Stills

Some Like it Hot (1959)

Irma La Douce (1963)

The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Sheet Music: Lispector, ‘Apollo Bay’

New series! Maybe / hopefully. Learning to play songs can be such a good way to absorb and understand them. I thought I knew this one pretty well, but there are clever things going on with the chords I hadn’t appreciated until writing it down today: not just the extended sequence which starts with the instrumental section, but also the move from C / E / F / C at the beginning to C / E / Am / F, the A minor making the key line of the song that much more poignant. There’s something of the sentiment of Lawrence / Felt’s ‘We might as well all stay in our rooms until we die’ here, which I’ve always thought was partially in celebration of one’s own curated world, the books and all the records of your lifetime. Lispector bring a wanderlust to it which refuses to entertain a distinction between travel, and travel in the mind. You can grow beyond a loss with either. Beautiful song.

Stills

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025)

The Friends (1994)

Afire (2023)

I didn't pick these films for the purpose, but it occurred to me after watching that you can feel the stamp of the times in each one. The recent ones do not shy away from war, torture or climate change, but neither are they overwhelmed by them. It Was Just An Accident, in particular, is so funny, and so vital, about such horror. Still, it was nice to get away to the 1990s for a while in The Friends which has this completely gorgeous soundtrack:

Stills

The Oyster Princess (1919)

Fante-Anne (1920)

The White Heather (1919)

The Bat (1926)

Saxophone Susy (1928)

Song (1928)

Recently-seen silent films, three from HippFest at Home, two from HippFest in person (captures from YouTube, which is sadly lacking the very picturesque Mountain of Destiny), and one from Matthew Jarron’s ‘Germany to Hollywood’ evening class (his course on Ealing Studios is booking now).

The Oyster Princess instantly became one of my favourite films, for its ultra-vivid design and uniquely rollicking German humour. There’s a fair amount of the latter in Saxophone Susy too: the setting is London, the production is not. The programme mentions ‘Weimar Slapstick’, which sounds like the ideal genre to me.

I watched The Bat, a proto-Batman tale full of (effective) suspenseful nonsense, not really expecting to find any connection to Citizen Kane, with whom it shares cinematographer Gregg Toland. There definitely is, though, in the diffused lighting and chiaroscuro, the tall sets, and, here, a view through a skylight which prefigures the crane shot which brings us to a washed-up Susan Alexander right at the start.

The shot from The White Heather is part of an underwater sequence that is the film’s main draw. The plot certainly isn’t: the two fighting divers (you’ll see them if you let your eyes adjust) are trying to retrieve / destroy a marriage certificate from a wrecked yacht on which hangs, on the one hand, the honour and future of a woman and her son, and, on the other, the solvency of her dastardly, denying husband.

If that all sounds a bit silly, Fante-Anne and Song are altogether more moving tales of jealousy; a poster of the main character’s rival in the latter is used imaginatively for a flashback, and, in the shot here, is destroyed in a fit of rage.

Stills

Mickey 17 (2025)

The Apartment (1960)

Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

Bacarau (2019)

The Piano Accident (2025)

Stills

Moving (1993)

Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (1976)

Days of the Bagnold Summer (2019)

The Lunchbox (2013)

House by the River (1950)

Winter in Sokcho (2024)

Had a few of these to catch up with. I'll let the images speak for themselves, except to say I like the echo between 'House by the River' this time and 'The Pleasure Garden' last time.

Aperitif

Stills

Tokyo GA (1985)

The Lady and the Beard (1931)

Pavements (2024)

Bad Seed (1934)

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

First films as directors in this lot by Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, the former’s The Pleasure Garden slightly pre-figuring the great The Wind (1928) in the pictured scene where guilt and terror spill over into a superimposed, ghostly image. It’s effective but not really the focus here. Wilder’s Bad Seed recalls the great People on Sunday (1930), for which he wrote the screenplay, in a scene towards the middle in which the gang of car thieves take the afternoon off to go for a swim. The spoilt rich kid of the title is driven to crime when his father sells his car right before he needs it to impress a woman on a date. It’s daft, funny and sometimes tragic, with such an energy. Wikipedia has a quote which might explain why:

We didn't use a soundstage. Most of the interiors were shot in a converted auto shop, even the living room set, and we did the automobile chases without transparencies, live, on the streets. It was exhausting. The camera was mounted on the back of a truck or in a car. We were constantly improvising . . . We were doing nouvelle vague a quarter of a century before they invented a fancy name for it.

Meanwhile, The Lady and the Beard is a hoot, based largely around the fact that beards were scarce in Japan, and (apparently) hilarious to eligible young ladies and prospective employers alike. Abraham Lincoln is the inspiration for it, but our hero has to shave it off in order to get a job in a restaurant. Not before it gets tittered at an awful lot, though. I’d been looking for an alternative way in to Yasujirō Ozu before making my way back to the later films, and this turned out to be a great place to start. Tokyo GA is pleasingly miscellaneous, being partly a search for Ozu’s Tokyo twenty years after his death: it features a touching, illuminating interview with the cameraman who shot most of his films, and a visit to his grave. But it also has many scenes which have nothing to do with him, such as this one, where young people gather in a park one drizzly day to dance to Blondie’s ‘Call Me’ and other western tunes.

Stills

Corpo Celeste (2011)

Jour de Fête (1949)

No Bears (2022)

Flow (2024)

No Other Land (2024)

The Velvet Underground (2021)

Howard Fishman: ‘To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse’

[It’s been a long time since I’ve written a book review, and there are a number of reasons for that, but the big two are not wanting to fix what I think about something, for myself, because it reduces it; and not wanting to engage in spurious authoritativeness, because I can string a sentence together. But I’m starting to think that disengagement is worse, and that there is probably a happy medium, a lighter touch. Again, we shall see.]

What I want to demand, and would not be caught dead demanding, was a few swims in the sea of unsaidness. [...] For the best communication, the most satisfactory human relationship... it seems now to me that knowing and being known are prerequisites... Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known. Well, by and large it has never too much disturbed me that I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others; that, indeed, without enjoying your apparent lack of inner conflict, I often turn toward the world a face much like yours - serene (or at least strong and cheerful) and imperturbable. But with you two, whose affection I value so highly, I wish to be known better and to know you better... [...] Love - Sis. (Chapter 23)

This is Connie Converse to her brother Phil, and his wife Jean, in 1957. Her relationship with Phil is one of the central pillars of this wonderfully generous, curious, detailed biography. There are a few dark hints here and there, and the odd moment of great tenderness and real connection (the above sparks one such). On balance, it seems he did support and encourage her in life, and champion her songs after her disappearance, but he also destroyed a lot of her papers, which, when confronted by the author, he admits but does not attempt to explain. He’s the best source Fishman had, but he’s ambiguous and not a completely reliable one.

The papers are where he starts: Converse left Phil a filing cabinet with an inventory, containing her life’s work, as well as letters and other documents. By the time Fishman saw it, many items were marked ‘dumped’ in Phil’s handwriting (so it’s not even as though he was discarding secretly, or - presumably - for space, since the filing cabinet remained the same size. Was he concealing something specific? Or curating to leave the best material?) What remained showed that as well as being ‘a great unknown songwriter’ she was ‘a polymath - a talented illustrator, painter, thinker, published political cartoonist and essayist, poet, photographer, and aspiring novelist’ (Chapter 6). Apart from the songs, the filing cabinet itself was a remarkable act of organisation, and that is a theme: the major work of her post-songwriting life was ‘The War of All Against All: A Review of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957-1968’. This journal was one she edited, run from the University of Michigan, its name a deliberate avoidance of the word ‘peace’ in order to keep suspicions of communism at bay. Fishman recounts a video conference with some academics, the better to understand what she had achieved with this. ‘Research expert’ Ivan Bojanic skims it on the call and can’t quite believe what he is reading:

‘Um, you guys?’ he interjected after some time. ‘This is not what I expected. I thought it would essentially be a synopsis of each article, in chronological order. But this is analysis, this is personal perspective... [...] She took all these disparate pieces of research, from people who were studying a million difference nooks and crannies of this nascent field, and tried to create a single unifying narrative out of it!’ (Chapter 28)

But I am skirting around the main event, the songs, which I don’t want to pin down or reduce. I’ve got a lot of exploring left to do, is one reason. They swim in unsaidness, not infrequently turning it inside out. They are punctuated with pauses (‘fermata’) and tempo changes. Converse wrote nearly all of them while living in New York, and had a small but enthusiastic following who heard them performed at house concerts, some of them able to remember great chunks of the songs when interviewed for the book over 50 years later, without having heard them since. A recording of one of these performances is what makes up the bulk of How Sad, How Lovely. There’s a digital-only release of her home recordings, Musicks, with about twice as much material. Then there’s Connie’s Piano Songs, a set of more arty, ‘through-composed’ (as in, melody keeps evolving and doesn’t repeat) songs, left behind mostly as sheet music, and eventually released in this version, by Charlotte Mundy and Christopher Goddard (Phil wasn’t too keen on these, not that he had any duty to be). I’m in love with the line in ‘Trouble’ that Fishman took for his play: ‘A star has burnt my eye’. Even more in context, actually:

My bed is made of stone
A star has burnt my eye
I’m going down to the willow tree
And teach her how to cry

As he points out, this predates Johnny Cash’s ‘Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry’ from ‘Big River’ by eight years. He wonders if he could somehow have heard it. How influence can work when the original has failed to enter the big river of popular culture. Which he questions as a way of going about things:

How many more Connie Converses are there out there - marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive? And what price do we pay, as individuals and as a culture, by continuing to use fame, wealth, property, and power as our primary metrics for success? (Afterword)

Good questions, and I’d like to know what the alternatives are. Perhaps fragmentation is a feature rather than a bug, and we should just give up on the notion of a culture everyone can be assumed to have access to. Perhaps that was always an imperialist idea.

Stills

It's been a while since there was any non-self-promotional content here, so here are some stills from films I've seen recently (this might be a regular thing, we'll see).

99% Cloudy... Always (2023)

Olivia (1951)

Scum (1977)

The Fall (2006)

A couple of these are moments of fracture: Olivia, left alone in the office of the head of her finishing school, with whom she's in love, lies on the floor in front of the fire, from heartbroken inertia. The dual roles in The Fall start to bleed into each other, as the narrator of the above scene begins to succumb to the morphine overdose he's just taken, and his character in the story is no longer able to stand. I guess you could say the same of Archer's vegetarianism in Scum, about to be breached by that sausage, but it's only a pose to annoy the borstal governor in the first place. Kazuha in 99% Cloudy... Always seems so much herself as to be incapable of being broken, though with her Asperger's she is vulnerable a lot of the time. In that scene, she's enjoying a moment outside an art class, where the tutor has encouraged feedback between the students. Completely oblivious to the hurt she has just caused by saying she could see no worth or interest in a photorealistic portrait, the opposite of her own explosive, abstract sculpture.

Whatever Works

Release day for the Mayfly Two album we trailed with the ‘Anti That’ single a few months ago. It’s baroque electronic indie pop, or something along those lines. The songs are warm, weathered, soft, sharp, comic, cosmic. They can cure you or skewer you, depending. They inspired the best arrangements I’m ever likely to make. We hope you enjoy them.

Instrumentals

Mayfly Two also have some instrumentals up, which could do with some ears if you would be so kind. These have been really fun to do, swapping loops or melodies and messing around with them. Me on guitar, both of us on beats and synths. Free to download at least until we decide it’s finished.

Anti That (Rock Version)

Not sure where to begin with this. Perhaps in April 2009, when Anne Bacheley and I collaborated on a track, ‘Anti That’, named after Stephen Pastel’s review of her album Headquarters:

Another record that we’re loving is Anne Bacheley’s Headquarters, a self released CD-R. From Poitiers, France, Anne looks like the secret third member of Melody Dog, and makes winning old-school indie music that lands somewhere between Holly Golightly and a less chaotic Comet Gain. Anne’s voice is perfect and imperfect, her playing primitive and gallant, her melodies true. It would be so great to see Anne get a record label to help out but maybe she’s anti-that.

It was finished but untitled when I heard the demo, and I suggested that title, but it could well have been written as a riposte to the very idea of getting help from a record label. I thought I heard something of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ in it, a certain worthy strumminess, that I set about unpicking with a beat pinched from Can and some very un-strummy Spanish guitar lines. And then, at the climax of the song, which literally cries out for power chords, I cut away almost everything but the drums, and let the vocal do the talking. Which it did, easily: it’s a great tune, and a great chord sequence, which only needs a light touch to do its work. It turned out really well, with this weird, lean, pop sound (like something on Morr Music, Anne always says). It didn’t rock though.

So anyway, I sent her my Morsels set towards the end of last year, which was not a little inspired by the playful hyperactivity of her anneemall EPs, and we – finally – ended up collaborating on more of her songs. It’s been worth the long wait, they’re so good I can’t tell you. And the reason I can’t tell you is that we’re looking for a record label to release the album we made of them, because they deserve to be heard. Don’t worry, when it’s time to decide we won’t compromise. And we probably won’t even find one. But! In the meantime, here is the opposite of that first version, played almost entirely with power chords. Rockism / Poptimism – who cares anymore, why not be both?

Morsels part four

Photo by Allan Gray.

Other gear / sound credits: Hologram Microcosm for guitar glitch and reverb; Boards of Deluge for the melting synths; Meat Beats’ Juno Works for more conventional but very useful sounds.

Morsels part three

Morsels part two

This actually may be a bit more focused. Fewer very short bits, anyway. And I wondered: should I have mentioned the Deluge specifically? I don’t want this to be about the gear used to make it. It’s also a bit unfair on the Loupé looping pedal. On the one hand, they’re great bits of kit; on the other, who cares how?

Morsels

I haven’t been writing much the last few years, but have been trying to make music quite a bit of the time, without really finishing anything, so here’s a thing I might do: gather the fragments as I go, and put them online. Last month I got my Synthstrom Deluge back from having a new screen fitted, which is what caused this particular burst of activity, and is I think why there are so many different techniques in use here. I worked out how to record guitar loops on it, synchronised to my looper pedal. I tried using a volume pedal for the first time, to fade notes in, à la early Tenniscoats. There’s some cacophonous FM synthesis, and a harpsichord. There’s all sorts. Future installments may (possibly) be more focused. Drums crackle a bit as they’re from the lovely Vinyl Drums From Mars sample pack.

2020 hindsight

As I barely wrote anything here last year, I thought I’d go through my diary to check what might have been. It’s not a long list (I’m a slow reader, writing here encourages me to read more, when I do it), but for what it’s worth, with a quotation from each:

John McPhee, ‘Oranges’

No-one worried much about freezes. For one thing, it was an era of scientific advances in which triumph over nature seemed not only possible but inevitable. A cannon had been fired in the streets of Jacksonville in 1888 in the belief that the concussion would kill all the yellow-fever microbes in the air of the city. (pp. 94-5)

Émile Zola, ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’

        ‘I want her, I’ll have her! And if she does escape me, just you see what a place I’ll build to recover from her. Oh, it’ll be magnificent, it really will! You don’t understand what I’m talking about, old chap. If you did, you would realise that action is its own reward. Doing, creating, struggling against harsh realities and either defeating them or being defeated – all of human joy and health are there!’
        ‘It’s just another way to drug oneself,’ the other man murmured. (p. 317)

Dava Sobel, ‘Longitude’

John ‘Longitude’ Harrison was born March 24, 1693, in the county of Yorkshire, the eldest of five children. His family, in keeping with the custom of the time, dealt out names so parsimoniously that it is impossible to keep track of all the Henrys, Johns and Elizabeths without pencil and paper. To wit, John Harrison served as the son, grandson, brother, and uncle of one Henry Harrison or another, while his mother, his sister, both his wives, his only daughter, and two of his three daughters-in-law all answered to the name Elizabeth. (p. 62)

Adam Rutherford, ‘How to Argue with a Racist’

It is therefore possible that you are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century. (Ebook, ch. 2)

Isabel Wilkerson, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’

Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had travelled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin (p. 273)

He brought his crushed velvet, jitterbug demeanor to the gray, humorless bureaucracy of a government hospital. (p. 460)

Kristin Hersh, ‘Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt’

        ‘He loves you, I can tell,’ you threw out, bored.
        ‘Sometimes I think he doesn’t even like me.’
        ‘Nobody likes you.’
        ‘Fair enough.’
        You: ‘We’re never gonna be okay cuz we got fucked-up egos.’
        ‘I don’t have a fucked up ego,’ I told you, defensive. ‘I don’t have an ego at all.’
        ‘Well, that’s fucked up.’
        ‘Oh.’
        Pitching your magazine back in the bin, you grabbed another. ‘Every hurt heals with scar tissue.’
        ‘That’s what you said about painkillers.’
        Pointing at our loved ones: ‘Whaddyou think they are?’
        ‘Oh.’ (p. 50)

James M. Russell, ‘The Forking Trolley: An Ethical Journey to The Good Place’

Some of Eleanor’s previous bad acts also point to the snares of anonymous and remote interaction with other people. She once posted her sister’s credit card details on Reddit, simply because she had told Eleanor she looked tired. (p. 52)

John Wyndham, ‘The Kraken Wakes’

        ‘But they are trying, you know, Phyl-’
        ‘Are they? I think they’re balancing things all the time. What is the minimum cost at which the political set-up can be preserved in present condition? How much loss of life will the people put up with before they become dangerous about it? Would it be wise or unwise to declare martial law, and at what stage? On and on, instead of admitting the danger and getting to work.’ (Ebook)

The Secret Barrister – ‘Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken’

Meanwhile at the National Probation Service, inexperienced, inadequately trained staff are monitoring ever-increasing caseloads of high-risk offenders in the community. One employee reported that the target culture had reduced him from seeing his offenders weekly for an hour to holding appointments once a month for an average of twenty minutes. These are the institutions we entrust to supervise and rehabilitate the most damaged and dangerous among us. At twenty fucking minutes a month. (p. 327)

It’s not why I read the book, but I worked for the Probation Service once, for about six months. Just temping, typing up Pre-Sentence Reports mostly, from Dictaphone tapes or handwritten notes, or (this seemed to be a new thing at the time) copying text that a Probation Officer had typed herself from a document on a floppy disk to the template, proof-reading as I went. There’s a job that probably doesn’t exist anymore. It’s interesting, if not surprising, to discover what happened to the service in the intervening two decades: ‘low- and medium-risk offenders’ got farmed out to private companies, in the wearyingly familiar privatisation narrative, to save the taxpayer money by sweeping the work under the carpet and ensuring it was done as badly as possible while still hitting those targets. There are plenty of other examples of this kind of corrosive neglect in the book, and it’s to the Secret Barrister’s credit that it doesn’t get overwhelming or overly repetitive: there’s always enough human interest alongside the institutional failures, not to mention a stout defence of the principles on which the criminal justice system in England and Wales rests. In a section which feels rather like being led on by a barrister’s speech in court must do, this ‘adversarial’ system is compared with the ‘inquisitorial’ one which is used widely in continental Europe. Adversarialism pits prosecution against defence in court, in front of a jury, and cross questioning is used to undermine the other side’s version of events. Which does sound a bit juvenile: the fiercest (most eloquent / devious / best prepared) cock will win the fight. Surely the inquisitorial system, where the aim of the state’s investigation is to establish the truth, rather than peck its eye out, is the more mature, responsible, balanced practice? Doesn’t this just highlight everything we know is bad about UK individualism and good about EU (relatively speaking) socialism?

Then comes a stunning about-face. Haven’t you been listening to how bad I’ve been telling you the state is? At following its own guidelines, gathering evidence, disclosing evidence, acting impartially under government pressure for certain types of conviction? Do you really want all that to go unchallenged? Yes, but you said all that about the UK state, which you’ve just spent a couple of hundred pages showing how badly it funds all those things. Surely in a grown-up country like Germany or France… You’ve seen Spiral, right? Oh, I see what you mean. If falsely accused, the Secret Barrister imagines asking themselves,

would I have faith in an inquisitorial jurisdiction where the state, with its variable competence and political vulnerability, controlled my fate throughout? Or would I trust the presentation of my case to an independent solicitor and advocate, and hope that twelve ordinary people, shown evidence that is relevant, reliable and fairly adduced, would find the prosecution insufficient to convict me?
        Every time the answer is the same. (p. 277)