CINECITY 2007 - THE FIRST HALF

A few comments on the films I managed to catch during the first half of Brighton’s annual CineCity festival. Expect more to follow in due course…

LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, 2007)
NB Mild spoilers
Ang Lee’s latest starts out impressively as an espionage set in Japanese-occupied China, with an added theme about the impetuousness of youth. Then, just when all is looking well, it gives all that up for a kinky S&M story in the mould of 91/2 Weeks. And, as Ben Grimm was wont to say – “what a revoltin’ development that is!” What is it with art movie audiences and S&M? They way they find it simultaneously so titillatory yet so self-congratulatory audacious? It’s like having your bodice-ripping cake and eating it. But more to the point, when are they going to shut up about it?

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (William Dieterle, 1948)
It’s not giving too much away to say this has the plot of Girl in the Fireplace minus the clockwork robots. In fact, one of its weaknesses is the time it takes the protagonist to figure out the premise – clearly he doesn’t go to see many movies. With themes of impoverished artists, otherworldly muses and impossible love, it unsurprisingly became a favourite of the Surrealists. It’s perhaps not the classic that endorsement might suggest, but presents an endless array of colourful characters portrayed in exquisite black and white photography.

SACCO AND VANZETTI (Peter Miller, 2007)
A well-made documentary on the notoriously rigged trial and murd… sorry, execution of two Italian-American anarchists hauled in during 1927. While ostensibly charged with a robbery, they were clearly on trial for their politics; harangued about it during cross-questioning, and even the real culprit owning up doing nothing to stem the prosecution! However this seems to expose the chief weakness of the film – a focus on the minutiae of the case against them at the expense of any real examination of the political milieu they were part of. For one example, we’re told solidarity actions occurred for them as far away as China – yet we never stray outside the courtroom long enough to look at these in any depth. At its worst it could be accused of counterposing ‘good’ anarchists (noble innocents given to taking in stray animals) against ‘bad’ ones who post letter bombs. Maybe there are other options…

SILENT LIGHT (Reygadas, 2007)
NB Fair to middling spoilers
You couldn’t ask for a film more beautifully composed than this, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something of the emperor’s new clothes about it. A man from a conservative religious community pondering leaving his family for another woman – we naturally expect him to “follow his bliss”, right? Okay, here he doesn’t. But is there anything more here that that straightforward, almost schematic reversal of expectation? We never learn how the experience transforms their relationship, any more than we learn what was wrong with it in the first place. Ultimately the characters stay like their silent prayers – outside and beyond us.

(Expert opinion was also divided over the single magic realist movement, a pivotal turn that ain’t for spoiling here. A friend was insistent one such moment alone in a film can only ever be considered a cheat. I found myself going with it, perhaps because the whole film portrays events in such a numinous way it didn’t feel so much of a wrench.)

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS (Mungiu, 2007)
“Enjoy the film” finished the guy doing the introductions, then caught himself. “Well, that’s maybe not the term…” Indeed this bleak naturalist drama about the perils of backstreet abortions in Soviet-era Romania isn’t exactly ideal first-date material - but it is compelling viewing. Filmed in (near-on) real time and often deliberately scuppering your expectations of film narrative, it so neatly captures a sense of verite it often becomes hard to work out just where its strong style is coming from.

During post-show questioning, the introducer (a Romanian critic whose name I now embarrassingly forget) seemed to dislike comparisons to fellow Romanian Puiu’s 2005 film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, emphasising one was set during dictatorship and the other after. Nevertheless, the counterposition of the sick and fragile human against the remorseless weight of bureaucracy does seem similar to our foreigners’ eyes. In some ways what’s so horrific isn’t the travails the girls must endure but the stoic way in which they accept them – as if such is but the way of life. Let’s hope Romania can become a home to a realist cinema that’s vital rather than just worthy.

(The festival also showed Mungiu’s earlier Occident, made in 2002. Conversely this was a farce-like comedy, albeit a pretty heavily black farce. This played well with interweaving and overlapping its characters, but couldn’t really compare against its successor.)

QUINTET (Altman, 1979)
NB Proper spoilers!

Every now and again an unfairly overlooked gem is rediscovered and restored. But with increasing frequency the corpse of a turkey is dug up for another flogging. Of course Robert Altman made some great movies, but I defy anyone to spot his handiwork on this klunker. It’s most reminiscent of Zardoz (Boorman, 1974), presenting a human race laid low not by external disaster but its own feeling of ennui. It’s a film about people who have lost the will to live… and the rest of the review almost writes itself from that point.

The premise is the jaded ensemble have had nothing to do but play games for so long they have resorted to playing a killer game. Which is actually a reasonable premise, except you get neither any sense of the game’s strategy nor any reason to care much who lives or dies. In fact you end up waiting hopefully for the next bumping off, just because each one brings the end of the film closer.

Throughout I kept wondering just what the new ice age setting had to do with anything. (Admittedly it does provide the sole saving grace – some cool sets, filmed on location at Montreal’s crumbling Expo site.) The general consensus seems to be this is a Cold War metaphor. Except this ‘metaphor’ (everything’s gone cold and no-one likes each other) is absolutely unilluminating on its subject. It’s more like a pun than a metaphor, except puns are supposed to be funny.

While Zardoz is often the subject of ridicule, I must admit to a sneaky soft spot for it. It’s absurd, incoherent, gimmicky and pretentious, but with all that ceaselessly inventive. Quintet shares all its failings but develops none of its saving graces. It was best left out in the cold.

http://www.cine-city.co.uk/2007/
(Yes it’s CineCity everywhere else but Cine-city on the website… what would Super-man and Spiderman have to say?)

HERE COME THE DALEKS!

NB In a futile bid to keep things timely, I’m posting this precisely one day after the anniversary of Doctor Who’s first transmission but more importantly two days after the unfortunate death of producer Verity Lambert. I’m also writing a companion piece on early Doctor Who in general, though I wouldn’t like to promise when that might appear.
Tributes to Verity Lambert here

(Plot Spoilers: C’mon, you must know the plot of this one by now!)

Pedantic Preamble: If you’re about my age you’re probably used to this series being called 'The Dead Planet'. They didn’t give the stories titles then, Dead Planet came from the first episode. But somewhere along the way it came to be called 'The Daleks', a generic title used in precisely none of the episodes, but a convention the BBC have followed with this DVD reissue. Now we all know what a Dalek is, that’s probably come to be the more saleable title. Personally I prefer 'The Dead Planet' as it captures more of the series’ mood. But onwards…

…whatever you call it, the key is almost casually thrown away. First the Daleks tell the Doctor the Thals are post-war mutations. We immediately assume their little green fingers are crossed inside their metal casings, and what they’re telling us is porkies. But he’s later shown Thal records and it turns out they are mutations. War mutated them from aggressive brutes into blonde, noble pacifists.

The Daleks are mutated by war too, but differently - literal personifications of the bunker mentality, trapped inside metal shells which are themselves trapped inside a metal city. (In this first story, they can’t leave the city which powers them.) They spend their time spying through long range scanners, or peering paranoid at people through their eyestalks. Driven quite mad, they throw away their chance of peace and reconciliation with the Thals. (Personally I’d have tweaked the plot to have the Daleks assuming the Thals are out to betray them, and deciding to get their retaliation in first. As things stand, the Daleks have physically mutated too far, cures just poison them and so events almost drive them to confrontation.)

It’s surely no coincidence the most popular Dalek story, 'Genesis of the Daleks', returns to their wartime origins and yields an even greater literalisation of the bunker mentality. But overall this sense of the Daleks trapped in their own folly gets steadily lost. Here we not only have the famous rubber-gloved glimpse of the ‘thing’ inside the box, but Ian ‘drives’ a Dalek canister like it’s just a vehicle and they’re even compared to dodgem cars! Yet as time went on the Daleks would become their metal casings, and with it the embodiment of unadulterated evil. And absolute expressions of evil tend to the absolutely uninteresting.

But the Thals are a different kind of trapped; scarred by war they’ve retreated into a pacifist ideology. This dead planet is of course a liberal Englishmen’s metaphor for ravaged post-war Germany; the remnants of Nazism locked inside their fanaticism but the good, blonde Germans driven too good – demilitarised, reluctant to take up their role in contemporary conflicts. The Thals even have their own Neville Chamberlain, who reads peace into a piece of paper and gets exterminated for his efforts. They were even originally intended to have more Germanic sounding names such as Stohl, Vahn and Kurt but before transmission these became Temmosus, Alydon and Ganatus. (See www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/b.html) Admittedly, the change to these ‘classical’ names was probably more aimed at engendering audience sympathy than disguising this metaphor.

But there’s enough nuances to stop it getting too schematic. Despite the somewhat underwhelming ‘final battle’, the last line is a nice touch. No-one slaps Ian on the back for being right; instead they look round at the pile of corpses and lament “if there had only been some other way”. We’re reminded what the Thals have not forgotten, that it was such conflict which ravaged their planet to begin with. The series has commendably kept this insistence that victory rarely comes without a price, and a refusal to accept easy resolutions. But it’s not a note you’ll hear played often in other modern dramas. There’s a post-war bleakness to everything, which makes it bizarre to think that Terry Nation was previously known as a comedy writer. (Turning the story into a comedic matinee adventure, as the 1965 film does, is somewhat like a Shostakovich concerto being covered by a popular beat combo.)

The Daleks doesn’t just live up to its rebranded title and deliver the Doctor’s most popular foe, it’s the start of ‘proper’ Doctor Who. The opposition of bad, city-based overlords to noble simple peasants (the Thals are farmers) will recur again and again. Previously distrustful of each other, the TARDIS crew stage a mock argument, but then work together to disable their Dalek guard. Though it achieves it by Maguffins, the script doesn’t allow them to leave until they’ve healed their environment - something which would become a fundamental rule of the show.

The one exception is the Doctor himself. He’s suitably outraged at the Dalek’s amorality, even offering up the TARDIS as a bargaining counter to slow up their plans. But its still Ian who saves the day, not only teaching the Thals to fight but rescuing the Doctor and Susan. If less self-serving than previously, the Doctor is still remote and irascible. At one point his insistence on facts and logic leads him into a big argument with Susan, only reconciled by Barbara’s intervention. His curiousity drives him to trick the others into visiting the Dalek city, and his fascination with its gizmos gets him and Susan captured. (A moment played not for drama but as a fait accompli.)

Of course with deadlines then so hasty, what we see on the screen is simultaneously launch and dummy run. The Daleks had originally been intended to have grabber hand next to their exterminator, but time and budget restraints left them stuck with the now-familiar sink plunger. Somewhat hilariously, the script was obviously left unamended and we see these plungers employed for all sorts of unlikely tasks, passing bits of paper between them and – perhaps best of all – carrying trays of food. (While the film version gave them grabber hands, the series stuck with the sink plungers. The daft objects now seem so lodged in popular perception, even the souped-up Daleks in the souped-up relaunch didn’t get grabber hands – just souped-up sink plungers!)

The downside of watching this 1963 show today isn’t its cheapness, though the production values are often so shoddy as to make you laugh about loud. (Its hilarious to consider the BBC all but cancelled it at this stage because it was getting too expensive!) Perhaps this is partly down to my generation, but in my youth an appreciation of science fiction involved accepting out of necessity the hairdryer spaceships and plywood sets - as signifiers rather than the signified, triggers for your imagination. The petrified forest on the screen is just a peg to hang the petrified forest of my mind; which looks something more like Ernst’s famous surrealist painting Europe After the Rain (below), a bizarre mix of the barren with the mutated. And the Dalek city of my mind looks more like… um… a city. Similarly the science fiction I would read required a similar effort, as it tended to grand, mighty ideas delivered in the most leaden prose. It was like reading an art book which was actually full of rough sketches. (But please note this is not to entertain the notion that special effects somehow stunt the imagination. This oft-heard but absurd argument is merely a repositioning of the old saw that reading comics or watching films somehow stunt the imagination – an argument which has been defeated but regrouped many times. If anyone wants to argue that '2001' stunts the viewers’ imagination while Doc Smith’s novels enhance it, please let them go ahead.)

No, the real obstacle is in the slowness. An important plot point is told you two or sometimes three times over, and there’s so much padding that at times you feel you could watch it on fast forward and miss nothing. (The cave episode, tellingly titled The Ordeal, seems particularly endless.) Though completely different in tone (not to mention hugely inferior), the 1965 film manages to cover every major plot point here and come in at 83 minutes.

But even here it can feel like a necessary counterbalance. If these seven episodes should have been three or four, today they’d be one or (if we were really lucky) two. Of course as soon as we clap eyes on the Dalek city we know we’re going to end up there. But here there’s sufficient space where that doesn’t happen straight away, and we have time to wonder what might be in there. When Ian is punishment exterminated, he can’t walk for some time afterwards. Today he’d be either alive or dead. Somewhere between William Hartnell and David Tennant, there lies a happy medium.

That aside, this story not only kicked Doctor Who into gear. Production history tells us it was nearly shown much later in the season or not made at all… concepts which now suggest an alternate universe. It not only established much of the furniture it also enabled a series willing to tackle challenging issues, and unafraid to pretend they had easy resolutions. More importantly than inventing the pepperpot, this story set a high bar. Whenever things started to go wrong, this would tend to be the template people would look back to.

THE IMAGINED VILLAGE

Brighton Dome, Sat 17th Nov

“It’s not about authenticity, it’s about identity. I’m not interested in people listening to this record searching for authenticity. But there’s a lot of identity there… This is what I am. I’m rooted and I’m English.”
- Simon Emmerson

Now a Singing Revolution might sound the sort of thing that only the more earnest folkie would dream of, with nothing ever coming of it bar dribble in his beard. Except one actually happened less than two decades ago – in Estonia during 1988. On (I kid you not) September 11th of that year, the crowd at a big music festival collectively launched into songs banned by the Soviet rulers. The event led to street demonstrations where participants continued their songs, until (to cut a long story short) independence was won four years later.

It would be charmingly romantic to imagine that we could have so personal a relationship to English Folk, as if its tunes were woven into the fibre of our beings. But, despite Emmerson’s quote above, we can’t. Perhaps for us it feels too close to celebrating nationhood, fine if you’re Estonian but not quite the thing for one of history’s great reformed bullies. Perhaps we’ve had to contend with too much faux-rustic claptrap and TV-advert Harvest festivals. (Though of course there’s been no shortage of awful Celtic ‘music’ either.) More likely there’s been some deathly combination of the two.

Nevertheless I cling to my contention that folk’s one of those either/ or types of music (alongside soul or country) - if it works well it works very very well, it’s only when it doesn’t work its horrid. So, despite not particularly expecting the evening to lead to any revolutions, I journeyed down to Brighton Dome to see Simon Emmerson and a big gang of his mates perform tracks from The Imagined Village.

There’s been talk lately of a folk revival, in which context it’s interesting to see so cross-generational a stage ensemble - from Sixties folk stalwart Martin Carthy through Eighties figures like Emmerson and Billy Bragg even down to some young ‘uns. But Carthy’s presence raises a question I can only speculate over. When there was so much great English folk about in the late Sixties (of which he was such a crucial part), how come there has been so little since? Where were the English music equivalents of the Pogues or REM? Perhaps the classic example are the Mekons, who in embracing rootsy music also decided to decamp to America. The Men They Couldn’t Hang are perhaps the exception that proves the rule. (NB If anyone is thinking “The Levellers” here, please could you leave the room quietly?)

Like today the Sixties felt a futuristic era, as if the future was bursting in all around you, and this doubtless proved part of the appeal in looking back. But then the future was something to be embraced not feared, so perhaps a rooting in the past did not automatically imply an escape into nostalgism so much as an emphasis on continuity. (Then again, against any notions of era-localism, it should be noticed Carthy’s daughter Eliza was also on stage and accounting for herself splendidly – perhaps folk does lie in the blood after all!)

But also, now popular music is less about claiming generational identity than it has been for fifty years, could a great barrier to folk’s cry for tradition and continuity be down? Of course some might argue this merely exposes a bigger still barrier to folk – its whiteness. Even if whiteness isn’t actually politically suspect surely it’s unsexy. After all no-one ever offers to put on some badass white music at a party, do they? Bragg seizes this elephant in the living room at one point, saluting “that much maligned of groups – the white working class.” And he has a point. As the Pete Poselthwaite character puts it in the film Brassed Off, on the pit colliery band forced to close with their mine, “if this lot were seals or whales, you'd all be up in bloody arms. But they’re just ordinary human beings!”

However Bragg (who can frankly be something of a plonker) then has to throw patriotism into the mix, even going so far as to have written a book called The Progressive Patriot. This seems absurd. As fellow stage-hog Chris Wood puts it on the band’s own website, “traditional music has never adhered to the constructed boundaries of a governing class. Nor should our sense of ourselves.” As another old beardy guy put it, the working class has no country. Moreover, it’s specifically in the context of folk music where this makes not more but less sense. Beyond the simply geographical ‘English folk’ is actually something of an oxymoron. Its original pre-industrial participants would have only held the haziest sense of themselves as English, like their music their identities would have been much more localised. Some folk traditions slip these boundaries altogether, such as the Cornish whose music more resembled the Bretons of North France. Yet, if taken geographically alone, we can talk of ‘English folk’. ‘Progressive patriot’ is the oxymoron.

Moreover, despite Bragg’s battlecry, the performance ultimately tries a little too hard to lose the whiteness tag and with it sometimes embraces a debased, multiplexy form of multiculturalism. Bragg’s introductory song, England Half English, is clearly intended lightheartedly but its insistence on equality through eating curry the one night then bubble and squeak the next feels irritatingly tokenistic. Buying a curry is merely consuming a culture, not interacting with it. Moreover, while the band were clearly chosen for their musical chops not their skin tones there was something of the ‘photo-op multiculturalism’ about the look of them and their mixture of ethic instruments – something slightly too reminiscent of Father Ted’s Anti Racist Slide Show.

Similarly, as seems to happen often at folk gigs, I found there to be far too much talking. This is something I normally find, but it’s normally confined to the audience. Of course you want folk gigs to be chatty and informal, but all the blather here puts you in mind of a nervous suitor on his first date. (Perhaps significantly, the Carthys talked the least and also played the most.) And the banner title, The Imagined Village was an ungainly mouthful which sounded suspiciously and unappealingly like a project. All of this seemed to dispel the very feeling they were trying to conjure. If this really was the music of our roots, our misplaced identity, why would we need an introductory essay to explain all that to us?

Something else I sometimes found cringey was the attempt to ‘update’ some of the old songs. This often reminded me of the more desperate devices by which schoolteachers would try to ‘reach’ their classes; “Hamlet was a Prince, which was like a Pop Star, only in the past” etc etc. Of course we don’t want folk music reverentially preserved, a task better given to embalmers than musicians. And apparently similar approaches can (and did) work well. Writing about contemporary subjects in the folk idiom can create an interesting frisson. For example, there’s Chris Woods’ song about a yuppie buying up a Cotswold’s cottage because it’s “quaint”, his 4x4 intruding into the folk idiom as his Gucci shoes do on the cottage floor. And adapting the essence of an old song into a new idiom can bring surprises to both, as Benjamin Zephaniah proves with Tam Lyn. But Bragg’s version of Hard Times of Old England ‘updates’ it by dropping contemporary references (Tescos, closing post offices) into an otherwise intact old folk number, and loses – in quite a literal sense – its integrity. It creates a disorienting kind of verbal collage best played for surreal or comic effect, like Pete Kennard cartoonishly sticking cruise missiles in Constable’s Haywain. (Oddly the only time this approach is attempted is for the CD cover/ gig poster image - see above.)

But all of that is to look at the flagon of ale as half-empty when it was equally half-full. Perhaps any gig with Martin Carthy aboard will have high points, but for every song that stumbled there was another which cut a rug. And as each new Starbucks opens it comes to feel more and more important to remind ourselves of a diverse landscape beneath such corporate uniformity. True, too many times that tradition has come to feel like faerie gold from one of the old tales, disappearing as soon as grasped. But I would contend it’s more like an irregular seam of gold - buried deep then shunted by subsequent events into an inaccessible seam, but real gold you can bite into.

The two opening songs demonstrated all we wanted with aplomb. For the first track, against spectral drones a recording of the old folkie John Copper lamented the “ ’ouses, ‘ouses, ‘ouses” which now cover so much of the Sussex Downs. The band immediately then launched into an inspired version of John Barleycorn Must Die. The effect was enhanced upon your host who had previously been so gormless as to fail to get this song! Indeed on the surface it is another‘ rebel martyr’ song, akin to The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down or the like. Repeatedly “they hired men” to assault Barleycorn in a myriad of ways, until you start to feel half of Sussex must be enlisted - but he mystifyingly seems to survive it all.

The point to John Barleycorn Must Die is that he cannot die, for he represents the barley in the fields – and ultimately nature itself. Whenever he appears dead he merely regrows a line or two later. Man may be predatory upon nature, but this very relationship paradoxically makes him dependant upon nature. The song has been played as a drinking song (the assaults he suffers mirror the stages in making beer, something contemporary audiences would doubtless have known), a rebel song (with him standing for the agricultural worker against the sent “hired men”), or for that matter as a rebel drinking song.

But today the song can have a meaning beyond those originally intended, with the beset-upon Barleycorn standing for the folk tradition itself. It’s a tradition they’ve tried to “bury beneath the ground” underneath those “ ’ouses, ‘ouses, ‘ouses”, and one “served most barbarously” by its own supposed adherents - sapping the thing they loved through their perverse desire to ‘preserve’ it. But, like the song says, “no man’s been born that could best John Barleycorn, for he’s suffered many pains.”

I’m agnostic over talk of revivals, suspicious of notions of identity and frequently frustrated by how hard it can be to access the essence of folk. But I don’t think it’s dying off anytime soon.

http://imaginedvillage.com/

THE ANTITHESIS OF MASS PRODUCTION?

Is Impro the primal musical mode?

“This music is always inherently political, because it’s about absolute freedom at all costs.”
- David Keenan

David Keenan is a name that’s been reverberating of late. I first heard him interviewed about his free folk outfit Scatter on Radio Three’s late lamented Mixing It. Later he sprung up last September to give a talk about the spirit of impro at the Colour Out of Space festival of “exploratory sound”. Then there he was again, in a recent Guardian feature on how hardcore punk was colliding with free jazz.

In the Guardian he continues: “once you go beyond the avant-garde, you’re back to being absolutely primitive…The first time music was ever made, it was improvised – yet to me, a lot of the improv that came out of free jazz became impossibly cerebral. What we want to do is return improvisation to its role as the primal musical gesture.” In other words, while the Guardian was writing about punk and jazz Keenan’s heart was more in folk. He’s even written a piece on this for the Wire entitled ‘The New Weird America’, and no I can’t claim to have read it so please bear in mind what follows is my interpetation! (Bizarrely, whilst writing up this piece I went to see the ‘Imagined Village’ folk night, in which programme Shelia Chandra comments “I like the way old singers never sing a verse in the same way, a tradition I feel I belong to.”)

In a more fulsome mode when given mike-time at the festival, he started from the assumption that rock music appears to offer freedom – but as soon as you start playing it, it becomes like going to work. ‘Popular’ music to Keenan becomes a ceaseless tug of war between the musicians and the marketing men. The spirit of the music comes from freedom, the escape from the drudgery of repetition, but in order to be sold it must become regularized, commodified, bottled. New developments in music ceaselessly reassert their free nature only for their proponents to sacrifice it for music biz careers- starting with folk but also blues, continuing through acid rock, hip hop etc. How can you sell someone a gig ticket if you’re simultaneously telling them you can’t be sure what they’re going to get? Isn’t that like a supermarket telling you there might be milk in that bottle, and it might not be off? Keenan waxed particularly lyrical on the question of time. To him keeping to the beat was factory time while improvisation was the antithesis of mass production.

Even the act of recording becomes problematic. In rock music the recording is the primary thing, fans dutifully buy gig tickets on the understanding they’ll get to sing along to what’s on the record. But for free music the primary thing is the live event, recordings are like snapshots you take of a holiday, triggers to remember what being there was really like. Moreover, music critics tend to side with the moneymen. Largely students of cultural studies disguised as music fans (tracing Hendrix’s guitar lines to napalm bombs in Vietnam etc), they’re always trying to frame music - take it out of the moment to pin it to some overall trend. (Amusingly, Keenan singled out Simon Reynolds as an example.)

Such theories perhaps have a particular resonance for me. I got into music later than other things, clinging to Marvel comics and science fiction paperbacks long after my classmates had succumbed to buying pop singles. And as a writer I inevitably got into it through the words – words were the hook that led me into song structures. I quickly warmed to things like the first Velvet Underground album, where the music’s main job is to illustrate the words like a sound artist. (Just as Reed sings of taking a hit of heroin, so the music speeds up and careers into simulating the effect.) But the all-engulfing soundscapes of their second album, frequently erupting to drown out the words, left me headscratching. Which of course meant that when I finally got absolute music, when I grasped that music didn’t need labels or literal functions any more than a painting needed to be representational, I got into it with a vengeance. I had the zeal of the converted.

But for all that, and even allowing for the fact that Keenan’s such an impassioned polemicist, it seems to me there’s much to commend itself in what he’s saying. It’s interesting to note that improvisation presents such a phobia for so many people. It’s understood how someone can learn the guitar, by sitting down and practicing chords. But if the same guy gets up to play those chords in an un-predetermined order everybody is astonished he could do it. Yet unlike guitar playing improvisation is something we are all doing in our daily lives, on a petty level pretty much all the time. We simply don’t notice we’re doing it.

Several members of Keenan’s panel compared predetermined music to going to work. (Perhaps partly influenced by the fact that impro musicians don’t get to give up the day job very often!) And work is of course a classic example of somewhere where we’re expected to behave like the appendage of machines. For example, call centre staff are often given lists of answers to likely questions, which they’re expected to regurgitate without deviating from. But call centre staff often do deviate, not just to relieve the monotony but because the script of standard answers never turns out to be as universal and all-embracing as it was trailed. In general at work, we quite routinely reassure our boss all is going to plan, while extemporising madly. Improvisation is not a bizarre mystery indulged in by artistic types, nor the last resort of the desperate. Improvisation is quite simply a contingent part of being alive.

“We’ve faced emergencies before! We can improvise, adapt, in the shortest possible time!”
- Quatermass Experiment

There’s an old jazz adage “improvisation is just composition speeded up”, but it’s not the saving time which interests me. It’s the way improvisation forces us to make choices before our conscious minds have had time to even absorb them, making us live by our instincts for a bit. Improvisation can be a way by which we tell ourselves something we already know, but are unaware we know.

On the other end of the scale to a call centre job, the time I saw Terry Riley’s In C performed live it did strike me as (pseud’s corner entry coming up) a model for a perfect society. By not constraining the players through time but uniting them by key, Riley devised a means where each person could be themselves yet simultaneously add to the overall group. The result was a fluid amorphous thing, not necessarily tidy but always far more than the sum of its parts. It was a thousand miles from many free jazz nights I’ve endured, where every band member seemed clamouring to be the front man in a momentous clash of egos.

Moreover, now might seem a good time to start improvising. Krautrock stalwarts Faust always insisted their records should look like bootlegs, to enhance the idea they were works in progress not final statements or definitive editions. Yet the economics of the time meant those ‘bootlegs’ had to be released on major labels. Nowadays a combination of CD-Rs, internet-ready sound files and much more have made musical micro-publishing (in essence becoming your own bootlegger) far easier. Some such as Damo Suzuki (another Krautrock stalwart) have given up studio recordings entirely in favour of bootlegging their own gigs. Others have gone so far as to suggest that micro-production will become the default distribution method for all music, whether improvised or otherwise. Moreover, all this is happening inside a culture where we can communicate more quickly (if not always instantly), where waiting for the definitive composition to be finally released is coming to feel more and more antiquated.

“He’s making it up as he goes along!”
- Heckler in Life of Brian

But if there’s much to commend in Keenan’s stance, if you take it to the max his ‘total freedom’ shtick will turn out not to be a skeleton key but a blind alley. Perhaps it’s just my natural moreishness, but I can’t see improvisation vs. composition as an either/or choice. It’s more of a balance which needs to be realigned. Take Terry Riley’s afore-mentioned In C, which gave its players much space in which to improvise but did so within the framework of game rules and guidelines. Or take Can, who would improvise wildly for hours but then play the tapes back and reduce them down to what seemed to be working the best. In a similar way we all live by the rule of gravity, which leaves us unfree to bound tall buildings. Yet the dancer or acrobat can use gravity in his performance, turning its forces to his own ends. Constraints can enable too.

A similar rule applies to words or song structures. During the whole three-day festival, out of a raft of performers, few used words as anything other than a sound source. Yet if the urge to innovate is innate in us, then so is the desire for stories. Folk music, the very wellspring of Keenan’s argument, is awash with stories. The idea that stories have or must take a single definitive form dates only from print, just as the same idea in music does from recording. David Thomas’ antics with the 2 Pale Boys are a case in point, a classic example of freeform storytelling married to improvised music.

Keenan’s argument also rests upon some more philosophical underpinnings, which again might appeal but taken in their most absolute form turn out to crumble. Firstly the suggestion that improvisation could be a talisman which could keep the money-men out of our temple sounds a little naïve in this day and age. If it moves they’ll try to make money from it, and if it stops moving they’ll try to sell it. But more widely, like the Surrealists, Keenan seemed to conceive of a ‘true self’ - locked away inside us from years of social conditioning but re-accessible through a series of ritual steps. It’s a charmingly romantic notion, but there’s no reason whatsoever to believe it. The Surrealists merely replaced the bourgeois fetish for consciousness and reason with their own for the unconscious. But the point is to combine the two.

Similarly the idea that free music can take the cultural studies away is reminiscent of the modernist mirage that art can somehow be purged of culture to be left pure and universal. Sounds are prized over chords, and chords over words for this very reason. But art is made by people so it will always be a form of social engagement, whether we choose to admit it or not. Denying this will not dispel it.

In short, Keenan was saying much that was worth saying. Improvisation is contingent to creativity, and we should embrace it not shut the door on it as soon as we can while fossilising what it sent us. His voice is necessary but a necessary corrective, by which we might realign ourselves. But at the end of the day he was serving up a malt when what we really need right now is a blend.

PS I absolutely adored Scatter’s version of She Moves Through the Fair played during his interview on Mixing It, which I (whisper it) taped off the radio and have replayed frequently since. But I found his performance in The Tight Meat Duo a pointless meander through the most tedious of free jazz byways. You pays your money and you takes yer choice!

Handy weblinks:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2207301,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Keenan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Weird_America
http://www.colouroutofspace.org/

A FEW MORE WORDS ABOUT CONTROL

“Ultimately the character portrayed with the least satisfaction is the city of Manchester. I don't mean specific locations, but the look of the film in general. Where are the dark, empty streets, the Manchester of the Seventies, evoked by the lyrics and music of Joy Division? I don't expect the film to be a history lesson but its glossiness is disappointing. How can an audience understand Joy Division without understanding its environment?”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,2180296,00.html

Always amusing to read a review of a film where it says exactly what you said, only the other way up. But who is this know-nothing, who has so little feeling for the music of Joy Division they can’t see it when its corollary is so clearly put up on the screen? None other than Natalie Curtis – Ian and Debbie’s own daughter! I hang my four-eyed head in shame!

She continues…

“In recent years much has been made of the notion that Ian's biggest problem was the women in his life, when in fact his inability to deal with his relationships, not to mention everything else, was a symptom of his depressive illness. Sadly, the film does little to show this, or how these two women were more aware than anyone of how ill Ian actually was and how hard they tried to help him.”

…while meanwhile…

“No matter how close either woman tries to get to Ian, neither can ever really get inside his head: neither cups of tea nor romantic conversations will do the trick… Control frames these failures - these gaps not closed - in such gendered terms; in terms of each woman's proximity to Joy Division as a band and Ian Curtis not only as a man but as a (burgeoning) rock star. This is not necessarily the fault of the film, for the contours of this story took shape long ago.”
http://fangrrrl.blogspot.com/

Perhaps Control is one of those films which divides its response neatly between girls and boys. “His inability to deal with his relationships… was a symptom of his depressive illness” sounds to my ears like a summary of the film rather than a critique of it. And, to make a comparison with the other great rock’n’roll suicide of our era, I don’t think I’ve heard any “some bitch drove him to it” style suggestions, a la Courtney Love. The film does show Debbie trying to help him, albeit in an ineffectual way, suggesting doctor’s visits which fail to happen. The irony lay in his making Debbie a surrogate mother without surrendering to her the authority of a mother. (How true to history all that is I’ve no way of knowing, of course.)

Plus a large part of the appeal of Joy Division to me is the conjunctions they found between the personal and the social, the private and the public spheres. (Formally caught in the combination of Curtis’ words with the evocative music, as already said.) You put in what you want to take out of these things of course, but for me it’s emphatically not merely the story of an isolated male ego, triumphantly insisting on his own private hell whatever the cost to those around him. (I never stand to hear Joy Division compared to whingers like Radiohead!)

Of course, that may well be just a personal response, choosing to see the glass half-full. And truth to tell, the last line quoted does somewhat resonate with me. Curtis quotes Wordsworth in the film, and in many ways he was a kind of post-industrial romantic - finding himself in tower blocks and empty car parks rather than waterfalls and fields of daffodils. But the deal’s the same, you look at the word outside of you and see only a reflection of your own face. (Me, I prefer the notion of two-way traffic.)

Hennings also says:

Listening, this last week, to Pere Ubu, Joy Division's cross-Atlantic mirror…

Reading this line just today, I was struck by the fact I don’t compare Joy Division to Pere Ubu more. Apart from musical connections (like using synth as soundsource rather than instrument) the comparisons between Laughner and Curtis are too obvious to spell out. But partly the contexts are so different. Paradoxically, the aesthetes in Ubu reviled American gonzo punks like the Ramones without any of that mud ever sticking, while Joy Division quite clearly had their feet in punk yet somehow effortlessly transcended it. At the time it seemed an incredibly powerful statement that the band just wore ‘normal’ clothes on stage. With every other band on earth spiking themselves up into hackneyed shock, that ‘normal’ look added massively to their mystique! (Joy Division happened after the Pistols, while Ubu went alongside the Ramones – at least as far as chronologies went.)

But mostly the consequent events are so different, that they can’t help but reshape what went before. While the electro roots of early New Order are clearly there in late Joy Division, I increasingly lost interest in their subsequent albums. (I’m glad they avoided becoming the first Joy Division tribute band, but have no desire to own a copy of Worlds in Motion.) With Pere Ubu, Laughner’s contribution lasted for two singles (not two albums) and subsequently they’re seen by pretty much everybody as Dave Thomas’ band. The tombstone on the cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart ultimately cast a longer shadow than that bomber over Tokyo…

A FEW WORDS ABOUT CONTROL

Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic of Joy Division’s ill-starred singer Ian Curtis can be said to have many achievements, but perhaps a crucial one is its ability to set the scene so well. So let’s try and follow its example…

From its very beginnings, British punk felt it saw a defect in previous home-grown music. In seeking to emulate American rock and blues, earlier bands ended up duplicating something second hand. While American music arose, quite naturally, out of the American landscape, British groups would sing diligently about (say) the L-Train while oblivious to what the L-Train was or where it went. So in Britain punk retaliated by taking up a provincial anti-Americanism (one of the Clash’s main anthems was “I’m so bored with the USA”), by dropping the L-Train and instead singing defiantly of the Number Seven bus.

While it would be easy to ridicule all that in hindsight, we should remember some (such as Paul Weller) were able to do it well. But the problem with this fixation upon fag ends, chip wrappers and damp weather was that it became just that – a fixation. American music had arisen naturally from its landscape, while this obsession with seedy Englishness soon became at best a cliché and at worst a put-on. Any dickhead, after all, can sing about stepping in used condoms in the hallway.

Joy Division, probably more by luck than judgement, hit upon a more winning combination. Curtis’ lyrics were (depending upon who you talk to) painfully introspective, universally existential or some combination of the two. (Typical line: “Seeing me this time/ Hoping for something else”.) It was in the music where the band conjured up cavernous yet claustrophobic soundscapes which, to quote K-Punk, “suggest the derelict factories and litter-strewn ex-public spaces of a decommissioned industrial economy.”(1) Bypassing the literalism of words, the music left you feeling you stood in a crumbling entropic Britain. It was a world away from the Clash’s rallying calls of onedownmanship.

And, perhaps more by luck than judgement, Corbijn uncannily duplicates this vital balance. While the frontstory recounts the details of Curtis’ life, something which in another context may have felt soapy, the sheer vivid look of the film makes it come alive. A shot as simple as rain on a phone box window becomes something simultaneously mundane and numinous. Rather than chase an elusive ‘authenticity’ the film achieves a kind of poetic realism. (2) (It should perhaps be noted that there had always been a strong visual dimension - the band’s look and sleeve design have been celebrated for synesthesiastically adding to their soundscape, and that Corbijn had been a photographer of the band.)

This is news to be received gratefully, for I had high hopes and bigger fears for this film. Biopics are normally something to avoid like the plague, and rock biopics are the worst of the very bad bunch. Made by those who understand more about lens apertures than music, they try to turn the amps to 11 and manufacture excess in the absurd belief that’s what rock music is about – or will at least drown out the complaining. This is bad enough at the best of times, but the most significant element of Joy Division’s music was its sense of restraint. Possibly more than even their post-punk contemporaries, they eschewed orgiastic solos for an austere discipline bordering on rigidity. Not to name names, but an Oliver Stone at the helm here would mean a Titanic on our hands. Even the film’s title, spinning off from the track She’s Lost Control, reflects this relationship between discipline and derangement.

We need Corbijn’s restraint for a separate, but possibly more important, reason. It’s scarcely a plot spoiler to reveal Curtis committed suicide, on the eve of the band’s first American tour. While the band’s star had been rising, it seems this terrible act propelled them into the big time. His death hit the headlines, made both a twisted selling point and an eerie sense of his melancholic lyrics, and one month later came their first hit single. Youth culture is of course obsessed with early death, but this story is so true to legend that interest can quickly become ghoulish. (I can remember seeing a bootleg t-shirt commemorating his death, and wondering even at the time whether a man’s life is best commemorated by a t-shirt.) Yet Corbijn avoids, for example, any gratuitous shots of Curtis as a gurneying corpse and instead portrays the moment of his death through his wife’s reaction.

Of course for all that we may ask whether we really want to know this sort of stuff. As Simon Reynolds has commented, underneath the grandeur of the songs the problems besetting Curtis were “mundanely specific.”(3) Isn’t it falling into the same ‘pop psychology’ hole as all TV documentaries seem to have of late?, with their banal and bathetic revelations that the Russian Revolution failed because Stalin’s dad didn’t hug him and the like. Curtis’ lover Annik Honore has commented: "The music should always be more important than people's private lives”.(4) Or as Bob Dylan memorably said “a poet tells you what you feel.” Shouldn’t our focus be on the music and our own reactions to it, and the tawdry details of those who made it be left to gutter journalists?(5)

Again, this question is a bigger deal for Joy Division than almost any other band. Even by the standard of bands, they went out of their way to create a mythos for themselves. If for a band a mythos is currency, they were shrewd enough to know you make a currency valuable through scarcity. As Emmy Henningshas said “part of Joy Division's allure lay in the fact that there was so little information outside of the sound and the record sleeves to go on. As a band they gave very few interviews, and the fact that nearly every photograph ever taken of them has become iconic is due partly to scarcity - images become icons through being both rare and precious.”(6) The band were like some ancient civilization where there were never quite enough artifacts unearthed to understand – some designs, bits of tablet in a script no-one’s sure how to read.

Curtis was found dead on May 18th 1980, precisely one day after my fourteenth birthday. At the time I held onto a huge yet half-formed belief in his death as something grand and existential, as if he had the courage to face something essential I could only glimpse secondhand through his songs. Too young to truly understand death, I figured it must be something cool.

Of course I was already seeing the world much differently by 1996, when his widow Deborah published her biography Touching From a Distance. Though I only read press excerpts, I was struck how far the husband she knew was from my image of a doomed Keatsian romantic. Instead he seemed a fairly typical Macclesfield male, leaving the wife to domestic drudgery while he went out and about, and (when she was permitted out in public) obsessive over her covering herself up. It’s Deborah’s book which has been adapted and extended into this film (she even served as co-producer), and in fact the very reason it should be made is because it dispels all the ‘die-young’ myths surrounding Curtis’ life. As Deborah has put it, "We're looking to give the world a truthful view of who Ian really was ... It will be a balanced approach - this isn't the rock and roll Shine."(7) Let’s do the punk thing. The punk thing is to kill your idols.

It’s unafraid to show Curtis as callous, as much torturing as tortured. One reader of Deborah’s book was even driven to title an Amazon review Rock Martyrs are Subhuman Too. (8) Yet he and everyone else is portrayed in quite a nuanced manner. Even the loudmouthed manager, Rob Gretton, is shown as torn over his response to Curtis’ unraveling life, concerned over his fraying health yet eager for him to keep performing, ultimately out of his depth. The film’s also unafraid to introduce farce elements into this otherwise bleak story. In a nicely telling moment we follow Curtis into the Labour Exchange with ‘Hate’ scrawled punkishly over his jacket, only to find out he’s actually working there as an advisor. These scenes are both funnier and more effective than the earlier, somewhat histrionic 24 Hour Party People precisely because they’re played so deadpan.(9)

The lynchpin of both book and film is the emotional triangle between Curtis, Deborah and first the band – then Annik Honore, the Belgian fanzine writer who became his mistress. In a sense, there are two Curtis’ in the film and they occur in reverse order to the one you’d expect. While still a schoolboy he carries himself like a self-confident star, only to become sullen and introspective when the front man in a successful rock band. Though we spy Burroughs and Ballard on his teenage bookshelf, the music he loves is not glum but glam – the Dionysian dressing-up of Bowie and Bolan. When Debbie first meets him, he’s in a combination of mascara and school blazer. As if unused to aesthetes in Seventies Macclesfield, Debbie is soon smitten by him - complaining he’s “a bit presumptuous” then letting him kiss her three seconds later. “You’re mine and you know you are,” he tells her by way of a marriage proposal. It’s like she was his first groupie, arriving even before his first gig. His subsequent disdain for Debbie can best be summed up by Blake’s proverb “the bounded is loathed by its possessor.”(10)

In a key early scene he recites a poem to impress Debbie. Yet when asked if he wrote it he shakes his head and replies “Wordsworth”. For all his acting the part of the star, as yet he has nothing to say. (Perhaps in an alternate universe he stayed like this and Oasis were formed fifteen years early.) While meeting the rest of the band at a Pistols gig gives him the opportunity, it’s the loveless bind of marriage to Debbie which gives him the motive to write. He earnestly scribbles lyrics in an exercise book as an alternative to talking to her, as she timidly taps at the door inviting him to bed. Henningsremarks how Debbie is “patronised as a terribly embarrassing reminder of the humdrum domesticity that rock music sets itself up time and time over to escape.” When a pregnant Debbie finds him backstage getting cosy with a hanger-on, he defiantly shoots back “should you be out in your condition?”

So instead of being at the football or with the pub darts team, Curtis was fronting a cutting-edge band which redefined music? Yes – and no. Factory Record’s Tony Wilson famously said he signed Joy Division because they were the only band he saw who had to be on stage – and he perhaps meant Curtis more than the others. The band was more to him than an excuse to get away from the wife and crying child. In fact, for a while seems to have served as his lifeline, the place where he could sing what he was unable to say. But as time goes on, the lifeline came to feel more and more like a noose.

Though never laboured, the film is normally clear. Only over this transformation does it become slightly elusive, and my comments here consequently more interpretive. In the early days, Curtis is the arrogant and ambitious one of the group. His tactic to get Wilson to sign them is march up and call him a “bastard” for not having done enough for them already. But as success builds the band becomes more of a bind, his input an expectation… all too much like the “opportunities” he’d find the hapless doleys back at the Labour Exchange. At one gig he finds himself unable to sing. When Rob Gretton’s solution (getting someone else up who happens to know the words) is less than successful (it results in a riot), he confesses his fears to Wilson.(11)

Curtis tells Annik his marriage was a “mistake” taken “too young”. While this feels more than a chat-up line, we might reasonably ask in that case why he doesn’t just leave Debbie for Annik? The film flirts with the idea that Annik is the one person he can express himself to. The above comment is made as they stay up all night talking, while the rest of the band crash out. But in a later scene Annik makes a prying attempt to open him up, with Curtis replying disarmingly his favourite colour is “Man City Blue”.(12) And, if his songs are to be taken as the voice of his heart, they seem far more concerned with lost love for Debbie than found love for Annik.(13)

When Debbie insists she must divorce him over Annik, Curtis asks “what’s that got to do with us?” The line got a laugh at the showing I attended, and while it is a classic piece of chutzpah its also possible he really meant it. As Beatrix Campbell and others have argued, there’s a common male desire to avoid maturity by making your wife your second mother – a desire compounded by the social breakdowns which were underway at this time.(14) The night before his suicide Curtis visits first his actual mother, and then Debbie to ask her to drop her divorce claim. Curtis first drove a wedge that kept Debbie away from his creative life, then complained that all she stood for was domestic drudgery. Yet, infanatalised, he was unable to completely cut the apron strings and run off with Annik. This was not long after their daughter’s birth. Babies are often a crisis point in such a scenario, bringing out in the father something approaching sibling rivalry. But it seems it was Debbie’s threat of divorce which took him over the edge. Though accounts often emphasise his last acts as watching a Herzog movie and listening to an Iggy album he hung himself, with horrific appropriateness, by the most domestic of icons - the clothes dryer in their flat.

www.controlthemovie.com
(The official site also has a cool trailer)

(1) www.factmagazine.co.uk/da/61846
(2) If the film has a fault, it’s that at times it leans a little too heavily towards the poetic and breaks the vital equilibrium. Real events are rejigged, compressed or even distorted – for example the urban myth gets repeated that Tony Wilson signed the band with a contract written in his own blood. (A tale which only seems to have started with 24 Hour Party People , five short years ago). Such things matter little. But I doubt, for example, many Macclesfield pubs were playing the Velvet Underground in 1979, and these jarring moments can throw you out of the film’s spell.
(3) Rip It Up And Start Again – Post Punk 1978-1984, Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-571-21569-6
(4) http://www.side-line.com/interviews_comments.php?id=23440_0_16_0_C
(5) The spotlight on Curtis’ troubled soul also makes for something of an auterist approach, with the rest of the band in very much secondary roles. We’re told band rehearsals are “pretty shite, actually” until he arrives and galvanizes them with his angst. But perhaps he needed them as much as they him. Producer Martin Hannett’s vital role seems particularly neglected. After a Tony Wilson film (24 Hour Party People) and an Ian ‘n’ Debbie film, the idea someone might make a Joy Division movie about Joy Division now seems remoter than ever. Notably, the band had agreed to dissolve if any member left, not just their front man. However, the last shot with (presumably) joinee Gillian Gilbert implies the others are ready to carry on reconstituted as New Order.

(6} fangrrrl.blogspot.com/2007/10/sister-midnight.html
(7) http://www.side-line.com/interviews_comments.php?id=23440_0_16_0_C
(8) =”http://www.amazon.co.uk/Touching-Distance-Ian-Curtis-Division/dp/0571207391/ref=sr_1_2/026-7793081-6048466?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192899908&sr=1-26048466?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192899908&sr=1-2
(9) Directed by Michael Winterbottom in 2002, and (while heavily featuring Joy Division) more the story of Factory Records.
(10) Assuming the film is faithful to Deborah’s book the character she seems least even-handed with is herself, time and again she’s portrayed as a doormat.
(11)Though the song doesn’t appear in the film, the psychological blood-and-circuses of Atrocity Exhibition would seem to contain Curtis’ most explicit doubts about the inherent exhibitionism of his career direction: “For entertainment they watch his body twist/ Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'”
(12)It should be conceded the Annik scenes do suffer from the film being based on Deborah’s book. The film scrupulously avoids portraying her as some clichéd femme fatalle yet, even more than his
time with the band, his moments with her were conducted away from Debbie. There’s a consequent extemporising, as they attempt to cut her a character out of little cloth.
(13) Anyway, is this ‘explanation’ quite the rosebud it appears? While it may account for Atmosphere or Love Will Tear Us Apart, how does it explain away Decades or Dead Souls? Curtis’ depression came to be a dark prism through which he came to see the surrounding world, and this is precisely what makes the music so worth listening to. Art is no mere mirror to life, and reductive and schematic approaches to it need not apply.
(14) Strictly Campbell’s argument was confined to the unemployed, jobless Northern males unable to confirm their identity in the classical way, stuck in the women’s world of the home. Nevertheless, there is a parallel.

TERRACOTTA BOYS ON TOUR

An Agency Worker Sees ‘The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army' at the British Museum (13 Sept 2007~ 6 Apr 2008) and wonders at the significance of their standing on Karl Marx’s old desk

The editorial staff are proud to announce that, even in this new young-people-friendly ‘blog’ format, Lucid Frenzy is not abandoning its dedication to the completely out of date. Its on-line life kicked off with a 1955 film, and now progress with a review of a set of action figures created in 210BC.

Well… sort of. As the subhead gives away, China’s Terracotta Army will actually be standing guard in the British Musuem’s Reading Room until early April next year – tickets still available! And it’s not really a proper review, so much as a reaction to something Jonathan Jones wrote in the Guardian about it.

“The First Emperor… is not the star of his own show. These nameless soldiers are the stars…How Brecht would have loved the terracotta army, and how he would have enjoyed this exhibition. How Marx's ghost might enjoy rising up from the desks below to savour it….This exhibition does the opposite of what it promises, and is the better for that... The emperor is gone. The human endures.” (1)

The reference to Marx comes from the fact the exhibition is directly above the Reading Room, the very place where Charlie took advantage of the quiet and the free heating to scribble down Kapital. And Brecht comes from A Worker Reads History where he says… well, you can read that one yourself…

“Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?” (2)

It’s true everyone is calling this show by its subhead – The Terracotta Army not the First Emperor. But, while it’s a supreme irony for me to say it, Jones is quoting Brecht inappropriately. In fact the great thing about the First Emperor is that even in death he remains so larger than life. He’s such a classic case of the megalomaniac ruler that if he didn’t exist you’d have to make him up. The fact that we still only have his guardsmen to view, that his own tomb remains unexcavated, merely adds to his mystique. He becomes like Citizen Kane keeping his Rosebud, like the directing yet unseen (and therefore all-powerful) Lord of the Manor in Miss Julie. I even started to wonder at points whether the whole thing was some elaborate jape, that all there’ll turn out to be in that mausoleum was a note reading “fooled you, archeologists”.

Proclaiming himself Emperor not only of China but the whole universe, he speaks through this show of his divine mission to standardise. He sought to impose both order and his image on the universe, and probably didn’t distinguish much between the two. He defined a doctrine of Legalism, that man was inherently wicked and needed rules and regulations to keep him in line. Weights and measures, the script people wrote in, the axle width of cards, even (most contentiously for today) a single currency… all had to be unified. For this unifier, everything reduced down to one.

The exhibition is as keen to propound this myth as Jones to knock it down. Chinese history becomes a simple before-and-after case. Before, primal chaos. (The Warring States Period.) After, order, stability, that sort of thing. Jones is on his best foot when decrying this, “what seems to me to be a strangely simplified version of Chinese history... It gives the impression there was nothing much before him, and continuity after him. Neither impression is correct.” The First Emperor conquered the surrounding states, true. But they were surrounding civilizations. And even his own clay guardsmen were vandalized and looted in a period of chaos which erupted very soon after his death.

But Jones’ argument seems to rest upon a kind of alchemical transformation, where the very burden of labour power becomes its own escape. The workers, told to build so many warriors, obeyed their orders so supremely well that they were able to bring their own creativity, their very individuality to the regiments they were charged with churning out. (“The love that endures in this art is above all the passion of the creator. What makes it a living art, despite lying in the cold grave so long, is that anonymous artisans…put their own selves, their feelings, their love of life, into these sculptures.”) So we have over seven thousand warriors, of which every one is in some way unique, humanised. Their faces become, by proxy, the otherwise lost faces of their artists. (3)

It’s a romantic notion, but not a terribly convincing one. For one thing, the work seems to have been mostly carried out not by artisans in quasi-autonomous craft unions but by prison labour. And the warriors’ production was an early example of mass production, of which identikit legs and torsos were assembled, and only at the very end given individualised touches. The pieces were all signed, but not out of some artistic pride. Both workman and foreman were obliged to sign each kit-part piece, so he could be tracked down and hauled up should defects emerge. Even the craft elements of those ‘finishing touches’ were more than likely an extra imposition upon bonded labourers, a final chore upon a long list of backbreaking tasks they could really have done without.

With notions so well-meaningly flimsy, we may be forgiven for wondering what really underpins them? At one point Jones mentions how the visual aids and notation have a ”rhetorical spin that might be mistaken for a glorification of the authoritarian state.” Others have commented more bluntly on why these figures have been released. Eying the world stage, is China now keen to reposition itself as the cradle of civilization? There’s some validity to this, it certainly felt fitting to see Zhang Yimou’s movie Hero (which earnt many similar criticisms) on sale in the kiosk. (4) But to merely nay-say is to side with the little Englanders and Paleocons. And after all, China can make quite a credible claim for itself as such a cradle. So Jones instead leaps for a third place which looks a pleasanter spot - without checking whether the ground there is solid underfoot or not.

So if not Brecht, who should be our guide to this show? Of course the ultimate example of the chaos inherent in life is death. It comes and goes as it chooses, sticking to no rules, obeying no timetable. Dictators dish out death, but they don’t like the way it can’t be put on the payroll. To modern minds, this leads to some fascinating yet perplexing contradictions in the First Emperor’s thinking. We often assume people in the past had an irresolute faith in the afterlife, something we lost only recently. The First Emperor built a city tomb to rule in it. Yet he spent much of his life thinking up schemes to cheat death. (Almost all absurd, and almost all doubtlessly hastened it.)

It’s widely held that the Chinese then held to a Phaorah-like concept of physical resurrection. Grain and other foodstuffs were stashed for his reawakening. Yet everything else is curiously jumbled up. The warriors were terracotta, yet brandished real metal weapons. (All since stolen.) Terracotta stable boys have been found by the bones of real horses. And in other places, terracotta horses were made. Jones writes convincingly how he “was fascinated by the idea of model worlds”. Certainly, despite the headline-getting warriors the tomb was a terracotta city with figures of all types and quite possibly designed as a microcosm of the universe. Did the real and the ideal become so jumbled in his megalomaniac and mercury-addled mind that he ceased to distinguish between a real and a clay horse? Or were the warriors really intended for a far more prosaic purpose, a massed army of scarecrows, a hex to scare off superstitious tomb robbers?

But of course the tombs were quickly robbed and, temporarily at least, the empire fell apart. (5) Ruling after death turned out about as successfully as cheating death. What we now see is awesome, but a supreme monument to folly. It’s like one of those mass parades they still put on in North Korea. There’s no secret inside his unopened tomb, it’s one of the oldest stories of all. And our guidebook to it is not Brecht’s Worker Reads History but Shelly’s stinging ode to mortality Ozymandias (“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read/ Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things”). (7) In that way at least the emperor is gone and what is human endures.

Digest Version: The Terracotta Army – an Autonomous Workers’ Soviet?

No.

www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/all_current_exhibitions/the_first_emperor.aspx

Footnotes:
(1) www.arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2162551,00.html (The link also takes you to some cool pictures.)
(2) www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1406.html
(3) Disclaimer - Slightly less than seven thousand have been shipped over for this show.
(4) The exhibition hints this mass production was an invention of the First Emperor, but notably declines to say so outright. While the scale of production may have been new, it seems doubtful the form was.
(5) A section of the Wikipedia entry, Terracotta Army Outside China, would seem to suggest these figures have always been shown in Europe and Canada over the more antagonistic America. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_warriors
(6) This accidental effect actually adds emphasis. The fact the figures have lost the objects they once held goes to make their poses all the more ritualised, like mimes displaying the significance of what they are doing by not holding the encumbering tools that would be necessary to literally do it.
(7) www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/reader/ozymandias.html

PUNK ART’S BODY IMAGE

A kind of postscript to the previous blog about the recent Panic Attack exhibtion of punk art, which delves into body and performance art, and into punk's relationship to radical feminism. I apologise if all that sounds a bit mainstream, but I figure this is my shot at the big time.

“The 1970s saw a flowering of artists’ work involving performance and the body – often reflecting the new identity politics that were a feature of the decade which saw the rise of radical feminism, gay liberation and black empowerment.” Indeed, both catalogue and exhibition strongly imply that the body was punk art’s second site of interest after the urban environment. Formally speaking, they’re most likely right. However, what’s all this talk of liberation and empowerment? Isn’t news almost always bad news? Rare to see are newspaper headlines reading such things as “World poised in anticipation of another day of peace and coexistence in Southern Glomobia?” When you focus on something, you normally focus on what you see as the problem. So doesn’t it stand to reason that as soon as you make the body a site of interest, you simultaneously make it a crux of anxieties?

Sheer ignorance keeps me innocent of whether there was such positive, ‘empowering’ performance art as implied by the above quote. But if punk paralleled performance art in its bodily fixations, it certainly wasn’t that side of it. Punk predominantly appealed to screwed-up white outsider kids, and it was the more masochistic – not to say self-destructive – aspects of performance art which appealed. Punk’s roots, after all, lay in Iggy cutting himself up with glass from onstage.

“Such grotesque figures may be best understood as conscious repudiations of the closed body of the Renaissance, in which all protuberances will be smoothed down, all apertures closed… [they] assert what Bakhtin calls the’ ‘unfinished body’. Parading its lumpy extensions, pregnant with liquids.” (Timothy Hyman’s ‘A Carnival Sense of the World’, from Carnivalesque, National Touring Exhibitions, 2000.)

This distinction between the classical and the grotesque is almost exactly paralleled in punk’s rejection of the jiggy song. Traditionally in popular music, the only problem with sex lies in getting hold of it. But with punk that’s just when the problems begin! Check out the Pistol’s Bodies (“Throbbing squirm gurgling bloody mess”) or the Dead Kennedys Too Drunk To Fuck (“In my room/ Wish you were dead/ You bawl like the baby/ In Eraserhead”, climaxing with the immortal line “Now I got diarrhea!”)

It’s doubtless significant that much of this happened during the Second Cold War, when slicing yourself with some glass seemed a perfect microcosm of a world at war with itself, or the Seventies slide when ‘finished’ ‘smooth’ urban environments seemed in short supply. But that really just made for a handy backdrop. Like much in punk, the drive came from much more personal and immediate sources. Unable to beat the jocks back up, the schoolyard weirdos found a way to beat up themselves. Unable to score, they convinced themselves sex was probably horrific anyway. And this drive came from the very source of their identity.

While it would be somewhat absurd to argue white suburban males are the world’s most oppressed group, women, gays and racial minorities can to an extent take a virtual refuge in a common identity. But what separated the outsider kids from the jocks was not skin tone or gender but their status as losers, with the result that loserdom soon became a badge of honour in the punk community. Death (the ultimate in losing) became a way out, but as a more masochistic variant of the sci-fi fan’s desire to become a brain in a jar. “I’m not a body!” Rotten had yelled on Bodies, if somewhat improbably. Instead as in many punk songs he’s a detached outsider, an intelligence released to float free of society and doing nothing but criticise it. The point about “the kid in the back of the room” in the Kennedy’s Insight is that he’s not really in the room at all, he’s already removed from it. (My ”Oi You! Punk and the Slag off Song”, from the prehistoric print version of Lucid Frenzy, delved deeper into this hyper-individualism.)

…except… except punk had a counterweight, which like all good counterweights could often exert an equal pull. Crispin Sartwell has commented “early gigs by Minor Threat, the Faith, or GI, for example, were incredible collective experiences… the closest I've ever come to a complete loss of individuation”, and anybody whose been to at least one good punk gig will know what he means. And, closer to our theme, except that the concept of a body at war with itself has another twist.

“It is often said that hardcore is the essence of suburban disaffection as applied to teenagers; the nihilism sweeping over Orange or Montgomery County… But hardcore was a critique of that nihilism too, a treatment for it.” (Crispinsartwell.com/hc.htm)

All of which is true, except pro-punk commentators like Sartwell are too readily to neatly divide the scene into ‘positive’ bands (like the Dead Kennedys or Fugazi) and ‘nihilistic’ ones (like the Circle Jerks). The Kennedys could write empowering anthems like Let’s Lynch the Landlord or Nazi Punks Fuck Off but also paeans to nihilism such as Forward to Death (“I don’t need this fucking world/ This world brings me down/ I’m looking forward to death.”) Fugazi, often seen as the epitome of punk as a progressive force, wrote Styrofoam (“We are all bigots/ So full of hatred/ We release our poisons/ Like Styrofoam”) and Shut the Door, their own exploration of the forward-to-death notion.

Neither would it be right to assume these bands flirted with nihilism as some rhetorical device. Their continual alternating between hope and despair was quite real, and the fuel which not only drove them as bands but punk as a scene. Punk wasn’t a political party putting forward a programme. Punk was meant ) to be disunified, conflicted and chaotic. The whole draw of punk was that it made a noise which mirrored the noise in your head.

As the catalogue specifically refers to feminist art, it’s worth looking at punk’s contemporary relationship with feminism. Now of course, we’re supposed to imagine they went together like a horse and carriage. It’s certainly true that punk inspired women’s involvement to a then unprecedented degree. But it departed from mainstream feminism precisely because it chose to focus upon the body and render it problematic, to magnify popular images of femininity to the point of distortion. Punk performers like Ari Up or Siouxsie tended to be highly sexualized figures, but they combined familiar images of sexuality (such as fishnets or knickers) with a sense of threat. This didn’t always go down well with the rest of the sisterhood. "A lot of young women, including myself, completely rejected the idea of feminism”, commented Helen Reddington, ex-punk and author of The Lost Women of Rock. “Because feminism at that time came as a set of rules and punk was about anarchy and rejecting rules. I thought, I don't want that. I want freedom. Now though, to me feminism means freedom, but it didn't look like it at the time."
www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,,2143793,00.html

However outdated it may now seem, the Prostitution exhibition fits here tighter than a glove. Fanni Tutti has explained how it led to her being simultaneously banned from further work in the porn trade, while being “chased across the gallery” by a Spare Rib editor! http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2614594.ece

POSTSCRIPT TO POSTSCRIPT! Yes, even I know performance art doesn’t necessarily imply body art!

PANIC ATTACK: ART IN THE PUNK YEARS

Review of a punk art exhibition held in the Barbican from 5 June to 9 Sept 2007, so no point rushing to see it now really. A slightly condensed version of this review appeared in Last Hours 16, see www.lasthours.org.uk

Drunk or sober, it’s a conversation I must have had thousands of times by now. What was punk really “all about”? Though certain patterns emerge, I soon came to realise that everyone had their own take on things. Its adherents don’t tend to see punk as a consumer identity to buy into, or as a historical artifact to ponder, or anything which lies outside themselves, but something we bring into being. For them punk started the day they started doing it, and its history consists of whatever they did. Who makes history? We make history. By and large, this is all to the good.

But sadly some come to take it all too far, and come to see punk as some repository of eternal values, forever poised in splendid opposition to “the system”. These values then tend to become only expressible through certain fetishised forms, such as fast and loud guitars. Those forms then become absorbed, loud and fast guitars end up on MTV or car adverts. People then either pretend this sacrilege isn’t happening or devote their energies to denouncing the unbelievers who have stolen their vital punk artifacts. It’s a kind of punk fundamentalism.

All of which is, by way of preamble, to say there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling punk stories which aren’t yours, or describing things you wouldn’t necessarily have done yourself. Many will baulk, I am sure, to be told “Panic Attack! defines the ’punk years’ as stretching from approximately 1974 to 1984”, and to be generally concentrating on London and New York.

But one upside of the show setting itself such a specific remit is that it gives you a clear sense of time and place. While the fundamentalists posture, the times where punk has made a difference are when it was engaged with the time and place it was in. The show’s initial blurb writes how punk coincided with and reflected the decline into far-right values most clearly marked by the Thatcher and Reagan electoral victories. “Punk” they say, “appeared as both a symbol of and adequate response to these ravaged times”.

Of course at the time many participants were only instinctively aware or even unaware of this seismic shift; they were reacting to more immediate events and were doing so with their gut. In a series of Peter Hujar photos of downtown New York, one looks up to the towering World Trade Centre from the street below. For a moment you get an entirely unintended effect – a sense of the weird juxtaposition of fags, punks and misfits hanging out in the shadow of such a gleaming temple to commerce. Now of course a combination of Bin Laden and Rudolph Guilani have seen both the misfits and their backdrop removed from such a location.

The blurb continues “although punk is most commonly associated with music and its attendant graphics and fashion, the exhibition argues that much of the best British and American art of the time is also punk in spirit.” At first sight, this makes a double kind of sense. If punk music was predominantly a response to its surroundings, would not artists working in other forms have come to similar conclusions? (Or as they put it,’”embody the punk zeitgeist”.) But more importantly, we might want to question the histories which paint punk as predominantly musical.

‘Hip-hop’ was initially coined as a fusion term – referring not just to music but clothing, graffiti, design and (ultimately) culture. If at worst punk obsessed over guitars, at its best it exhibited much the same attitude. Photographers and fanzine makers are often insistent they were not ancillary events to the bands, but doing punk stuff in their own right. In fact you could argue punk and hip-hop were essentially similar - existing in an era before multimedia technology existed, or at least when it was embryonic, but willing it into being. Even with the straightforward bands there’s often the sense you need to watch them, look at the album cover and read the lyric sheet simultaneously. On a DVD you can do just that. But back then you needed to put those elements together in your head, like assembling a gun which was split into separate parts in order to be smuggled through security.

Take for example the artist Linder who wrote and assembled collages for punk fanzines, provided covers for the Buzzcocks and other bands, formed her own post-punk outfit Ludus, and continues with exhibitions, multi-media and performance art to this day. 

However even mainstream coverages of punk often refer to graphics and fanzines, if for no other reason than they reproduce better in books. We might ask how much cross-traffic there was between punk and the visual arts, between the venue and the gallery? Of the thirty-three artists in the exhibition, you could probably get into some pedantic argument about how many figures had formal involvements in both scenes. (Were Jarman and Mapplethorpe punk figures or fellow travellers? Were Basquiat’s forays into bands long enough to call him a punk? etc etc) 

But let’s leave such pedantry for another time. My argument would be a double one. Firstly, whichever counting mechanism was devised, I contend such crossover figures would be in a minority. Secondly, virtually nobody outside this minority does anything at all interesting throughout this exhibition. Without this direct connection, you can’t help but feel, we’re left with a number of art school chancers who were not parallel ‘embodiments of the punk zeitgeist’ but merely saw ‘punk’ as an exciting buzzword to add to their press release.

Take for example Tony Cragg, whose pieces here consist of him taking similarly coloured plastic rubbish and staple-gunning it to the wall “to reflect upon such subjects as inner city unrest and media-fuelled patriotism”. It’s a classic of the ‘radical’ gesture which upon close examination (or indeed any examination) proves to be trite and empty. For one thing, is rubbish really so shocking? Since when did rubbish become the unacceptable face of consumerism? Of course I don’t like seeing rubbish litter the street, but the damage from discarding a drink can is nothing compared to that from driving a 4x4. This fixation upon rubbish is not only snobbish and puritanical, but exemplifies a wider trend.

Many works here are complicit in the liberal notion that punk was a protest about negative things like unemployment and urban decay. But it would be better to argue punk was a celebration of urban decay! As alluded to earlier, punk inhabited a transitional zone between the collapse of the post-war consensus and the ‘reality’ of free market economics we now inhabit. It was easy at this time to see Babylon as collapsing, and this collapse as the fertilizer by which punk might grow. Abandoned buildings meant squatting opportunities and skipped rents. Unemployment meant time off to practise your art. It’s all falling down? We never liked it anyway. Punk was always closer to a Ballard novel than a World in Action special report. X-Ray Spex’s forays into a plastic future were so much richer and nuanced than Cragg’s messing about with rubbish.

Moreover, sticking bits of rubbish on a gallery wall is redundant chiefly because it in fact changes nothing for the gallery-going experience. Formally, it works no differently from looking at watercoloured landscapes on the wall. (Had janitors been employed to sweep in rubbish over the Italian shoes of the opening night attendees, it might have been a gesture worth considering.) One of punk’s more distinguishing features had been to transform the gig environment, combating its descent into a mere passive spectacle. If punks had felt that way about the rock gig, how much more strongly would they feel about the gallery?

This is not just the social observation that galleries tend to be more full of wealthy connoisseurs sipping Chianti as they discuss inner city unrest. (Though that reason alone would of course be enough.) Unlike the rock gig the gallery experience is individualised and based around questions of ownership. You’re expected to contemplate the works passively and quietly, internalizing your reaction. Indeed, in tests the words people most associate with galleries and museums are the ones for churches. A gig conversely is collectively owned by its attendees. (In fact, punk insisted the attendees’ response was vital to the gig, that they were only marginally behind the band in order of importance.) Moreover, in a gallery the work is usually a single original or at most part of a limited run. The rest of us may gawp at this work, but it is owned by either a (normally wealthy) individual or an institution. (The analogy carries for albums or fanzines, which we even tend to think of in terms of copies rather than originals. When did you last wonder where the master tape for your favourite album was?)

Given the show’s emphasis on New York, it’s interesting to reflect how contemporary punks saw its visual arts scene. It was, in brief, war. Adele Bereti of the Contortions commented “we all lived by walking into art openings, stealing all the food. Everyone gawked at us because we were almost like an exhibition of our own… The art scene was very conservative: in the galleries everyone would be wearing suits. In a way we were more exciting than the art on the walls.” There were probably time-specific reasons for such enmities. Firstly, free lunches should never be knocked. Secondly, punks at the time tended to live in the cheap-rent Lower East Side which bordered artsy SoHo, generating neighbourhood rivalries. (James Chance commented “SoHo should be blown off the fucking map, along with all its artsy assholes!”) But most importantly, the hostility towards visual arts was arguably because of punk’s tendencies towards performance art and multi-media. The anti-gallery stance was less a wall than a filter, a way of keeping out all the elements you didn’t like about the visual arts scene while extracting the essence which you did. (Both quotes from Simon Reynolds’ ‘Rip It Up and Start Again’.)

Radical art must always challenge its parameters, wherever it encounters them. But that doesn’t mean punk must exist in some permanent antipathy to galleries. Saying you can only relate to galleries by invading them is like saying you can only relate to gig spaces by disrupting bad boy band performances… a worthwhile thing to do, maybe, but you wouldn’t devote your life to it. In fact many involved in the arts scene had been mounting such a challenge since the Sixties. Movements in conceptual, performance and even auto-destructive art had defied the notion of a saleable art object - producing art which only existed as a time-limited performance, an idea, something easily reproducible or even something which smashed itself up before the potential purchaser could get his credit card out. (Given this its remarkable how few artists here attempt anything similar. The nearest is probably the video pieces.)

So if punk could instead have subverted the galleries, two of the main ways it could have done so are references to popular culture and employing the disarming power of humour. Punk didn’t see itself as some dour form of social realism but as something which permeated popular culture, barbing pop hooks and inverting the language of ads – the poison in the human machine. Galleries, on the other hand, don’t tend to be barrel of laughs. Again, the main people here who employ such tactics are those associated with the punk scene. For example, there’s the blackly witty comic strip panels of former Black Flag artist Raymond Pettibon. Against the dead weight of litter nailed to the wall, these comic panels seem simultaneously sprightly yet dark and foreboding, exuding both energy and menace.

One caveat needs spelling out. If the best and most punk-influenced work on show here is the punk-connected, that doesn’t mean punk is always and inherently in the right! At several points the works here manage to pinpoint and then magnify weaknesses more widely found in punk. Stephen Wallats’ piece, a series of imagined thoughts projected into the mind of a young mother living on a housing estate, is creepily patronising in a “I know how the proles think” sort of way. But it also feels uncomfortably similar to a whole genre within punk, for example Scritti Politti’s Skank Block Bologna. (I’m thinking there of a good punk record, one which I’ve bothered to commit to memory. The more third-rate punk music we drew in, I would suspect, the closer this comparison would get.)

Similarly, a weakness of such a time-specific show is that it now seems dated. Hilariously, the ticket desk personally warn punters of the potentially offensive nature of some of the works. This mostly seems to refer to the duplication of the Prostitution exhibition put on at the ICA by Throbbing Gristle (then still called COUM Transmissions) in 1976. At the time this caused a furore only topped by the Pistol’s later Grundy interview; indeed even as the show went on one wall of the exhibition was given to the outraged tabloid headlines it generated. Putting porn magazines on the hallowed walls could be seen as an almost perfect example of subverting the gallery context.

…well, for then maybe. Nowadays, when hardcore porn is never more than a mouse click away and ‘Porn Star’ has become a T-shirt, its about as shocking as if someone shouted “what a fucking rotter” on the telly. In fact the porn pages now seem almost quaint, particularly in their habit of including some absurd text story alongside the images. (Called self-parodic things like ‘My Driving Instructress Gave Me a Lesbian Love Lesson’.) Today such tame and tedious drivel may make us question the ‘schematic shock’, the notion that pressing media panic buttons should be our main activity. Indeed, at their worst, Throbbing Gristle did tend to fall into this trap.

But if its no longer shocking it comes to works in a different and presumably unintended way. The hook is that the photos featured not some anonymous model but a band member, Cosey Fanni Tutti. Beneath the rhetoric it’s clear she posed for these top shelf mags as a day job, a way of keeping the rest of the band in black armbands and noise machines. Its reminiscent of the scene in Quadrophenia where Phil Daniels discovers his rebel mod hero is a Bell Boy at the Grand. Its as if Johnny Rotten had at the time held down a day job at the deli counter at Tescos, and forgotten footage had been released of him pleasantly serving slices of cheddar to the customers. You can’t, it seems, rely on a gallery opening happening nearby every time you get hungry. And even rebel punks still need to eat…

Coming soon! Post-scripts about punk's relation to radical feminism. Be afraid... be very afraid...