Four Tet, Pantha du Prince & Rocketnumbernine, Bongo Club, Edinburgh, 13th March

Last spring, Andy suggested going to an all day Fence gig, a refreshing, thoroughly enjoyable day I probably wouldn’t have thought to go to myself. This year the same thing has happened again with a gig which he admitted could have been so much noodling, but which in the event was tightly plotted and exhilarating. Wait a bit and go here for his own thoughts. To me, Rocketnumbernine brought to mind Silver Apples for their drums + one-bloke-on-synths configuration, and Can’s ‘Vitamin C’ for the drum-heavy assault. Switching between an acoustic and an electronic kit, the drummer ploughed into his intricate but always rockin’ rhythms, closely followed by the synth and bass lines played / triggered by the band’s other member, who stared intently at a touch screen throughout whilst playing the mini keyboard on the lower rung of his rig. ‘They must be American’, I thought. ‘Brits don’t work this hard at their music’. But no, they are from London, and just look at how sweet their album cover is. Their set never paused for applause, building magnificently from interesting to involving to fuck yeah, and I made a mental note to try to miss fewer support bands.

Next came Pantha du Prince, accompanied by a few jarring signals: a hoody, which must have been insupportably hot under the stage lights, and black tape covering the Apple logo on his laptop. Not that there is anything wrong with obscuring logos, eschewing the corporate, etc., but it sent out a ‘too cool for my own equipment’ kinda vibe, at least to begin with. But then the set started, and he began to move in this strange, stilted way; made me think of Gary Numan and Andy of... well, we’ll see if he puts that in his review, but it was someone even more stilted than Gary Numan. Thoughts of cool vanished with the dancing, the black tape became a good thing, and the music tinkered, then rumbled, then soared. The hoody vanished at some point, to cheers (what is this, Top of the Pops?). Again the rhythm was paramount, along with the basslines suckered on to its floor. I’m scrabbling around for other things to say about how great this set was, but it has blown away on the wind, and perhaps that it how it should be.

Four Tet were another one-man-and-his-laptop job, which I did know, but the pictures on their site of the luminous hats had had me hoping for some kind of spectacle. But it was just Kieran Hebden in a t-shirt with a table full of computers (two laptops, actually) and assorted mixers / controllers. Which he handled with an easy and intense grace, floating above his toys like a hawk above a valley, spinning out snippets into wrong-footing reversals and elongated batterings. There was nothing from Rounds, the only album of his I know at all well, but every so often something recognisable bobbed up and the crowd whooped. As to what Hebden was actually doing up there... this is the problem with laptop performance, isn’t it? With Rocketnumbernine, you could see, roughly, which action was causing which noise, but the other two acts didn’t allow that. I suppose a back projected screen of Ableton or whatever would be a bit rubbish, but I remember that kind of thing working for Björk when she used a Reactable. Still, you could see Hebden’s glee at dropping in at last the beat you didn’t know you’d been been holding your breath for, full and low-end, the snare just barely different from the bass drum sound.

Arriving back late, we walked past a club by the bus station. Thump thump thump thump, it went, through the wall. A pause, and the same blaring synth plus faux-delirious vocal break for the same number of bars as always before the thumps began again. ‘That’s what dance music really sounds like,’ I said. When it doesn’t, it can be so great.

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Update: Andy’s review is up, and ten times better than the above.

Tricot Treat

Lately, S. has been teaching me to knit. It isn’t a long-cherished ambition or anything, but I’m going to be an uncle soon, and an edict has been issued: four-inch squares of knitting from everyone, no excuses. To be stitched together into a blanket. The picture isn’t the finished square, just a practice one, and it’s been surprisingly enjoyable to do. Miles better to listen to music to than surfing the web, which is what usually happens around here. If you got good at it, I imagine it might even be as good for listening to music to as a long train journey.

Anyway, I’m just churning out some place-holder text to try to approximate the look of a post on Anne Bacheley’s much missed old blog, which often had knitting on it, in amongst the music, books and comics. And all of a sudden – it’s back! In English, too. Fabulous news.

Bookmark this: http://anneemall.free.fr/

Charlotte Brontë – ‘Shirley’

There are several unusual things about Shirley, compared with Charlotte Brontë’s other books. Where usually there is a solitary protagonist, making her or his way in the world, here there are four: the brothers Robert and Louis Moore, textile mill owner and tutor respectively; Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, vicar’s niece and heiress. Materially speaking, Shirley is the only one with no financial concerns, though Caroline is well enough provided for while her uncle is alive. Perhaps because there is no principal character, first person narration is not used, except for a few late chapters told through Louis’ diary entries. For the rest, the single viewpoint, so important in her other novels, and used even when not strictly necessary in Tales of Angria, is foregone, and she gives us an in-the-round narrative, with an unusually broad context stretching from community to society and the world beyond. In addition to the usual cast of upper class educated class (governesses, vicars), are mill workers – though they remain mostly an abstraction. Patricia Ingham’s book reproves this treatment as paternalistic, with justification. There is no governess at all, though there is a male tutor, and Caroline does contemplate the profession briefly. If there were a governess in the novel, there might be no room for this bald statement from Miss Hardman, in Mrs Pryor’s remembrance:

WE need the imprudencies, extravagances, mistakes and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of tradespeople, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children’s minds and persons. (p. 377)

Though usually put more subtly than this, it is a theme which runs through Charlotte’s novels. As is unrequited love, here best – though not only – personified in Caroline (her existence becoming a ‘useless, blank, slow-trailing thing’ (p. 390)), and… I was going to say illness, but it is the story of the Brontës, rather than their own stories, which is dominated by illness. There is Jane Eyre’s Helen Burns, of course, echoed here in Jessie Yorke.

Echoed? There is no comparison. Because although Shirley is a very flawed book, all over the place in terms of social attitudes, over-full with its plethora of protagonists rehearsing too many variations on the themes of love and near-death, with a plot which was plainly altered as it went along, with characters which change with the wind, with a handful of interjections from its author reminiscing inappropriately about real life incidents... it is a mess, but it is brilliant. If Jane Eyre, as George Eliot and I contend, is hamstrung by its artificial language, and the absence of character in favour of dialectic, Shirley breaks free of its author and takes in several characters beside her own. Charlotte doesn’t quite know yet how to distribute them, but no matter. Shirley is Emily Brontë. Mrs Gaskell says so, and it rings true. Who else could this be about:

In her white evening dress; with her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like, – a thing made of an element, – the child of a breeze and a flame, – the daughter of ray and rain-drop, – a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed. (p. 630)

Caroline is an amalgam of Anne Brontë and Ellen Nussey, according to J. M. S. Tompkins’ excellent essay ‘Caroline Helstone’s Eyes’*, and this too seems plausible. She seems at first to be another Charlotte stand-in, but she is too placid, too neat, too readily drawn to the relatively conventional Robert Moore, for whom she pines and nearly dies. The pining is drawn from Charlotte’s own experience; Tompkins observes, ‘When Caroline and Shirley are with their lovers, we cease to think of Anne or Emily’. Charlotte wouldn’t love someone so straightforward, and one can’t help but think of her rather than Emily when Shirley declares, ‘I will accept no hand which cannot hold me in check’ (p. 551). The Pensionnat Heger looms over Shirley in its unguarded moments, for who could this be but Mme Heger / Mme Beck?

I remember once seeing a pair of blue eyes, that were usually thought sleepy, secretly on the alert, and I knew by their expression – an expression which chilled my blood, it was in that quarter so wondrously unexpected – that for years they had been accustomed to silent soul-reading. (p. 273)

It returns later on, too, during the schoolroom romance between Louis and Shirley – which is Not Dodgy because it is several years since he was her tutor; she is Just Helping Out with the lessons he still gives to her younger cousin Henry. Louis is M. Heger, just as surely as M. Paul in Villette is M. Heger, though he is not nearly as well realised. It may seem reductive to read Shirley in this way, but really it seems the only way to make sense of it. Even the setting of the story in 1811-12 can be seen as a tribute to the Duke of Wellington, Charlotte’s hero, battling Napoleon on the continent, which has knock-on effects for British / American trade and causes the economic unrest which twice leads to violence in Shirley. But try as it might, it is not a political novel. Instead it is a brave tribute to two sisters recently dead, it is Charlotte writing the Brontë myth before even Mrs Gaskell has had a chance, it is tender and dumb and blatant and outspoken, it abuses the author’s God-like privilege to construct a happier future for a family already gone (that is why the omniscient narrator), it is heartbreaking.

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* ‘Caroline Helstone’s Eyes’ rebuffs the suggestion that Caroline was originally intended to die, and argues that it is more likely she was intended to end up a spinster.

Patricia Ingham – ‘Authors in Context: The Brontës’

George Eliot on Jane Eyre:

All self-sacrifice is good – but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of of a diabolical law which chains a man body and soul to a putrifying carcase. However, the book is interesting – only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of news reports. (p. 26)

Exactly so, George! Couldn’t agree more with the second part of that. In the light of Wide Sargasso Sea and The Madwoman in the Attic, it is interesting that her take on the book is so anti-Bertha. But then George Eliot had good reason to dislike the institution of marriage, and to see it as a bar to love rather than a consecration of it. In Shirley, Charlotte Brontë acknowledges this tendency to read fiction by way of oneself, when she has Caroline Helstone point Robert Moore in the direction of Coriolanus, with the following purpose:

It is to stir you; to give you new sensations. It is to make you feel your life strongly, not only your virtues, but your vicious, perverse points. (Volume I, Chapter VI)

It is useful to be reminded, though, that there are other points of view. Ingham’s book is a whistle-stop tour of the various contexts from which the seven Brontë novels sprang, plus a chapter on ‘Recontextualising the Brontës’ in which adaptations on stage, screen and in song are listed and briefly accounted for. Between 1910 and 1926, twelve films were made of Jane Eyre, whilst Wuthering Heights (being altogether pricklier) got only one, in 1920, and had to wait until 1939 for another. Ingham does a good job of tracing the plots of the various Jane Eyres, showing how the focus stays mostly with Rochester, with a submissive Jane, until the ‘tokenism’ of Delbert Mann’s 1970 film shifts to Julian Amyes’ faithful balance in his 1983 BBC series, and finally Robert Young’s 1997 film has Jane dominant. Which is to miss the point too: ‘this is not the equality that the novel asserts’ (p. 241).

The earlier chapters give the contexts of the Brontës’ home life, ‘The Fabric of Society’, ‘The Literary Context’, class, gender, mental health and religion. Haworth sounds as though it was pretty horrible in the 1830s / 40s – life expectancy actually ran below the Brontë siblings’ early death dates, though most of the population were manual labourers and didn’t live anywhere as rarefied as the parsonage. The round-up of divisions in Christianity was useful, too (for instance, if you had no idea what Methodism was). Two Lunacy Acts in 1845 improved care for the insane to the extent that: ‘any asylum with more than 100 inmates was obliged to employ a medical superintendent’ (p. 63), which makes Rochester’s behaviour towards his first wife seem more charitable than the feminists would have it.

Particularly good is the chapter on religion, which shows the differences between the faiths of the three sisters in terms of their ideas about salvation. James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is mentioned as a favourite book; it is one of my favourite books too, but it must be terrifying if you actually take it seriously. A satire on the idea of predestination, it shows the moral and mental chaos which can ensue if someone believes that his actions have no bearing on his salvation, because he is already saved. Anne believed that everyone would ultimately be saved; Charlotte was less sure, and saw her own weaknesses as indications that she may have been already damned. Examples are given from her novels of Christians who fail in their duty because they lack an accompanying human warmth – St John Rivers from Jane Eyre is held up as the moral nadir of the book, because of the scheming, premeditated way (odd that it is OK for God to predetermine) he sets about ensnaring Jane, in comparison to Rochester’s hot-headedness. Emily is the most interesting here, though, because the least fixed. Ingham describes Wuthering Heights as an ‘open text’, and suggests several possible ways in which it can frighten the life out of you:

Is it straining too much to see the novel as an evocation of the ultimate suffering in humans and a metaphorical version of the idea of hell as the absence of a loving God which, by translating it into human terms, illuminates the Christian concept? Or is the metaphor reversed so that the idea of an absent God or heaven is used to represent the torment of human passion which is always ultimately frustrated? Or is the novel arguing that such suffering and hatred rules out the existence of a loving God, a revision of the problem of evil? (p. 213)

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The ‘Dude Watching’ cartoon is by Kate Beaton and can also be found here. Thanks to T. for pointing that out.

L’inhumaine (Marcel L’Herbier, 1924)

Like many popular singers, Claire Lescot attracted more admirers than she knew what to do with. Many were rich and powerful, and promised to take her away from it all. Claire had to admit that she did want to get away, but wasn’t at all sure that this was the way to do it. For these men bored her frightfully; the last thing she wanted was more of the cosseting with which her career already provided her. She wanted action, adventure, new places, new thrills. She announced that unless somebody did something really exciting, and soon, she was going to leave it all behind for a time and embark on a journey around the world. The announcement was made at a dinner party in a house whose décor positively ached with modernity: leading in to the main hall were two functional staircases, in the left and right corners, and one in the centre with steps askew, like crooked teeth or fallen columns. In the centre of the room were tables laid out in a horse-shoe formation, on a floor with a black and white pattern, bold and interlocking like a Navajo rug. Around this central square was a moat, in which swam some ducks. Doves flew about the room, to no-one’s surprise. The servants wore papier-mâché heads with fixed smiles, but there were real people inside – at least this is what the host told his guests. The whole thing bored Claire so much she could almost have cried. But she could not be bothered, so instead she listened to the compliments as they poured in, and deflected the proposals.

But one guest, arriving late, was not to be so easily put off. Einar Norsen, unlike the other admirers, was so sincerely convinced of his love for Claire that it was all he could stand to watch her talk merrily to his rivals. Through the course of the evening he grew increasingly agitated, and when she made her remark about travelling abroad, alone, he wrote a note for her and left the dinner party, to drive home down the high coastal road. He drove furiously, his vision blurred, the twilight trees and the road seeming to split into two and then four separate overlapping fields of vision. Abruptly the car swerved left, until it hung precariously on the cliff. It tipped until it was vertical, then fell into the sea. Back at the house, after dinner entertainment was in full swing – dancers, fire eaters, a man spinning a barrel in the air with his feet – and Claire refused to take Einar’s note seriously. He would kill himself because she was going away? Preposterous! But despite herself, her interest was piqued. She liked the geekiness of it. A little later Einar’s death was reported at the house by a simple country girl who had seen the car fall into the sea. She drew back at the grandeur of the room, and four servants with papier-mâché heads moved slowly forward to terrify her still further.

But Einar was not dead. He had contrived to make Claire believe so, in order to tempt her to his home, where he could show her an invention which he believed would change her mind about going away. Some spectacles and a stick-on moustache were crucial to organising this, but I forget the details. Revealing his true identity, he explained that he had developed a system which would allow Claire to sing to her audience across the world, as with a radio, but that it would also allow her to see their reactions on a screen. They tested it: Claire sang into a microphone, and on the screen appeared an African woman in a grass skirt, sitting in a mud hut, looking in surprise at a speaker. Einar pressed home his point that Claire could have all the excitement she wanted without ever leaving the house. Claire seemed reasonably impressed at this. Things seemed to be going Einar’s way.

A rival with heavily made up eyebrows had other plans. Djorah de Nopur, an exotic prince of some sort, whose suit had been rejected, plotted against the pair. At the theatre after a performance of hers he advised her not to go back to Einar’s house because, ‘you will never reach it alive’. And so it very nearly proved: Djorah introduced a deadly snake into the back compartment of her car, placing its small unlocked cage amongst the branches of a shrub which she had been given alongside the bouquets. Sending off her chauffeur on some pretext, Djorah drove her himself. Another journey along the high coastal road saw Claire bitten on the wrist, shouting and banging in vain against the compartment window. Djorah pressed on at top speed, demonic, triumphant, and Claire finally slumped back in her seat. On arrival, Einar retrieved her limp form from the back of the car and wondered what to do. The obvious thing would have been to call an ambulance. Instead – and without even employing this as a back up strategy – Einar took Claire in his arms up to the laboratory, where he kept the radio performance machine and all his other inventions. He summoned his own servants / automatons, in black gloss papier-mâché head-pieces, and set to work making his laboratory flash and shake, swing and explode. There were cogs, there were pendulums. Wearing extended welders’ goggles, Einar really gave it everything he had. The same stark black and white patterns from the dinner party were brought alive, and it was clear that something astonishing was going on. Something more exciting than fame, fortune and proposals from princes. If only she could have seen it. At length Claire Lescot opened her eyes.