THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Ever'body might be just one big soul,
Well it looks that a-way to me,
Everywhere that you look, in the day or night,
That's where I'm a-gonna be."

- Woody Guthrie, Tom Joad

DOCTOR WHO: 'VICTORY OF THE DALEKS' (aka NOT THEIR FINEST FORTY FIVE MINUTES)

On the basis of the first two episodes (alright, one and a bit), the new series of Doctor Who was generating a generally positive consensus in the nerdsphere. Andrew Rilstone had commented: “Fanboy says new Who ‘quite good’, shock.”

That didn’t last long, did it?

Way back when the show was first revived, I actually got quite excited about Mark Gatiss being brought on board as writer. Not just because I’d been a fan of League of Gentlemen, but because a writer of surrealist black comedy seemed a far better fit for the show than a ‘proper’ SF writer. And while it's true that neither ’The Unquiet Dead’ nor ’The Idiot’s Lantern’ really lived up to this promise my mind had made itself, I still await a new script from him with that promise.

In the following documentary, Doctor Who Confidential, Steven Moffat enthused “it’s like British icons shoved together!” And so it was. A shopping list of British icons stuck on the screen, with no thought of plot or character development or even a linear viewing experience.

The trouble with committing your words to print is that they can come back to haunt you. Last time I wrote “Nowadays, you can get old episodes on DVD. There’s no need to keep remaking them.” So of course the next thing they do is remake an old story which you can’t get on DVD, one which has been lost! The early part of this episode was ’Power of the Daleks’ in a transported setting with something different written on the lid. (Alright, half different.) The Daleks are pretending to be dutiful robots, only the Doctor knows what they’re up to and no-one will listen to him. And some of the individual scenes captured this tension and paranoia well. I especially liked the Doctor raging at Churchill, then stopping and realising a Dalek was hovering outside the doorway. But these scenes were just that - individual scenes!

With ’Power of the Daleks’, David Whitaker set things up so as to make this tension effective. First, no-one knows who the Doctor is and has no reason to trust him. Second, the Daleks’ plan makes some kind of sense. (Here it relies upon Churchill being scared into summoning the Doctor, then abruptly losing that fear as soon as he turns up. Did their whole plan hinge on the vagaries of a human whim?) But more, it gave that sense of tension six episodes to marinade in. The fact that we the audience know just what the Daleks are up to just makes the tension all the more unbearable. Here it gets maybe twenty minutes. This is a classic example of the new, sophisticated show not being able to do things the old one could perfectly well.

The new DaleksV2 appearing and exterminating their begetters... okay, that was a cool scene. There’s no reason why the things-within shouldn’t update their carriers, any more than we should still be driving around in cars from the Sixties. And it might have finally ended the whole ‘human DNA’ theme, which worked so well in ‘Dalek’ but has now run its course. But, yet again, the word is ‘scene’! These new Daleks didn’t do anything the old ones couldn’t, nothing bigger or badder or eviller.  They just looked more blinging and spoke in more grating voices. Their appearance was incidental to the main plotline, which could have carried on the same way even if the khaki Daleks had hung about. It was just one more sight on a whistlestop tour, not a development.

And the dogfight in space even broke the one sole unifying factor they had been applying, the British icons thing. You didn’t think Battle of Britain, as the two in no way resembled each other. Instead you simply thought “finale of Star Wars.” A fourth-rate, years-behind-the-times copycat of Star Wars.

You could if you wanted list all the logical inconsistencies. Couldn't the Doctor have proven the Daleks weren't servile robots by opening a lid and revealing the green globby thing inside? Did the blackout really hinge on generators being shut down and not people blacking out their windows, as the term might seem to imply? If the Doctor is already known to Churchill, why didn’t the Ninth Doctor enlist his help in ’The Empty Child’? Why did all the Dalek technology have to be taken away if Bracewell could just be left to roam? That whole thing about his implanted human memories overriding a bomb, how was that supposed to work anyway? Yet the way the episode was strung together it would be more a challenge to look for con-sistencies, so let’s leave it.

Perhaps most worrying of all was the way the episode seemed to cast a shadow over the direction of the series in general – principally over Amy. Her line “ever fancied somebody you shouldn’t?” is an ill omen. If the companions are going to simply alternate between having unrequited hots for the Doctor and generating some star-studded love story, then things are going to get schematic. But I was perhaps tempting fate when I wrote (in Andrew Rilstone’s comments) on the theme of all this part-happening in her imagination:

“However if (as some are already speculating) this is made into a Big Plot Twist, like the whole thing’s happening in Amy’s mind in some ‘Life On Mars’ scenario, that would ruin everything. Fans have a ‘better out than in’ philosophy, in which whatever is implicit is better made explicit. Taking such a turn would be a classic demonstration of how wrong they are.”

Amy not recognising the Daleks is clearly connected to the over-riding ‘crack in space’ theme. But we’re getting more and more suggestions that she is not just a symptom, but is in some way connected to this mysterious crack. It first appears on her bedroom wall. The duckpond is empty, in the same episode we learn her surname is Pond. And most ominous of all is the line that she “understands” the android Bracewell.

The theme of the ordinary person thrust into extraordinary situations is a staple of British fantastical literature. It was the very basis of the original Doctor Who. Though the show had the same name as now, Ian and Barbara were clearly intended as the audience identification figures, to the point where it could easily have been called ‘Schoolteachers in Space’. But this idea is being increasingly and repeatedly lost. (See for example the godawful Day of The Triffids remake on last Christmas.) If Amy turns out to be anything other than an ordinary girl with an extraordinary imagination, they will ruin the very thing they have created. 


Worse, you get the feeling it is all being done backwards – purely for the sake of being able to set up clues, which can get the message boards a-whizzing. I am no fan of this confusion between dropping clues and writing, but a mainstream show like Doctor Who makes the worst home for it. (Needless to say, I hope to be proved wrong here.)

Of course, having already sat through ’Boom Town’, through ’The Lazarus Experiment’, through ’The Unicorn and the Wasp’ I will carry on watching. ’Love and Monsters’ and ’Fear Her’ went out back-to-back and somehow I still carried on watching! You have to allow a show such as this to have off-episodes. And as next week starts a new Moffat two-parter, the dial will hopefully shift into the plus zone once more. In one sense, I’m even questioning why I should bother writing about this. Why not write about that gorm-free remake of The Prisoner for the Lost generation, which went out shortly after it? Is it illustrative to list the badness of bad things?

The answer is in no small part down to a Doctor Who obsession on my part, itself explained by what constituted my youthful viewing habits. But, as mentioned, the episode did raise problems with the wider series. (And it came from an idea of Moffat’s, after all.) And above all it so exemplified another claim I came up with last time: “It suggests Moffat is writing down incidents and images as they come to him, then later stringing them into storylines.”

...which is in many ways a perfectly valid approach. A TV show should strive to produce striking and memorable images, particularly a show not bound by the constraints of literalism. But the downside of this approach is that all too often things stop at this first stage. It’s like someone picked up the shopping list of images instead of the script, and shot that instead. It’s simply... well, “shoved together” would be a fitting phrase.

The Daleks have become such an icon that this seems particularly true of them. Their only possible rival for the defining image of the show is the Tardis. (Even the Doctor keeps changing his face.) Consequently, their popularity has had a paradoxical effect on the show, simultaneously bringing out both it’s strengths and weaknesses. You had to have a Dalek story, ready or not. But there’s no need to tell us about them, for the point is simply to show them.

In the old days their return could signal fresh new twists, as with 'Power of the Daleks'. But it all too often meant the return of the first Dalek storyline, albeit restaged and with new actors. ‘The Daleks’ meant ‘the Dalek story’, taken in the singular. Now what counts is the Dalek icon. With ’Evolution of the Daleks’, when the Dalek-human hybrid graced the cover of the Radio Times, it seemed a striking image. Yet the whole of the episode seemed to a chain of events to get us to that image (plus a few others along the way). Instead of the old Dalek story, we didn’t get any. ‘Repeat till cancelled’ versus ‘shoved together’.

But let’s not call this the darkest hour when it’s barely even the end of the beginning. Next week will hopefully bring a better choice of fare...

IT'S RUINATION DAY!

"It was not December and it was not in May
It was the 14th day of April, that is Ruination Day
That's the day... the day that is Ruination Day"

LOOK WHO’S BACK!

No, really!  The TV happened to flick itself on the other Saturday night and I discovered that, despite the lack of fanfare, it seems there’s a new series of that Doctor Who thing going on.

Initial prejudices:

I never quite rode the widespread wave of excitement when Steven Moffat was announced Lead Writer. Of course, I’d enjoyed his episodes as much as anyone else. But he seems to have lodged himself into the fan mind as the good writer, the savior who was going to rescue the show as the Davies era got more and more excessive. (Some later Davies stories could have been titled ‘Doctor Who in an Exciting New Adventure Against The Law of Diminishing Returns.’) A few times I’ve seen ‘Family of Blood’ referred to as a Moffat episode, presumably because it was above-par and presumption kicked in. Yet at the same time, and as I argued after ‘Silence in the Library’: “By this point Moffat’s motifs are starting to show.” The whole thing seemed to carry the risk that we were banking in our expectations of Moffat just as he’d given up the best of what he had to offer. (And no writer should be seen as an endless generator of story ideas, after all. Fields need to be left fallow.)

Moreover, Moffat’s new broom seemed to be stopping short of a whole bunch of the old writers, including ones like Chris Chibnall whose work I never cared for. This seemed a little close to rearranging the deckchairs, to “same as the old boss.”

And first sight of Matt Smith’s new (should that be new new?) Doctor had left me similarly agnostic. I liked the principle by which the series was being given a root-and-branch reboot, with not just a new cast but a new credit sequence, logo and everything. But Smith’s look didn’t seem enough of a break from Tennant’s frenetic, exuberant show of a performance. (In a shameless piece of fanfic, I even created a characterisation for the Doctor entirely to be an ‘antidote’ to Tennant.)

’The Eleventh Hour’:

The first episode didn’t feel crammed so much as double-booked, straining to both introduce that new cast and run with a full storyline. Which is perhaps partly inevitable, the same thing happened to ‘Rose’. (The last time an entirely new cast had to be fitted into a regular-sized episode.) So I withheld from print and judgement until Moffat had two episodes under his belt.

But what was more concerning was the way the story seemed to confirm my fears. It was very much a mash-up of episodes Moffat had already written, ‘Girl in the Fireplace’, ‘Empty Child’ and ’Smith and Jones’. (Okay, he didn’t actually write ‘Smith and Jones.’) Plus, as Andrew Hickey has noted, “the characters of Amy and Rory are more or less identical to the characters of Sally and Lawrence from ’Blink’.” Nowadays, you can get old episodes on DVD. There’s no need to keep remaking them.

With such demand on screen-time, you might expect Prisoner Zero, the obligatory monster, not to get much in the way of backstory. And in fact he doesn’t get any. But, more a source for concern, without it he seems to lack for motivation as well. You sometimes wondered if he’d been imprisoned for the crime of hanging round looking menacing, as he seems to do precious little else. (Or perhaps imprisoned simply because of this habit.)

On  Barbelith, Iamus comes up with a credible argument for what Prisoner Zero represents (scroll to 20:33 / 05.04.1 posting):

”Zero is not an alien from an intergalactic prison. Zero is the emotional residue left over from The Doctor's abandonment of Amy. That's his whole, sole purpose in this story. The dank and dilapidated little room he's been growing in for twelve years, the one that Amy is terrified to look at is the same as the one in her head that four psychiatrists told her to lock and ignore. “

...all of which is a very good argument. The monsters on this show are intended as id-creations, repressed parts of our own minds. Yet that “whole, sole” argument doubles back on itself. In an episode like ‘Dalek’ the Dalek not just represents the Doctor’s sublimated hatred and aggression, but is even able to draw them to the surface. Yet there the Dalek can be both, both alien and monster, both repressed self and antagonist. It is not a mere shadow but becomes a character in its own right, and even has a parallel journey to the Doctor’s. Zero, alas, is all too tellingly named.

However, the episode did contain some splendid snippets of dialogue, and some equally memorable images. (Such as the giant eyeball peering through the crack in the wall.) And the opening scene, where the Doctor meets the young Amelia, was (however derivative) almost sublime. Portraying the Doctor as part childhood fantasy, part unreliable blunderer, demonstrates a great insight into both character and series. What’s crucial is that, just as in Alice in Wonderland, the girl is made to take on the role of the adult, given the role of food provider, logically insisting “you said you liked apples”, patiently serving up fish fingers with custard even though she knows its weird.

’The Beast Below’:

Coming on more like a sequel to this first scene, The Beast Below made for a far better episode. True, it was still a little derivative, this time of ’End of the World’ and (even more) ’The Long Game’. But as Moffat wrote neither of those, and everyone agrees ’The Long Game’ was rubbish anyway, these seem smaller sins. (Thematically it’s also similar to ’Planet of the Ood’, but time enough to get into that.)

One masterful aspect of this episode was the setting, which kept up a long tradition of projecting a very British future. While New Who has, at it’s worst, strayed into pseudo-Hollywood brashness, this was very much our future. Incorporating quaintly retro elements like the London Underground signs or old BBC logos has a peculiar resonance. Surrealist objects such as lobster telephones are purely juxtapositional, they’re brought into existence exist simply because they shouldn’t be. But such settings get their peculiar resonance from being both absurd and fitting. Yes we’ll have spaceships, but they’ll still be slightly shabby. They will fly, but never quite on time.

There were perhaps functional problems with the premise. The concept is the elephant in the living room, the weasel in the cocktail cabinet - that a society based on a repressed truth will become riddled with petty repressions. (Given a visual correlative by the beast’s tentacles bursting everywhere.) But there’s logical incongruities. Why would a spaceship without an engine be run by fairground machines? Isn't the boy punished for poor school marks, nothing to do with spaceship propulsion? Perhaps you should expect such lapses from such a show, and just watch the sights.

A worse problem is the fact that it feels disjointed, like two different stories stuck together. The first is about the arbitrary rules the adult world presents itself as to a child. Grown-ups have such apparently capricious changes of mood that it seems they are forever showing different faces. At this point the young girl, Mandy, seems like the story focus. Yet, as soon as the mysterious Liz10 is revealed to be Queen, the focus switches to her – her attempts to solve the mystery, and ultimately her dilemma - which acts as an enhanced microcosm for everybody else’s. (In different ways, both introductory stories have felt like two halves stuck together. It suggests Moffat is writing down incidents and images as they come to him, then later stringing them into storylines. Whether this trend will continue remains to be seen.)

The episodes also finishes on one of Moffat’s patented motifs – the final reveal. Here we finally see what’s previously been hidden - the space whale and the city spaceship. Yet, while this reminds us of Moffat’s previous reveals, this time no harm is done. It doesn’t diminish what is on the screen before us now.

It was nice to see the Doctor’s insistence, repeated in both episodes, on solving problems through using your senses. (In fact, ’Beast Below’ is predicated upon his insistence on looking at what others shun from.) At one point, he even announces proudly a job done with “no Tardis, no screwdriver” – hopefully a statement of intent that the magic wand fixes of the Davies era have been given the shove.

It was equally disappointing, however, to see CGI used in both episodes. CGI on a BBC budget rarely looks good, but it’s more than that – it’s far too redolent of the show attempting to take on Hollywood, a battle it could never hope to win and would only rob it of it’s uniqueness. As mentioned earlier, monsters here are always id-projections and the rubber suits (however shoddy) underlined that by never looking too ‘otherly’. They should always look like our reflections, however distorted.

This was particularly annoying in the first episode, where the appearance of the monster was unnecessary to the point of being counter-productive. As Amy enters the room and looks at the monster the emphasis should all have been on her reaction – giving it the fearsome power of suggestion, rather than some cheap effects tool. The space whale’s tentacles were admittedly a more difficult problem, but could still have been rendered through animatronics.

Worse still is the repeated hints that Yet Another Big Universal Apocalypse Is Impending, due to arrive (at a rough guess) around episode twelve or thirteen. This is not just becoming formulaic, it also seems far too resonant of the Angry God era which should have died with Tennant. (With the references to the “panopticon”, I would guess the eyeballed Atraxi from the first episode are coming back somehow.)

The Doctor:

Whilst personally, I would still have gone for more of a contrast from Tennant, I will concede that Moffat’s Doctor is showing signs of becoming a character in his own right, and no mere variation on a theme. I’m not sure I’m keen on Matt Smith’s performance, but my responses are rarely actor-led and I even came to like Rose despite Billie Piper. Moffat clearly has in mind a more frazzled, ungainly Doctor than Tennant. At times Tennant’s eccentricities seemed like a mere disguise for a razor-sharp mind, while Smith’s is simultaneously sharp and askew.

There was one exchange he has with Amy...

”I thought... well, I started to think you were just a madman with a box.”

“Amy Pond, there's something you better understand about me, 'cause it's important and one day your life may depend on it. I am definitely a madman with a box!”

...which did not merely bode will for the future but is the most pithy summary of the character we've had in a while. Or perhaps even ever.

Moffat has stated that the new, more Heath Robinson look to the Tardis is intended to reflect new Doctor’s state of mind. But given this, you have to ask, wouldn’t the first-seen ‘raggedy Doctor’ be a more appropriate look? Why does he have to don the bloody bow tie? When the Doctor cries “to hell with raggedy, time to put on a show!” it sounds too close to a Tennant line. It also suggests an attempt to marry the character to the current(ish) fashion for ‘geek chic’, and chasing fashions has never served this show well.

Amy Pond:

Despite the worrying signs that we’re in for more ‘deferred romance’ and ‘love triangle’ plotline, there does seem a lot of promise in the Amy character. The Doctor first entering her life as this Peter Pan figure is appropriate. He stands for her imagination, her sense of child-like wonder which she had come to believe was just a figment.

The first Amy we see, dubious of the Doctor, is disguised as a policewoman. But as the second episode starts we see her floating in space in her nightie, suggesting these adventures are still part-set in her dreamland.

There’s the suggestion that, as he part-lives in her imagination, she intuitively understands him more than have previous companions. She knows that he will interfere in events and so tries (however mistakenly) to prevent him in order to protect him. She then grasps the true nature of the space whale because it is like him, over a fact of his life he has only just imparted. Saving the day on your first trip must surely be a record! This suggests a different dynamic to the usual Doctor/companion relationship, which will hopefully not degenerate into another Mickey love triangle.

‘”Too early to tell” wouldn’t be much of a conclusion, would it? While signs are mixed overall, some are promising and others downright great! Enough to keep you watching further into the season...

WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT IF BLOGGER DID WHAT IT SAID IT COULD?

...but apparently it can't. I lost count of the amount of times I had to repost and hand-edit the posting below just to get something halfway readable. One link I have now officially given up on formatting correctly. However many times I redid it I'd just  have it 'corrected' back to being wrong again. Apologies if people ever find things here hard to read. It's not me. It's them.


Blogger provides a forum for problems, but rather than anyone monitoring it for reported bugs they pretty much expect users to sort out their own problems between them. (Yep, while providing a product that isn't open source.)


Does anyone know if other browsers create the same problems? If so, I may well consider migrating.


What a piece of crap...

JOSEPH CAMPBELL DOESN’T NECESSARILY COME IN CANS

In a recent blog entry, Andrew Hickey tears into ‘comparative mythologist’ Joseph Campbell, for the negative and homogenising effect he’s had on genre fiction.

”If there is one person who I wish had never been born, it’s Joseph Campbell...

The concept of ‘the Hero’s Journey’ has done more to ruin fiction and popular culture than any other concept I can think of. What annoys me is that something that was intended as a *description* is instead increasingly being taken as a *prescription*.”

In short, Campbell to Andrew is the man who said the hero can have a thousand faces, but only one sodding story! This low level of esteem is commonly held in our circles. Andrew Rilstone, for example, has written of “the increasingly cancerous influence of Joesph Campbell”.

I would readily agree that there are many points where Campbell’s work can be criticised. But is it really him to blame every time you see a crap film? Hasn’t he just become a handy target, whereas really we know better?

In fact it’s in the gap between Andrew’s two comments above that I want to insert my two-penneth.

How did we get into this situation? Campbell is now inextricably caught up in the popular mind with Star Wars. It probably was George Lucas’ namedropping of his Hero With a Thousand Faces  that propelled him into the popular consciousness. Without this connection would they have made a popular TV series about him, The Power of Myth (even filmed on Lucas’ ranch) or brought out the accompanying (and refreshingly slim-line) book?

Yet Hero itself had actually been published back in ’48 and all his major works completed at least decade before Star Wars was released. Moreover, Campbell had been writing studies on myths and legends for those interested in history, culture or psychology. There’s no suggestion anywhere that any of it was intended as a practical guide for contemporary writers. When Lucas finally caught up with him and showed him the Star Wars films, he confessed to ignorance of them – for he rarely visited the cinema and didn’t own a TV.

But the real villain of the piece isn’t even Lucas - it’s Disney Exec Christopher Volger who wrote the 1992 ‘guide’ The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures For Writers, a book so appallingly autistic that burning would be too good for it.

Volger reduced Hero to the clod-hopping, meritocratic, evening-classes-for-all notion that it wasn’t even a guide but a manual. You just have to enroll in the course, read the set book with due diligence, follow the requisite sixteen steps and – hey presto! – your writing is mythic. That’s what it says on this here certificate, don’t it?

Volger made Campbell into cans, something saleable and consumable. It’s the difference between shamanic flight and a package holiday. It reminds me of the William Burroughs story Ah Pook Is Here about the wicked American capitalist who reads myths, but as if he were reading Moby Dick to know about whaling and having to skip all the bits about the white whale. If you wanted to make the mistake the other way up, you could read a recipe book then complain it was hard to relate to the characters. There’s no point wishing Christian Volger was never born because he already has been. But maybe there’s some way to fix the problem retrospectively...

For all their wooliness and New Age tendencies, the insight contained in Campbell’s works is that stories take on their own power. Any writer will tell you there’s some point where the story seems to surge ahead of him and write itself while he struggles to catch up. (Of course the operative word there is ‘”seems”. Stories are sentient life forms only in the worst of New Age mumbo jumbo.)

The point is that writing is a way of unlocking something, of accessing parts of your brain you didn’t know you had. The Surrealists fixated on automatic writing as a method of unleashing the subconscious. But in a sense all writing – at least all good writing – becomes automatic writing. As is said on www.jfc.org>the Joseph Campbell Foundation website:

“All myths are the creative products of the human psyche, artists are a culture’s mythmakers, and mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind’s universal needs.”

Of course the gormless literalists don’t even have the courage of their own convictions. They insist endlessly ‘all stories are one’. So if that’s the case, why do they even need this stupid manual in the first place? It’s like saying all roads lead to Rome, so I’d better bring a map. If they really believed what they say, wouldn’t anything they wrote take on that form, manual or not? Shouldn’t they even try to break from the mould, secure in the knowledge their story would reshape itself back into the one ideal form? Of course they would never do anything so edgy, so close to surrendering control! This is an essential part of colonising Campbell, that you can leave enough of a veneer to make your money-making seem somehow ‘spiritual.’

To re-iterate my main theme, the workaday hack writers don’t get it. So what else is new? You don’t judge a book by its slowest reader. The stupidest, klunkiest interpretation of something may well be the easiest one to get. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one. There’s a simpler reason for all the bad scripts out there. There’s bad writers.

PostScript: For those who haven’t yet had enough of this sort of thing, I posted some comments on Andrew’s blog about the relationship of Campbell to Structuralism. Given this description, I am not expecting an unseemly rush...

WHILE THE TEXT TAKES A BREAK...

Not sure when the next text entry will arrive here, to be honest. In the meantime, here's a link to some wintry-looking pictures I've recently uploaded to Flickr.

(If you like those, there's also a few more in different sets.)

I've actually got a whole slew of pictures hanging around which I would like to upload. The only snag is that I am possibly the last person left alive to have a film camera, which means laboriously scanning in each snap one at a time. It's like, so Twentieth Century!

‘FORWARD IN ALL DIRECTIONS’: THE EX LIVE IN BRIGHTON

Audio, Tues 2nd February

If Faust hadn’t already nabbed the name, you could call this gig ‘return of a legend.’ Though the band stated at one point this to be “not our first time in Brighton, of course”, it is by my reckoning over twenty years since their last visit. Of course the band were actually formed a decade even before then, but that gap still counts as a fair while even in my book.

This return visit had filled me with excitement, but also stirred up some trepidation. Their previous visit (at the now-defunct Richmond) had seared itself into my young memory. At the time I was religiously attending hardcore punk gigs, still oblivious to the essential fracture in that scene. Most attendees insisted that political radicalism must be married to musical conservatism, with only a few of us questioning this orthodoxy. Yet, though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, was inspired me about The Ex’s performance was the way they inhabited the punk genre without being confined by it. What to others was a narrow passageway, which pretty much dictated movement within it, The Ex treated as a broad open space where their elbows could poke wherever they chose.

Alas I’m not as familiar with their subsequent career as I would like to be, but it would seem that they continued to carry their “forward in all directions” maxim into ever-new territory. Formed from the Dutch squat scene, it was like they went on to squat every new piece of musical territory they could find – playing with everyone from free improvisers to traditional Ethiopian musicians. As Ian Aitch wrote in The Guardian:

“Take any major musical development of the last 50 years and you can almost guarantee that they have either incorporated it into their sound or played with it and discarded it. They have dabbled in jazz, improvisation, guitar-destruction, drilling venue walls, dance music, military-band precision, ska, toy instruments, horns, African beats and sampling. I could go on. Yet, surprisingly, none of this comes across as radical departure in style. They still sound like the Ex on every recording and at every gig.”

So in short I was massively keen to see the band again, yet wary that a let-down gig might tarnish my memory of how much they’d shone in the Eighties. I was also curious how they’d sound with the new singer. (“After 29 years and 1,371 performances” founder member GW Sock finally left the band.) Or, for that matter, accompanied by a four-piece brass ensemble. (Brass Unbound, more used to the free jazz scene.) After all The Ex sound is spiky, abrasive and angular, not necessarily an obvious fit for jazzers.

On stage the band took the standard audience-facing formation, while Brass Unbound filed along sideways beside them. This turned out to be a handy visual metaphor for what happened aurally. Much of the time the band would dominate, with the brass acting as an accompaniment or simply not playing at all. Then at a point where even The Ex seemed to have spent their fury, things would transfer to the brass section for a fresh eruption of sound. Their rolls gave a kind of flesh to the band’s more skeletal sound. Formally, it reminded me of the way that Godspeed You Black Emperor is almost two bands within one group – the ‘rock band’ and ‘string section’ passing the ball between them as their tracks progress.

But there’s perhaps a deeper connection. On the Pitchfork site, Aaron Leitko has commented on the band’s “repetitive, dissonant, and weirdly funky riffs.” (My emphasis.) Just listen to the video clip above of the track ‘Double Order’. In a reversal of conventional musical hierarchy, it’s the guitar which holds the line with that morse-code pulse – freeing the bass to lope and swoop and the drums in particular to go scatter-crazy. In general, there’s something intrinsically uninhibited in Katherina Bornefeld’s polyrhythmic drum patterns, which rarely march in the lockstep of punk orthodoxy. In short, there are already ‘receptors’ in the band’s sound for the brass to insert itself. This was no gimmick or sterile ‘experiment’, but a true marriage waiting to be made.

Despite my description above, there were rarer moments when both band would blast along together. There was even a visual correlative for this – a couple of times a member of each outfit would swap places, as if exchanging prisoners. When these moments worked they were stupendous, and perhaps reminiscent of the Eeen Ronje Holland release (where the band effectively expanded into a twenty-piece outfit given to frenzied noise symphonies).

However it has to be said such moments didn’t always entirely work. When they were good they were very, very good. And while they were never so bad as to be horrid, they were sometimes cacophonous rather than convulsive. I could be wrong, but I also got the impression that the tracks were written by (and hence for) the band, with the brass parts incorporated at a later point. (Certainly the video clip above, despite announcing the tour, features only the band.) Yet for all that the gig was overall above 90% successful, a pretty good batting record.

And Arnold de Boer gave such a sterling performance as the singer that I found myself seized by a romantic hope. True, the band now contain only one founding member - guitarist Terrie Hessels. (Who I hope stays awhile longer.) But perhaps they don’t need any. Perhaps they could perpetuate their existence for another thirty years, perhaps even forever, morphing members as they went, advancing in all directions...

NB: The band’s site currently has some cool stuff to download, for the punk-rock price of bugger all! (But nothing yet with Brass Unbound. Their practise seems to be to hone a sound by touring before releasing it.)

GOCOMPAREDOTCOM

"If there was any possibility he [Saddam Hussein] could develop weapons of mass destruction, we should stop it.”

-       Tony Blair, giving evidence to the Chilcot enquiry today

“The best form of defence is attack and the most vital element of attack is surprise. Therefore... the best way to protect yourself against any assailant is to attack him before he attacks you... or better... before the thought of doing so has even occurred to him!!!”

-       Master of Llap-Goch, The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok

REVOLUTION ON PAPER: Mexican prints 1910-1960

At the British Museum until 5th April

1. Re-inscribing the Tombstones

“Politics was central to his art”. They’re talking about Leopoldo Mendez, but the label could convincingly be applied to almost anyone here. This is a highly political collection stemming from a highly political era, roughly spanning from the 1910 Mexican revolution to the world war against fascism. (The single exception may be Orozco whose heart always seems to have lain with the grotesque.)

Of course Diego Riviera is the ‘name’ on which the show is hung. Not only does his image (above) advertise the exhibition, we see two of his prints almost before we’ve even entered the room. But the show does a sterling job in unearthing his lesser-known contemporaries. Pasada’s print ‘The Graveyard’ icily portrays the tombstones of the poor as lacking inscriptions, yet he is but one of many artists rescued from similar anonymity.

There’s perhaps an irony here in these prints being taken up in the country they so lambasted, the United States. In some ways they were adopted the way white musicians adopted blues, nodding obligingly to the originators as they rushed past them towards fame. This influence persists; and, truth to tell, I mostly think of these artists through their influence on the radical comics collective from New York World War Three (even if their weapons of choice are stencils ratther than prints).

There’s often a roughness to things, but a roughness which keeps them vibrant and compelling. As Richard Dorment comments in, all of all places, the Telegraph: “If this kind of thing seems crude, it was meant to be. Most of this art was never intended to shown in museums or even private homes, but was pasted on walls, or distributed at protest marches.”

(At the same time, we perhaps shouldn’t over-romanticise this aspect. The prints are a good less crude than, for example, the screenprints that filled walls of France during 1968. And tellingly, unlike in France, these prints were normally signed. These artists never asked for anonymity! They exist on the slippery borderline between art and political activity, but do not fall for either side.)

And of course function determines form. Simplicity and reduction play to prints’ strengths, not against them. But more, these works, designed for walls or pamphlet covers, are more often signs than windows. The veteran World War Three posse member Seth Tobocman articulated the difference when I was lucky enough to interview him: “A window moves inward. You look into it – at a scene. Whereas a sign actually exists in, and interacts with, the world outside of it.” ('Comics Forum' 26, 2002) As you walk around you can find exceptions to this rule, or works which lie between the two. But the signs predominate.

2. Fathers and Skeletons

A classic example of this re-inscribing is the very artist who came up with the ‘without inscriptions’ print - Jose Guadalupe Posada (above), who is presented here as the founding father of this school, like Woody Guthrie to the Sixties folkies. Perhaps due to his working in an earlier era, his work is admittedly less eye-grabbing than his disciples. His images don’t dominate the broadsheets in which they appeared, but are incorporated into (often heavy slabs of) text, like cartoons in a newspaper. Sometimes rather than a single bold image a series of thumbnails pepper the page. You need to look past all that to discover the power of his images.

All that said, it’s important to notice the divergencies his followers underwent. The curator suggests that Posada pioneered the ‘calaveras’ genre of skeleton imagery. However, Posada is more rooted in this imagery’s origins in the Day of the Dead festival than his followers would be. Death to him was a great social leveller, reducing us to the skeletons we all are underneath. In this way his skeletons are almost like the Neurath’s semi-contemporary ‘universal man’ iconic figures, so often used in statistical graphics (below). The skeleton figure acts paradoxically, throwing emphasis onto the figures’ accoutrements (bosses’ top hats versus peasant caps), whilst confirming that these are only accoutrements for almost identical figures. (See for example his ‘Skeleton of the Brave KKK’ (1910/13), in which a skeleton confronts the Klansmen with their mortality.

Yet the later Mexican artists tended to use the calaveras image in a more targeted way, as a shorthand for the dead hand of capital. Take for example Ramirez’s ‘Mother Country’ (1940) where a skull and vulture leer behind the fascist ‘side’ of his composition, against heroes of the revolution standing behind the leftists. This may be a case of the Mexican artists absorbing an international image. The Russian caricaturists most associated with the 1905 revolution, such as Bordsky or Kustodiev, tended to use the skeleton in this way. It’s certainly the way this image has come down to us, with the World War Three artists regularly depicting cops, politicians and real estate developers as skeletons.

3. Flags Need Soil

Yet, notwithstanding the above, the exhibition emphasises the importance of indigenous folk art on the movement. For example, it recounts how the era coincided with a spate of discoveries of Olmec ruins, which demonstrated how old indigenous civilisation truly was, and led to anthropological magazines such as ‘Mexican Folkways.’ (It is perhaps a little naive in accepting this as pure coincidence. Surely such discoveries could have been emphasised and capitalised on by the leftist government, or perhaps even invested in through increased archeological budgets.)  In Mendez’ ‘The Large Obstacle’ (1936), for example, the fist that stops the fascist tank arises from the land itself.

This is doubtless part of the appeal of such art. In a way it becomes the opposite of the Italian Futurism of the same era, rejecting an ‘avant garde’ sensibility and choosing to draw from the past rather than trample over it. The art comes to feel rooted in popular movements, not intellectual currencies. Yet this feeling is too good to take on trust. Whilst commenting on the Futurist show I felt the need to contextualise, if not rehabilitate, their rampant technophilia. Yet perhaps the opposite is true here, we can become so seduced by this notion that we neglect to look the horse in the mouth.

For what roots the art can also cause it to become mired in nationalism. Life springs from soil, but sadly so do flags. Jose Chavez Morado’s ‘The Laughter of the Public’ (above, 1939) is ostensibly anti-fascist, but treats it’s threat as a Spanish import – countering nationalism with more nationalism. (In much the way the Eighties Labour Party lambasted the oligarch Rupert Murdoch, but only for being a foreign oligarch.) Yet in an irony of history the Spanish empire exported anarcho-syndicalism to South America along with dictatorship, and several works (including Dosamante’s ‘Bombardment Spain’, 1937) cry for unity with Republican Spain.

4. Collectives and Warfare

Curator Mark McDonald depicts a scene as a hub of creativity, a “great print-making furnace and a forum for artists”. Yet look closely and there’s the all-too-familiar mix of resources being pooled and co-ops created (such as Mendez’s Workshop of Popular Graphic Art) at the same time as intense factionalism. While Riviera befriended Trotsky on his exile to Mexico, Siqueras tried to assassinate him. (Yes, in person! Though his was not the successful attempt.)

Sadly, this seems to sum up the politics of the latter part of the era. While the name of Zapata continued to be venerated, Trotskyism and Stalinism became the only actual games in town. A 1941 print by Zalce is entitled ‘The USSR is Defending The Freedom of the World – Let’s Help!’ Despite the United States remaining their main print-buying market, the conflation of dollar signs with swastikas continued even after American entry into the war.

But perhaps the best barometer of this is the way Zapata himself was depicted. Curator Mark McDonald describes him as “the saint of the farmers”, and certainly his 1919 death had made him a secular saint to which all factions must pay homage. Yet his departure from the here and now also made his image malleable, and within this image there are significant variants. Siqueiros’s ‘Emiliano Zapata on Horseback’, isolates his figure and places him above others on a horse, in what could almost be a portrait of Cortez. Yet Aguirre’s ‘Emiliano Zapata, the Great Leader of the Revolutionary Peasant Movement’ conversely rehumanises the man, placing him before a field of crops, and putting his feet so firmly on the ground that they must surely be dirty. In a famous tale, after taking President Diaz’s palace, Zapata refused to occupy it and made his bed in the stables. Formally both pictures observe the same salutations, but in the second some residue remains of Zapata’s libertarian politics.

Yet radical art was not crushed as completely in Mexico as in Russia, and other images are perhaps more ambiguous. Riviera’s introductory image shows him holding a horse, yet standing. In Bracho’s ‘The Struggle of the Popular Movement’ (1948), the figure of Zapata is fused with the landscape, and set behind a mass of people. In one sense it recalls Mendez. Yet the identification of a figure with a landscape must surely always carry a taint of royalism.

I don’t have much of a conclusion to come to here, except to encourage one and all to see this must-see show, viewable for the pro-worker price of bugger all! Check out the details here or watch this official video.