of Simon Reynolds’. Bottom left are postcards from this year’s Duncan of Jordanstone degree show, where the design departments once again had most of the best stuff. If you’re talking chart places, Interactive Media Design were a high new entry, Interior and Environmental Design slipped ever so slightly from the top, and Jewellery and Metal Design were a non-mover at number two. Illustration fell 30 places due to wanting to be Fine Art, and Graphic Design failed to chart through slavishly following uninspired briefs as per usual (the pink postcard is from the exception to this). Against the wall and to the right are, y’know, records. I won’t list them except for Rachel Grimes’ Book of Leaves, bottom right, which is obscured by the only ray of sun we have had all weekend. To the right of that the negative crescent moon is a Peter Parker button badge.

Commercial Alternative, Mono, Glasgow, 4th July

2010-07-06T19:58:00.003+01:00

Returning after Girls Names’ set to the corner where S. sat knitting on a sofa, I found her friend D. incredulous: ‘I hate things that inept. Did you find anything musical about it at all?’ he asked, from somewhere up his rock mountain. From the third buttercup on the left in my pop pasture, I conceded, ‘It was a bit things-added-together.’ With a Jaguar guitar hitched high and trouser legs rolled in what could conceivably have been a homage to J. Alfred Prufrock (except Prufrock would presumably have noticed the missing apostrophe in the band’s name), the singer looked as deliberately weedy as Pants Yell!’s Andrew Churchman. He didn’t sound like him though, with a lower voice, channelled through a wind tunnel of reverb, which had the peculiar effect of making him sound like Morrissey. The undercarriage to this mumbled wail was made mostly of Shop Assistants, fast and raucous. Which is why I don’t think the ineptitude charge is fair: they played very well. I think what D. really objected to was the projected, celebrated introversion. And this is the kind of tension which threaded its way through the bill of Mono’s summertime mini-festival, made up of bands skirting the Crystal Stilts / Vivian / Dum Dum Girls axis, and bands with a more traditional / less insular outlook.

Openers Golden Grrrls were on a blissout variant of the pop trail. There were three of them: two grrrls, on mini-keyboard / guitar / vox and drums / vox, and one boy, on another Jaguar. He went reverb crazy with that whilst the other two took turns singing, the other guitarist playing simple, bass-line parts for much of the time. I really enjoyed them. Peter Parker were less talkative than last time (maybe because it was daylight), but I can report that Ros’s bob has become a perm, and that she hasn’t dyed her roots, giving a rich brown / blonde / cherry palette. Jane wore tights that looked like they’d been ripped from the walls of the Alhambra. My favourite of theirs is still the set-closing ‘Once In A Lifetime’. Up next, Astral Planes rocked, and had a high posturing-to-tunes ratio. ‘Mid-period Primal Scream?’ I queried. ‘Suzi Quattro,’ confirmed S. I’m going to lump Remember Remember in with the rock camp too, because they were definitely not going for any kind of honed minimal perfection. Brogues reckoned they were reminiscent of Steve Reich and John Adams, but to me their rhythms sounded lumpy and their loops / repeated phrases lacked any interesting variation or tone, going instead for alterations in volume. Music with drums in it should never swell, how about we make that a rule? 1990s were a million times more fun, and I even liked that song by the drummer which annoyed me when it was on YouTube. Most of the set had a harder edge than that, and Mr McKeown’s soloing on yet another Jaguar (‘How many of them are there here today?’ he wondered, annoyed. ‘Fuck’s sake’) was sharp, effective, and defiantly un-indie.

Things I love about Comet Gain: Realistes!, Casino Classics, Jon Slade when he used to do the Plan B radio show, sounding like he was permanently in his pyjamas. Things I know about Comet Gain apart from that: zip. What are they even called? MySpace offers: ‘D.C. FECK; M.J.TAYLOR; J.W.SLADE; K.ISHIKAWA; R.EVANS; OTHERS’. ‘Feck’? Wow. Is ‘R’ for ‘Rachel’ as in ‘What’s your favourite Hitchcock? / Determines a friend’s real feelings / Strangers on a Train’s mine / But Rachel says that Rope’s got its moments’? Apparently it is. They are so referential and so seemingly hidden that they can be a mysterious bunch. Of course that makes it more exciting to see them. Maybe they are missing a guitarist because they are joined onstage by ‘Jackie McKeown’s twin brother John’, i.e. the chap from The Yummy Fur rather than the very same one from 1990s, i.e. do not dare trying to be defiantly un-indie under our watch, son. A song or two in D. C. (Detective Constable? Comics?) Feck warns, ‘don’t try any of that rock ’n’ roll whammy bar stuff or I’ll kick you in the... dick’, he concludes, tailing off. Looking at the pairing of him and Rachel I can’t shift the impression I’m watching a band fronted by Bill Oddie and Janet Ellis. Jon with his wraparound sideburns doesn’t quite fit, but seems oblivious. Obviously all this is great, I love the fact that they’re visually so ramshackle, so unconcerned, so beige. Rachel is dressed to give a performance review, but is behaving like a shadow boxer. Unconfined by an instrument, she’s jumping and punching and grabbing at the air and she invests the performance with so much energy. D. C. Feck draws on this, as he leans into the mic, his impassioned and cultural words take on urgency through the presence of the dervish to his right. And the songs? There are plenty I don’t know, but a few from Realistes!, most importantly ‘I Close My Eyes to Think of God’, because I love that song, and the implication that a life from which a partner has departed is worse than one without God, because at least the partner was real. They fluff the start of ‘Why I Try To Look So Bad’, which Feck has apparently forgotten all about, but once they are in, the water is lovely if indistinct (the Farfisa organ stage left looks great, but you can’t hear it), but that doesn’t matter at all, and Comet Gain are Comet Gain, there is no arguing, there is no anything except for blind trust.

They slowed things down for the last song, and at first the line ‘Where you been’ didn’t mean much, it could have been anything. ‘Ain’t seen you for weeks’. Oh God, what’s that? On the tip of my tongue... ‘You’ve been hanging out with’ (Of course you have!) ‘All those Jesus freaks.’ Bloody hell. The perfect compliment to the recent Felt celebration fanzine, we got a drawn out ‘Ballad of the Band’, and at the end some delicate slide guitar from John / Jackie, with maybe a little snuck-in whammy bar action.

Nick Cave, Dundee Literary Festival, 25th June

2010-06-28T22:49:00.000+01:00

Nick Cave was in Dundee on Friday, reading from The Death of Bunny Munro (out now in paperback – and look, Canongate have finally arrived at a good cover), and being interviewed by his publisher, Jamie Byng. The readings were excellent, as you’d expect – the cruising in the Brighton sun soaking up the sex one seems to have become a set piece, and is absolutely prime Cave, as in-your-face hilarious / horrific as ‘Stagger Lee’ or ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’. Then there was an extract introducing Bunny Junior, and his habit of collecting things – which gave me a start, because I’d forgotten he did that, but it chimes with And the Ass Saw the Angel’s ‘Mah Sanctum’ bit (Euchrid in his bird’s nest of a hideout, stacked with shoeboxes filled with his disgusting accumulations), and also Cave’s collection of unusual words for the earlier novel. Not to mention ‘Nick Cave: The Exhibition’, which I was kindly directed to a while ago by a chap called Rafiq who said that it contained:

a copy of a hand written dictionary that Cave kept for the years he was in Berlin (where he wrote his first book). A whole note book of words that he had read or heard and liked enough to write down and define.

If I’d asked a question after the readings it would have been about this: collecting and cataloguing mundane objects. The questions which were actually asked were about writing practices (‘No, I don’t keep a checklist!’), the theme of redemption (‘I’m not sure that comes into it...’), and the humdrum ‘when you get an idea, how do you know if it is going to be a song, a screenplay or a book?’ To which the answer was, ‘The idea doesn’t come first, that’s the thing.’ The questions were all so damn awestruck. And you couldn’t blame the questioners, confronted after all with Nick Cave. You could maybe blame Jamie Byng for his uniformly bland, overly verbose non-interrogation, but then he wants to keep his author onside for a follow up book, which is fair enough. But what they were all getting wrong, I thought, was to see Cave as this untouchable rock ’n’ roll deity, spilling over in all directions, across boundaries and genres, cool because he is transgressive, larger than life and impossible to pin down, even as a seer with a hotline to God. Some of this may be true, but it is also pretty unhelpful. Cave himself always tries to turn the conversation around to practicalities, to his 9-to-5 approach to writing, and to the inspiration he takes from collected objects and observations (see the ‘Stories’ section of the exhibition site). I like the idea that at some level he is a train spotter, a bug collecter.

Actually there was a great question, right at the end. On the subject of abusive and / or neglectful fathers (i.e. Bunny and his own, even more grotesque father), someone asked, ‘Is there anyone by whom you feel demonised? And are you grateful?’ Nick Cave was in Dundee on Friday. How on earth did that happen?

There is a similar reading / interview available on iTunes’ ‘Meet the Author’ podcast.

Foxtrot Echo Lima Tango: a fanzine about Felt &c. 1980 – 2010

2010-06-24T21:41:00.000+01:00

Listen to this. No, say this out loud:

Food, yeah. That’s a weird one. Because, like, the thing about food is – everybody’s a vegetarian in the music business. I can’t believe it! I’ve never ate a vegetable in my life! I think I was forced to eat a sprout once when I was two, you know – that’s the limit of it really.

Are you feeling the lilt of it? Try some more:

It’s up to them. It’s their choice. It’s perfectly OK. But I get some stick. I wish people wouldn’t give me any stick. ‘You need vegetables...,’ all this kind of rubbish. Maybe you do, but I’m not hurting anybody. It’s up to me if I don’t want to. I can’t eat vegetables. I mean, my mum took me to the doctors when I was about four – after the sprout – and she said, ‘This baby won’t eat – he just won’t eat.’

Chances are you are now talking Brummie. At least, I was by the time I’d got that far. I miss that accent sometimes, it is prosaic but it can be so warm. If you were down but not yet out, that’s the voice that would do you most good. If you were engaged in producing a run of the most austere, literate, self-consciously precious records to grace the 1980s, though, it mightn’t be what you’d choose. The Lawrence which emerges in this fine new Felt fanzine is isolated from the rest of Birmingham: he lives that line from ‘Crystal Ball’, ‘we might as well just stay in our rooms until we die’, with his meticulously clean, air-freshened flat, the kitchen cupboards filled with nothing but his collection of Kerouac paperbacks. He walks a line you get the impression that only he can see: between fame and self-sabotage, between trashy concept and fine feeling, between work and non-work. He is as finicky as Kraftwerk, but without the accompanying wealth or acclaim. Not that there hasn’t been acclaim, of course, but it must be hard to remember it or feel its worth when you end up, after all that, not famous, on the dole. This fanzine is beautiful because it shows the breadth and depth of reactions to Felt, it shows that plenty did see the line, it is full of love and obsessional responses to Lawrence’s obsessional detail.

A few highlights:

Benjamin Knight’s ‘Sunlight Strings the Golden Glow: The Guitar of Lawrence’, which introduces the word ‘felty’ to the language, to describe the softness of a band’s sound, and is insanely detailed without ever losing its awestruck tone. For example: ‘At 1:40, some double notes spike between Lawrence’s words accentuating them before he stops singing long enough to let the guitars lead us down the shortest lonely path back to the song’ (on ‘Hours of Darkness Have Changed My Mind’).
‘Felt on the Tyne’, an idiotic radio interview with a DJ who’d never heard of them. ‘YOU’RE VERY LAID BACK HERE AND EVERYTHING BUT ARE YOU GONNA SOCK IT TO THEM. ARE YOU LIKE A NOISE BAND? OR ARE YOU TOTALLY MOODY?’
The two long interviews with Lawrence, by Chris Heath (from 1987) and Alistair Fitchett (from 2005), particularly the sprouts line from the former and his fierce defence of not selling out in the latter. ‘For the kids, for the people who really love music like me. There must be somebody like me.’
Alasdair MacLean’s line about the way Felt made him and his school friends feel ‘estrangement from the details of our lives’.
Maurice Deebank’s anonymous third-person grumbling about history’s focus on Lawrence, and his spectacularly un-Pop missing of the point: ‘If you have something worthwhile offering, then let it speak for itself.’
Alex Deck’s home-made ‘Felt Box’, made of felt with felt lettering, the inside a trove of clippings and photos surrounding a series of TDK cassettes.

It’s really pretty special. Get one from here.

E. M. Forster – ‘The Eternal Moment and Other Stories’

2010-06-23T18:16:00.000+01:00

The second of Forster’s two short story collections, published in 1928 but written before 1914 and, taken together with The Celestial Omnibus, it represents ‘all that I am likely to accomplish in a particular line’. It is a pretty squiggly line, veering from the home turf of anguished rich travellers (‘The Eternal Moment’), to more fantastical, metaphysical territory. ‘Co-ordination’ imagines Napoleon and Beethoven in heaven, measuring their glory in terms of how often people still perform the works of one and mention the achievements of the other; quality and interest are ignored, and they get excited unnecessarily about the activities of a school with a Napoleon themed term during which child after child plays parts of the Eroica symphony badly on piano. ‘The Story of the Siren’ has men and women driven mad by beholding an underwater siren, or at least driven to a state of mind in which they can only relate to other people who have experienced the same thing. ‘Mr Andrews’ considers the ascent of a Christian and a Moslem to heaven. ‘The Point of It’ is an exercise in snobbery directed towards the middlebrow, or else a robust defence of taste in the face of ageing, and contains this bleak but halfway convincing prognosis:

By different paths they had come to Hell and Micky now saw that what the bustle of life conceals: that the years are bound either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth, who seem to contend for our souls like angels, hold each the seeds of our decay. (p. 52)

But the real interest in this book is in the first story, which is particularly far even from the line established in The Celestial Omnibus. ‘The Machine Stops’ is science fiction. The earlier book satirises modernity’s obsession with advancement and activity, which feels like an internet theme to a modern reader. ‘The Machine Stops’ goes much further, predicting the rot of the attention span down to about ten minutes (the maximum length of a YouTube clip), the total loss of primary sources from the education system, the loss of geography as a meaningful concept (hello broadband), and the fractured discourse of instant messaging / tweeting / texting. People live in stacked hexagonal boxes beneath the earth’s surface, and all of their physical and conversational wants are supplied in situ. The messaging system is based on tubes and doesn’t seem to be electronic, but its functionality is identical to much of today’s communication technology: many conversations are held at once, there is a constant scramble to be first with a new idea (with the emphasis on ‘first’ rather than ‘idea’), and lectures are no longer something to be attended and absorbed, rather they are delivered to the home and last, as I say, a mere ten minutes. People leave their hexagonal boxes so rarely that they can’t remember how to interact with others when they encounter them face to face. Vashti, the central character, has a ‘horror of direct experience’ (p. 11). The whole of this civilisation is controlled by the machine of the story’s title, and the machine’s manual is the only book left over ‘from the age of litter’ (p. 7). Artefacts are a thing of the past – so digital copies, too, are anticipated. There is no indication that any force more evil than a drive towards economical performance is at work behind this, but the results are deadly:

Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally. (p. 17)

Because of the confined living circumstances, physical strength is now a disadvantage, and in childhood, ‘all who promised undue strength were destroyed’. It’s an anti-target message, and an anti-technology message. If things become too easy, they cease to be worth doing at all.

A few more quotes:

And of course she had studied the civilisation that had immediately preceded her own – the civilisation that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. (p. 9)

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child. (p. 10-11)

Georges Simenon – ‘The Brothers Rico’

2010-06-13T09:31:00.000+01:00

        Simenon: When I did a commercial novel I didn’t think about that novel except in the hours of writing it. But when I am doing a novel now I don’t see anybody, I don’t speak to anybody, I don’t take phone calls – I live just like a monk. All the day I am one of my characters, I feel what he feels.

        Interviewer: You are the same character all the way through the writing of the novel?

        Simenon: Always, because most of my novels show what happens around one character. The other characters are always seen by him. So it is in this character’s skin I have to be. And it’s almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t – it’s impossible. I have to – it’s physical. I am too tired. (The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 3, p. 28)

This intrigued me. It seemed a healthy mixture of popism and rockism – the work ethic of the latter, the ephemeral flourish of the former. Was a serious novel ever written in eleven days? Is an author justified in getting quite so intensely involved for a piece of pulp fiction? I like the idea that he ends up somewhere he didn’t know he wanted to be by a process of which he is not in control.

The Brothers Rico is mentioned in that 1955 interview as the one of his recent novels of which he is most proud. It is from 1954, so perhaps his memory doesn’t stretch back very far, but still. There are three brothers Rico: Eddie, Gino and Tony. Middle brother Gino is a hit man, elder brother Eddie runs a protection racket in Florida, and Tony is a getaway driver. The problems begin when Tony marries Nora Malaks, and word gets around that he might, if the police ‘gave him a chance and weren’t too rough on him’ (p. 57), give evidence in court against ‘the organization’. The organization cannot allow this to happen, and call in Eddie, the responsible brother, to track him down, ostensibly to warn him and get him shipped out to Europe. The allegation is curious because it is so vague. Nora’s brother Pieter is the one who makes it. An ambitious young man, an assistant manager at General Electric, with one eye on the chance of an eventual place on the board of directors, he goes to the police, presumably horrified by what his sister has told him of her new husband. Maybe it’s civic duty, maybe he sees that the higher he gets in his own career, the worse it is going to be to have a gangster for a brother-in-law. Tony’s complicity in Pieter’s second hand offer of a confession is never confirmed. Given that his wife is pregnant, it would seem the worst possible time to make a decision of that sort. This is something of a weak link in the novel’s plot, but it doesn’t affect the tension that gradually builds up around it.

Boss Sid Kubik lays out the facts for Eddie at a meeting in Miami, and his reaction to Pieter’s ambition is revealing:

Was this to imply that Pieter Malaks was the same sort of person as Eddie? Well, it just wasn’t so […]. He, Eddie, had never aimed that high. He was satisfied with his Florida setup, had never tried to make up to the bigshots. Didn’t Kubik know that? (pp. 55-6)

Eddie Rico is a pathetic specimen. He makes a virtue of always doing as he is told, and although his patch of the extortion network is relatively violence-free, The Brothers Rico shows how morally untenable this position is. He thinks he has done pretty well for himself, with a nice house, and a wife and kids to whom – unlike Tony – he never imparts compromising information. But this leaves him isolated in an underworld which does nothing but use him. He is proud of his status as a regional bigshot, but incredibly sensitive to over- or under- estimates of his importance. He wants respect without responsibility, and in a slightly autistic way he wants to fit into the organization’s jigsaw, not realising that everyone else is playing chess.

The novel builds to two great set pieces in chapters seven and eight, in the first of which Eddie finally catches up with Tony and confronts him. The movie version is quite close, though Tony and Nora seem more innocent. The tragedy in this scene is that it is of no consequence: all that matters is that Eddie has led the organization to Tony’s hideout, and in the subsequent chapter, back at the hotel, they place a guard on him and make him sweat it out.

This Is Not Le Weekend, Part Two: Peter Parker and The Sexual Objects, Tolbooth, Stirling, 29th May

2010-06-03T18:51:00.003+01:00

The merchandise stall was the preserve of the last two bands on Saturday’s bill. At first glance it looked more like Peter Parker’s table, with their free button badges and 7" singles – one all to themselves (‘Swallow the Rockets’), and one split with The Sexual Objects (‘Pretty Living’). But there were some clear A4 folders too, containing four sleeveless 7"s (including the Objects’ otherwise unavailable ‘Full Penetration’), a couple of CDs, and a fanzine in a choice of light green or pink, proclaiming at the front: ‘The Creeping Bent organisation salutes the written word of our favourite oracle, Tangents / Unpopular Culture, and in particular their Fifty Thousand Reasons series, reprinted here with their kind permission.’ There follow John Carney’s words on Davy Henderson, Alan Horne and Dave McCullough. What a fabulous reminder of what’s important. Wasn’t there supposed to be a book of this series coming out? It should do so. Of course I felt a special thrill for having once been so ludicrously uninformed on the subject of the Fire Engines at the same website a few (six!) years ago. But I’m catching up, slowly.

This was my third time in the presence of The Sexual Objects. The first time, they began so unpromisingly with a round of slow rambunctious harmony singing before deigning to launch into their good stuff. Davy’s not-quite-American drawl sleazing nonsense the while. The parallel between that noise and Vic Godard’s messier recordings is only just dawning on me – the song title ‘Outta Place Again’ is a clue, referencing ‘Out Of Touch / View’, it is so strange to hear that sound shorn of its harsh London inflexions. My second time seeing them they supported Vic, and we missed the beginning of the set. But maybe they are a band best burst in upon in flagrante, in the white heat of their anti-passion. Davy’s drawls were great on that occasion, perving on ‘the beautiful girls of Peter Parker’, with whom they were about to release ‘Outta Place Again’ on that split single, and time-stretching the legendarily short Fire Engines live show, going on about ‘23 minutes seems like 23 freaking hours’ in reference to the Objects’ set length, and then ‘23 seconds becomes 23 years’ in reference to God knows what. There’s a playful arrogance to the man’s every move which can be irritating until you tune in and start to agree with it. In his article John Carney says, ‘For Davy though the Captain and his Magic Band were the thing, like say Love were for Michael Head. We’ve all got our touchstones.’ We do, but how rare and how brilliant is it to find a new one?

Peter Parker were fun, as last time. Roz’s cherry bob was in fine condition, and Jane was fabulously sarky. ‘Last time I was in Stirling I saw R.E.M.’, said Roz between songs. ‘Don’t tell jokes’ was the instant put down. Later on someone heckled something about women and apes, which Jane picked up: ‘What’s that? Women like apes? We have to, otherwise we’d be lesbians.’ [laughter] ‘Thanks for setting me up, doll.’ Then they ripped into Jeremy, stage left, for it being his 42nd birthday. ‘You wouldn’t think it, would you?’ ‘42, eh?’, etc., etc., for minutes on end. Jeremy stood stock still, moving not a facial muscle. You’d imagine he must be used to it. The music was full bodied jerky coquette pop, with one tune nicked wholesale from Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’, and I was thinking maybe it didn’t quite hit home until the last song, ‘Once In A Lifetime’, with its two note nagging guitar married to a varispeed disco beat. Disco finales are great – see also The Lodger’s ‘Good Old Days’ set climax at Mono a month ago.

Back to that new touchstone. Whose band opened with a lurching swampy instrumental number like a stationary car revving in the rain, its wipers juddering unevenly as bulbs shoot from its snoot. Yeah. Davy’s head swaying lopsidedly and looking as always like he was trying to swallow his red Fender Jaguar directly through his stomach wall. I remember those mannerisms from that otherwise under-appreciated Fire Engines show. Giving the lie to the band name, this is not cock rock, it is visceral. They’re back on the harmonies for the second song and these are as bad as before, but this time I’m reminded of what Matt Groening said about Trout Mask Replica: ‘It’s the worst dreck... But they want it to sound that way.’ The out of tune male voice choir bit is the moat you have to cross before being admitted to the castle of ‘Merrie England’ et al. (I don’t know or care how ironic that is, but it is nice to have a Scottish singer singing about England in the run up to this dreadful World Cup season that is about to hit). The remainder of the set was thunderous. Just as it got into its stride I couldn’t help but peek at a text message someone in front of me was composing: ‘It’s a bit disappointing actually. There is no Jiz’. Which almost topped the single entendre of Davy’s announcement that The Sexual Objects’ album is to be called Cucumber. In the unlikely event that they haven’t already thought of this, Chris said he’d like the cover to be like The Velvet Underground & Nico except with a cucumber instead of a banana, please.

What did it sound like? I just stumbled across A Jumped Up Pantry Boy’s argument for Station to Station, which I can sort of see, but also a more down-to-earth Television for the vocals, Beefheart of course for the logic, and 1978 Subway Sect for the falling down stairs whilst playing aspect. Compared to The Nectarine No. 9, whose Received Transgressed & Transmitted I have recently been lapping up, they are a move from eclectic dub strangeness to relatively more straightforward rock, but there is a corresponding jump in energy which makes them irresistible. A few feet to the left of me, a man danced like he was dislocating his right arm with each gyration, lost in the elasticity of a sound which suggested everything. It’s art rock, but it pulls your body apart as much as it does your mind.

This Is Not Le Weekend, Part One: She’S hit and Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat, Tolbooth, Stirling, 29th May

2010-05-30T20:16:00.000+01:00

Walking down from the hostel we spotted, though a window a few floors up, the red walls of the Tolbooth bar, against which John Edwards battered the living daylights out of his double bass this time last year, and against which Bill Wells took the afternoon breeze and made it his own in 2008, with his National Jazz Trio of Scotland. We were early, and could hear somebody soundchecking within. After a few seconds this noise was joined by a two tone fire alarm, and the sight of a metal grille auto-descending, sealing off the area. A frippery of pop stars meandered from the front entrance, and followed directions from the man in charge to gather across the road. Someone made the obligatory ‘thought it was part of your set’ remark to a young man with cheek bones, and Davy Henderson of The Sexual Objects paced with a mobile phoned glued to his ear, as either his very presence or possibly the alarm summoned into being two fire engines, which pulled up alongside. The front one had its engine left on, which drew the attention of a lanky fellow in a tweed jacket. Approaching it with a recording device, he stooped and pointed it, sonic screwdriver style, at its innards. The driver noticed almost immediately, scowled, and switched off the engine. As much as to say, where do you think you are? This is Stirling, we don’t want any of your field recording art wankers here. And all too soon, the fireman is to have his wish: the marvellous Le Weekend festival comes to an end in October, and this gig, billed as This Is Not Le Weekend, is a one-day prequel, representing the pop end of its spectrum. Could this be an effect of the new Tory administration’s programme of cuts? We’ve been so lucky to see bands here that it can’t possibly have been profitable to put on – in particular the Japanese ones, flown in specially, often for a single show. Hope to see you again, Nagisa Ni te and Eddie Marcon, but without subsidy it doesn’t seem very likely. If the Tenniscoats don’t come back I’m emigrating.

She’S hit [sic] came on not long after the building re-opened. Have you seen their MySpace page? It is full of horribly unappealing Mary Chain / Velvet Underground comparisons (unattributed, Chris pointed out), and instead of citing The Birthday Party as an influence (‘She’s Hit’ is a song from Junkyard), they go for that band’s earlier incarnation The Boys Next Door, presumably to generate a fake sense of insider allegiance in anyone who recognises the name. So I wasn’t looking forward to their set at all, but in the event they were so funny that it didn’t matter that they are paper thin. Featuring a slouching guitarist in a leather jacket with a silver glitter guitar, a singer with hair ‘like A Flock of Seagulls after a thunderstorm’ (© S.) and a stand-up drummer with stand-up hair who had to bend double to reach his drums (which showed off his crucifix chain to advantage), they played what amounted to covers of Beat Happening’s ‘Bad Seed’, JAMC’s ‘You Trip Me Up’ and ‘Sidewalking’, and Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’, all stripped of their vocal lines to be replaced with a constipated groan and Bobby Gillespie posing. The smoke machine was turned up to 11 and it wasn’t a great surprise, a few songs in, to hear the fire alarm again and find ourselves directed outside. On resuming, the singer removed his aviator shades to reveal eyes which were wide dark wells, hedged in by product-laden brushed-forward hair which clung to the space where the specs had been. He looked like a baby owl surprised in its nest. The chap standing in front of me sported the stance and hairstyle of a young Stephen Pastel, the whole thing seemed a conspiracy to re-create the fabled Living Room of 1984. But, y’know, time didn’t drag, it was hugely entertaining, and as long as they are not serious about any of this I don’t see the harm.

Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat are serious people, of course, but I wondered how well their different brands of seriousness would sit together. Bill tending so much towards the light, and Aidan towards the shady. They began instrumentally, Aidan brushing a cymbal along to Bill’s spaced out piano chords, and the rich tones of Aby Vulliamy’s viola knitting it all together. Then a shift on piano to a higher register, a broken-off arpeggio figure, repeated, and in came Aidan: ‘You know that I would love it, it would be such a thrill to kiss your lips,’ the word ‘lips’ dying on his, retracted as much as sung. Soon his imaginings have wandered on to the hips and he’s sliding his hand ‘beneath your dress’, wrapt with forbidden sexual tension, held suspended like a moth in front of this old flame by Bill’s sun-lit phrase. But he knows that the prospect is all, and kills the song abruptly with the words: ‘Let’s stop here.’ The song which followed was the most striking of the set: exaggeratedly spooky, hammy chords lending the implication of menace to a story about keeping the house keys when your parents move, sneaking back, being surprised by the new owner’s return, and doubly surprised by her question, ‘Have you had your dinner?’ Again the song leaves you hanging, and given Moffat’s subject matter elsewhere I think you are supposed to infer that some inter-generational sex is in the offing. Or at least that the boy (what age is he?) thinks there is. Both songs have more of a narrative, literal framework than you usually find with Bill’s music, and you wouldn’t want it limited in this way all the time, but still: the pairing does gel, to create moments of musical tension to match the words.

In part two: a virtual repeat of Foolin’ Around #1, with Peter Parker and The Sexual Objects.

P. G. Wodehouse – ‘Carry On, Jeeves’

2010-05-14T21:56:00.000+01:00

There is little to no point reviewing a P. G. Wodehouse book, is there? They’re all the same: a tonic for the duration, then instantly forgotten. I used to read them all the time, then stopped a few years ago after Robert McCrumb’s biography put me off. It was so leaden, and then there was the business of the broadcasts for the Nazis. A bigger jam than ever Bertie Wooster faced, and no Jeeves on hand to steer him through. ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’, the first story here, is the one in which the pair first meet, and Bertie, hungover and trying to get his head around Types of Ethical Theory, a book lent by his overbearing fiancée Florence (‘a girl with a wonderful profile’) is smitten at once:

       I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of Johnnie stood without.
       ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’
       I’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the door like a healing zephyr. (p. 2)

Here are some more of Jeeves’ refined manoeuvres:

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. (p. 31)

He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish. (p. 79)

Jeeves flowed in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering over its mossy bed. (p. 94)

Jeeves projected himself into the room with the tea. (p. 105)

Then he streamed imperceptibly towards the door and flowed silently out. (p. 112)

There was a great one about Jeeves’ voice being like the baa-ing of a distant sheep, but I can’t find it now. There are a couple of very similar quotations online, though: ‘There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.’ (from Joy in the Morning, via), and ‘That soft cough of Jeeves’s which always reminds me of a very old sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain top.’ (from Something Fresh, via).

Graham Swift – ‘Last Orders’

2010-05-09T10:59:00.001+01:00

       ‘So then I thought, But I can change in another way. She won’t see me turning up at the hospital but I can have something to tell her. Something to compensate.’
       I think, you might have done both.
       He says, ‘Amy don’t give up.’
       I think, Who’s talking? (p. 84)

For fifty years, Amy Dodds has been taking the number 44 bus to visit her daughter June at a psychiatric hospital. Twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. June can’t speak, and gives no indication that she is aware of Amy’s presence. June’s father Jack refuses to go, has never been, will barely acknowledge June’s existence. He has been a butcher all his working life, and the ‘something to compensate’ he mentions above, in conversation with Vic the undertaker, is the decision to sell up so they can retire to Margate. He wants to start a new life, aged 68, meet new people. He has a fixation on the ‘new people’ part, which reminded me of Alan Bennett’s recollections of his parents’ attempts to get on in society. But the decision, much as he wants to pretend otherwise, is not a result of Jack’s resolve, or an argument won. He is being forced out of business by a nearby supermarket, and is already seriously in debt because of a loan he took out in his early 60s – clearly that would have been the better time to sell up and retire. Especially as he dies of cancer before the move to Margate can happen.

Sound fun? No, it’s not. Last Orders is about failure, in personal and economic terms. It is structured around the drive four of Jack’s friends make from Bermondsey to Margate to scatter his ashes. Chapters are named after places on this journey, apart from the ones which look back, which are named after the character doing the reminiscing. Every significant character gets a say. As the back stories are filled in, a pecking order emerges. At the bottom is Lenny, who had dreams of becoming a professional boxer, but settled for selling fruit and veg from a market stall. Jack would probably be next, but he would rather have been a doctor than a butcher – in hospital, he confuses his surgeon by drawing a parallel between the two professions. Then there is Ray, who wanted to be a jockey but instead worked in an insurance office, eventually arriving at a compromise by going part time and spending his free days betting at racing tracks up and down the country. Ray is the only one of the four men in the car (five, counting Jack) not to have been self employed. Vic Tucker, the undertaker (he tucks them in) is top for his generation, with a successful business and two sons who work for him. Driving the car is Vince, Jack’s adopted son, who owns a car showroom and is richer than all of them. He provides and drives the car, a Mercedes: ‘It’s a 380 S-Class, that’s what it is. V8, automatic.’ (p. 23). He wears a camel hair coat and for some reason kept reminding me of Vinnie Jones.

The personal pecking order closely follows the economic one. Lenny and Joan couldn’t afford to take their daughter Sally to the seaside as a young girl, so let her accompany Jack and Amy Dodds, with Vince, on their weekend outings in the meat van to (guess where?) Margate. In a round about way this leads, years later, to Sally becoming pregnant by Vince, and Vince running off to join the army to escape the consequences. Sally has an abortion and ends up marrying ‘Tommy Tyson, care of Pentonville Prison’ (p. 132), thereafter descending into prostitution. Vince later pimps his own daughter Kath to a customer he is worried might not otherwise buy the Mercedes. I could go on, but that is enough to demonstrate the point about the web of mistreatment and resentment that constitute the bulk of the novel. It is carefully worked out, and plausible enough, but I couldn’t see a point to all the misery. There is no moral order, or how could Vince come out top? Why all this fuss over the death of Jack, a man who is overwhelmingly weak and blinkered? Ray at least has some self-awareness, and is likeable enough for his misfortunes to amount to something like tragedy. His betting pays for daughter Susie’s emigration to Australia, but when his wife leaves him he stops writing to Susie because he feels it would be an imposition to tell her. He reflects:

If I’d been another man I wouldn’t have just sat there with it getting dark, but not bothering to put the lights on, as if, if I sat very still, I might fade away altogether. (p. 100)

Election Night Special

2010-05-07T22:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday morning, doing some last minute Googling in order to have some clue who to vote for, I found to my horror that I’d been living in an SNP constituency for the last 5 years. The Labour candidate didn’t seem to want to do much about it either – information about her pitch for office was scanty, and the only Labour name being touted on lamp posts and railings around here was that of the MP for the next constituency along, who has a massive majority. It seemed odd: this was a seat they could probably have won back. They lost by a hair’s breadth in 2005, this time it was substantially more. How silly. That was my disinterested take on the election. Over in Edinburgh, aided by a ‘crate of Delirium Tremens’, Chris got rather more into it. Here is his cracking Facebook coverage, reproduced by kind, not to say foolhardy, permission:

21 hours ago

Work out your Tory victory name by taking the name of a Tory shadow minister and adding DEAR GOD, NO! at the end.

20 hours ago

A mathematical formula:

Ben Bradshaw = Massive Cunt.

18 hours ago

Simple algebra:

Jeremy Vine = Shite.

17 hours ago

An algorithm:

Alex Salmond + oxygen = 100% unadulterated pish.

17 hours ago

Eat my shit, Jacqui Smith, eat my shit.

Only, make sure you film it so your husband can have a big wank over it.

17 hours ago

Charles Clarke has been beaten by a LibDem midget!

I hope he filmed it so Jacqui Smith’s husband can have a big wank.

James Hogg – ‘Altrive Tales’

2010-05-03T21:11:00.002+01:00

Some more Scotlands, from 1832 but with settings stretching back to the 1680s. Following a format established by the 1829 ‘magnum opus’ edition of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, which did so much to establish contemporary fiction as a serious – and collectible – form, on a par with classic poetry and drama. Altrive Tales was to be Hogg’s collected prose works, published regularly in uniform editions which would sit impressively on the shelves of discerning middle class readers. It was to include his novels, as well as his short (and not so short) stories, and it was to dispel the popular idea of him as an erratic, uncouth, untutored genius: by its bulk, scope and accomplishment. To the failure of the series, which due to the bankruptcy of the publisher did not get beyond its first instalment, Gillian Hughes (this edition’s editor) attributes the drop in popularity Hogg’s work suffered after his death in 1835. Victorian editions were censored, the ‘Justified Sinner’ became a ‘Fanatic’; without the rough edges what was the point? If an authoritative collected works had existed, she argues, this bowdlerisation might not have happened. The books published over the last 15 years by the Edinburgh University press are to some extent an attempt to realise Hogg’s own original plan for Altrive Tales.

The thing is, though, James Hogg’s genius was erratic, uncouth and untutored: that’s what makes him so thrilling and, sometimes, so frustrating. In the ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’ which opens Altrive Tales, he freely admits to being erratic:

I cannot make out a sentence by study, without the pen in my hand to catch the ideas as they arise, and I never write two copies of the same thing. (p. 17)

This is an enormously appealing idea: inspiration and composition are inseparable, and neither involves planning. In fact they barely involve the author, at least on a conscious level: Anthony Trollope this is not. The memoir is a practical account of Hogg’s writing career, and a lot of it turns upon how hard he found it to make money. My favourite bit is this brainwave:

I took it into my head that I would collect a poem from every living author in Britain, and publish them in a neat and elegant volume, by which I calculated I might make my fortune. (p. 39)

He did get pledges from some key figures (Byron, Wordsworth), but was perplexed that his friend Walter Scott refused to contribute anything:

He remained firm in his denial, which I thought very hard; so I left him in high dudgeon, sent him a very abusive letter, and would not speak to him again for many a day. I could not even endure to see him at a distance, I felt so degraded by the refusal; and I was, at that time, more disgusted with all mankind than I had ever been before, or have ever been since. (p. 40)

Scott comes out of this episode well, attending to Hogg during an illness despite the quarrel, and refusing to allow him to mention it once they have made up. Eventually he works it out for himself:

I can account for it in no other way, than by supposing that he thought it mean in me to attempt either to acquire gain, or a name, by the efforts of other men. (p. 49)

The other long piece in Altrive Tales is ‘The Adventures of Captain John Lochy’, an infuriating novella which follows a man of uncertain (but, it is hinted, aristocratic) parentage on the military campaigns he joins in order to get out of Britain, to avoid the murderous plots of those who want to prevent him inheriting his due. It starts well: the first attempt on his life occurs when he is a baby, and he is abducted from a farmhouse during the night and hurled by the ankle into a loch. He is rescued by his dog, Cowlan, who behaves in an appropriately doggy way:

he had me at his side, trailing by the night-gown; and though he could not then bark aloud, he was still making a constant attempt at it with his mouth shut. (p. 82)

When he joined the army, though, I started to lose interest. There is fighting and looting and Charles XII of Sweden vs. Peter the Great, and plenty of Jacobitism (Wikipedia thinks people are still trying to restore the Stuarts to the English throne?!), and it all gets a bit this-happened-then-that-happened and maybe this is my anti-history prejudice but it did seem as though the pacing was shot. The character Finlayson ‘had not one virtue but an inviolable attachment to me’ (p. 100), and is a less evil reprise of the Justified Sinner’s Gil-Martin, complete with a shifting identity that in this case is achieved by dressing up. Not to knock dressing up, but it is a less interesting fictional device than a Calvinism-inspired descent into madness and terror.

The collection ends with two great short stories, one featuring the abduction of a child by orang-utans (or ‘pongos’) who, when they realise they aren’t going to be able to teach him to speak, go back and abduct his mother to help out. The other, ‘Marion’s Jock’ (which also appears in The Three Perils of Man) is the only tale here told in Scots dialect. Marion is tired of her son Jock lazing around all day eating, and gets him a job as a shepherd at a nearby farm. Unfortunately, Jock is much hungrier than this lowly position allows for (they feed him oatcakes and hard cheese), and there’s a massive side of bacon hanging in the kitchen, and he’s got a knife, and they put him in charge of a flock of sheep… It gets messy. Unlike the longer ‘John Lochy’ story, ‘Marion’s Jock’ is tightly controlled and about as perfect a murder ballad on the theme of greed as one could wish for.

Pop Will Starve Itself

2010-05-01T12:19:00.002+01:00

This week I got sucked in to thinking, like Tim, about the debate Everett True has been following / stirring on print vs. web music criticism (that’s the messy blog version, there is also a professional journalist one). It all seemed to boil down to a post / comment I can’t even find now, in which The Hype Machine responded to Chris Weingarten’s accusations of mathematics by saying that there is nothing wrong with a culture in which small blogs write enthusiastically about small bands they like (actually, here it is). Everett thought that there was, that the role of tastemaker involves something like an encompassable zeitgeist, to which the critic responds in positive and negative terms, providing a narrative for people to follow. For instance: love Suede, hate Kingmaker, ran 1992’s narrative in his own paper Melody Maker. Glam is back, with a literate twist. Let every shiny thing crush every whiny thing. Then you know where you stand. You’re a pleb going with the populist flow, or you’re in the know, ahead of the curve, avant of the garde, these ones here are the best band in the world, in ways you never dreamed of! And, while that kind of dialectic can be exciting, it is polarising too.

But pop is polarising, isn’t it? In its time, it has been about kids vs. adults, amateur vs. pro, commerce vs. authenticity and authenticity vs. commerce. Above all it has been about mass media, and subverting (but still appearing in) mass media. Malcolm McLaren’s ghost should remind us of that. I remember seeing him on daytime TV last year, panicking the presenters in his inability to talk for fewer than eight minutes at a time, and saying, ‘I don’t think people listen to a lot of music these days’ – i.e. for all the explosion in coverage, the amount of time spent listening hasn’t gone up. And how could it? There are only so many hours in the day, most of them wasted at work. Pop was always about its own story, of how rock ’n’ roll became pop became psychedelia; how pop became glam; how rock ’n’ roll and glam became prog; how prog got trashed by punk; how punk led on the one hand to DIY and indie, and on the other to post-punk which led (with added glam ’n’ electronics) to new romanticism. Perhaps shoegazing to grunge to britpop in the ’90s was already less iconic, already drifting from the mass media into its own smaller world.

What I want to know is: can pop function away from the mass media? All of the progressions / reactions listed above (and any others you can think of) rely on the fame of their predecessors. Simon Reynolds wrote an interesting piece a while back about how the consensus of music critics melted away as the noughties progressed, and the output of music increased. There is more great music now than ever, ran his analysis, but none of it has the critical mass in terms of coverage that – say – The Beatles, T-Rex, The Smiths or Pulp had. He even identifies Arcade Fire, in 2004, as the last band with this kind of consensus behind them. (Weren’t they rubbish? Why aren’t the Tenniscoats as big as The Beatles?) Maybe this is a hopelessly 20th century idea, but if pop music is about recycling itself into endlessly fascinating forms and reacting to its own ludicrous excesses, then it is going to need a present moment to react to, and from which to draw ideas. If the only famous sounds are from the 1950s – 90s, and everyone keeps recycling the same ones, then is it even pop music any more?

But what might happen (at least for those who ignore the aggregators), is that the death of pop means the rebirth of folk. Not in terms of sound, but the way it propagates itself. Word of mouth recommendations replacing cover features, the slowing down of change (because a single band can no longer have the same influence), the relaxing of rigid divisions inspired by iconoclastic writers, listeners constructing their own narratives. Mass exposure via the media relies on there not being that many other things in the news, and Weingarten’s argument highlights the fact that music is way past that point now. There is no encompassable zeitgeist: what’s out there is too big. But that’s only a bad thing if mass media is a concern. It’s bad for pop, and it’s definitely bad for music journalists, but it might not be bad for music.

The Lodger & Water Wolves, Mono, Glasgow, 20th April

2010-04-22T18:53:00.002+01:00

Being by my reckoning the fifth of Brogues’ ‘Foolin’ Around’ gigs, and the first since this all-conquering Pastels / Tenniscoats show. The first, too, Chris noticed, not to be held on a Thursday. ‘How did you manage to forget which week one of them was in and still remember the day?’ I wondered, but he was too pleased with his new painting of Freddie Mercury from Mono’s Project Ability exhibition to mind much. Ooh, Project Ability have a Flickr page, I didn’t know that. We wondered, anyway, whether the day of the week was what had kept the audience numbers down: there was plenty of low key atmos, and those who were there were appreciative, but – you could’ve tried a bit harder, Glasgow.

Especially as what you missed was top notch. Having narrowly missed Water Wolves supporting Real Estate in January (seat... or support band?), it was good to have the opportunity to catch up. Brogues has compared their guitar lines to the Go-Betweens, and listening to their MySpace songs I do agree (do you know that early Robert song ‘Hope’?), but in the flesh they were far more on the wavelength of The Clean, with the fluidity of the sound, the reluctance to change chords, the easy-going frailty. The two guitars took turns at being the bright, trebly one, and the drummer in his tank top looked like an extra in a Philip Larkin documentary. Maybe this kind of thing works best live, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a magic all the Wolves’ own. A girl at the front shouted out something about ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, and I couldn’t work out if it was because the previous song used the same chords or because the following one stole some of the lyrics. But nothing could be further from the Ramones: this was un-regimented, de-regulated, ramshackle as a sparkler.

Not so The Lodger, who are a highly organised bunch. The second bearded singer of the evening looked much more like a morning person, with his Green Flash trainers and lightening fast guitar arm. He wouldn’t make a great substitute for Ivor Novello in the film from which (I presume) his band took their name – too open, too honest for that ambiguous character. To begin with, on stage as on record, The Lodger can come across as plain: a whirlwind of activity neatly tidied away into a teacup. But then you tune in. Their appeal is not in the surface of the sound but in its drive and urgency. Especially thrilling are the lurches into disco – particularly on set closer ‘The Good Old Days’, a great, great single which should come with umpteen extended 12” mixes. Other attempts to deepen their sound are in evidence: Ben introduced one song from the new LP by saying that really it is stuffed full of saxophones, but that the logistics of getting the extra musicians into the band’s Vauxhall Corsa all the way to Glasgow meant that we would have to imagine them. They are doing the full orchestrated version in Leeds soon. ‘Let Her Go’ was deployed at the set’s mid-point, a ball of energy oddly reminiscent of Subway Sect’s lethargic ‘Turn Your Back On Everyone’. ‘Many Thanks For Your Honest Opinion’ – ‘one of the first songs I ever wrote’ – was more fiery still. A. was even reminded of Passion Star, for the tender hearted self possession. That is a compliment indeed. The Lodger kicked up a storm.

Momus – ‘Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands’

2010-04-12T22:38:00.003+01:00

A collection not of stories but of Scotlands. Numbered, but not in order. None of them are entirely real, none entirely false. ‘Every lie creates a parallel world: the world in which it is true’, states the cover in bold capitals over a flag which is Scotland’s in shape, England’s in colour. Some of the Scotlands are more Germany than Scotland; quite a few are 90% Japan. The majority are high concept one-liners (Scotland 37: ‘The Scotland in which every citizen is pale, malevolent and glaikit’ (p. 131)), but many also run to several pages. A few are obscene, a few might count as magic realism, myths or fairy stories. The influence of Momus’ holiday to Orkney in 2008 is clearly felt. Edinburgh, where he is from, is the most vividly realised city; Glasgow hardly features; and Dundee is, unaccountably, completely absent. Primal Scream are in there: rebranded Sonic Flower Groove, you’d have to be a pretty odd Momus fan not to pick up on that. Norman McLaren is there too, under the name McBean, and I wondered what the point was in telling people about Norman McLaren if you aren’t going to reveal his name? Like you did here. Maybe he is more famous than I’m giving him credit for. Click Opera runs through this book’s veins: its recurring themes are here too, most emphatically the one about the UK’s boorishness, its intolerance of nonconformity, which is the target of Momus’ satire whenever he switches Japan for Scotland. There is never any ‘reveal’ as such, the details build up until you realise you’ve been had:

Some adorably cute kids, a boy and a girl, are slithering by on steel rollbars, pointing at the rain flecking the airport window. Their mother indulges them for a while, then calls them to her kindly. They respond with a loud ‘Aye!’, an obedience which is at once utter compliance and delight. (pp. 35-6)

An unexpected effect of the book was that it made the things it led me to look up seem fake. It is heavily referential throughout, nearly every page sent me to Google, and what I found on the internet was often written in the same factual style as the book itself. A mention of McCaig’s Folly, a fake Roman amphitheatre in Oban, led me to this website, and the first sentence there, ‘Oban stands unchallenged as the capital of the western seaboard of Scotland’, could easily be the start of another of Momus’ Scotlands. The fact that I knew about McCaig’s Folly, and have seen it many times (though I didn’t know its name before), wasn’t enough to make the real website ring true. But I believed in Momus’ fakery (as fakery), because it was on paper.

Googling the word ‘superlegitimacy’, from the same story as the quotation above (Scotland 101, natch) led me right back to Click Opera. That entry is reworked, in fact, and included as Scotland 124. In it, the Tokyo train driver of the blog post becomes an Edinburgh tram driver (like there are ever going to be any of those...), but, place names aside, it is not Edinburgh which is being described. The story is a simple one: the narrator takes a tram, from Pilton to Restalrig, and happens to stand close to the driver’s glass partition. He soon notices ‘a series of odd cries’ coming from the driver, and begins to closely observe his behaviour, which appears to be highly eccentric:

I watched – and filmed – the lunatic. He did seem exceptionally focussed. At each station he made a series of florid manual curlicues, approximating the gestures of an orchestral conductor. He pointed vigorously at the TV screens in his console displaying the doors, then pulled the tram away from the station with both gloved hands on the accelerator lever, uttering as if by compulsion the ecstatic, falling cry: ‘Kkkkyyyyyoooooooooo!’ (p. 106)

It turns out that within the driver’s own culture, this behaviour is perfectly normal – it only appears remarkable to the narrator as an outsider. Perhaps for this reason he is also better placed to see its virtue: the man has ‘the very soul of a tram driver’, and is the opposite of an employee within an individualistic society, who would never identify himself with such menial work in this way. The flaw with this attitude is that

Individualistic societies cover their hierarchical verticality with the ideology of ‘equality of opportunity’ (which of course entails its less benign cousin, inequality of result). (p. 107)

If an individualistic society is vertically structured, with everyone chasing the same goals, ‘Scottish society is superflat, diffuse’. Your job gives you a place within it. In the book version, the narrator actually becomes the driver, and gets to feel his pride. It seems very much like a happy ending, but there is a problem with it: the narrator has swapped curiosity for a contentment which never looks beyond itself. And Momus would not be Momus if he did that.

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Update: Chris points out, ‘the perpendicular St Andrew’s cross on the front cover isn’t in the colours of the English flag – it’s Pantone 1655 (ref. Scotland 23)’. I dunno though, it looks red and white to me.