LUCID FRENZY JUNIOR

DON’T GO CALLING MY CONTEMPORARY “CLASSICAL”!!!

2012-01-31T20:02:00.000Z

Stand by for a nerdy rant about nomenclature...

‘Audiences flock to 'difficult' contemporary classical music’, by Alex Needham in today’s Guardian, is a rare case of good news - about how audiences are finally waking up to the “sonic adventure” of modern music.

He quotes Gillian Moore of the Southbank Centre on this welcome development. “Moore says the increased audience for these works is the result of a campaign to reach people interested in the cutting edge of other contemporary art forms, rather than those who prefer to hear Beethoven.”

One way this happened was through the borders between this and the fringes of popular music becoming more porous, if no eroding entirely. She cites a festival she put on: “we wanted to make the connections between Aphex Twin and John Cage, Squarepusher and Stockhausen.” (That was in 2003. By this point you’d need to remind me where the gaps were.)

...to which I’d add the growth in interest in contemporary visual art, with the Tate gallery turning into two and the Tate Modern itself now growing an extension. Why would you want to spend the day looking at the art of the Twentieth and Twenty First centuries, only to go home and plonk on a CD so rooted in the Nineteenth it might as well wear a top hat and tails? When we open our eyes, what we see is our times. Why not have a soundtrack to it?

And I should know! For a fairly good example of someone who got into modern music by the congruence of these routes would be me.

So, having established what excites people about modern music is the modern bit, why oh why call it by the oxymoronic term ‘contemporary classical’? Or even, at one point, ‘avant garde classical’? Classical music, by any real definition, should have died sometime early in the Nineteenth century. Would you call Jackson Pollock a contemporary classical painter? Yet he used the same tools as classical painters (oils, brushes, canvas) so is closer to them than Berio or Varese (above) are to classical music. It suggests that everything that isn’t ‘frivolous’ pop music, all the ‘serious’ stuff, should get shoehorned in together.

Admittedly, I can’t think of much of an alternative! ‘Modern’ (which I used above as a catch-all) smacks of Modernism, which covers a briefer period of history than we need. ‘Avant garde’ is too associated with Modernism, not to mention dodgy political notions of vanguards and linear history. Some people use ‘new music’ (most often in connection with minimalism), which seems too vague and unspecific. Jessie J could be called new music, at least when she has a new single out.

Perhaps the span of this sort of music is so broad that it will stretch any umbrella term thin. As a stop-gap, I’d suggest dropping the ‘classical’ and keeping the ‘contemporary.’ If follows fuzzy logic, but it gets there. And I doubt Jessie J gets called that so often.

...okay, it matters less what it’s called than how it sounds. The afore-mentioned Gillian Moore suggests five starter pieces at the end of the Guardian piece. (Though frankly she’s on her own when it comes to Conlan Nancarrow!) But, as I suspect the third main way people get into contemporary music is by film soundtracks, here’s Ligeti’s ’Requiem’ as used in ’2001’. (Just stills, but hopefully enough to jog the memory.)

...and if that didn’t give you the shivers try Pendercki’s ’Polymorphia.’ (Sharing partly because of the fantastic visuals, perhaps a little horror-filmish but which still work well with the music.)

Pleasant dreams!

KRONOS QUARTET: ‘AWAKENING, A MUSICAL MEDITATION ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11’

2012-01-29T22:27:00.003Z

Barbican Hall, Thurs 26th Jan

(Part of the ‘Awakenings’ residency)

"I've always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive... But it has to be expressive of life. To tell the story with grace and humor and depth. And to tell the whole story, if possible." — Kronos founder David Harrington

Disinterring the Ghosts

What do we want? Political art that’s not sloganising! When do we want it? Now! But what happens when abstract art points at real-world events? Such as when Miro titles a painting ‘Paris 1968’ or the Kronos Quartet call a programme of music “a musical meditation on 9/11”?

Is it just the power of suggestion at work? Is there another sample group, sitting in some other concert hall, clutching guides explaining that the whole thing is about the invention of the refrigerator? And are they sagely noting the section that’s clearly dedicated to the vegetable tray?

I don’t know, because I wasn’t in the refrigerator room. But the one I was in, that kind of worked for me.

The venerable quartet take to the stage surrounded by debris, clearly designed to evoke Ground Zero. (That kind of neatly arranged stagy shorthand for debris that always has chicken wire and a bicycle wheel in it, but never mind that.) They start to play slowly and tentatively, notes at first just floating away, only gradually joining up into lines. It’s like the way improvised music normally starts, only without the improvisation.

Finally things turn into ’Awakening’, a piece in traditional Uzbeki style. In a patented Kronos method, used intermittently throughout the programme, a recording of an Uzbeki singer appears among them. The language is unfamiliar, the voice sounds distant, it’s almost a drone.

In his comic strip reaction to 9/11,‘This is Information’, Alan Moore comments “complex information is reduced to dull simplicity. Rubble, for example, contains little information. It all looks the same.”

In a similar way, we’re watching a cross between a re-enactment and a seance, where the ghosts of the dead are gradually disinterred from among the debris. In contrast to the live players, the recorded voices feel like a spectral presence.

But what’s equally important is what isn’t there. Though at points there’s projections, the debris is the nearest thing to a direct visual indicator of the attack. Those iconic newsclips of planes hitting buildings, of stunned onlookers, all are eschewed. In a piece first performed on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, such images were clearly seen as overly familiar - obstacles to coming to terms with the event. The task now is to get back to the immediacy.

From this disinterring, the programme falls into three distinct sections. The guide divides these up musically, into ‘traditional’, ‘musically dramatic’ and ‘contemporary classical.’ (Though I dislike the oxymoronic term ‘contemporary classical’, I concede I know what they mean.) In a video interview, David Harrington gives them more evocative (if extemporised) names, “the world outside“, “the event” and “the dressing on a wound.” (Though, in a highly eclectic evening, there are also huge varieties at play within these sections.)

The three sections equal to two approaches going on at once, superimposed over each other. There’s a ground-level chronology of events, plus the sonic equivalent of a commemorative wall – the place where people pin photos of the disappeared. The three sections roughly correspond to ‘human voices’, ‘disaster striking’ and ‘remembrance.’

The varieties of ethnic styles in the first section come to represent the multiplicity of people felled by the attack. The sonic violence of the mid-section, with pieces by Einsturzende Neubauten and John Oswold (described by Harrington as “fiendish”) equates to the attack itself. (It’s bizarre in a fun way to see the Kronos Quartet playing a Neubauten piece, striking sheet metal and wielding power tools while still studying their scores!)

This leads into selections from Michael Gordon’s ’The Sad Park’, which uses recorded reminiscences of the day, but only from children. Children, needless to say, do not contextualise or comment on what they experienced. They just describe it, in simple language. (“And all the persons that were in the airplane died.”)

Later, in the finale, on Sallinen’s ’Winter Was Hard’, an actual choir of children come onto stage. Not only do they contrast with the disembodied voices, they stand and sing as a group. (In the YouTube clip linked to above, Harrington comments he wanted to show them listening as much as he wanted them to sing.) The ending is not rousing but delicate, elegiac, almost a palindrome of the opening. It’s like visiting the grave of a loved one. You arrive, memories of them stir and then settle, you leave again.

Though some pieces were written specifically to commemorate 9/11, none were originally planned to be played in this sequence. That seems important, the programme is stitched from pre-existing pieces. Like the debris, they’re picked up and put together into a meaningful shape. A mix of tracks, rather than a dedicated piece, in many ways seems the best means to remember 9/11.

Reclaiming the Grief

...but anyway, if you’ve read any of my live music reviews before, you’ll know I always end up flying off at some tangent or other. And this time what interests me is the way that 9/11 so quickly became the property of the right. It was like the only way it was possible to express any sorrow over the dead was to take their side, to the point where even to mention the event seems to play into their agenda. (While of course, to quote Alan Moore from the same comic strip as before, “We all wept. I’m weeping now.”)

Take for example Paul Greengrass’ 2006 film ’United 93.’ Greengrass had previously been seen as something of a radical, for example with his 2002 film ’Bloody Sunday’which challenged the orthodoxy (read ‘cover-up’) surrounding the massacre in Northern Ireland. Though make in a similar verite style, and rivalling the other film in quality, ’United 93’ is of a very different political stripe.

Perhaps the most infamous event is the portrayal of the German plane passenger Christian Adams as a stereotypical ‘old Europe surrender monkey’, despite the quasi-documentary’s inability to source this in fact. (I’m told Oliver Stone’s ’World Trace Center’ of the same year pulls a similar volte-face for a previous political radical, but then who cares what Oliver Stone has to say about anything?)

But, with the performance happening a mere forty eight hours before Holocaust Memorial Day, I wondered whether this would continue to be the case. Of course Zionists and other reactionary groups try to make the Holocaust a tool of their agenda. (The trump-card atrocity of history, which supposedly allows them to commit their own with impunity.) But this agenda does not dominate media images of the Holocaust, which we normally think of as a human tragedy. (Disclaimer: yes, the comparison between the two events is not what you would call exact. Just go with it, okay?)

Of course, straight after 9/11 Bush’s political machine enlisted it in their drive to war; supposedly, we were with them or with the perpetrators. But that war was disastrous and the Neo Con project was derailed. (If “invade everyone, steal their stuff, then expect them to be grateful” qualified as a ‘project’ in the first place.) This piece was written for the five-year anniversary, is that significant? Does it mark a turning point? Bush remained in power to 2009, but by 2006 his star was already waning. (The two films cited above were released the same year, but film has a longer lead-time.)

Of course I should not attempt to enslave the Kronos Quartet to my mental scheme. They’re not an agitprop outfit, and their aim is clearly to rehumanise the tragedy, not quote Chomsky over Cheney. Nor would I suggest anything is calculated, in the way a spin doctor writes buzz words for focus groups into politicians’ speeches.

Nevertheless, they have a history of performing pieces with a political dimension, including a soundtrack to a gay riot. The guide comments “the Kronos Quartet have long sought to amplify contemporary music’s conversation with the real world”, and in this YouTube interview Harrington expresses anti-war, pro-peace sentiments. Notably, the programme includes Terry Riley’s ‘One World, One People, One Love’, using a titular mantra recited by Alice Walker, hardly the sort of thing Bush would be likely to utter.

The right tended to homogenise the victims, strip their identifying differences to make them generic ‘Americans’. (While of course a fair proportion of those murdered would have been Muslims.) Wheras here, as mentioned, the multi-ethnic numbers which open the show are clearly intended to remind us of the multiplicity of the people who worked in the Towers. (In the centre of the highly diverse New York City.)

But more, similarly to the way the Zionists used the Holocaust, 9/11 was to become the defining tragedy of our time. If atrocities had been committed against Arabs, Asians or Muslims, either before or after 9/11, it didn’t matter – the Twin Towers overruled them. Our dead were deader than your dead.

Perhaps significantly, while another night in this visit was titled ’Made in America’, the remit here was decidedly wider. American corporations have the hideous buzzphrase ‘ROW’ or ‘Rest of World’, for the bit that’s left after a product has been launched in the Americas and Europe. This night was very rest of world...

Of the four pieces in the opening section, not one is white or European. I didn’t even realise until afterwards that the Uzbek opener featured the Muslim call to prayer. They notably included Iraqi and Iranian numbers. Overall, the twelve pieces hail from eleven different countries

Moreover, the programme was replete with references to other atrocities around the world; for example, the Neubauten piece, ’ Armenia’, itself sampling Armenian folk, recalled the Armenian genocide. The traditional Iraqi piece was titled the blackly humourous ’Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me.’

When a significant event happens, it’s like all the art created before suddenly becomes recalibrated around it. (PJ Harvey’s ’Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea’, for example always seems to me to have 9/11 references, even though I’m fully aware it was released a year before.) But through this method 9/11 becomes contextualised, connected to other tragedies, rather than merely absorbing them.

Of course Riley’s mantra, ’One Earth, One People, One Love’, is unifying and so perhaps suggests at a unifying point. And, with its myriad of voices and tongues, the event does suggest at a Tower of Babel analogy, where (if not God himself) religious fanatics felled the tower that signalled human achievement.

But the tower that’s being rebuilt isn’t the original tower to commerce (or ‘world trade’) so much as, to borrow Leonard Cohen’s phrase, the tower of song. If Uzbeki music is unfamiliar to me (which it pretty much is), I am not as lost as I would be to hear Uzbek spoken. Musicians consider it natural to play together, in a way novelists don’t. Music can act as our common tongue.

It was an event which had to be more than the sum of its parts to work, in fact it couldn’t have more explicitly given itself that task. And of course, at the same time we don’t want everything spelt out for us. It’s not a jigsaw but an act of origami; we’re better leaving the venue with the parts still arranging and rearranging in our heads. Overall I’d say it was good, it was very very good and at points it was actually great.

...which may be partly why it left me thinking about other musical depictions of 9/11 which broke with Bush’s jingoism. In fact Kronos seem almost at the centre of an industry for these. I would now very much like to hear the whole of Michael Gordon’s ’The Sad Park’. In addition another Kronos commission was Steve Reich’s ’WTC 9/11’, performed at the Barbican last year, but I was unable to attend. (It’s YouTubed here.) Perhaps that right wing domination will be broken yet...

Alas a life of moneyed leisure still seems to be eluding me, so I was unable to visit London for the other two Kronos Quartet events. Though I would certainly have seen the ‘Early Music’ night if able, I was most aggrieved to have missed George Crumb’s ’Black Angels’, headlining ‘Made In America’.

A showreel for the residency:

’Oh Mother, The Handsome Man Tortures Me’ in full (albeit from elsewhere):

Coming soon! Yes I know, last time I promised ballet! Apologies to all tutu lovers I have in fact been practising my pirouettes and pas-de-deuxs all week and the ballet is coming, honest...

BUILDING THE REVOLUTION: SOVIET ART + ARCHITECTURE 1915-1935 (2)

2012-01-25T18:51:00.008Z

For the first part to this retrospective of the recent Royal Academy exhibition click here.

Thin Borders, Porous Walls

There’s a post-hoc tendency to ringfence the Russian revolution, to make it appear an isolated outbreak of madness. While of course all these buildings went up with post-revolutionary optimism, that spirit was far from unique to Russia – the ideas were as porous as their walls. Russian Constructivism was actually but one example of a global tendency, a spirit which flowered as widely as it did briefly. For just one example, the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, which I visited last year, employs the same effect of making the staircase central.

Counter to most assumptions, prior to the Cold War there was plentiful cross-fertilisation. The famous Swiss architect Corbusier designed the Tsentrosoyuz building (1929/36, above), for the central union of consumer cooperatives, while the Red Banner Textile Factory (1925/37) came from the German Erich Mendelsohn. Even Corbusier’s celebrated nautical metaphors are frequently taken up by others, in Moscow and other towns not noted for their seaside status.

Peering From Inside the Closet

However, even re-examined enough to be stripped of any connection to totalitarianism, there remains an aspect of all this which is hard for us to relate to. Can we understand that people might embrace life in those open-plan buildings? Not just communal living but constantly working and socialising with the same people, eating together in vast halls, only separating to sleep? (Perhaps some radicals thought even that last part too much of a concession, and set about designing a vast bed the size of a small town, ready for us all to share. With a duvet turned by hydraulics.)

We can read here how the communal kitchens and crèches were largely designed to enhance the liberation of women, or the worker’s clubs to provide information and entertainment. But it still seems an infinity away from our closeted and segregated lives, spending evenings alone watching property porn on the TV.

We are walled off from all this not just because of the Cold War years, for ‘public space agoraphobia’ is reflected in more recent aesthetic styles. The ‘industrial gothic’ look pioneered by films like ‘Alien’ (1979), relocated ghosts and monsters from Gothic castles to imposing and intimidating institutions. We see such places and immediately feel lost in a maze, we imagine a minotaur. Notably, many of Pere’s photos have an empty corridor stretching to vanishing point (example above), an image familiar from many such a film.

Yet shouldn’t art do just that? Not flatter your core assumptions but challenge them, take you out of yourself? Should we not take this strange perspective as an opportunity to question the way we live? More than any other time in history we live apart, yet more than any other time of history we are watched. We are set aback when we see see such wanton disregard for ‘privacy’, yet what we have really done is swapped the communal for the panopticon. Tony Hancock’s words in ’The Radio Ham’, “I don’t know anyone down this street, but I’ve got friends all over the world”, seem all too prophetic, as Facebook friends replace real friends and neighbours.

And at times even own media seems aware of our alienation. Though they never say it, their ceaseless fixation with social networks is clearly compensatory. A typical example was their risible response to the Arab Spring as a “Facebook revolution.” Yet of course the defining factor was that people went beyond getting together virtually, and started getting together on the street. Dictators can withstand a few ‘dislike’ tags on their home page.

It All Ends in Mausoleums

Alternately perhaps the problems of our own existence, coupled with these architects’ skill and prowess, can make this aesthetic too seductive. The Marsakov Bakery in Moscow (1931, above) is at least in part a dressing-up of the Fordist production line. And a Fordist production line in sleek Modernist surroundings, with gleaming surfaces and light pouring through the windows, is still a Fordist production line. Slavery isn’t ended by giving slaves finer chains.

The Lensovet Communal House in St. Petersberg, built for the Party elite, both looked much more imposing and was considerably roomier than regular fare. Narkomfin Communal House, built for the Finance Ministry in Moscow (1930), was topped by a double-height penthouse for the minister. And this when all too often regular workers endured “cramped communal living conditions and long working hours.” Even by the Twenties, some animals were already more equal than others.

In fact, seeing the Twenties through the prism of its art and architecture can be terribly misleading. Lenin was artistically tolerant (though scarcely indulgent), but that did not cross over into the political. The show states that the Revolution “brought the Bolsheviks to absolute power by 1921 under the undisputed leadership of Lenin.” Is that the sort of reactionary comment well-off gallery curators are likely to make, unwilling or afraid to admit that workers could run their own lives? Possibly, but that doesn’t stop it being true.

The regrettable facts are that the collapse of the revolution into bureaucratic authoritarianism was not a chance result of Lenin’s death, but a slow process of encroaching Bolshevik control. This was mainly achieved not by guns or threats but something more sordid - subtle and incremental subversion, drawing actual power away from worker’s soviets.

The buildings, often now empty, were almost from the beginning drained of anything but formal power. Their spirit was debased almost as soon as they went up, in some cases sooner. Even Stalin did not pull them down, though he forbad anything else going up in their style. (And, perhaps significantly, the synechdoche for the Eastern block during the Cold War was the Kremlin – the very antithesis of a modern building.)

The last room is given over to Shchusev’s mausoleums for Lenin. Starting straight after his death in January ‘24, there came to be three of these in increasingly elaborate succession, the last (1929, above) in marble, red granite, “porphry and labradorite.” (The last two perhaps carried by three wise men as they sound like alternatives to frankincense and myrrh.) It was a cross between a Pharoah’s pyramid, a fortress and a corporate HQ, with the great leader’s body houses in a glass sarcophagus.

Of course these stages of the Mausoleum are a barometer; simply put, the more ostentatiously Lenin’s corpse was put on show, the more buried was the revolution. Neither was this cult of personality any bar to Stalin, if anything it was a spur to creating his own cult. When he died he was first added to the same mausoleum. (Though removed in ’61, on Khrushchev’s orders.)

Nor should we fall into some romantic but imaginary opposition between creative architects and sinister bureaucrats. Melnikov abandoned architecture rather than submit to Stalin’s anti-modernist directives. Merzhanov’s work got him sent to a gulag in ’42 (from where he continued to work on architecture in secret.) Yet others (including Kliun, Levinson, Fomin and Iofan) succumbed. Shchusev, as we’ve seen, never had to turn his coat for it was put on wrong to start with.

Suppose you were an architecture buff, with no particular interest in the history or politics of this time and place, should you still see this show? The answer to that is most probably ‘no’, which is of course a great tribute to the work here. The task may be like trying to take an interest in Dada but without the anti-art, or in windows while ignoring glass.

Other recent Constructivist exhibitions, with their wider remit, may have served newbies better. (For example ’Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism', which I would link to if Blogger's moodies allowed. Look for 'Shows of Future Past' in the sidebar.) If this show were an evening class it would most likely be an advanced course, for all that it covers the same period as others have. In fact it works best when at it’s most advanced, when the Constructivist crew had travelled furthest from painting upon canvas.

It may well be one of those things greatly liked by those who like that sort of thing. A camp I most likely fall into. But consider Edwin Heathcote’s words from, I kid you not, the Financial Times: “there’s plenty here to stimulate and inspire, even if we know it all ended badly.”

Coming soon! It’s about time we went to the ballet...

BUILDING THE REVOLUTION: SOVIET ART + ARCHITECTURE 1915-1935 (1)

2012-01-22T22:27:00.003Z

At the Royal Academy until... well, today actually. But the ’Recreating Tatlin’s Tower’ section remains open for another week, until 29th Jan, and is free!

“Engineers and bridge-builders, do your calculations and invent a new form!” - Vladimir Tatlin

Okay, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re about to ask, “an art exhibition in a gallery space, but all about architecture, can that be satisfactorily achieved?”

But that isn’t what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking “okay, it’s been a while coming but this time Four Eyes has finally lost it. Now he’s banging on about some show about Soviet-era tower blocks, doubtless to tell us how they’re more aesthetic than ‘bourgeois’ painting or something. We have been patient with his funny fixations up until now. You distract him with a question while I call Social Services.”

Let’s take both of those in turn.

First, the architecture isn’t always in a gallery space, for this exhibition starts before you’re even in the building. The courtyard holds a replica of Tatlin’s Monument to Third International, known universally as the less mouthfulsome Tatlin Tower (above). Unsurprisingly, it’s nowhere near to Tatlin’s intended gargantuan scale, but it remains impressive. (“I thought they were doing building work” I heard one punter exclaim, taken aback that this metalwork was actually part of the art.) But of course this can’t be kept up once we are inside the exhibition space. You can’t pluck buildings from the Moscow skyline, subject them to a shrinking ray and stuff them inside another one, like shrunken heads put on show by a victorious tribe.

The general format is to display large-scale modern-day photos (by Richard Pare), with adjacent smaller photos from the era, often still attached to handwritten index cards. (Videos, which usefully show the buildings inside and interacting with, their environment, were sometimes added but for some reason on absurdly tiny screens.) It’s like seeing photos of someone at the different stages of their life, and works pretty well.

The space is designed unassumingly but modernistically, with a heavy use of bold whites, and displays not in cabinets but sleek floating shelves jutting from the wall. (Not for the first time the Academy has proven itself more adventurous and more inventive than supposedly cooler galleries.)

And the second question? The last thing we have here is some fanatical ‘formalism’, sour-faced committees purging any ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics in their obsessive rush towards an unliveably austere utopia. Instead we have creative and innovative architects who, in the show’s words, “sought a radical new language with which to construct the world of Soviet Socialism.” In fact its nearest thematic cousin is last years ‘Pioneers of the Downtown Scene’, in Seventies New York, in its attempt to reclaim the city for the human imagination - a plastic arena we could shape to suit our desires.

True, there’s one major difference. A totemic word for the Downtown scene was ‘play’, as an antidote to a city quite literally built about commerce. The Soviet architects (and Constructivism in general), hated anything that suggested of “bourgeois-bohemianism”, proudly donned blue collars and became as equally fixated upon work. Nevertheless, the similarities are there for those with eyes to see.

Relative Dimensions

The exhibition promises to show “new developments in art, poetry, theatre and architecture.” Though its heart is clearly in the last item, let’s start as it does with the earlier ones.

Whether the artworks should be called ‘bourgeois’ or not is a question I’ll leave to others. Notably, however, several of their own creators went on to think so. Nikritin’s large (and very good) Russian Futurist work ‘The Connection of Painting to Architecture’ (1919/21) sums up a tendency, to move from painting into three directions. Tatlin himself started with sculptures and ‘counter reliefs’.

Many of the paintings are abstract but with perspective, making them feel already ‘proto-architectural.’ Popova’s geometric ‘Spatial Force Construction’ (1921, above) is described as “a transitional stage from painting to architecture.”

From there the show threads the art in parallel with architecture. Handouts suggest these are “set in dialogue”, with direct comparisons left implicit, but it basically means spotting recurring geometric forms (“circles, truncated cones and fractured planes”). In practise this was more like trying to carry on a conversation with two different people at once. Yes, those forms recur, but only like words repeated across two quite different sentences.

Things would have run more smoothly if it had followed chronology of the times; first the paintings put up and done with, then moving on. Building the revolution isn’t a pun or a slogan, it’s doing just what it says on the lid. These guys weren’t marking or responding to anything, they thought themselves part of a movement which was remaking Russia, if not the world.

The art is often at its most interesting when its creators do not quite take this path into architecture. Malevich for example stopped painting but for ‘architectons’, architectural-style models never designed to be buildings. The students of Unovis produced abstract drawings styled after rooms, unsigned and produced collectively. Popova produced sets and designs for Meyerhold’s theatre.

However these divergencies do tend to get crushed by the show’s over-arching theme. We’re told, for example, “Malevich and Rodchenko explored the potential for two-dimensional art to be translated into three-dimensional constructs.” This not only conflates the two (which might have confused both of them), but misses the central point. To Constructivism the move beyond painting wasn’t to up the number of dimensions but function. Works had to do something or fulfill some role, not merely decorate, and aesthetics’ role was to be based around that.

A Tale of Two Towers

Architecture has a reputation as ‘power art’, and it can’t be denied that it’s the one art form habitually loved by dictators. In a scene in the film ’Downfall’, Hitler looks over models of a re-transfigured Berlin and confesses to Speer this is his favourite part. Whether based on a real conversation or not, it has the sting of truth; those grand architects drawings vying with the real world so obstinately difficult to shape into them.

Yet at the same time Stalin ordered production of a lot of musicals, and that doesn’t make the musical as a form inherently totalitarian. We need to decouple such notions from the work here, which is rarely grandiosley self-important in the same way.

It’s part of a general problem of this era. Seeing an exhibition set after the Russian Revolution is a bit like seeing a film when you’ve been tipped off the ending. You have to somehow hold that apart in your mind, or you won’t understand why the characters are behaving the way they do.

Let’s start with that model tower in the courtyard. In a pre-echo of the corporate dickwaving contest that mars the modern London skyline, Tatlin’s designs planned for something taller than the Eiffel Tower (both above). But even if you only saw a model of the Eiffel you would most likely guess it was designed to stand tall; dominating its surroundings, its symmetry enhancing the way it points proudly up at the sky. Its shape is designed to enhance its scale, it is made to look big.

Though it’s similarly iconic you wouldn’t necessarily think the same thing of Tatlin’s tower; it snakes and slopes, rather than jutting straight up. It’s more open design is built around a spiral, it’s apex not even coming to a point. In a detail almost forgotten it was designed to move, so it “would have appeared like a figure in motion, striding forwards towards Communist utopia.”

In fact the exhibition gave me a new favourite image of the Tower model, Tatlin and his assistants scaling it in order to complete it. (The model itself was over five metres tall.) It makes the climbers look giant against the mountain, and the work look enticingly incomplete. Its not a power figure but a congruence for movement, monument both to things done and yet to do.

It could perhaps be argued that the Eiffel Tower, raised to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, marks a bourgeois revolution while Tatlin’s was designed for a proletarian. Of course that’s something of a simplification, but that doesn’t stop it being argued.

Powerplants Not Palaces

Tatlin said of his tower “I believe that it can be done if we really want it.” This proved prophetic, albeit in an ironic sense, for it is of course one of those projects which is chiefly famous for remaining a model and a plan. It may even be the best-know unbuilt building in history. A shortage of steel meant that even the celebrated model, the only way we know it, had to resort to wood. And that non-existence, the fact that it never truly made it off the drawing board, means we should see it less as monument than as tombstone – an unerected tribute to a people’s revolution that never was.

And yet shouldn’t we challenge that assumption, or at the very least look into what underpins it? If Tatlin’s Tower was never built this show features many other buildings, admittedly less grand and audacious, which still stand today. At their enlarged size, Richard Pare’s blown-up photos show up their cracks and blemishes, yet they are still recognisable from their younger days. They’re rather like old men, no longer tall and proud on the street, somewhat beaten and faded, yet still standing and with their stories to tell.

Shukhov’s Shabalovka Radio Tower (1922), one of the first post-revolutionary constructions, was built not according to flighty idealism but new architectural principles, sound enough to ensure it remains in use today. It is this which becomes the poster image of the show (up top). Perhaps we read what we choose into these things, and others will see that lattice as a spider’s web. Yet to me the converging concentric circles, with the giddyingly enticing ladder pointing through them to the sky, make for an image which almost pulls you upwards. It couldn’t be more suggestive of liberation.

But the whole picture changes again when you’re shown images of the tower from without (above). Seen this way, it doesn’t dominate its environment, in fact its barely a trace in the sky. It’s like it’s survived so long the way reeds can weather storms which fell oaks.

If Shukhov’s tower is important for being pioneering, the (of all things) water tower at Ekaterinburg, central Russia, (1929, above) was designed to be “a focal point” at the end of a boulevard. Sacking the palaces was not enough. Technology, the workplace, everyday life, were all now to be at the centre of things. Consequently, factories and services needed their own aesthetic. Nowadays we hide such things away like the electric cabling behind the walls of our houses. Their function is only to be venerated when put in the past, like the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern or gasworks of Tate St. Ives. But why not celebrate the power plant that lights your home?

Space Breaks Open

Exhibitions divide their subject matter into manageable sections. Here this becomes purpose, (so we have ‘Communication’, ‘Industry’, ‘Housing’, etc.), but frankly you wouldn’t know any of that without the signs to tell you. This was a movement about putting things together, founding a common aesthetic. The show says itself “ architects applied the new formal language as enthusiastically to industrial plants as to office buildings.” For example, the afore-mentioned Water tower seems of a kind with Melnikov’s “highly individual” round house (1927, above), even if one was for housing water and the other... actually, it was just Melnikov himself!

However the show does have the smarts or the luck to start things off with the theme of Communication. It means the word in the narrow sense, of the communicative industries. Yet things work out a different way.

As we’ve already seen, power and domination are not the key concepts here. Creating a break with the past, putting the productive forces at the centre of life, they are at least present - but neither is key. The primary purpose of this new urban environment was to enhance the flow of communication.

Rather than the grim fortresses of Cold War imaginings, the buildings are virtually porous - bursting with openings, held together with criss-crossing gangways or connecting skyways. The show speaks of “wide corridors intended to promote social interaction.” Like a microcosm of the whole spirit, Golosov’s Zuev Worker’s Club (Moscow, 1926) or the Palace of Culture in Baku (Azerbajan, 1929) are both built around a central cylinder housing the staircase. Again and again the emphasis is on buildings which are light, open and airy.

Once profits circulated while workers stayed where they were told. Now for the reverse. To go back to the poster image, a still-transmitting radio tower - what better symbol for this show?

...for the rest click here!

“THESE CLOTHES DON’T FIT US RIGHT”: REMEMBERING REM

2012-01-16T18:47:00.000Z

Last autumn, when REM finally called it a day, the most common gag was to say you hadn’t known they were still together. And, okay, maybe they hung on longer than they should have. (Though ask yourself how many jobs you quit, how many relationships you ended, how many flats you left just when you should have?)

But in their eighties heyday they were little short of a vital band, and they were hardly slouches even when the nineties rolled by. Watching their episode-length appearance on ’Later With Jools Holland’, repeated on the BBC last Friday, I was set back by how much they were still kicking in ’98 – a full year after Bill Berry had left the band.

I had even completely forgotten about this track, ’Country Feedback’, despite having the album it’s on (’Out of Time.’) When you can write a song as powerful and self-assured as that and it just vanishes into your set-list... that suggests a band who were doing something right. Heard now, it inevitably starts to sound like it’s about the breakup of the group - despite being written twenty years too early for that.

PS: Sorry about that aggravating bloody logo which seems almost tatooed on Stipe’s forehead, it’s the best YouTube can offer. (When will they learn that such practises make us loathe and despite Aimersoft, whatever that bloody is, rather than rush out and buy it?) If you have access to the I-Player, you may be able to watch the whole thing without it intruding. (Because of course we all disapprove of things like this.)

END OF 2011 CATCH-UP 3: THEATRE + GIGS

2012-01-07T13:51:00.001Z

For catch-ups on last year’s visual arts go here and films here. (...and if anyone’s wondering, theatre and gigs go together because they’re both fundamentally live experiences, and not because they were the last two left!)

Though I’m normally not quite as bad at attending the theatre as I am writing about it, I’d concede that I’m not exactly good at it. However, I did manage to see more things this year – principally because of an arrangement where National Theatre plays are transmitted live in Brighton’s Duke of Yorks cinema. (And in many other places round the world, check their website to see if anything’s going on near you.)

Through this, I saw and enjoyed ’The Cherry Orchard’, Danny Boyle’s quite splendid version of ’Frankenstein’ and ’Collaborators’ - a new play by John Hodge riffing on Stalin’s encounters with Bulgakov. Hodge’s play was a good example of how an artwork can be good in itself, yet also be entirely politically reactionary.

Of course, the last thing we would want is a pro-Stalinist play, but at the same time we’re used to Stalinism as a stick. It’s like we’re supposed to believe in some binary choice between the world exactly as it is now or dying in some gulag. Hodge went out of his way to contrast RP-speaking aristos against proley revolutionaries. (Stalin himself was given a South-Western accent, and everyone had a similar variant.) The ‘problem’ of the revolution was therefore not that a gangster group seized their chance to usurp power, but that the toffs-on-top natural order was reversed.

The most absurd moment must surely be when we hear the peasants had their entire harvest stolen by Stalin’s troops. All true of course, yet we’re told this by a tearful landed gent, as if they had all been treated indulgently under feudalism. Admittedly, the theme of the play is a narrower one of man-meets-devil (in itself done very well) rather than a general comment about the Russian revolution, yet even so this ludicrous toss shouldn’t go by uncommented. Simultaneously a great play and risible.

Speaking of Stalinist Russia, I also saw ’Dying For It’, a new translation of Nikolai Erdman’s celebrated ’The Suicide.’ The play’s both famous for its quality and notorious for being banned. (Erdman had the bad luck of attempting to stage it in ’28, just as Stalin took power.)

Watching it today it seems less anti-Soviet than anti-ideological, you could almost call it post-structuralist if that term had existed when it was written. When a young, unemployed man contemplates suicide every social group (from the workers to the intelligensia) attempts to claim his act for their own dogma, despite his motives clearly being tawdrily personal. Perhaps that defence would have cut little ice with Stalin!

It was only let down by the semi-professional production. The acting ranged from the very good to the plain old wooden, which unfortunately can make for the worst of both worlds. If all the acting is poor you tend to adjust to it, like listening to a singer who can’t really sing. Unfortunately, some good acting will only draw attention to the bad.

Perhaps out of some subconscious perversity, I managed to go to Shakespeare’s Globe twice without seeing a single Shakespeare play! Instead I took in Marlowe’s ’Doctor Faustus’, followed by ’The Globe Mysteries.’ (A new version of the Bible stories staged in Medieval times by different groups of workmen, the “mystery” in the title coming from an alternate name for guilds.) Alone of the above, these two I did intend writing about...

Much of the appeal of the Mystery Plays is in their reductiveness, in their telling cosmogenic stories in ways which fits the conventions and limitations of the stage at the time. God, for example, is presented as the Guv’nor. Of course all but the dimmest contemporary audience member knew that God didn’t really have human form, any more than a shed is really Noah’s Ark or a blue sheet the flood. A dramatic device is simply being used to represent him. Nevertheless, the play recreates creation time when the Bible stories were thought of as historical events.

It seems significant that characters not only address the audience, but interact with it and even climb down into it. (When Judas introduces himself we boo, like we’re at the panto.) The actors are there to demonstrate something to us, not convey some illusion of depth. Lucifer, for example, rebels against God simply because that is what he does in the story.

By Shakespeare, we have a stage full of metaphor and ambiguity – all of which rests upon the development of character psychology. To take the (upcoming) example of Macbeth, when he sees a dagger before him the whole scene is predicated on our understanding the dagger is not there, it’s merely a projection of his guilt.

Though Marlowe’s life was roughly contemporary with Shakespeare, his ’Doctor Faustus’ struck me as transitional between these two. You could call it Marlowe’s ’Hamlet’ as it’s based around the indecision of the central character. Like Hamlet, Faustus doesn’t address the audience but soliloquises - thinking aloud that we might hear. He could easily be seen as a sympathetic figure, not hungry for worldly things but for knowledge, Renaissance man bumping frustratedly into the confines of his world.

Yet the spirits and demons conjured up by his cursed bargain inhabit some transitional space between physical beings and projections of his psychology. The “good and evil angel”, frequently rushing on stage to dramatise his conflict, are presumably no more than embodiments of his mind. However Mephistophilis can, when it suits him, be seen by other characters, and even confesses to slyly manipulating events before he first appears. This makes him a character in his own right, not a creation of Faustus’ mind but a demon who was standing waiting somewhere before he was summoned.

And yet at the same time, he insists Hell is not a place at all but instead a state:

“Hell has no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.”

Perhaps more crucially, Hamlet’s conflict is over his course of action. Yet Faustus signs away his soul early in the play. After that, his endless pontificating is rather after the fact, like a man wondering whether he should have jumped from the twelfth floor as he passes the seventh. Nor does he seem corrupted by his worldly knowledge, he just carries his conflict with him as the play crawls to its fated conclusion. Instead of development it is structured around set-pieces, such as the dramatic appearance of the Seven Deadly Sins, many involving acrobatics and visual pyrotechnics.

Yet what, on the page, makes the play sound stuck at some mid-point, may be precisely what makes it enjoyable to actually watch. It has the vibrancy of the stilt-walking demons, dramatically parading the stage in their animal-skull masks. Yet it is more than a mere show, or demonstration of a moral, for we sense a character (however sketchily) at the centre of it all. The two traditions, show and play, may not logically fit together, but like plugging together two incompatible devices they create a lot of sparks.

After not seeing any Shakespeare at the theatre specifically dedicated to him, I did take in Platform 4’s version of ‘Macbeth’. Taking advantage of the intimate confines of Brighton Pavilion Theatre, they employed minimal props and a dark ambient soundtrack to play up the crucial claustrophobia of the play. It was only marred by a weak performance in the (somewhat central) role of Lady Macbeth.

Somehow the one thing I do seem to have managed to write about is gigs. (Even managing to fit in things I didn't go to - not quite sure what the logic is there!) Let’s get started on the few exceptions...

As a kind of very early Colour Out of Space warm-up (seeing as it was in January, and the main event November), Primate Arena was staged in Coachwerks. Israeli artists Eran Sachs and Alex Drool performed with local boys from Blood Stereo and Bolide Awkwestra. This was about as enjoyable as it was indescribable, but fortunately there’s a YouTube clip...

(Incidentally I am still intending to write something about Colour Out of Space itself, hopelessly out-of-date as it may be.)

I took in one night of the Soundwaves festival, at the never-before-used venue of Brighton Town Hall. (Imposingly grand and Victorian, if you’ve never seen it.) This was full of good ideas which frankly didn’t come off very often, but I suppose it’s better to have fought and lost...

I saw both Acid Mothers Temple and Wire again, both of which I’ve written about before. (AMT here, Wire not since Ye Olde Print Days.) Here’s something from the AMT gig, complete with craaaaazy light show...

...and, in what couldn’t be more of a contrast if I was trying, Wire going through their paces...

Despite seeing the O’Neill brothers many times as (the massively under-rated) That Petrol Emotion, this year was the first time I ever saw the Undertones. It was very much a back-to-basics set, playing the first album in entirety. New singer Paul McLoone is a great frontman, my only possible quibble would be that he (and the band) are perhaps a little too polished and accomplished for songs about the fumbling awkwardness of adolescence. I did like the way they didn’t save this number for the closer, but audaciously dropped it in the middle of the set...

I even had a ticket to see Death in Vegas the next night, but alas was beset by the lurgee by then and unable to attend. They sounded something like this, I would imagine.

Late addition! For some reason, mostly likely connected to foolishness, I forgot to include any mention of 'Faster Than Sound: Brainwaves' an evening of music inspired by MRI scans featuring Mira Calix and Anna Meredith. Not sure absolutely everything worked but the highlights were high and, with it's instillation pieces in the audience and such, it felt very much like a special event.

Still later addition! For some reason, my aged noggin skipped over one of my favourite gigs of the year - Chumbawamba at the Ropetackle Centre in Shoreham. This was not only the first time I'd seen the stripped down/ acoustic version of the band, but the first time I'd seen them since the Nineties! Once one of my favourite bands, I kind of went off them after 'Anarchy' (for reasons unconnected to the infamous-for-some EMI signing), but this new version were kind of quietly resplendent! It's cool the way they can ceaselessly morph without ever conforming.

It made for a Chumbawamba-themed couple of days, as the night before the Cowley Club had shown their docu (the splendidly titled 'Well Done, Now Sod Off!' and Boff (no longer an active member) had given a talk.

Couldn't find anything from the gig YouTube-wise, but this (from Cologne) was a number they performed. Joe Strummer's 'Bank Robber', from those quaint old days where we still imagined it was people who robbed banks...

Coming soon! Let’s hear it for the out-of-date stuff...

"MASTERPIECES OF COMIC ANARCHISM": RIP RONALD SEARLE

2012-01-03T18:10:00.000Z

News is in, alas, that the celebrated British cartoonist Ronald Searle has died aged 91, at his adopted home of France.

The BBC quote Simon Winder, from his publisher Penguin saying: "We are all extremely sad to hear of Ronald's death. He was a marvellous, remarkable man and a great artist. I can think of nobody who did more to ridicule and undermine 1950s Britain, and [his work] will endure forever as masterpieces of comic anarchism."

Ironically it’s almost exactly a year ago that I posted my write-up of his retrospective exhibition at London’s Cartoon Museum.

END-OF 2011 CATCH-UP 2: FILMS

2012-01-01T19:49:00.000Z

I seem to have written about films less than ever last year (at least ones without live soundtracks). I’m not quite sure why what as once a staple of ’Lucid Frenzy’ should get such a poor showing, except for the obvious point about them being crowded out by other things. It’s not like I stopped seeing films, so let’s try and belatedly redress the balance a little now...

After the trailer for ‘Brighton Rock’ showed Pinky riding with the Mods, I was all set to lay into the film. It felt like it was playing to mid-America by sticking together the two things commonly known about Brighton. (Perhaps we should be grateful the Levellers weren’t featured, maybe playing a gig in the Royal Pavilion.) Yet, as anyone whose seen the original or read the book can tell you, it’s not only set two full decades before the Mods and Rockers era – it has to be set them, it’s a story about that era.

Actually they turn this to their advantage by updating everything around Pinkie’s gang, but leaving them as relics. Their hovel-like hideout could be from the Forties film, while their enemies’ palatial HQ at the Grand exemplifies the way crime has become professionalised – no room left for the furtive amateur and his pocket knife.

And the Mods play the same role as the storm in ’Othello’, their massing an accelerating barometer of the impending violent tragedy. (Pinky riding with them, however momentarily, is still pretty silly, however.)

But actually the best thing about the film is Andrea Riseborough’s Rose. She’s not Carol Marsh’s well-meaning good girl, but a sullen no-hoper, a thick-specced victim. After being so rigorously kicked by life, she seizes with relish her first chance to kick back. In the scene when she opens Pinky’s draw stuffed with knives and knuckledusters, it’s like she’s opening a door in her mind.

‘Attack the Block’ was probably lucky to come out in the spring, before the summer riots. After that it seemed okay to hate black kids in hoodies again, with the media in witch-hunt mode and previous liberal people like Mark Millar saying idiotic things like all rioters should be shot. I’ve a feeling it will now become shelved in the collective memory for a while, but hopefully not forever.

...for it’s actually quite a well-constructed film, balancing the humour with just enough pathos to carry you without swamping you in syrup. But perhaps it needed a plot tweak. There’s the line where the gang member calls the alien “the blackest thing I ever saw, even blacker than my cousin.” In urban coding, where black equates to ‘hard’, along comes another gang who are both blacker and harder.

So rather than the pheromone arousing mating instinct the aliens should have been specifically after revenge, their dead herald like a wasp giving off an attack signal in death. Without this the gang leader is dosed with the pheromone just by encountering the first alien, whereas everything should have been a consequence of his decision to kill it.

‘Kill List’ was probably quite flawed, but at the same time its one of those films where the flaws become part of what makes it compelling. There’s nothing neat or tidy about it, you can’t call it done and close it away, it lingers in the mind.

As most people will know by now, it performs an abrupt left-turn part-way through. Admittedly, I’d heard this before seeing the film, but unlike others I didn’t find that at all jarring. If we’ve not specifically seen anything similar up to that point, virtually everything had been marinated in that atmosphere. (Just check out the trailer below!)

However, something about that left turn does feel strangely Seventies. I’m not quite sure why that era is currently so dominant in our culture. While this is of course far superior to those pointless Seventies remakes that fill the multiplexes like landfill, it does seem strangely at odds with the desire to put the initial scenes so much in the real world.

It was one of those films which stimulated debate, and I do have a (kind of) take on what its all about. But to avoid too many spoilers all I’ll say here is – to get a good man to go bad, pepper his path with tasks which seem in the name of good.

I suppose I should be too grown-up for superhero films nowadays, but I find I keep enjoying them like some middle-aged fanboy.’ X-Men First Class’ was a successful excursion into Sixties spy thriller territory. ’Thor’, however was perhaps the greatest feat in that fans would naturally look forward to the other two, but scarcely for a character who was at most the Captain Peacock of the Avengers. (Too powerful, too remote, stuffed shirt personality etc.) It also means I liked a Kenneth Branagh film, whatever next?

Just as Rose was the surprise highpoint of ’Brighton Rock’, so Loki was to ’Thor’. (I wonder how many also saw Tom Hiddleston in the quite different ’Archipelago’?) His malevolence was less a given and more the product of a conflicted character. (Though alas, they didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions and by the finale had made him more of a melodrama villain.)

’Captain America’, if more a fan fave, can be a harder character to write than is sometimes acknowledged – for the opposite reason to Thor. He’s kind of ‘just super-powered enough’, not enhanced enough to measure against other super-types yet also more than human. (To the Avengers what Batman is to the Justice League.) This can work its worst in his war-setting stories, yet the film made a good fist of this – both super and gritty.

Marvel have generally done a good job of weaving their own-universe films together with invisible thread, so they can work standalone but also add to a bigger picture. (Presumably one to be presented in the forthcoming ’Avengers’ movie, for ’Captain America’s full title has ’The First Avenger’ appended to it.) Yet this first installment to be set in the past does suffer from a less-than-climactic final battle, which is clearly only there as a set-up device to take Cap into the present. So you remember not the battle with the Red Skull but the final scene of him in modern Times Square, which shouldn’t really be climax so much as coda. Still, that caveat aside, it’s a successful film.

Though Miyazaki only wrote ’The Secret World of Arrietty’(it was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayash), it may be his most successful film since ’Spirited Away.’ Based on Mary Norton’s book ’The Borrowers’, on the “little people” living beneath our floorboards, it’s incredible the way it creates such strange and compelling landscapes out of ordinary domestic rooms – the familiar rendered strange again. The only problem is, so compelling is this set-up that when the film later goes into plot mode it can’t really compete.

(I would post a trailer, but the only ones on-line seem to be dubbed into intrusive American accents. You can see the film sub-titled – I did!)

‘True Grit’ and ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ could both be classed as revisionist Westerns. Literally so in the case of ’True Grit’, as its a remake of an old John Wayne film. It was ’Meek’s Cutoff however which most audaciously tried to make us back to that era. A bold attempt, but not an entirely successful one.

’Tree of Life’ and ’Melancholia’, conversely, are so dissimilar they end up becoming similar again. A spiritualist (and heavily Christianised) meditation on upbringing and existence versus a dark fantasy on depression and the end of the earth. ’Melancholia’ has its moments, but I can’t help finding something adolescent about it’s endless insistence on the ‘fact’ we’re all going to die and deserve it, it’s the art movie equivalent of death metal. Perhaps what the two had in common was an inability to really engage me.

’We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and’Wuthering Heights’ could make another pair. Two British directors (Lynne Ramsey and Andrea Arnold) break with their normal environments – into America (a Columbine-style school massacre) and historical fiction, respectively. I’ve been an admirer of both directors in the past, but perhaps preferred them when they stayed on home turf.

The medical disaster film ’Contagion’ stuck determinedly to its procedural convictions, never succumbing to hyperbole or melodrama. It almost gleefully casts Hollywood stars like Gwynth Paltrow and Kate Winslet then gives them no actual emoting to do. In fact everyone’s about as clipped and as calm as some British Forties film. In short, ’Contagion’ is the antidote to apocalypse porn. As always, the fact that people aren’t really acting like they’re in a film makes the whole concept more chillingly credible.

...but it has a strangely conservative undertaste to it. It implicitly links the virus’ spread to a wife’s extra-marital philanderings (even if the coda formally points the finger elsewhere), before going off on a subplot about the most date-restrictive father this side of the Southern Baptists.

Similarly, the Jude Law character seemed too blatant a bad guy. Okay, I got the fact that he spread a secondary contagion through his internet conspiracy theories. But surely you can suspect the motives of multinationals and government agencies without succumbing to those daft conspiracies? After the virus of Communism in the Cold War and then the fundamentalist Muslims, maybe actual viruses will be our invisible enemy in the next few years...

I also took in ’Film Socialism’, Godard’s latest up-yours to the internationalist capitalist order and film narrative. This is the one set on a cruise ship and a petrol station, respectively, and is subtitled in ‘Navaho English’, a kind of half-assed baby-speak apology for a translation. Quite why I bothered now escapes me. (Patti Smith is in it, perhaps for almost a minute.)

I also managed to take in ‘Black Swan’, ‘Inside Job’, ‘Archipelago’, ‘The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams’, ’13 Assassins’, ‘A Separation’, ‘The Guard’, ‘Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy’, ‘The Turin Horse’, ‘Shame’ and ‘Carnage’ - all recommended, albeit to mixed degrees. I did see ‘Tyrannosaur’ (Paddy Considine’s directorial debut) but despite being a fan of his acting was agnostic at a few points, as for a realist film some of it seemed a little over the top.

I missed seeing a few films I intended to, ‘Poetry’, ‘Troll Hunter’, ‘Take Shelter’, ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and ‘Another Earth’ – hopefully I’ll catch up with most of them. I did think of seeing both ‘Green Lantern’ and ‘Tin Tin’, but I’m told I didn’t miss too much...

For Part 1 (Visual Art) click here. Extra stuff on gigs and theatre incoming...

END OF 2011 CATCH-UP 1: VISUAL ART

2011-12-29T16:37:00.002Z

Time was, I used to pretend that these end-of-year reports were some comprehensive distilling of the year, like you get in proper blogs or quality papers. The truth is, I was only ever using them a memory-jogger for all the things I’d thought to write about over the past twelve months, but never got around to.

Particularly for visual art exhibitions, but in most other fields as well, this last year’s been a frenetic one. (If ‘Doctor Who’ went somewhat off the boil, that’s an exception to the rule.) And I’ve been busy with other stuff, so perhaps it’s no surprise I’ve got behind things.

So, despite the blog’s recent concentration on visual arts, there were still a few things which escaped comment. Perhaps not strictly to be listed as visual art, but I enjoyed both the British Museum’s ‘Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World’ and (particularly) ‘Journey Through the Afterlife: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.’ The Afghanistan show was perhaps a little scattershot, recounting different civilisations arranged along the silk route which had little in common, while the Egyptian had more of a focus - on how their myths and rituals concerning the afterlife had changed over time.

Generally, I enjoy such events but there’s not much scope for me to write about them. I’d love to imagine I could make erudite points, on how recent scholarship has challenged some of their hieroglyphic translations or something like that, but the chances seem remote to be honest with you. (I’m back to see their show on the Hajj next year, but short of becoming an Islamic scholar in the meantime shall probably stay quiet on the subject.)

I did consider writing something about the ’Out of Australia’ exhibition in their prints room (which seems to be fast becoming one of my haunts), but time was pressing and it was so wide-ranging (from the Forties to the present) it was hard to focus on.

I wasn’t always convinced by the emphasis on “Australian-ness”, I got the impression that rather than trying to capture Australian landscape or culture most saw themselves as modern artists who simply happened to be based in Australia. The Angry Penguins, for example, a self-styled Surrealist group, were hardly named after the most notable native animal, and seemed more concerned with imagination than nation. (In fact the precise phrasing of the title seemed to have it better, for most seemed to leave Australia as soon as their career kicked off. Perhaps in those days it didn’t have much of an indigenous art trade.) One exception was the European artists who’d been interned there during the war, such as Erwin Fabian (see below). Others became influenced by Aboriginal art...

I seem, for some reason, to be very bad at writing about Cartoon Museum exhibitions. I did intend writing something about their ’Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-2001’ show. Readers with exceptional memories will remember me writing something about Doctor Who and comics for the late, lamented ’Comics Forum’, longer ago than I care to admit. This exhibition did convince me I should go back and rewrite whole chunks of it, possibly not a very realistic prospect but surely a sign of a good show!

My main criticism would be the lack of material from the Sixties. This is probably something of a fait accompli, shows like this rely on comic fans and their private collections of original art. But before the Seventies there’s little of this, particularly in British comics. Without anyone intending such, it feels like a whole era of comics history is being written out. (Disclaimer: a fair amount of Doctor Who comic strips from the Sixties were admittedly awful, and nothing much to do with the TV show beyond affecting a fairly rough approximation of William Hartnell. But surely they’re still part of the history!)

’Capturing Colour: Film, Invention and Wonder’, at Brighton Museum, was a decent local exhibition. But it’s emphasis on the technology of early colour film (if interesting in itself) did make it rather insistent on “capturing” colour, as if any other kind of image was incomplete, rather than employing colour – as an aesthetic choice and key to emotional states. And this while showing clips from Powell and Pressburger films, whose lurid colour coding was surely anything but naturalistic! (see below)

(Brighton Museum also brought us ’George IV and His Friends’, a small-but-perfectly formed exhibition of caricatures and political cartoons from the Regency era, and ’Ragmala: Paintings From India’.

Despite my best intentions, I managed to miss the shows dedicated to Bridget Riley, Gerhard Richter, Lygia Pape and ’Infinitas Gracias: Mexican Miracle Paintings’. The last three of these are still showing into the New Year, but I almost certainly won’t be able to make them.

I was also absolutely gutted to realise I had missed Wild Thing, a Royal Academy show devoted to the sculpture of Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein. (Which actually finished the year before last.) Anyone who read my review of the Vorticists will be familiar with the last two names, while (irony of ironies) I publicly grumbled about the smallness of a British Museum show given to Gill last year! Oh, to turn back time...

While this year may be pushed to match the last for quality (even if I’m very much looking forward to both the Munch and the Bauhaus shows), it seems more than a match for quantity. I already seem to have managed to commit myself to seeing at least one out-of-town exhibition a month, and counting.

As much of this is of course due to the accursed Olympics, a fair portion of what’s happening is blatant tourist bait. (Though I will probably be sad and obsessive enough to attend this one.) But others do seem intent on actually giving the crowds something worth seeing. You never know, I may even attend one or two shows not about Modernism...

Coming soon! First I shall endeavor to put together similar catch-up posts on films, theatre and gigs. Then, despite all this activity, there are still a few visual art reviews I should have posted last year which I will hopefully catch up on in the next few weeks. (Yes, doing them now does officially qualify as a pathology). There’s also one I might even be able to manage to run in the nick of time, but please don’t hold me to that! After then things may go quieter on the blog from while I concentrate on other things for a bit. (Not always interesting or creative things, alas...)

LIVE SOUNDTRACKS: DAVID THOMAS’ ‘CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ + 65DAYSOFSTATIC’S ‘SILENT RUNNING’

2011-12-26T12:25:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of posting here lately, just as I was behind on things anyway I was struck down with the lurgee!

This year has been so frenetic that I pretty much skim-shopped the Cine-City film festival, usually an annual staple! I did manage, however, to take in the two live soundtracks at the Duke of Yorks –David Thomas’ take on ’Carnival of Souls’ (of Pere Ubu fame, but this time assisted by the Two Pale Boys) and 65daysofstatic’s ’Silent Running’. (Incidentally, you are supposed to spell the band’s name like that, as one word.)

If the sound of the two bands couldn’t be more different (Wikipedia describes 65days as “instrumental post-rock” while Thomas has explicitly defined the Two Pale Boys sound as “indy arthouse films”) then perhaps the two films couldn’t be more different either.

’Silent Running’, released in 1972, was the first directorial effort of Douglas Trumbull, who’d been SFX wizard on ’2001’ and others of a similar ilk. (He would only direct one more film.) Though small compared to others he worked on, it’s budget was huge compared to ’Carnival of Souls’, made a decade earlier. This was the only film by Herk Harvey, produced and directed in three weeks’ downtime from his day job of making industrial and educational films. The cheapest of B flicks, it first sank without trace but then resurfaced as a cult classic.

What makes ’Carnival of Souls’ such a horror classic, despite so little horrific actually happening in it, is it’s indeterminancy. You’re not just unsure what’s going on in it, you’re even unsure what kind of film it is – is it cheesy B-horror, a straight-faced parody of all that or some psychological art movie? The elements seem to shift around without settling. (This is surely what made it such an acknowledged influence on Romero’s ’Night of the Living Dead’.)

Though Thomas gave the film a brief introduction, he was smart (and archetypically playful) enough to avoid taking any kind of angle. Instead, both his words and his score played up those ambiguities. The music seemed as indeterminate as the film, taking in Sixties jazzy pop, woozy broken-trombone film noir soundtrack and dark ambient electronics, much of it at the same time.

And like all great soundtracks it never tried to dominate. Officially described as an “underscore”, it worked almost as the film’s unconscious, worrying away beneath the surface. It could drop away to a whispered presence, or for long stretches even lapse into silence. But like an undertow it could as quickly change currents and stir itself up into dominance. Just like the dream sequences in the film, it would sometimes seize control.

’Silent Running’ is probably one of those films you need to see at the right age, which in my case I did. (Early teens, since you asked.) It’s a kind of SF parable, with a blatant (and fairly hippified) ecological message. (The original score has, I kid not, Joan Baez songs on it!) There’s long sequences of geodesic domes in space, housing the last plant life of the earth, tended by an astronaut gardener (played by Bruce Dern) and a team of diligent robots.

An astronaut gardener tending a geodesic dome in space... there’s something of having it both ways in that image. We get our fix of huge spaceships but at the same time can tell ourselves we’re decent citizens concerned about ecology. (Though of course in ’72 perhaps any kind of ecological message was an advance.) I’d be fairly certain that it was this combination which attracted 65daysofstatic.

Certainly their intricate yet explosive musical outbursts worked well with the extended SFX sequences. However, you couldn’t help but wonder whether those were the “money shots’ – the moments which had attracted them, but which then obligated them to soundtrack the rest of the film.

When the Two Pale Boys fell silent, you felt the silence was part of their intent – like white space being incorporated into artwork. When 65days fell silent you sometimes wondered whether they were just waiting for the spaceships to come back. At other points they would drown out the dialogue. (Okay, it’s the sort of film where you can fill in the dialogue for itself.)

And not all of what they played was great. The band clearly like the piano-based ’Burial Scene’ enough to stream it on their site, yet it doesn’t really cut it for me. Though I don’t know the band’s recordings so well, I’ve seen them live a few times and can report they’re not merely about bombast – they’re quite up to providing light and shade. The problem, then, can’t be in them coming up with quieter sections - but must be the essential soundtrack question of moulding their music to the film.

Though much of the music was splendid stuff, I’m not sure it was soundtrack music. I suspect the band were taking sections of the film to use as their rock videos. (I’ve seen them play live to video projections before.)

In a nutshell, while one soundtrack made the film a backdrop, the other was so firmly wedded it would never work without it.

Part of 65days’ soundtrack from Bestival...

’Carnival Of Souls’ was never copyrighted, and you can see the whole thing (unsegmented) on YouTube, or even download from here. (Nothing on-line from Thomas’ soundtrack, however...)

THE MARTIN SKIDMORE MEMORIAL COMICS PUB QUIZ – NOW WITH ADDED ANSWERS!

2011-12-04T16:35:00.008Z

Here’s the promised answers to the comics, cartoons and animation quiz questions I posed earlier, which hail from this year’s Comics Friends United. (That’s me above, setting the test in requisite Teacher garb, under the somewhat wary eye of event organiser Hassan Yusuf, in a photo by attendee Martin Hand.)

1. MUSIC

Q1: Paul Mavrides’ strip ‘No Exit’, published in Anarchy Comics No. 3 in 1981, featuring punk singer Jean-Paul Sartre Junior. What actual punk singer was he based on?
A1: Henry Rollins (from his Black Flag days)

Q2: ‘Watchmen’ contains quotes from all sorts of folk from Jung to Nietzsche. But only one musical figure is quoted twice. For three points, who is it and which songs are quoted from?
A2: Bob Dylan. “At midnight all the agents” (in 1) is from ‘Desolation Row’ and “two riders were approaching” (in 10) is of course from ‘All Along the Watchtower’.

Q3: A record made No. 2 in the singles chart over the Christmas period in 1967, despite actually being a double EP with a comic strip insert by Bob Gibson. For one point each, what was the EP called and who recorded it?
A3: ’Magical Mystery Tour’ by the Beatles

Q4: For a point each, what comics artists drew the cover of Frank Zappa’s 1978 album ’Studio Tan’ and his 1983 album ’The Man From Utopia’?
A4: Gary Panter and Liberatore, respectively

Q5: Nurse With Wound’s 1996 album was called ’Alice The Goon’, after the track ’Prelude to Alice the Goon’. What’s the comics connection?
A5: Alice the Goon was a Popeye character, created by EC Segar.

Q6: The 1990s satirical cartoon Duckman (based on a Dark Horse comic), had a theme tune by who?
A6: Frank Zappa (yes, him again!)

Q7: What comic artist also performs in the noise band Lighting Bolt?
A7: Brian Chippindale

Q8: In the 1996 Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’ Homer attends a Loollapalooza festival. In the course of the episode he meets several bands, all voiced by themselves, one of which provides a version of the theme tune for the closing credits. Which?
A8: Sonic Youth (I discovered in the course of asking this question that i) I cannot pronounce “Loolapalooza”, ii) neither can anyone else.)

Q9: The Teardrop Explodes sang “comics are all I read”. What’s their other comics connection?
A9: This is the one that Rol got. Daredevil 77 had the caption “and then – it happens - filling the wintered glades of central park with an unearthly whine – painting the leaf-bare branches with golden fire – the teardrop explodes!” (Someone asked on the night if that was by Gerry Conway. I replied “well, it’s badly written.”)
No points for “from a comic”, one point “from a Marvel comic”, two points for “from Daredevil”. If anyone knew the exact issue number they are too sad even for us.

Q10: Who recorded the song with the lyrics “Doctor Strange is always changing size”? (Please name band and song)
A10: ’Cymbeline’ by Pink Floyd

2. GEOGRAPHY

Q1: Superman hangs out in Metropolis, and Batman Gotham City, what City did Will Eisner’s Spirit inhabit?
A1: Central City

Q2: Fort Thunder (now sadly defunct) was a warehouse turned into an art colony by a bunch of crazies, including comics artists whose style came to be named after the venue. They included Brian Ralph, Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman. What city was it located in?
A2: Providence, Rhode Island

Q3: The European comics magazine Stripburger has been running since 1992, and claims to be the only comics magazine in its home country. Which country?
A3: Slovenia. (Easier to answer if you’d been to their recent exhibition in Orbital Comics.)

Q4: What imaginary country was featured in Dylan Horrock’s ’Atlas’?
A4: Cornucopia

Q5: In which imaginary country is the TinTin adventure ’King Ottaker’s Sceptre’ set? (Clue, it was derived from sections from the names of two existing East European countries.)
A5: Syldavia. It was dervied from Transylvania (which then still existed) and Moldavia.

3. ART AND LITERATURE

Q1: Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage ‘What Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing’ has a comic cover framed on the wall by a well-known pair of comic artists? Who are they?
A1: Simon and Kirby. (As seen above, the comic was ’Young Romance.’) Half a point if you only got one.

Q2: Which of the For Beginners series of books was drawn by Robert Crumb?
A2: ’Kafka for Beginners’ (Later repackaged by Fantagraphics as ’Kafka.’)

Q3:...and which by Oscar Zarate?
A3: ’Freud for Beginners’

Q4: What American writer wrote a novel about Krazy Kat?
A4: Jay Cantor (Called, appropriately enough, ’Krazy Kat’.)

Q5: What Academy Award winning author wrote the storyline for the first Superman film?
A5: Mario Puzo

4. ODD ONE OUT

Q1: Hanna Barbera’s The Flintstones was, as we all know, set in the stone age. But other settings were trialled. Which of these wasn’t?
- Hillbillies
- Pilgrims
- Ancient Rome
- Outer Space
A1: Outer space

Q2: Which of these famous people was never used as a ‘guest star’ in Cerebus?
- Woody Allen
- Marty Feldman
- George Harrison
- Brian Jones
A2: Brian Jones. Allen appeared in ’Latter Days’, Feldman and Harrison in ’Guys’, and Jagger and Richards in ’Church and State’ - but without Brian Jones.

Q3: Which is not a genuine Asterix title?
’Asterix in Belgium’
‘Asterix in Corsica’
‘Asterix in Spain’
‘Asterix in Sweden’
A3: ‘Asterix in Sweden’

Q4: Which was not a genuine subhead of Raw magazine?
"The Graphix Magazine for Damned Intellectuals"
"The Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism"
“The Graphix Magazine That Became Jaded by Ennui”
"The Graphix Magazine That Lost Its Faith in Nihilism"
A4: “Jaded by Ennui.” The others were in issue (2 ’80), 5 (’83) and 3 (’81) respectively.

Q5: The Caption convention in Oxford, now Britain’s longest-running comics convention, normally has a theme for each year. One of the following is a fake year name, but which?
Are we having fun yet?
Euro Standardised Caption
Love is Caption
Pirate Caption Ahoy!
A5: Pirate Caption Ahoy. (Though people on the night suggested it would make a good theme for Caption!)

5. KNOW THE LOGOS
(One point for each)

K = Moon Knight
N = Deadline
0 = Frontline Combat
W = Whizzer and Chips (half-point only for Whizzer, as they were never two separate comics.)

T = Swamp Thing
H = Hate
E = Asterix

L = Lone Wolf and Cub
O = Thor
G = The Avengers
O = Love and Rockets
S = Maus

C = Captain America
F = The Flash
U = Fantastic Four
!! = Cor!! (I thought no-one would get the double exclamation marks, but it seems almost everyone did!)

6. COVER VERSION
(One point for knowing the name of comic, plus another for the issue number. Half a point for a ‘Friends explanation’ eg. “the one where the FF first face Doctor Doom!”)

1. Dark Knight Returns (or Dark Knight 1)
2. Where Monsters Dwell 21 (half point for “the one withFin Fang Foom”)
3. Conan the Barbarian 1
4. Watchmen 12
5. Nick Fury Agent of Shield 1
6. Brave and Bold 28 (1 point for “first appearance of Justice League”, half-point for ‘Justice League’)
7. Red Sonja 1
8. Amazing Spider-Man 1 (no points for Fantastic Four!)

7. TRUE OR FALSE
Q1: Nicholas Cage was such a comics fan he christened his first-born son Kal-El.
A1: True. (Though he has as yet not fired him on a rocket ship away from the globally warmed Earth.)

Q2: The Alan Class reprints of old Marvel comics in Britain were copied from the printed pages, without securing any copyright, which is why they were always so badly reproduced.
A2: False. (Well they were reproduced pretty badly, but just because of penny-pinching.)

Q3: The voice of The Shadow on radio broadcasts was provided by Orson Welles .
A3: True.

Q4: In October 2004, Fathers For Justice member Jonathan Stanesby protested about family law by scaling Tower Bridge dressed as Spider-Man, only to get stuck and have to be rescued by the Fire Brigade.
A4: False. (In October 2003, FFJ member David Chick scaled a crane near Tower Bridge, and didn't get stuck.

Q5: The Dazzler as originally conceived was based on an actual disco singer in a cross-promotion with Casablanca records, and her only super-power was the ability to compel people to tell the truth.
A5: True. The deal collapsed before publication. (Of course a better power for the Dazzler would be to compel polite lying, as in “no, we all love your comic, honest!”)

Q6: Marvel’s ’GI Joe’ 21 (1984), was “the most unusual GI Joe story ever” – a completely silent issue! However, this was because in their haste they sent the artwork to print before it had gone to the letterer.
A6: False . The issue was produced in haste, but the silence was always planned.

Q7: The “bullet logo” used by DC comics in the Eighties, with the four stars in the circle, was created by the same designer as the “I Love NY” logo.
A7: True. (It was Milton Glaser.)

Q8: In 1989, the Barbie Liberation Organisation stole a bunch of Barbie and GI Joe dolls, switched their voiceboxes, then returned them to the stores. Children then found Barbies who yelled “vengeance is mine!” and GI Joes who breathed “let’s plan our dream wedding!”
A8: True, all true!

Q9: A talking Clanger doll, commercially released by the Golden Bear Company, said when squeezed “oh sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again!”
A9: True! (Oliver Postgate always wrote actual dialogue for the Clangers, though it was always rendered indecipherably through the swannee whistles. Major Clanger used that line. The toy company then used the phrase unwittingly.)

Q10: The 2000AD strip ’Nemesis The Warlock’ was originally based on the Jam song ‘Going Underground’, as everybody in the strip lived underground?
A10: True There was a planned series of ‘Comic Rock’ strips based on popular songs of the day, but that was the only one to appear.

8. CARTOON CATCHPHRASES
(1 point for cartoon, 1 point for character)

1. “It’s the wool-uf, it’s the wool-uf!”
Lambsy Divey, ‘It’s the Wolf’

2. “Hay-lp! Hay-lp!”
Penelope Pitstop, ‘Perils of Penelope Pitstop’
(One team on the night insisted ’Wacky Races’ was an equally valid answer. However, though Penelope of course appeared in it, I’m sure she didn’t use that catchphrase.)

3. “Up and at ‘em!”
I was thinking of Radioactive Man from ‘The Simpsons’, but someone pointed out on the night he actually filched that catchphrase from Atom Ant – so either earns a point!

4. “To infinity – and beyond!”
Buzz Lightyear, ‘Toy Story’

5. “Herbidaceous!”
The Narrator, ‘The Herbs’ (or ‘The Herb Garden’) It was said at the start of every episode as a kind of “open sesame” for us to enter the garden.

9. CARTOON THEME TUNES
(One is not a cartoon theme tune, please say where its’ from)

Q1: “Buckle up your seatbelts,
They could be in orbit in the stars
On a spooky planet, maybe Mars
There’s no way of knowing
When they’re groovin’ way above the atmosphere
Trying to get back to here”
A1: ’Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space’

Q2: “With beauty and grace,
as swift as can be,
Watch it flying through the air.
It travels in space,
or under the sea,
and it can journey anywhere.
It travels on land,
or roams the skies,
through a heavens stormy rage,
It's Mercury-manned,
and everyone cries,
‘it's the marvel of the age!’”
A2: ’Supercar’

Q3: “Be an early riser
Strive to be ambitious
Speak a little wiser
Try to be judicious
Be a good adviser
Never ever vicious
Where will you be then?
Face front, lift your head, you’re on the winning team”
A3: If you joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society, Marvel’s original fan club back in the Sixties, you got this song on a single as part of the package.

Q4: “It’s -- -,
Brave and free,
Fighting evil ‘neath the sea,
He is a boy.
A very special boy,
Powered by propeller shoes,
Flying sub ahoy.
Whooshing through the water
On a friendly dolphin’s back
Racing to the rescue
Of victims of attack”
A4: ’Marine Boy’

Q5: “Terrorist your game is through
Cause now you have to answer to...
America!
What you going to do when we come for you now?
It’s the dream that we all share,
It’s the hope for tomorrow”
A5: ’Team America – World Police’ (Special expurgated version for a family audience!)

A6: The words to the 'Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines' theme...
“Muttley, you snickering, floppy eared hound.
When courage is needed, you're never around.
Those medals you wear on your moth-eaten chest
Should be there for bungling at which you are best.
So, stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Howwww!
Nab him, Jab him, Tab him, Grab him
Stop that pigeon now.
You, Zilly, stop sneaking, it's not worth the chance.
For you'll be returned by the seat of your pants.
And Clunk, you invent me a thingamabob
That catches that pigeon or I lose my job.
So, stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Stop that pigeon
Howwww!
Nab him, Jab him, Tab him, Grab him
Stop that pigeon now.”

...okay, who do I need to send no-prizes to?

Coming Soon! All the stuff I’ve promised to post here and haven’t yet...

A SONG FOR TOMORROW

2011-11-29T18:26:00.000Z

Just in case anyone doesn't know (most likely through being colonials), tomorrow's public sector strikes are likely to be the largest since the Winter of Discontent back in the winter of '79. See you there!

(Incidentally this Tom Robinson track was prophetically written in '78, so all the "you should have been there" stuff is intended ironically.)

"It was us poor bastards took the chop,
When the tubes gone up and the buses stop,
The top people still come out on top,The government never resign."

PS: Answers to the Comics Quiz are coming!

COMICS QUIZ!

2011-11-27T18:40:00.004Z

These are my quiz questions from yesterday’s Comics Friends United. (I co-ran the quiz with Nigel “the N is for knowledge” Fletcher, whether Nigel is going to put his on-line anywhere I’ve no idea.) Congratulations to the Brave and the Cold team for their top score, narrowly beating the Super-Villain Team-Up.

If you didn’t attend (or did but have a really bad memory), feel free to have a go if you think you’re sad enough. No prizes this time... well, maybe a no-prize, I’ll post the answers in due course.

Please remember it was planned as a live quiz so don’t just Google - use your noggin!

Funny thing is, I probably now have enough unused questions to do another quiz!

COMICS AND MUSIC

1. Anarchy Comics... or more specifically, Paul Mavrides’ strip ‘No Exit’, published in Anarchy Comics No. 3 in 1981, featured punk singer Jean-Paul Sartre Junior. What actual punk singer was he based on?

2. ‘Watchmen’ contains quotes from all sorts of folk from Jung to Nietzsche. But only one musical figure is quoted twice. For one points, who is it and for two extra which songs are quoted from?

3. A record made No. 2 in the singles chart over the Christmas period in 1967, despite actually being a double EP with a comic strip insert by Bob Gibson. For one point each, what was the EP called and who recorded it?

4. For a point each, what comics artist drew the cover of Frank Zappa’s 1978 album ’Studio Tan’ and what comic artist his 1983 album ’The Man From Utopia’?

5. Nurse With Wound’s 1996 album was called ’Alice The Goon’, after the track ’Prelude to Alice the Goon’. What’s the comics connection?

6. The 1990s satirical cartoon ’Duckman’ (based on a Dark Horse comic), had a theme tune by who?

7. What comic artist also performs in the noise band Lighting Bolt?

8. In the 1996 Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’ Homer attends a Loollapalooza festival. In the course of the episode he meets several bands, all voiced by themselves, one of which provides a version of the theme tune for the closing credits. Which band?

9. The Teardrop Explodes sang “comics are all I read”. But what’s their other comics connection?

10. Who recorded the song with the lyrics “Doctor Strange is always changing size”? (For two points, please name band and song.)

GEOGRAPHY

1. Superman hangs out in Metropolis, and Batman Gotham City, what City did Will Eisner’s Spirit inhabit?

2. Fort Thunder was a warehouse turned into an art colony by a bunch of crazies, including a clutch of comics artists whose style came to be named after the venue. They included Brian Ralph, Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman. What city was it located in?

3. The European comics magazine Stripburger has been running since 1992, and claims to be the only comics magazine in its home country. Which country?

4. What imaginary country was featured in Dylan Horrock’s Atlas?

5. In which imaginary country is the TinTin adventure King Ottaker’s Sceptre set? (Clue, it was derived from taking sections from the names of two existing East European countries.)

ART AND LITERATURE

1. Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage ‘What Makes Today’s Homes So Different So Appealing’ has a comic cover framed on the wall, made by a well-known pair of comic creators? For a point each, who are they?

2. Which of the For Beginners series of books was drawn by Robert Crumb?

3. ...and which by Oscar Zarate?

4. What American writer wrote a novel about Krazy Kat?

5. What Academy Award winning author wrote the storyline for the first Superman film?

ODD ONE OUT

1. Hanna Barbera’s The Flintstones was, as we all know, set in the stone age. But other settings were trialled. Which of these wasn’t one of them?

- Ancient Rome

- Hillbillies

- Outer Space

- Pilgrims

2. Which of these famous people was never used as a ‘guest star’ in Dave Sim’s ’Cerebus’?

- Woody Allen

- Marty Feldman

- George Harrison

- Brian Jones

3. Which is not a genuine Asterix title?

’Asterix in Belgium’

‘Asterix in Corsica’
‘Asterix in Spain’

‘Asterix in Sweden’

4. Which was not a genuine subhead of ’Raw’ magazine?

"The Graphix Magazine for Damned Intellectuals"

"The Graphix Magazine of Abstract Depressionism"

“The Graphix Magazine That Became Jaded by Ennui”

"The Graphix Magazine That Lost Its Faith in Nihilism"

5. The Caption convention in Oxford, now Britain’s longest-running comics convention, has a theme for each year. One of the following is a fake theme, but which?

- Are we having fun yet?

- Euro Standardised Caption

- Love is Caption

- Pirate Caption Ahoy!

KNOW THE LOGOS

One point for knowing which comics logo each letter is pulled from, note it runs all the way along the phrase to the exclamation marks!

COVER VERSION

One point for knowing name of the comic each of these eight cover segments is cut from, one for the issue number. Half a point for a ‘Friends explanation’ eg. “the one where the FF first face Doctor Doom!”

TRUE OR FALSE?

As the round name might suggest, please state which of the following is true and which false...

1. Nicholas Cage was such a comics fan he christened his first-born son Kal-El.

2. Alan Class reprints of old Marvel comics were copied from the printed pages, without securing any copyright, which is why they were always so badly reproduced.

3. The voice of The Shadow on radio broadcasts was provided by Orson Welles .

4. In October 2004, Fathers For Justice member Jonathan Stanesby protested about family law by scaling Tower Bridge dressed as Spider-Man, only to get stuck and have to be rescued by the Fire Brigade.

5. The Dazzler as originally conceived was based on an actual disco singer in a cross-promotion with Casablanca records, and her only super-power was the ability to compel people to tell the truth.

6. Marvel’s ’GI Joe’ 21 (1984), was “the most unusual GI Joe story ever” – a completely silent issue, no captions or speech balloons. However, this was because in their haste they sent the artwork to print before it had gone to the letterer.

7. The “bullet logo” used by DC comics in the Eighties, with the four stars in the circle, was created by the same designer as the “I Love NY” logo.

8. In 1989, the Barbie Liberation Organisation stole a bunch of Barbie and GI Joe dolls, switched their voiceboxes, then returned them to the stores. Children then found Barbies who yelled “vengeance is mine!” and GI Joes who breathed “let’s plan our dream wedding!”

9. A talking Clanger doll, commercially released by the Golden Bear Company, said when squeezed “oh sod it, the bloody thing’s stuck again!”

The ’2000AD’ strip Nemesis The Warlock was originally based on the Jam song ‘Going Underground’, as everybody in it lived underground.

CARTOON CATCHPHRASES

One point for naming the cartoon, another for the character who says it.

1. “It’s the wool-uf, it’s the wool-uf!”

2. “Hay-lp! Hay-lp!”

3. “Up and at ‘em!”

4. “To infinity – and beyond!”

5. “Herbidaceous!”

CARTOON THEME TUNES

Name the cartoon/ animation whose theme tune these words are pulled from. (Please note, one of these is not a cartoon/ animation theme. An extra point if you guess which, and yet another point if you can say how it actually was disseminated.

1. “Buckle up your seatbelts,

They could be in orbit in the stars

On a spooky planet, maybe Mars

There’s no way of knowing

When they’re groovin’ way above the atmosphere

Trying to get back to here”

2. “With beauty and grace,

as swift as can be,

Watch it flying through the air.

It travels in space,

Or under the sea,

And it can journey anywhere.

It travels on land,

Or roams the skies,

Through a heavens stormy rage,

It's Mercury-manned,

And everyone cries,

‘It's the marvel of the age!’”

3. “Be an early riser

Strive to be ambitious

Speak a little wiser

Try to be judicious

Be a good adviser

Never ever vicious

Where will you be then?

Face front, lift your head, you’re on the winning team”

4. “It’s -- -,

Brave and free,

Fighting evil ‘neath the sea,

He is a boy.

A very special boy,

Flying sub ahoy.

Whooshing through the water

On a friendly dolphin’s back

Racing to the rescue

Of victims of attack”

5. “Terrorist your game is through

cause now you have to answer to,

America,

What you going to do when we come for you now?

It’s the dream that we all share;

It’s the hope for tomorrow”

6. For the final question, each team chose a sealed envelope at random. It contained the title and a random couple of lines from a cartoon theme tune which they had to remember the whole of and then sing back. One choice not used on the night was ’Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines.’ The sample lyrics were...

“Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him,

Stop that pigeon now!”

Two points if you can remember all the words, one point for a decent effort. (The teams on the night got an extra point for singing them, but that may not work so well over the net.)

Answers, as I say, to follow. For now it only remains to give a big thanks to Hassan Yusuf and Fiona Jerome for organising the day, plus the good folks at 30th Century Comics for providing the prizes.

THE GREATEST BRIGHTON GIGS I NEVER WENT TO (2)

2011-11-23T19:04:00.002Z

Continuing the vidclips of local gigs I failed to attend, taking us back from 2009 to 1974!

The Slits
10th Sept 2009, Brighton Concorde

In a similar story to Thee Silver Mount Zion, I had seen the reconstituted Slits at an earlier gig at the Pressure Point but was out of town for their return. From watching clips I’d reckon the set I saw to be better. (I posted my review of it in tribute after Ari Up’s untimely death.) But then a lot of the live experience comes from Ari’s arresting personality, which isn’t going to transmit to video the same way. This version of ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ can’t be faulted, though.

Fever Ray
Loop Festival, May 2009

Despite attending this very festival, and despite a friend’s protestations, I insisted on watching Squarepusher on the other stage. (Who admittedly was great!) Shortly after I read a Guardian review of this set, which prompted me to listen to the album again on Spotify - which prompted me to kick myself very hard indeed! Unfortunately this vid kicks out mid-track, but it’s surprising how well such spooky spacey music works live. (Her videos are worth watching too, in a strange and unsettling way that leaves you wondering if you’ve inadvertently strayed across some black magic ritual.)

PJ Harvey & John Parrish
15th April 2009, Corn Exchange

Beyond watching some of an early mid-afternoon set at Glastonbury, many moons ago, I have never actually succeeded in seeing PJ Harvey. This was another one I didn’t make this one through an unindulgent response from my bank manager. I guess I will never see her like this now because she isn’t like this any more. (Tho’ of course it’s cool the way she won’t rest on her laurels but is forever breaking into something new.)

The Vitamin B12
15th Nov 2008, Komediai

I don’t always make it to Brighton’s resident purveyors of Dadaist shock-tactics anti-music, but then I saw them fairly often when they used to rehearse in the front room of my old house. (I’d come home from work and they’d be squarking on saxes and hitting household items.) Believe it or not, this banging-against-the-bourgeoisie session is pretty ‘regular’ for them.

I obviously managed to make everything in 2007, because coming up next we have...

Polly Shang Kuan Band
11th Nov, 2006, Old Market

Not one for the fainthearted! Brighton’s finest in full frenzied flow, from the first ever Colour Out Of Space – which I inexplicably missed! (Alas only a short clip.)

Sonic Youth
Sometime in 1985, Brighton beach

“Anyone for a swim?”

There’s a story to missing this one, which may set the scene for what Brighton was like in the Eighties. I’d turned up in town for a seafront rally, especially early as rumours were flying that the fascists were going to try and disrupt it. (I remember this as a May Day event, and while the video claims August the weather looks more May-like.) A few bonehead twats actually did show up for once, and stood around in small clumps, occasionally shouting “seig heil” and generally behaving like the master race. Psychic TV (then Brighton residents) were supposed to play the beach, but had cancelled. The support act were still playing but, never having heard of Sonic Youth, we took them to be a reggae band (in the style of Big Youth?) and headed home. Ironically, only a few years later I’d have stayed for a reggae band!

Sonic Youth
11th August 1985, Zap Club

...and this is them at the old Zap Club, later that night. (Or back later that year, if my memory’s correct.) In fine ‘early’ mode, recited vocals, detuning as the new tuning, detached cool shook up in the same bottle as total derangement, coming at song structure like it’s an enemy stronghold that needs to be sacked! To this day I have never seen them, and most likely now never will, though I have seen both Kim and Thursten play solo.

ABBA
Brighton Dome, 1974

Okay this one’s a bit of a cheat! The odds were against me seeing this gig, principally because i) I wouldn’t move to Brighton for another decade and ii) I was eight at the time. But it was on the stage of Brighton Dome that Abba launched their career by winning Eurovision! And any excuse to play the track is a good one, as I think you will agree...

Coming Soon as I get the chance!: Something on this year’s Colour Out of Space...

THE GREATEST BRIGHTON GIGS I NEVER WENT TO (1)

2011-11-19T11:57:00.003Z

This started with a desire to clone myself and ended up as an act of masochism.

I have wanted to see Bellowhead’s famed live act for a while now. But this desire is apparently not mine alone, and normally by the time I’d made my way to the ticket shop there was no more room at the inn. This time I made sure I was bright and early, and had my ticket to clutch. Then what do you know but Colour Out of Space (Brighton’s three-day festival of “exploratory sound”) gets announced the same weekend!

And then what do you know but two other folk/country artists I’m desperate to see get announced on successive dates the same weekend – Gillian Welch and Richard Buckner! There didn’t even seem to be any way to evaluate my choice, as the two styles of music were so completely different as to be incomparable.

When early experiments in devising a cloning method did not work well, I finally decided that Colour Out of Space would contain a whole load of acts I would never see again. The others (with varying degrees of certainty) may show up here again at some point. (Or at least such is my hope!) So I sold back my prized Bellowhead ticket and bought up a Colour Out Of Space pass. (Which I will write about soonishly – promise!)

Then, as is my custom for skipped gigs, I searched YouTube to try and catch snatches of what I missed. At some point along the way, it occurred to me to do a whole post just of unattended gigs. (As a kind of ‘negative space’ version of the normal run of things.) This gathered momentum and, at a further point along the way, became the two-part affair you see before you.

Having embarked on this, I discovered a complete absence of clips of this most recent Bellowhead gig, so I’ve slipped its predecessor into the chronology below. Nor could I find anything of Richard Buckner in Brighton, or for that matter anywhere in Europe. (So this doesn’t fit the schema at all, but having heard this there’s no way I’m not passing it on. Living right up to his “insurgent country” tag...)

People always tell me the fun starts when I’m not around. Let’s see if they’re right...

Gillian Welch
12th Nov 2011, Brighton Dome

Everybody’s... well mine... favourite Country star sounding typically fatalistic yet fantastically poignant on ’The Way It Will Be.’ (NB: I don’t think she’s singing “I’ve never been so disabused” about my not making the gig.) Someone else uploaded the classic ’Revelator’ but alas the sound is muffled for sections of it. Here’s me getting all excited over that album.)

I seriously hope she comes to Brighton again...

Bela Emerson
4th Nov 2011, Green Door Store

It’s fantastic the way that Emerson can exploit the sumptuous, cigar-advert sound of the cello yet simultaneously make it sound so strange and out-there just by judiciously incorporating some loops. This clip is perhaps a good indication of how she uses them to build the layers up, until there’s a wall of sound that would knock Phil Spector over.

(Yeah, I know we were all consigned long ago to a soundbite world. If eight-and-a-half minutes seems too long to some, I nearly posted the other number which is twice the length!)

DJ Shadow
May 12th 2011, Dome

Alas I had to be out of town the weekend that Brighton Festival tickets went on sale and ended up missing out on a couple of things - chiefly a rare UK appearance of this guy! Music composed entirely of samples from what is quite possibly the world’s largest record collection. That weird thing that looks like the Death Star remodelled as an art installation, but still trying to take over the universe, is apparently the ‘Shadowsphere.’

Josh T Pearson
March 29th 2011, The Hanbury Club

Although I was absolutely gutted about not getting into this, the clip does reveal why a small and intimate venue like the Hanbury was needed. It’s about a seismic a shift from Pearson’s old Lift To Experience days - as if Ingmar Bergman took up breakdancing. Back then, tracks would start with the end of the world and work their way up. Now, playing solo, at times both his voice and guitar fall away almost to nothing, but the effect is to make you lean in, desperate to capture each breathy word.

Duke Garwood
March 2011, Hector’s House

In all honesty I stumbled upon this clip searching for something else. But now I’ve seen it I wish I’d seen Garwood’s blues, even if I’ve never heard of him before!

Show of Hands and The Brighton Taverners
Jan 2011, Brighton Trades and Labour Club

This place was less than five minutes from my house for about seven years without me going into it once, and I had only moved away from there a few weeks before this occurred. Apparently the farewell gig of the Brighton Taverners (who I had never heard of before), for which Show of Hands turned up “all the way from Devon.”

Bellowhead
Nov 2010, Brighton Concorde

As said, one of the many times I failed to see the full-on folk outfit do their thing, a group always described by A-list folk blogger Andrew Rilstone “the mighty Bellowhead.” (I always thought that was John Peel and the Fall, but no matter...) So raucous and yet so directed! Hopefully they will stride a Brighton stage sometime again soon.

Micachu perform Cornelius Cardew
July 2010

Somehow this one slipped me by! Michachu (aka Mica Levy) performing Cornelius Cardew’s ’Treatise’ as part of the Soundwaves festival. Alas the clip is little more than a minute long!

Nina Nastasia
31st May 2010, The Freebutt

I couldn’t make this night at the (now sadly lamented) Free Butt, though I did try and see her more recently. An icy night when the roads had been closed most of the day, I made my way there over treacherous underfootness to find it was unsurprisingly cancelled and not a single punter in the bar. I did see her at the ‘Homefires’ multi-headliner night back in ’07 where she mostly just seemed nervous. But here she’s at the height of her powers. If this version of (not the Beatles’) ’Cry Baby Cry’ doesn’t do for you what it says on the lid, I fear for your heart and suspect you of being a robot in human guise.

Tunng
15th May 2010, Komedia

I love the slightly twisted psych-folk of Tunng. Yet, though they seem to play down here a bit, beyond a short set at the Loop festival, I always seem to miss them. Not great sound quality on this one, but it is the very track which got me into them. (After I heard it on the Festive Fifty, many moons ago.)

The Fall
9th May 2010, The Concorde

Time was, I wouldn’t have missed a Fall gig had I been on my deathbed. But, truth to tell, I don’t normally bother going to see them now. Once they were so relentlessly, insistently together it was almost frightening. Later gigs can be strange, hit-and-miss affairs, constantly see-sawing between nailing it and bashing thumbs. (Depending upon the mood and alcohol consumption of the cantankerous Smith. And I’d guess his stated antipathy to Brighton doesn’t help.) From the clips, this night seems no exception. But when they’re on it they’re still on it! This is a rare re-tread of an early number, and virtually Smith’s signature tune. “When I am dead and gone, my vibrations will live on...”

Show of Hands
Komedia, April 2010

More of the above! As even I was able to see, once I’d finally caught up with them, Show of Hands are primarily a live band. The idea that folk music means wan warblings about May Queens, or school-assembly recitals gets unceremonially trampled in this charge-through of ‘Keys of Canterbury.’

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra 27th March 2010, St. George’s Church

Actually I saw them a few years before in this very venue and they did this very number! But I’d happily have seen them again. Last time they sang a ‘clean’ version and Efrim confessed he’d been worried about swearing the whole time. Maybe there’s now a trendy vicar in charge, because this time they did the unexpurgated version. Be warned, kids!

The band commented “AA meetings and gymnastic classes in the basement, and a picture of jesus hung dangled above the stage, blood from his wrists pouring out on us. too much. we could have done better by them i think, but church-gigs are an awkward thing- uncomfortable as those fucking pews.” But to my ears those harmonies work splendidly in the cavernous Church.

Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra
10th March 2010, Brighton Dome

Alas I just couldn’t cobble together the cash for this, no matter how many old jeans pockets I rummaged through. But word was that ex-Special Jerry Dammers’ tribute to the “cosmic jazz” of Sun Ra was quite splendid stuff! The band trooped off stage through the audience, playing all the while, then served up this impromptu finale in the bar area afterwards.

Coming soon! 2009 back to (yes, really) 1974

ENGLISH JOURNEY RE-IMAGINED/ SILVER APPLES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES STAY CULTISH)

2011-11-14T17:34:00.004Z

See here for other recent cult-event experiences

ENGLISH JOURNEY: RE-IMAGINED

Barbican, London, 22nd Oct

... in which Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and assorted folks attempted to evoke the spirit of the English landscape in a multi-media extravaganza involving readings, music and visuals.

As which many of these things, I suspect we English came to be reacquainted with ourselves via an imported idea. It was some time after American writer Greil Marcus coined the phrase “old weird America” that we finally noticed we sat atop an England still older and still weirder. Perhaps we’re finally catching up. Recent genres such as folktronica feel almost explicably about coming to terms with it.

But coming face-to-face with it still feel strange and unsettling. This is exemplified when, during an instrumental piece, a black-faced Mummers takes to the stage. He dances, but in an oddly automated way, as if zombified, a disinterred corpse. Coming to a halt well before the music he stands stock still, facing out at the audience, his very existence almost a confrontation. The relative you wanted locked away.

Of course the point of multi-media events is to create a synergy of all their elements, where they all gang up on your senses to the point where you can no longer tell them apart.

In all honesty, I am not sure how well that worked here.

This is partly because the music dominated. Perhaps inevitably for, in an evening designed to evoke, music has something of a headstart. As Tolstoy said, “music is a short-cut to emotion”, working it’s way upon you while words are still assembling their argument. But also, perhaps the music just worked better. Folk instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy were rendered unfamiliar. But most dominant was the percussion. Not least because it was too loud to miss, but it also fittingly employed actual objects such as pebbles. I’ve often wondered if something animist lay in the heart of music concrete, as if all objects have a spirit and music’s purpose is to release it. The music here felt part-predicated on that idea.

(Perhaps ironically that I realised afterwards that my ear had made the key evoker of Englishness someone German!, FM Enheit, aka Mufty, late of notorious metal-bashers Einsturzende Neubaten. Still, I suppose we both inherit the Romantic tradition!)

Meanwhile, as the musicians were bringing pieces from the landscape into the auditorium, the wordsmiths were casting their nets nationwide. Many of Moore’s solo performances have been site-specific, often not in regular venues and designed around conjuring up a sense of place. This virtual tour took in Aldburgh and Newcastle as well as London, and the compacting of all these journeys into one point felt very modern - less pilgrim journey, more Google Maps.

But perhaps more to the point, the dense and allusive style of Sinclair and Moore was an odd fit for a live event. It’s like taking a document with lots of hyper-links, then having it read it out loud in the town square. You kept wanting to pause it to follow up some of those links.

The reading which worked best was Moore’s, from the journal of Victorian poet John Clare (see vidclip below). Though beset by madness, Clare had left his asylum to walk to his home village, his intent to see Mary, his first wife and childhood sweetheart. So he was distraught, not only to find merely his new wife but to be told such a marriage had never been, and that anyway Mary was now dead. Although you tended to presumed the marriage was a figment of his illness (as confirmed by subsequent research), I was at the time ignorant of this – an ambiguity which probably enhanced the experience.

A recurrent theme of the night was the concept of multiple Englands, of cultural memory growing in a sedimentary fashion, each layer inscribing itself upon the one beneath. I took the marriage to Mary to be in itself a ‘folk memory’, a buried layer, a Merry England which may never have been but still cannot be dispelled.

Whether this is an insightful idea or not is in a way beside the point. The point is that it is an idea, that my mind took Clare’s simple, direct words and sparked them against themes laid down elsewhere. At other times, it was too busy playing catch-up.

You may if you wish put this down to a prejudice of mine. I tend to prefer art which is a kind of collage, which takes simple elements and spins them into more resonant combinations. Moore was for many years the apple of my comic-reading eye, but the dense prose he can go in for, and the increasingly citational basis of his writing... that’s not really for me.

Try the podcast

SILVER APPLES

Coalition, Brighton, 28th Oct

A trendy young clubber joined the post-show toilet queue, grinning ear to ear. “And what are most 71 year olds doing tonight?” he asked, addressing no-one and everyone simultaneously. “Having a fish supper and watching some telly?” Indeed it seems worth remarking on, when music so out-there has come from someone looking every inch a retired financial advisor. (When told from the audience “you’re beautiful” our star turn quickly corrects the notion – “no I ain’t!” “I look in the mirror”, he explained, smile exacerbating the wrinkles.)

I’ll confess upfront to previously only knowing Silver Apples by reputation. That reputation is pretty much as the Stooges of electronica, pioneering a sound which all about them thought folly - then splitting before it all took off. Main man Simeon built his own kit out of oscillators, junk and the spirit of discovery, alienating even his own band who (all bar the drummer) walked out on him. He just built more switches. The first album came out in 1968, ahead even of anything in the German electronic scene.

He has a weak singing voice, true, but that just throws the focus onto the music. It’s not so much like looking at a template or prototype, it’s more akin to a stem cell dividing. Simeon didn’t pioneer a sound so much as an approach, different tracks point in very different directions indeed. You hear the roots of electro-pop, minimalist proto-techno and quite abstract instrumentals, all jumbled together.

In fact those differences are paraded almost willfully. The gig seems sequenced by i-pod shuffle, jumping from metronomic beats to abstract blurts to semi-songs and back again. I couldn’t quite decide whether that aided or abetted proceedings. Certainly it made everything seem alive with possibility. (Simeon cheerily explained his un-upgraded kit was “still a mystery to me”.) But some transitions were quite jarring. (To see what I mean try following the links from the YouTube clip, several tracks from the night have been uploaded.)

You get this strange displacement activity in venues nowadays, now the lucre has moved from live music to clubs. Gigs now start strangely early, so a club night can be slotted in after they finish. I’ve no idea what kind of a night went on at Coalition after we left, but it’s hard to believe it’s not indebted to Simeon in some way. Yet (lads in toilet queues notwithstanding) I expect the two audiences overlapped scarcely at all.

Mostly however the seafront venue started to remind me of the original Zap Club, which I’d attend on first arriving in Brighton in the mid-Eighties. ‘Alternative’ then was a more nebulous term, less a marketing tag and more a territory to explore. (Though thankfully Coalitions’ ceiling is less likely to drip into your beer.)

Certainly what appeals is the way the sound remains unupdated, like it’s emitting from musical Babbage Engines. Vintage cars are always more appealing than contemporary ones, precisely because they’re less smooth running, more likely to crank and belch gas. Like a lot of music, for it to feel like its working it has to feel like it’s barely working, for only then do you sense you’re in on something special.

And yet don’t we have quite a contradictory reaction to electronica? We tend to hail the pioneering days of backroom boffins armed with soldering irons, before rich kids could just buy some kit off the shelf and elbow in. Yet we also praise it for democratising music, rescuing people from having to devote months to mastering archaic instruments. (There’s the famous quote from Alvin Lucier, that electronics should liberate music the way the instant camera liberated photography.)

But perhaps those seemingly contradictory arguments can actually combine. Perhaps the point of Silver Apples isn’t that it happened at the beginning but that it hit a kind of goldilocks ‘just right’ point, where you needed neither a pedigree in music nor degree in electronic engineering – when, given enough attitude, the gifted amateur could take the stage. In fact it worked so well that, over forty years later, he can still be there...

Coming Soon! Beyond even culty...

JULIAN COPE/ PETER GABRIEL (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GET CULTISH)

2011-11-11T16:44:00.005Z

JULIAN COPE

Concorde, Brighton, 18th Oct

“I was thrown out of the crib into the snow
I was born to entertain so here I go”

How do you define a cult act? Well, when a frontman promises “near-hit after near-hit, plus a few obscure B-sides and unreleased stuff” and receives an uproarious cheer... that’s a pretty good sign. (The frontman being the only man on stage might be construed as another clue.) It was perhaps a peculiarity of the early Eighties that so many chart-topping pop stars became cult acts shortly after. But of course most succumbed to the lure of reforming. Even Howard Devoto reformed Magazine, (though he baulked at rejoining the Buzzcocks). Beyond Cope, it may only be Morrissey and Paul Weller who have resisted.

Yet Cope stands steadfast even in that select company. You would guess that most of Morrissey’s cult fans would be secretly delighted were the Smiths to reform. Yet stock in Cope’s original outfit the Teardrop Explodes has if anything gone down in the intervening years. Those that still think of Cope tend to think higher of him now, that he got better as he got weirder. (For example, I think that.)

Ironic then, that this must be the most Teardrop-derived set I’ve seen him do! Admittedly, most of these come from their second album. (Which in retrospect, along with his first solo work, seems transitional to his solo years proper.) His haunting version of the Teardrops track ’The Great Dominions’ was a particular highlight. (Shown below, in Brighton but from his previous visit.)

In point of fact, there’s very few new songs. There’s a very Fugs-influenced drum-basher which rails against Cromwell. (A protest song about Cromwell is surely something only Cope would try to do and only Cope would get away with.) That may have been it! Instead he tells us about his forthcoming book about the prophets. (“Messed-up dudes”, to a man, so we hear.) A friend suggests the gig’s whole purpose may be that the book advance is now all spent. But it was still a worthwhile night.

Cult appeal may lie in seeing someone stride like a star in a small room, interact with his audience, extemporise, change his mind. Which is actually something that suits Cope down to the ground. As I’ve argued before, the very purpose of the rock star is to be saviour and screw-up, tragic hero and clown, all simultaneously. I quoted John Lennon: “part of me thinks I’m a loser. The other that I’m Christ Almighty.”

But I may as well have used the quote from ’Las Vegas Basement’ above, for Cope may be the epitome of this more than any other man. He has said himself, “What I'm trying to do is strike a balance between triteness and greatness.” In his leathers and cap, he looks simultaneously like a rock star on a cover shoot and someone on their way to a fancy dress party. There’s lots of laughter, yet any with-him vs. at-him distinction soon erodes.

Why should Cope epitomise those early Eighties era so well, perhaps even better than Weller or Morrissey? Punk had still believed it could act as a radical and transformative force, an idea soon lost to musical commodification. Early Eighties types could still take to the Top Of the Pops studio yet still feel like musical outsiders. Pretty soon after that, you were asked to choose.

I will admit to slightly mixed feelings about the solo shtick. A song like ’Great Dominions’ benefits from the spotlight intimacy, but the set as a whole might gain something in variety were the occasional extra hand aboard. Cope’s appeal, after all, isn’t as a singer or player. In fact, what he’s really good at is being Julian Cope. I reckon he wouldn’t lose much of that in a crowd.

But don’t expect any objective assessments from me. I found myself smitten many years ago. As, I would guess, was everyone else here...

PETER GABRIEL

With the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Mermaid Theatre, London, 19th Oct ...oh, okay, I only heard this one on the radio!

Peter Gabriel rediscovers his back catalogue with the assistance of symphony orchestra... no, thankfully, not what you’re thinking. Of course we have Simon Reynolds to tell us that music has become too self-referential and backward-looking of late. But worse, when singers use orchestras they’re not normally interested in using the orchestra. The orchestra is just like the stretch limo that takes them to their award ceremonies, it’s not about taking them any better or any differently. It’s merely musical bling (except perhaps for that musical part). Barely altered arrangements wrap themselves round a saccharine approach to melody, a regressive attitude even compared to the things Stravinsky was doing with orchestras more than a century ago.

But here, take for example ’Rhythm of the Heat’ (see vidclip). After the final line (“the rhythm has my soul”), the recorded version breaks into a frenzy of African drumming. This version neither emulates nor diminishes that but strikes off somewhere new, a cacophonous cross-currents of lines, a veritable jungle of sound. (It sounds almost like Stravinsky now I come to think of it, but at least that takes us within the last century.)

Perhaps we should have guessed we were in for something better than nostalgia given a gimmick. Gabriel is not one for looking back, pretty much eschewing his back catalogue with Genesis from the day he left the band. So it may be significant that the only track from the first two solo albums, his first single ’Solsbury Hill’, is the only significant mis-step. It’s one song which simply isn’t suited to being dressed up in orchestration, it pretty much is the simple flute line and spirit of jaunty innocence. Gabriel, I would guess, felt obliged to include his hit.

Coming Soon! More of this sort of thing...

ELIZA CARTHY/ JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTER BAND/ LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO FOLKY)

2011-11-08T13:24:00.004Z

ELIZA CARTHY

Ropetackle Centre, Shoreham, 12th Oct

I’d only seen Eliza Carthy once before, some three years ago, at the Daughters of Albion night. Though for some reason I don’t seem to have mentioned her at all in my write-up, she made an impression on me – a wild card, leaping on stage and stirring things up with her rousing fiddle.

So, while the Ropetackle Centre in Shoreham is perhaps not the rockiest of venues (and rarely gets confused with the ABC No Rio), I was initially surprised by the sound of this set. It was all very songwritery, the words witty and urbane, the music more notable for nice arrangements than foot-stompin’ tunes. It all felt strangely un-folky, with (in perhaps the biggest surprise) Eliza playing very little of her trademark fiddle.

I may have something of an agenda here. When music is raw and raucous, people tend to look for a black influence. And of course much great music has come from exactly this influence. But, beyond all the prinnying about the happy past, folk gives us a reservoir of raucousness beneath our feet.

Equally, I may have simply been confounded by my own expectations. (For all I know she has sounded like that on record all along, with the last time I saw her the exception to the rule.) I did find myself getting into it more as it went along – to the point where the very final track, ’Thursday’, I liked a great deal (check vidclip). That may be partly because it is built around a simple and effective tune, rather than a fancy arrangement looking for a home.

But also it made respective sense of (if such there be) her change in musical direction. Rather than hiding or excusing away the mundanity of a middle-aged life, it instead finds a poignancy in a mundane situation. Having become confused about the day, she believes she has more time at home with the family, and doesn’t have to take to the road. It’s rather like Joni Mitchell’s ’Chinese Cafe’ upside-down, rather than reflecting on the troubles of adapting to middle-aged life it struggles to raise itself out of them. (“The baby she distrusts my suitcase/ So I put it away in a safe place.”) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life is too short to waste on trying to recapture your youth.

I wondered if that song was the key to it all, and if I could hear the rest of the set again I would glom on to it. But alas live sets cannot be replayed, and instead I was on a bus taking a bizarrely circuitous route back to Brighton...

JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTERBAND

St. George’s Church, Brighton, 27th Oct

’Freedom and Rain’, the 1990 collaboration between June Tabor and the Oysterband is of course a classic album, rated both by folk fan and not. Yet of course after it the two went their own ways and, having missed the moment, there was no way to see them again. Until twenty-one years later, when they reunite for a successor (‘Ragged Kingdom’) and... yes, really!!!... embark on a tour which takes in Brighton.

Judging by this night, the new album draws from more contemporary styles. It’s predecessor included contemporary songs, true, but they generally already came in folk styles. (For example Shane McGowan’s ’Lullabye of London’.) This night featured versions of more modern-sounding numbers, including PJ Harvey’s ’There Was My Veil’ and even Jefferson Airplane’s ’White Rabbit’. (Though the latter doesn’t seem to be on the album.)

As I’ve said before, Tabor must surely be one of our finest folk singers. Her voice is so full of feeling, yet so free of affectations or showy flourishes. Some attendees baulked then when Oysterband frontman John Jones took over a fair portion of the singing. (As Tabor plays no instruments, she’d then slip off to the side of the stage.) Unfamiliar with the band beyond this collaboration, I couldn’t say whether these were tracks from the new album or band classics enlisted to fill up the set. I suppose time will tell.

Personally, I found myself enjoying these numbers enough. The only parts which didn’t work so well for me were when Jones and Tabor traded vocals (such as their cover of ’Love Will Tear Us Apart’), which didn’t seem to marry so well.

Naturally we all focus on the vocals, but seeing the band live I wondered if the drumming was just as integral to the sound. It’s not rock’s regimented “factory beat” which Matt Groening has railed against, more a series of circular rolls and rhythms which stop the sound slipping into lockstep. Check them out in the vidclip below. Ironically, I noticed this on the military-themed opening number, ’The Bonny Bunch of Roses’. (So different to the Fairport Convention version that it took me a while to recognise it as the same song.)

If I had one complaint, it might be the choice of venue. The natural acoustics and size-defying intimate feel of St. George’s Church might have been better suited to a solo, acoustic Tabor. A standing venue, with the standard brightly-lit stage, might have served this night better. But still, a combination I never hoped to see, armed with brand new material... I simply would not have missed this one.

This is from the first reunion at the Roundhouse last year, performing ’All Tomorrow’s Parties.’

LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES

Dome Theatre, Brighton, 1st Nov

Thirty singers, all unmicrophoned, lined before a plain background in bright traditional dresses, colour-coded for their section in the harmonies, looking like pastel crayons in the box. The image is bold and simple yet striking and containing variety – the perfect visual correlative of the sound.

Though I first heard them during their Eighties popularity and have music by them at home, it’s not until now that I notice something quite fundamental about them. As you most probably don’t remember at all, a recent installation led me to discover the Renaissance music of Thomas Tallis. Having then found a Tallis LP in a charity shop, I had been playing it recently and (as you are supposed to) noticing the intricacies of the vocal lines. Yet the lines here are no less intricate, it’s merely the harmonies sounding so... well, harmonious that allows you to miss that.

However, if the music rewards attention it doesn’t necessarily encourage it. Perhaps it’s the foreign language, perhaps the relative shortness of the pieces (some stopping just as they seemed to be getting going), perhaps just something in the style, but it somehow becomes rather chill-out. It’s like trancing out to someone’s mellifluous voice, then only noticing as they stopped speaking that they could have been saying something interesting. (A friend said he found the same thing, so it wasn’t just the mood I was in.) In a way this is odd because the successions of held notes on first impression sound rich and resounding. I am not entirely sure whether this is a disadvantage or not. Perhaps folk music should sound simple and heartfelt, and disguise its sophistication in smocks.

Coming soon! Gig-going gets culty...

DOCTOR WHO: THE (NOT-SO) SPECIALS

2011-11-02T19:29:00.003Z

(aka ‘Who’ fan in obsessive behaviour shock)

Planning to create a special one-stop page for all my ’Doctor Who’ reviews, (which in fact lies here), I came across something I’d started then forgotten – reviews of the ‘specials’ which finished David Tennant’s run. Though I’m fairly sure I lost enthusiasm for them originally through the ‘specials’ not actually being very... well special, I decided to polish up and post them anyway. This is part of my idle fancy that I might one day have a comprehensive list of ’Who’ storylines covered. I haven’t re-watched any of the episodes (which I don’t currently have any access to), so they are slighter pieces than normal. As they date from some time ago, I’ve given them ’Friends’ style subheads as a memory jogger.

I did think of saving this to post in the ‘timey wimey’ hour when the clocks go back, until it occurred to me that saying that was easier than doing it yet had a similar result.

’THE NEXT DOCTOR’

(aka ‘The one where the Cybermen go Victoriana Cyberpunk and David Morrissey plays the Doctor who isn’t the Doctor’)

I think I probably enjoyed this one more than the average fan. (In fact for some reason I’ve tended to like ’New Who’s Cybermen episodes more than the average fan.) Maybe I just liked the underbelly of Victoriana being broadcast on Christmas Day.

I wasn’t even bothered by David Morrissey so obviously not being the Doctor from the off. (Or from earlier. It was really given away in the trailers, by showing off his conventionally heroic personality. Even when fools don’t know what to do with the Doctor they don’t make him conventionally heroic. Instead they give him question-mark lapels.)

But did it have to assert so vehemently that this Doctor is the actual Doctor? Couldn’t it at least have flirted with the idea that anyone who wants to be the Doctor can be? (At least, you know, sort of.) The invitation in a character like Rose is that you can be a shop girl one week and sailing the universe the next. Does that have to stop dead at the companion? Does copying the Doctor inherently involve a cargo cult mentality?

It professionalises a character whose appeal rests so much on his gifted amateurism. Worse, it shifts the role of heroes in stories from inspiration to delegation. And it renders almost meaningless all those big-up speeches about how much the Doctor values humans. ...actually, if it’s going to stop those irksome audience backslaps perhaps its not so bad after all. Okay, forget I said anything...

’PLANET OF THE DEAD’

(aka ‘the one which has flies drawn to it for some unaccountable reason’)

A London bus, with its vivid colour coding, marooned in the desert is a strong image. Not necessarily a different image from the Tardis being anywhere at all, but strong nonetheless. So enjoy it, because unfortunately that’s all this least-special of all the specials has to offer.

Ripping off films is fine, in fact its virtually a ’Who’ tradition. But simultaneously ripping off ’Flight Of the Phoenix’ and a caper movie is simply dumb. Unlike the bus in the desert, it’s not an interesting juxtaposition but an oil-and-water clash. Caper movies have an almost de rigueur gravity-defying scene, normally where the fabled jewel is nicked despite the laser wires, and in fact that’s exactly what we get here. ’Flight of the Phoenix’, conversely, is precisely about the effects of gravity. It’s set in a world of real physical rules, it closes in on the sweat of people’s brows, on ropes fraying with strain.

One suggested improvement - Lady Christine’s stolen cup was made from a rare metal from a meteorite, and is what the aliens were after (rather than the Triotian MacGuffins). She ends up having to give up her precious booty to the Doctor, as it’s unique properties make it essential to their escape.

Okay then, two. Enough of these info-dump psychics. Carmen was the most egregious one yet. Do London buses usually have a resident medium on board? Wouldn’t a cleaner or call centre worker be more common? And her powers played no part in the story, just ostentatiously foreshadowed a later one. Why not just have a telegram arrive from the scriptwriter? “Doctor in peril. Stop. Foreshadowing. Stop. See episode after next. Stop.”

’WATERS OF MARS’

(aka ‘the one with a base under siege, soggy zombies and where the Time Lord Victorious is wrong’)

Despite the generic plotline, this one nearly gets away with it, through a combination of speed and style. Two scenes stand out. After the Doctor has refused to help he stands still in the airlock as the chaos is unleashed behind him in the control room. This plays the normally frenetic Tennant against type, the stillness in the middle of all the noise shouts louder.

And yet there’s still something very New Who about this moment. Not only do we know full well he will turn and intervene, that this is just Campbell’s Refusal of the Quest from Screenwriting Basic. But there’s also the whole high-sounding business of “some fixed points in time” is just an excuse to have it both ways – moments can be decreed ‘fixed’ or ‘unfixed’ as is convenient. In short, this moment isn’t being milked for its emotional weight but the very reverse – the emotional weight is found a useful hook where it can be hung.

The coda scene (with the ‘Time Lord Victorious’) admittedly goes some way to remedying that. (Also, as we think the first scene was our statutory twist, we’re not expecting another wringer.) Of course it refers back to ’Voyage of the Damned’, with Mr. Copper’s line “if you could decide who lives and dies, that would make you a monster.” (Somewhat presented as A Significant Line at the time, but at least not delivered by another bloody psychic.)

’THE END OF TIME’ (Parts 1 + 2)

(aka ‘the one where Russell T Davies started writing more like Russell T Davies than we had previously thought Russell T Davies capable’)

More than anything else in ’New Who’, this two parter succumbed to the lure of ’The Matrix’, throwing lots of crazy-sounding concepts and wild images at the

screen in such a hectic way that you don't really notice their not

joining up. In a way it was all summed up by an early line - "we see so much yet understand so little."The whole Donna subplot, for example, was pretty much superfluous.

At the same time, the Master replacing everyone with himself is Davies’ writing par excellence. It’s not just a dramatic cliffhanger, it’s quite a neat image of megalomania that he would literally rework every other person into his image. I guess the general idea is to establish the two rival kinds of megalomania, the Master wanting dominion and the Time Lords deciding to destroy what they couldn't control. But in terms of story logic it doesn't really make much sense - how exactly does it aid him, more than would taking over everybody?

And once he’s stuck himself with that image, Davies, isn’t sure what to do with it – and in fact just reverses straight out again. The Master doesn't know the guard's been replaced when the guard is him? That'd take a fairly hefty no-prize to explain!

In general, having more developed three-dimensional characters, like a Doctor who can cry at the idea of his forthcoming death, fits poorly with "in one bound he was free"-style get-outs. ’The Matrix’ has ciphers for characters and intends nothing else. Can you ask the audience to buy into those emotional payoffs, then say “oh, it’s only sci fi, of course lots of it doesn’t make much sense”? Davies seems confused about what kind of thing he’s writing at quite a fundamental level.

But one thing which annoyed me was the theme of the Doctor's own megalomania, so heavily foreshadowed in ’Waters of Mars’, suddenly being so absent. Of course the Time Lord Victorious gets projected onto the Master, as the Doctor’s shadow. But it all feels like a cop-out from the idea that the Doctor himself might go baaaad. However, it is to some degree brought back in the end, and brought back fairly well, when the Doctor must sacrifice himself for the “not very important” Wilf.

VISUAL ART REVIEWS PAGE

2011-10-13T19:36:00.002+01:00

Reader please note I have added a page which gathers links to my visual art reviews in one handy go-to place.

(I may do a similar thing for my 'Doctor Who' reviews if I find the time...)

SON OF THE RETURN OF ‘DOCTOR WHO AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND’

2011-10-09T18:28:00.007+01:00

Previously on ‘Lucid Frenzy’, in a two-part piece, I tried to transcribe what I saw as the essence of ’Doctor Who’ and ascertain how well the revival was preserving and updating that essence. As the title might suggest, this looked into the political philosophy of the show, but of course that wasn’t the piece’s raison d’etre.

Except this time it is. No more sitting on the fence. The Doctor has probably hung around England long enough now to acquire voting rights, so it’s time to pin down just where he pins his rosettes. (Just in case anyone ever figures which constituency the Tardis should be counted in.)

“I think that I shall not listen to reason.”

- Madame du Pompadour

Let’s start with ’Girl in the Fireplace’, if for no other reason than it lets me use this line – what was it that made those clockwork robots tick? They not only had mechanisms in the place of brains, they were forever attempting to make the organic into components of the machine - eyeballs into spy cameras and so on.

Of course they turned up during the Ancien Regime for a reason. They came to represent the imagination-deficient revolutionaries, the uprising of shopkeepers who, lacking the aristocratic grandeur of imagination, take everything literally – “thickies from thick-town.” In this literal-mindedness, they attempt to remove the head of the Madame de Pompadour, gormlessly unaware that her head was only ever symbolically important.

The Doctor, meanwhile, falls in love with that head, countering their clockwork noggins with the beating of both hearts. He was never more the dashing romantic hero (well at least not since ’The Christmas Invasion’), charging through mirrors on horseback and risking all to save her.

And she is saved – only to die anyway. Rescued from the robot’s beheading she simply dies of old age, and their life together can never be. We’re reminded that a whole history dies with her. The bureaucrats the Doctor forever encounters, the bean-counters and rule-followers who disbelieve his tales and clog his path, these analogues of the clockwork robots come to inherit the world she leaves behind. It’s a pessimistic view of history, in which the present is only a grey delineated sequel to the more colourful carefree past. It’s a fantastic episode, it topped polls and won awards. It’s also almost the very definition of reactionary.

So big it doesn't need a name; just a great big ‘the.’”

- The Doctor, ’Silence in the Library’

Of course it’s absolutely in character for the Doctor to both choose love over operating system, and choose a mate within class confines. He is full of aristocratic signifiers – titles instead of names (the Doctor, Time Lord), costumes instead of clothes, has neither need of nor interest in money or work, and above all inhabits an air of mystery which suffuses his ‘specialness.’ The Doctor first visited the French Revolution in his first ever season, in ’The Reign of Terror’, and he took the aristos’ side then as well.

But then that’s hardly the sort of thing we should be surprised about. We’re talking a long-running prestige BBC drama, not some agitprop theatre company operating above a pub in Haringey. The BBC is government-funded, so what to expect from them except the art of the state?

But let’s look at it from a different angle...

“Everybody lives! Just this once! Everybody lives!”

- The Doctor

’The Empty Child’ was from the previous season to ’Girl in the Fireplace’, when Christopher Eccleston was still the Doctor. He stumbles upon a collectivised child group stealing a slap-up feed from a hoarding nuclear family, who have been cheating on the rations. Enthused he cries “I’m not sure whether it’s Marxism in action or a West End musical!” (Though even here the group is notably a pretend family, with the mother figure Nancy at the head, insisting upon table matters.)

Yet beyond that family there are no real villains. Problems arise from good intentions misdirected, which the Doctor is called upon to re-route. This applies not just to the nanobots, who are only trying to fix up the injured, but also to Nancy. Unable to care for her own child, born out of wedlock, she sublimates this urge into looking after the gang of street urchins. To quote myself (well no-one else does)...

“Evil in [the Doctor’s] universe tends to be less an absolute force and more a product of the misguided or misunderstood. It’s less about kicking bad guys and more about healing the sick. In ‘The Empty Child’, for example, the malevolent monster disguised as a child crying for his mummy turns out to be nothing other than a child crying for his mummy.”

This time the future is coming up roses. Almost the last line is the Doctor calling “Don’t forget the Welfare State!” Wars will cease, poverty be reduced and single mothers given public assistance not ostracisation. (“Twenty years to pop music! You’re gonna love it!”) It’s almost the polar opposite of the previous story.

Okay, but what do you expect? A long-running series stretching back to the early Sixties, invented by committee, written in relay... that’s scarcely a recipe for consistency, is it? Yet, as you’ve probably guessed if you didn’t already know, both storylines actually came from the same author – Steven Moffat. What gives? Maybe we could go for a third example from him, establish a triangulation point to try and sort this sorry mess out.

“This dream must end, this world must know,
We all depend on the beast below”

’The Beast Below’ is perhaps Moffat’s most explicitly political storyline so far, and is a much closer successor to ”The Empty Child’. With the absence of anything resembling a West End musical, we are forced to conclude it must be Marxism in action. (I am only half-joking there.)

Society ‘above’ is predicated on both repression, and on repressing the very knowledge of that repression - which itself sends shock-waves through everything. The ‘beast below’ on which we all depend is the slave subject of imperialism, the sweatshop workers who clothe us, the migrant labourers who put food on our plates even as we grumble about them. The whole notion of England, pulled from its white cliffs and green fields, as a city thrusting itself through space, powered by the labour of others reeks of colonialism. (Even if we weren’t tipped off by our intruders being “Scottish.”)

Of course I was half-joking when I said it was Marxist. As in ’The Empty Child’, everyone really wanted what was best for everyone else. Problems can be solved by a push of a button rather than a messy revolution, and life goes on much as before only more nicely. (If I was that space whale who’d been tortured for decades after turning up just to help out, I might be a bit miffed about the whole thing.) It might make an interesting comparison to the SF classic ’Metropolis’ and it’s call for “a mediator between head and hand.” But it’s clearly packing an inclusive, socially progressive message. Two onto one, Moffat’s a liberal, Job done. We even got to finish early.

And yet... what about the character Liz10, who later turns out to be Queen Elizabeth 10th? She not only becomes their key ally in fixing the problem. It’s notable what a Queenly role she plays within the storyline, she is simultaneously above her subjects and represents them. Her button is simultaneously the same as everyone else’s and vital. First it appears the truth had been kept from her, that her power is actually only symbolic. Then it transpires she is as in denial of that truth as anyone else – and has held the power to fix up everything all along.

Her character is a clutch of contradictory signifiers; regal, commanding, decisive, while at the same time black and street-talking. (“I’m the bloody Queen, mate. Basically, I rule.”) Which makes her an interesting companion for the Doctor - who himself epitomises a similar set of contradictions, aristocratic saviour and social leveller.

As George Orwell once said of himself, the Doctor “preserves the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible.” Of course his most regular foe was always the Master, a fellow Time Lord. But this is even truer of the revived show. Three times now the enemy have been not a species but a family group who felt they should be running things (‘Aliens of London’, ‘Family of Blood’ and ‘Vampires in Venice.’) And the Time Lords themselves are seen in a schizo, polarised way, either a sober, regulating force who keep us from the abyss (’Father’s Day’) or malevolently destructive megalomaniacs (’Death of a Time Lord’).

“Hang on a minute. Who put you in charge? And who in the hell are you anyway?”
“I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey... and I'm the man who's gonna save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?”
- ‘Voyage of the Damned’

Of course it would be pointless to take all the episodes in the show’s history and separate them into little lists marked ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’. Art is not about getting the right answer, and art criticism is not about accountancy. The point is that the two things are intertwined, that this is not some paradox or error on the show’s part but a reflection of the British society which spawned it.

This is enhanced by the fact that we most compare our popular culture with a New World nation – the US. In attempting to define and defend what is special about ourselves, we tend to reach to (and then rewrite) our past. But this only exacerbates a tendency that is already there. It’s something which would still be true if we compared ourselves to another West European nation. Can you imagine a French Doctor, proffering baguettes instead of jelly babies? A German Doctor? Think how smoothly that would make the Tardis run!

To dig deeper, we need to not only look at what is present but what is absent. Though there’s been two takes on the French Revolution, the show only touched on the English in a short two-parter transmitted a decade into the show’s history. This is indicative of our culture in general, the English Revolution is not held as a totemic event the way the French one is across the water. There is no English Bastille Day. It is not held up even by the mercantile class who it took to power, even under the cosier rebranded name the English Civil War.

Arriving much earlier than the French, this event was never as root-and-branch. It’s not simply something like our monarchy being retained (at least after a brief inter-regnum), for even other European countries with monarchies do not match ours for status or grandeur. Aristos retained a stronger symbolic importance in no small part because they retained their actual existence, heads attached to shoulders and everything.

But there’s another, more recent factor. Britain escaped much of the social turmoil that swept the continent in the early Twentieth Century, not just the great wars but the worker’s movements. As well as no Bastille Day, we have no May 1968.

So, from the anti-French antics of the Scarlet Pimpernel through to today, we retained our fondness for aristocratic heroes. And it must be admitted that, functionally, toffs make for effective heroes. An aristo is not promoted according to merit, his superiority is held to be inherent and self-evident. He is constrained from acting out his will by no day-job. (There’s a strong overlap with the emblematic hero, a point I argued here.)

Plus there’s a twist. Since the medieval Robin Hood ballads had noble origins grafted onto them, the aristocratic hero has tended to be an outlaw. Created in the era of the Welfare State, the Doctor was first an exile then the only one left. This threw the aristo off his antique furniture and into the maelstrom, like Robinson Crusoe forced by events to reassert his essential superiority.

”Planet Earth. This is where I was born. And this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.”

Rose, ’Army of Ghosts’

Moreover, an aristo who disdains social dues might even one day brefriend you, and take you on a life of adventure away from clocking-in cards. This was true of the Doctor even during the ban on hankey-pankey in the Tardis, but is out in the open now. The new Doctor’s companions have all been taken away from jobs rather than careers, a shop worker, an office temp, a kissogram. (Martha, true, was a trainee Doctor. But then she was a different colour to most aristos.) A tall, dark stranger takes them away from all that.

Of course to think of the Doctor in this way is tantamount to suggesting that he occupies a fixed point in the narrative, that he merely appears mysterious to the rest of us. True, he often operates on a meta-level to the mere humans around him – possessing secret knowledge, pulling off impossible feats. But he is not and never was a short-cut to a copycat morality. He’s also prone to expressing doubts, making mistakes, even feeling regret. This departure from conventional hero status is a major attraction for the show.

Yet this apparent departure from the description actually confirms it. An aristocrat in a post-aristocrat world, he still has his privileged birth but no longer occupies the same place in that world. Stripped of his formal status, he is forced to extemporise.

Some take this character as a signifiers of a golden past where all knew their place. Others turn him into critiques of the post-war era; the target culture, the snooping, the petty regulation. Yet such characters were not a result of these divergences so much an expression of a paradox in our culture, one which expressed itself within as much as between ourselves. Popular characters like the Doctor are not offered as a solution to social concerns so much as a signifier, as a worrying-tooth which we might use to worry them through.

I ended the previous piece by quoting him saying “you need a Doctor.” But perhaps all this time he's merely been a symptom...

"NO TONGUE CAN TELL": RIP BERT JANSCH

2011-10-05T18:44:00.006+01:00

"In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin along with his sailors do dwell"

Alas news is in of the death of legendary folk guitarist and ex-Pentangle member Bert Jansch. I saw him live precisely once, after Pentangle reformed three years ago. Reports suggest his personality matched his music - he described himself as "not one for showing off", and his guitar-playing is understated and unassuming. Listen to it for thirty seconds and it can pass you by, listen to it for three minutes and it becomes transfixing.

From back in the day, Bert playing 'Rosemary Lane' solo plus the Pentangle classic 'House Carpenter'...

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG’

2011-10-04T22:55:00.002+01:00

“You could have told me all this the last time we met.”

As you’ll know if you made it through my review of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, I haven’t found it easy to write about Moffat’s recent episodes. That’s partly because I don’t find them very coherent, which makes them hard to respond to coherently. Those pre-credit sequences where we jump about all over the place, staying just long enough to take in one wild set-up before being whisked off to the next, I’m starting to think they’ve become the show in microcosm.

In fact quite a few things in the show are starting to remind me of the show. The finale of the last season, when there were no stars in the sky, I took that as a metaphor for life without wonder or imagination. Get to the finale this time (let’s forget it being chopped in two), and all I could think was “it’s not just in this episode that time never progresses.”

Because things aren’t even consistently inconsistent. It’s a strange mixture of stuff flying off in a thousand directions and a feeling we’ve all been here before. Take that oft-repeated lake in Utah and picture it on a windy day. The surface is an almost feverish succession of ideas, mad details sometimes on the screen only for a few seconds. (Pterodactyls! Dickens! Balloons!) But beneath that disturbed surface there’s no tides. We’re just cycling round the same stuff. Time is collapsing – again. The Doctor is imprisoned in a straggly beard – again. “All of history is happening at once.” Or at least the last two seasons are.

Some of this seems to be working to a purpose. Whatever reality they end up in, Rory still has to hang around hoping Amy will notice him. Some of it... well, it just feels like time’s stopped ticking.

You could of course get all zeigeisty about it. In the Hartnell era, time was one fixed point. You stood in its way at your peril. Now time is all in flux, except for the fixed points ... except they aren’t even really fixed in themselves. And inhabiting this flux is a postmodern landscape of quotes and quips. And quoted quips.

Let’s be clear, I don’t care at all about being asked to accept a poetic, squinty type of truth. If “all history is happening at once”, London would be ruled not just by Romans but by Normans, and the Daleks of 2150, all in one big logjam of order-giving. Except that wouldn’t have many practical consequences because without time no-one would be able to move. That matters not one whit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if that sort of thing bothers you, then this sort of thing will bother you.

But on a bigger level - this plotline we’ve been following since ‘Silence in the Library’ hoping for resolution, did it really make much sense? Some of the answers were precisely what we guessed all along, while others were... well, what exactly? We’re told (and have it repeated here) “the Silence is not a species. It is a religious order.” But then why do they look so much like a species? We’re told Madame Kovarian is one of their “human servants”, and she’s offed in the classic Who tradition of collaborators who outlive their usefulness, so she’s presumably not in on the order. The Headless Monks look pretty much like a religious order, but what’s their connection to all this anyway? Are they all acting from their own idea of high motives, trying to defend reality by stopping the question being asked? If it was all about the Doctor, why were they hanging about the whole of Earth for so long anyway?

I suspect we’re supposed to be distracted from those unanswered questions by the raising of new ones, “the fields of Trenzelor” or whatever it was. I worried before about the show being “lost in Lostness.” I don’t have to worry any more about that coming. It’s already happened. Its rules are hasty rush and perpetual deferment. Watching it is like a donkey charging after a carrot.

Of course if you look long and deep enough you’ll find nice themes in there, as is almost always the case with Moffat. It looks like I was right about the Easter motif. (Good Friday was the date played prominently up on the screen.) The underlying plotline is reminiscent of ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, trying to step away from your destined sacrifice to just live your life, and ultimately being unable to.

Except the one doing the dodging isn’t the victim but the would-be assassin. The Doctor and River are the star-crossed lovers who cannot be apart but can never touch. He calls her the other pole and I started to think of them as the twin poles of existence, wanting to unite yet with the whole of creation being predicated on their staying apart. (I was probably getting carried away by that point.) You could have taken that core and built an episode around it, just as you could the core of ’Let’s Kill Hitler’. But it all just gets crowded out by so much other stuff. Sometimes quite cool stuff, like a room of chattering skulls. But stuff, nonetheless.

Even within all that we have problems, though. River is of course the ultimate femme fatale - only she can save the Doctor, but at the same time only she can kill him. She’s been appearing to consistently upend the Doctor’s life, most seriously not when she poisons him but when she demolishes his self-image in ‘A Good Man Goes To War.’ Yet here it’s all reversed, her role is now to big up that self-image by telling him how much the universe loves him, and her ambition is to tie the knot with the handsome hero. It’s like the dark side of her role has been hived off and handed over to Madame Kovarian, the anti-River who arches her black eyebrows and scoffs as they flirt.

Admittedly this tends to be the way of things with femme fatales. Like pirates, they’re cool figures to introduce but no-one knows much what to do with them once they’re there. And if they do go anywhere, that’s where they go – back into the dutiful spouse. (Think of the risible ending tacked onto the marvelous ‘Gilda.’)

But that criticism pales to nothing when compared to the Doctor’s death dodge, a misdirection and copout that would make Chris Claremont cringe. Robot duplicates are like something from a Fifties Superman comic. Maybe there’s some lawyer’s defence, that when we’re firmly told “that is the Doctor”, he is technically aboard the Tesselactor. (And somehow avoiding getting first zapped and then burnt.) Someone somewhere will be posting to a message board how a robot could start to regenerate.

But it makes a nonsense of the pathos of what has gone on before. “I died to save you all. But don’t worry, as it happens I slipped out the back door.” That fixed point turned out to be timey-wimey after all. And wasn’t the point that reality couldn’t cope with a fixed point being altered, not that Madame Kovarian had kitted River out in an obedient suit?

And the final question turns into a kind of metafictional gag that underlines how much this show has become about itself. It’s not the ultimate question of our universe, but it’s universe, the one implied by the title. Doctor... who? I doubt we’re supposed to care what the Doctor’s actual name is, or even imagine we might get told. It’s a signifier of the central character’s mystery.

The Doctor “stepping back into the shadows” is more interesting, however. It would have made more sense if he’d been reincarnated at the end; people still know what he looks like, don’t they? (Though the “fall of the Ninth” stuff suggests that’s all to come.) But it does suggest they intend to do more with the ‘legendary Doctor’ stuff than just raise it and return to business as usual. I’m not sure they are going anywhere with this. But it’ll be nice to have the incognito stranger replace the celebrated galactic hero for a bit. Jaded of cracks and Silence and time ending, it’s good to have one element that seems genuinely intriguing.

Moffat wasn’t always this way. ’Girl in the Fireplace’, ‘Blink’ even as recently as ’Beast Below’, all were fairly coherent, self-explanatory and self-contained single episodes. (In fact the point all this started to change was the day River showed up.) Those simple, happy days when we thought the show was some sort of modern fairy story, when horses showed up on spaceships and Amy floated from the Tardis in her nightie, where did they go?

You can almost see him taking the road of the old show, only in accelerated fashion for our broadband-speed times. Remember how that went? At first everything was stand-alone, stories only joined at the edges. Only monsters and aliens recurred, so only monsters and aliens recognised the Doctor, and that rarely counted for anything. Then we got a few through-lines thrown in. An extra inducement to keep watching, they seemed a good idea. But it’s like introducing ivy to a garden, pretty soon its erupted and tangled together and is choking everything else. It was around then that the show got cancelled.

There was a distinct jump from last season to this. Nerds of a certain age will remember scouring cheap shops for science fiction paperbacks. These would often be cheaper if they had a hole punched through them. (An accident of shipping, according to legend.) The previous season was like a science fiction anthology from such a shop, cobbled together from quite different authors. The crack was like the hole, you’d be reading one story then another and it would appear at regular intervals. But it was just an intrusion on everything around it, breaking into separate realities.

However, this season wasn’t cut from whole cloth either. Particularly in its second half, it was more like a Cubist painting; the same themes, tropes and concepts seen from a succession of new angles. I’m not quite sure why that should be. Was Moffat imposing more of a remit on his writers? Or were they becoming more accustomed to what he was after, like workers trying to second-guess and appease the boss?

So a through-line which I liked less the more dominant it became, which cast its shadow more on the incidental episodes. And yet the irony is that they came to be the episodes I liked! Last season, I favoured precisely one non-Moffat episode (‘Amy’s Choice’) and regarded the rest of them pretty much as filler. This season I only found two episodes to be filler (‘Pirates of the Hollywood Ripoff’ and ‘Son of the Lodger’, though admittedly ‘Night Terrors’; avoided the label only through judiciously applying aplomb.) This season it was non-Moffat episodes which I found the twin highlights, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’.

What they had in common was a deployment of SF tropes and tricks in order to see a known character from an unexpected direction. As such, you’d get more out of them the more of the show you’d watched. But you didn’t have to have watched the rest of the show to get them at all, the episodes were explicable within themselves. Moffat and the Ninth, I would guess, will give us one more season of all of this before ending everything again except for not really. But it’s those two episodes which signpost where the series now needs to go.