It’s been ages since I’ve posted a playlist, so I thought I’d change the format slightly. Background: I write about music a lot for various publications, but as a music journalist I also receive hundreds of promo type emails every week and, when something looks interesting I download it and save the release in a folder marked with the month, to be properly checked out later (sometimes much later). So I thought ‘going forward’ (I hate that phrase, what did people used to say?) that at the end of each month I’d go over the items of interest and see if they really were interesting, and write a little bit about them.
Now is as good a time as any to start, but to get it rolling I thought I might as well do a look back over the summer, which I think I did years ago on my old website. Anyway, let’s get on with it.
Going right back to the beginning of June, an album I really liked and have kept listening to is…
This vinyl-only release is the brainchild of acclaimed folk guitarist C Joynes, aided and abetted by a starry ensemble consisting of the Dead Rat Orchestra, plus fellow experimental guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Nick Jonah Davis and Cam Deas. The Borametz Tree takes its name from the fabled “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary”, a tree supposed to produce sheep as its fruit (also the title of one of the album’s best songs) and it’s a suitably exotic and otherworldly collection of tunes. Otherworldly is perhaps misleading; in fact the multi-textured music here is very much of this earth, often many different corners of it at once. The album opens with the richly reverberating “Triennale” which sets the scene with its atmospheric, droning combination of elements from different western, eastern and African folk music traditions; but which all gel beautifully to make a familiar yet alien whole. It’s incredibly elusive; the aforementioned “Vegetable Lamb…” begins sounding perhaps Scandinavian or even Scottish, but strangely could equally be Arabic; and this kind of melange characterises the whole album, somehow encompassing everything from bluegrass to the music of the steppes. Mysterious, wild and invigorating.
Transfigurationsis interesting, an album distilled from a multifaceted performance art project, it’s part experimental (but relatively orthodox) songs, albeit with the cello as the central instrument, part sound-collage, part social commentary, part spoken word performance. The album kicks off with ‘Rupture 1’ (the album is punctuated by five politically-charged Ruptures) featuring an excerpt from an old news report about the Black Panthers in the May Day protests of 1969, beginning a theme of civil unrest that runs through the whole album. At various times it reminded me of the mini-album Jarboe and Helen Money made together a few years ago; kind of an obvious comparison, but to me this was more satisfying. Although less indomitable than Jarboe’s, Cellista’s vocals are more melodic and the songs (or at least the handful of more conventional ones like ‘Confessions‘ and standout, ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ featuring Dem One) are straightforwardly affecting. The actual cello playing reminded me less of Helen Money than of the fantastic Julia Kent; atmospheric and (that word again) mysterious. The album is, deliberately, very timely (Cellista explained while promoting the work that “Transfigurations is a response to the world we inhabit. It is meant to allow us all, singularly and as a community, to see the ruptures that punctuate our place in the present”), but the framing of our time (specifically 2017 in fact) as a time when always-present tensions have risen to the surface reinforce the idea that the issues of our time are the issues of all time. It’s a good album.
Quite liked it in small doses, at least. It’s very nice and all, but taken as a whole its slightly twee and fragile retro, sometimes synth-pop indie style made me think of Philip Larkin on The Beatles; “like certain sweets, they seem wonderful until you are suddenly sick. Up till then it’s nice, though.” Philip Larkin, All What Jazz, Faber & Faber, 1970, p. 102
Speaking of retro (and what would pop culture in 2019 be without the ghosts of the 80s and 90s hanging over it?) I quite liked K. Michelle DuBois’ “summer single” ‘Waves Break’ which sounds weirdly like Jan Hammer producing The Cure c. Japanese Whispers but with the Bangles doing the vocals. I seem to quite like K Michelle DuBois against my will; I checked out her album Harness last year, decided it sounded like the kind of music you get on Buffy style teen soaps, ie not my cup of tea, but then ended up listening to it quite a lot anyway. Not at all sure about this video though.
One of the problems with promos is they are sometimes sent out so far in advance, for understandable reasons, that you tend to listen to and then forget about them before the release date is even near. The example that led to this observation is the unpleasant but extremely powerful new album by Margaret Chardiet’s industrial project, Pharmakon. The promo has been with me since June, the album itself (Devour) is out on August 30th via the reliably great Sacred Bones Records. I’m not sure I’d say I ‘like’ Devour, but it’s a hypnotically ugly record, paradoxically chaotic and controlled, emotional and yet kind of blank and icy. More tuneful than I had expected though; if you don’t like the single ‘Self-Regulating System’ then you probably won’t like any of it.
2019 is (to me at least) one of those times when the zeitgeist feels like an actual entity, less the ‘spirit of the age’ and more an actual ‘time-ghost’, a baleful Lovecraftian presence whose unseen influence poisons the atmosphere of the era, insidiously affecting the minds of influential people.
It’s a silly conceit perhaps (although few ancient civilisations would have thought so), but also a handy one; great swathes of history can be explained by the idea of the time spirit invisibly presiding over the earth like the Old Gods of the Cthulhu mythos; ages of empire and revolution and war and faith and enlightenment and (that ambiguous word) “progress” of various kinds.
Looked at as a succession of identifiable ages, the idea of zeitgeist (as an entity, or in the usual usage) has both pluses and minuses. On the one hand it gives us history in a usefully linear, easy-to-summarise, teach and learn kind of way, (too) neatly summarising otherwise amorphously opening and closing stretches of time. On the other hand, it removes to an extent the sense of individual and group responsibility that’s at the heart of all human activity and ventures.
This is almost fair; people have no choice but to act as products of their time and environment; but mostly it’s unfair, since whatever time people come from, ideas of good/bad (extreme ones anyway) remain somewhat static: people generally do know when they are acting badly. And while people are a product of their time, times even more so are a product of the people who inhabit them. The eternal problem is that even rational and enlightened human beings can be counted on to do irrational things. Some of these, like firing missiles at people who they don’t know and have no personal disagreement with, are simply harmful. Others, like voting for political parties which it is not in their own interest to have in power, or protesting by destroying the neighbourhoods they live in, when logic would dictate that they should attack those of the people who cause their woes etc, are self-harming too. Being swept up in the zeitgeist is a thing, and in a way the proof of that it is, is that it can be hard to justify afterwards, even to yourself.
Currently, the zeitgeist seems to desire that the people of the world should be drunk on bigotry and self-interest. The hangover from this kind of a binge we already know; bulldozing piles of bodies into pits and swearing it’ll never happen again. Only the next time, we (or they, depending on how events play out) may have to dirty our/themselves by doing the ‘bulldozing’ by hand, since ignoring impending ecological disaster in favour of increased profit (as I write, commercial whaling has been resumed after a thirty year cessation) is part of the whole bigotry/self-interest worldview.
In the UK, the two main political parties – theoretically irreconcilably different in almost every respect – are facing what, however it works out, is one of the biggest political challenges since World War Two (I mean Brexit, I suppose I’d better name it for reasons of clarity, much as I hate to) in exactly the same way. Not – as might be expected (or even quite reasonably demanded) – by taking steps to prevent the problems that are inevitably going to arise, or even (as might be reassuring, if perhaps comical) by plotting some utopian alternative Britain which will blossom in the aftermath of the upheaval. Instead they are just wringing their hands over the future of the parties themselves in the aftermath of the divisiveness they have helped to fuel, or at best not tried to heal. Oh well.
In 1826, William Hazlitt wrote (not in The Spirit of the Age, though that would have been neater:
…hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.On The Pleasure of Hating from The Plain Speaker (1826) in Selected Writings, p. 400-1, Penguin Classics, 1982
The extent to which this is still a demonstrably true and relevant statement is depressing, suggesting that while ages may each have their own spirit, the ghost at the heart of them is humanity itself. Like businessmen (and they usually are men) polluting their own land and rioters destroying their own neighbourhoods, it suggests that, if catastrophe comes, it will be human nature that facilitates it, while at every stage, offering apparently valid reasons for doing so; as Hazlitt also noted, ‘Reason, with most people, means their own opinion’ (Ibid, p. 439)*
*he wrote ‘It is always easier to quote an authority than to carry on a chain of reasoning’(ibid; p. 449) too, which is perhaps even more relevant here; I’m doing it
Having said all that, although “the” zeitgeist is talked and written about, there never is only one spirit of any age. Against Adam Smith’s definitive statements of the Scottish Enlightenment like ‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’. (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), you have to set Byron’s memories of childhood in Aberdeenshire at the end of that same century: “I remember a Methodist preacher who on perceiving a profane grin on the faces of part of his congregation – exclaimed ‘no hopes for them as laughs.’” (Lord Byron Selected Letters & Journals ed. Leslie A Marchand, Pimlico, 1993, p.352.
British life in the 1930s
Two of my favourite books, Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool and George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier were published a year apart from each other (in 1936 and 1937 respectively – more about the former here), by people who were not only contemporaries, but who knew each other and went to school together and remained on friendly terms; a narrow focus you’d think, but they perfectly exemplify very different currents in European society of the time. The Great Depression and the precarious living conditions of working class people (Orwell), and the dying years of ‘jazz age’ decadence and the ennui of the moneyed class (Connolly) are almost opposites, but both were to fuel the coming war; are these two zeitgeists or one? Which brings up the question (because I’m bringing it up) of hierarchies of zeitgeist. As World War Two loomed, these two groups were the yin and yang of interwar Europe. There was the vast mass of the unemployed or poverty-stricken working class for whom the Depression meant impending starvation and the need for change in order to survive. Then there was the differently disaffected upper class, products of and heirs to decaying empires, with little desire to deal with the running of them in the aftermath of the seemingly hollow victory (Allied Powers) or disastrous defeat (Central Powers) of World War One. But are yin and yang one entity, or two? (both, inevitably)
Closer to our own time, what could be more 80s than yuppie culture, racism, Thatcherism and Reaganomics? But also, what could be more 80s than “alternative comedy”, Rock Against Racism and the miner’s strike? In the early 90s, rave culture peaked around the same time as Guns ‘n’ Roses; a disappointingly sturdy beast as it turned out. Zeitgeist lore would have you believe that a pincer movement of dance music and Nirvana’s Nevermind swept away cheesy trad rock and its stylings, but in fact “Slash” was miming a solo on an unplugged Les Paul in the desert in the video to a hit single just months afterSmells Like Teen Spirit had apparently rendered such things obsolete. So it goes; Mull Of Kintyre was the song that topped the charts as the year of punk came to an end. As with empires and revolutions, eras of whatever kind are rarely as neat as we’d like them to be retrospectively; and I say that as someone who owned, without any feeling of incongruity, albums by Nirvana and Guns ‘n’ Roses and the The Shamen.
in 2019, 80s nostalgia is at an all-time (or time to date) high; but, even in the western world, there was more than one 1980s
But away (partly) from music, the ways in which apparently opposed forces come together to define an era is always fascinating to look at. When they are violently opposed, as in the case of something like the hippies putting flowers in guns and then being shot at Kent State in 1970, it’s pretty black and white. Whether or not you think the hippies were ‘the good guys’, shooting unarmed protesters will always make you ‘the bad guys’. The two sides of the conflict couldn’t have been more clear. On the other hand, once you remove the life-and-death struggle, things become more ambiguous. To cite a very trivial example; the founding of the extremely successful label Earache Records in 1985 was part of a government sponsored enterprise scheme which essentially rebranded unemployed teenagers as entrepreneurs. It’s often celebrated as a kind of ironic victory of the anarcho-punk-crusty underground over nasty old Thatcherism – and that’s how label founder Digby Pearson saw it:
“… in the 80s, when you were unemployed in the UK, you had to go to visit the unemployment office every two weeks, and I didn’t fancy doing that. If you start a company, you get the same amount of money and you don’t have to visit the unemployment office every two weeks. You’re not unemployed anymore, so it’s a method for the government to reduce the unemployment figures…They didn’t care what business you did, as long as you did something… it was an excuse to say ‘Wow! I’m a record company!’ But the truth is I had no plans, nothing really.” quoted in Albert Mudrian, Choosing Death – The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore, Feral House, 2004 p.121
BUT, much as one applauds any victory over Thatcherism, isn’t the phenomenal success of Earache Records (going strong over 30 years later, with offices in London and New York), for all its rebellious, anti-Thatcher stance, just what the government wanted to happen? Doesn’t it kind of prove that, in this one specific instance at least, Thatcherism worked? Bleh. A silly segue, but it makes me think of this achingly ironic note from Breaking Free (1989) by “J. Daniels” – a very entertaining revolutionary socialist (or perhaps more precisely, anarcho-syndicalist or some such thing) Tintin book in which Tintin and Captain Haddock help to bring down western capitalism.
Attack International: “we have copyrighted Tintin” – good luck with that
Apologies for abruptly bringing optimism into what has so far been apocalyptically downbeat, but the point here if there is one, is that people can and retrospectively do choose the zeitgeist they prefer. The changing critical fortunes of pop stars are always very interesting to observe from that point of view – the world is full of “the kind of people who had to wait until 1968, when it became chic to say that Brian Wilson was a genius, before they could admit that they liked The Beach Boys”* – so why not do it now, and in doing so strengthen the spirit itself? Against Trump, Farage, Brexit, rigid political ideology and religious dogma you can set Greta Thunberg, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, David Attenborough, Bonnie Greer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stormzy, Carole Cadwalladr and really, so many more; this was a random, pulled-out-of-the-air list, in no way meant as definitive or even representative.
*Charles Shaar Murray in Creem magazine, 1972, from Shots From The Hip, Penguin books 1991, p.16
Marxist revolutionary Tintin
The current, sunnily optimistic issue of the alumnus magazine of my alma mater (well, why not? I’ve never written that phrase before!) pleased me – because if populism and intolerance are ‘the zeitgeist’, then so is this – and what’s more it is the future too. It’s hard to think of a more conservative (in the tradition-bound sense) institution than the University of St Andrews, but even aside from the cover story (Internationally Scottish; an exhibition celebrating diversity), the magazine regularly celebrates its award-winning graduates from all over the world, the globally important research undertaken at the university and, on a more intimate level, has a news column recording marriages and civil partnerships of its alumni. That is, it covers a hugely diverse mix of people from a multiplicity of backgrounds, doing a range of things. It celebrates diversity (have to admit that phrase is irksome though) – just like movies and TV shows and commercials and shops and organisations still now do – not because such things as internationalism and civil partnerships are either ‘politically correct’ or daringly edgy, or because it’s somehow forced on them (by whom, anyway?), but because it’s good business; because it’s society, it’s people, and what people do, how they live and what they want. When people stop being diverse, this will stop happening. And the point is that people always have been diverse, but the people in charge have not. But, almost against their will, they are starting to be.
15th century university in the 21st century
Looking at the bigger picture, it quickly becomes clear that all this apparently endless Brexit/Trump reactionary nonsense is just the foamy-mouthed dying throes of old ways of life. Despite the constant yammering about elites and freedom, these ways of life were established by people with an inflated sense of their own importance and exceptionalism (and/or that of whatever they identify with; nation, gender, ethnicity; the usual suspects) and a vision of freedom which only meant their own freedom to do whatever they want to do without interference.
That’s not to say that the dying throes of outworn cultures are harmless (see WW1 for instance), and I’m not naïve enough to say that all will be well; but in the end, the wave of reactionary negativity is doomed, because ultimately people don’t want authoritarianism unless they happen to be the ones in positions of authority and because people who have grown up and lived in relative freedom will not have it easily taken away; I hope anyway. In history there are very few analogues to the present time, which is probably why the geist of the Weimar Republic hovers so ominously.
Despite the current state of world and British politics, in most important ways, more things are probably better for more people – certainly in the western world (not, I realise, a minor caveat) – than they were in, say 1989 – and the bits that are worse are fixable, given the political will to fix them. The political class finding that will rather than being absorbed by its own power struggles and internal battles is always a problem, admittedly; and more and more I feel the will will have to be forced upwards from ‘ordinary’ people, somehow, though that ‘somehow’ presents a whole different set of issues.
But while looking forward, it’s instructive to look at what it actually is that people are nostalgic about. Yes, there are those who yearn for times when they could do whatever they wanted because of the class/country/whatever they came from, but there are also things like the wartime spirit, or the solidarity of the mining communities before Thatcher destroyed them. Nobody wants to be bombed, and few if any people actually enjoyed working in coal mines – what people generally miss is the sense of community that arises from adversity,* The thing to do then, is to try to create the missing sense of community without having to experience the adversity. And people are doing exactly those kinds of things; community projects, ecological movements, local groups, international organisations. Imagine the progress – in the sense of good things for the future of the world – that could be made if people tried to humanise entities like the EU, rather than breaking them apart or divorcing from them or viewing them as first and foremost business ventures. If hate groups are on the rise (and they always seem to be), then more positive movements are flourishing too. Personally, although I think it’s great, I don’t really feel comfortable belonging to things, but I’m glad other people want to. But as with the ever more arcane (and ever more necessary) rules about recycling and plastic-usage, I’ll get used to it. We can still be okay in the end, if we want to be. This wasn’t what I started out to write, but it’s a nice note to end on.
*Side note: it can be shocking for someone of my generation to realise the extent to which shared experience – already very much in the decline in the 70s and 80s, has changed and all but disappeared. To take a very trivial example (the main kind of examples I seem to give), if you were at school in the UK in the 1980s, and if your family was the sort where the TV was on in the evening, you could pretty much guarantee that you and almost everyone you knew would be watching one of 4 (or even 3) shows at any given time. Not only did you as a child know what was in the top 10 (possibly most kids still know that) but, thanks to Top of the Pops your parents did too, and possibly even your grandparents, if you had such things. I’m not saying it was better, but it was substantially different. What we now seem to have in place of that kind of boring, take-it-for-granted shared experience is vaguely similar but utterly different; instant familiarity. ‘Re-imaginings’, reboots, remakes, new songs that sound like old songs (I recently heard a hit song that blatantly “borrows” the melody of the verses from Dolly Parton’s Jolene and another which lifts the chord sequence of Every Breath You Take by The Police; these are not obscure reference points, but nor are they acknowledged as pastiches or homages, or credited as samples are, though presumably royalties are being paid). Familiarity, however much contempt it’s supposed to breed, is apparently comforting, or at least saleable.
As I write these words it’s the first day of summer and I’m sitting in my study (sounds pompous, but ‘room full of books and records where I work’ is less economical), with Atom Heart Mother playing, looking out at a beautiful sky of quilted dove-grey clouds receding towards the Lomond hills, over a typical rural Scottish landscape; a bit of wasteland filled with flowers and few decaying disused buildings and beyond, a park (the part I can see currently empty except for white goalposts) and then woods leading up to the hills. It’s nice. Despite the semi-optimistic whingeing of my last post I’ve really not been any more productive; at least I haven’t finished writing many things. But I’ve made lots of notes, and reading through them there seem to be some (perhaps tenuous) links and themes running through them. So here are a couple of them.
On work days part of my routine is to fill the bird feeders in the garden before breakfast. At around 6.30 am the bird traffic outside the kitchen window is pretty steady; for someone who has lived in rural areas my whole life I’m mystifyingly ignorant about nature, so I’m surprised to find how many birds I can identify. At the feeders (there’s a central metal lamppost-looking part with two hanging feeders and a tray, plus two smaller ones in the shape of flowers, a poppy and a daisy); uncountable numbers of sparrows (recently including puffed-up, demanding sparrow chicks, bullying their parents), a couple of blue tits (looking the worse for wear as apparently they do when they have young), a contrastingly pristine great tit, a robin, a tiny coal tit, a few increasingly bloated wood pigeons and a pair of elegant and extremely skittish collared doves. On the ground, feeding off the seeds the sparrows throw about the place; four (sometimes five) yellowhammers, the males like little canaries, the occasional chaffinch (I think always the same one), two big, luxurious-looking crows, more sparrows (of course), the odd magpie and a few blackbirds (a young one has taken to landing on the tray and flowers too, the first time I’ve seen one do that). In the last week or so, mysteriously less welcome, a small flock of starlings. The baby who came first was, to start with, a cute, rotund, almost kiwi-esque creature, but although the other birds mostly don’t seem to mind them too much, and though I would hate for them to starve, I’m not pleased to see them. Ted Hughes’s fault? I rarely read poetry nowadays, but I haven’t forgotten the note he wrote in Moortown Diary (by far my favourite of his books, it was published in 1989 as an expanded version of 1979’s Moortown) about his poem Poor Birds:
That winter, in particular, was doubly darkened – by bigger hordes of invading starlings than I have ever seen. All day long they would be storming down onto the field beside us, or roaring up, wired to every rumour, in a bewildered refugee panic, very disturbing , even slightly depressing, and somehow ominous, since they couldn’t be ignored… Moortown Diary, p.61, Faber & Faber, 1989
Although there are at most 6 or 7 starlings in the little flock that visits here, they bring something of that doom-laden quality, possibly just by association (I grew up on farms, where they are never welcome), or maybe just because of their oddly un-pretty greasy-looking speckled plumage. Dilemma; how to harmlessly discourage starlings without discouraging everyone else? Conclusion – you can’t, they have to eat too, it’s fine.
But then, this week, one morning I glanced out of the window just in time to see a collared dove take off in panic from the top of the feeder where it was perched, just as a bird of similar size and colour landed. I edged towards the window and standing there looking fairly furious was what I am reliably informed (corroborated by google) was a sparrowhawk (see bad phone photos taken at the kitchen window below). I assume it’s a young one, since it was about the same size as the dove it scared off and since ‘tis the season for young birds. It (I want to say he, but I have zero idea how one would tell the gender of a hawk – but in fact a friend pointed out to me that males are grey while females are brown, so I can reinstate his gender!) seems to have a very short visiting window, between 6.20 and 6.35 am, but after day two, when I looked just in time to see his claws, holding (I’m pretty sure) a dead fieldmouse, disappear into the air, he has returned every day. Not that I’ve seen him every day, but there is a particular, slightly unsettling stillness and tense silence in the garden after he has visited. At least, the silence feels tense to me, because it’s so unusual; even the near-constant chattering in the laburnum tree (more sparrows, I presume) is subdued for a while and I can hear the sound of traffic in the distance. And yet, I don’t feel the same dilemma as I did with the starlings; here is an actual predator who definitely means harm to the birds I feed, but while I would hate to think I’ve fattened up the sparrow babies to feed him, I don’t try to think of ways of scaring off the hawk without scaring everyone else. Of course, like the starlings and everyone else, the hawk needs to eat too. But, less altruistically, there’s something in me that would apparently rather see a single hawk than a whole flock of sparrows – understandable perhaps; I see sparrows every day, I didn’t even know what a sparrowhawk actually looked like until this week – but not a thought process one would want to extrapolate outwards into other areas too much.
But, coincidentally, I’m going to do that anyway…
If there’s a human equivalent of the sparrowhawk, I suppose it would be the apparently endlessly fascinating serial killer. There are people (they are easy to find online) who think that their fascination with serial killers marks them out as being in some way edgy and ‘different’, but the depressingly inexhaustible stream of TV shows, books and films about them (aside from the recent excitement about Zac Efron playing Ted Bundy, there are entire channels on TV now that seem exclusively to consist of shows with names like ‘I married a serial killer’, ‘the killer next door’ ‘killer kids’ etc) should be enough to show that, far from being different or marginal, this is a mainstream interest. It’s The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal and Psycho and the majority of cop shows; it isn’t revelling in obscurity, it’s the same crap that everyone is interested in. The irony is (I’ve watched those kinds of shows too) that – I was going to say ‘in contrast to the feathered raptor’, but that’s just not right – the more you learn about genuine psychopaths, the more you realise that while people in general are unique, complex and incredibly varied, the psychopaths themselves have a strong family resemblance and are far more limited and in fact far less interesting than ‘normal’ people. If you remove the frisson of fear which is the real attraction of the films and books, take away the violence and horror; these are very boring people indeed. I don’t want to rob birds of emotions and personalities that I can’t prove they do or don’t have, but to the inexpert human eye (mine), sparrows seem like a fairly interchangeable bunch, they mostly do the same things in the same ways. Hawks may do likewise, but I rarely see them up close and they have a certain glamour and rarity value for that reason. Serial killers on TV are a constant, sparrow-like presence, their tiresome lack of empathy making them far more drab and uniform than their unfortunate victims.
Which is probably why there are so few documentaries about the psychopaths who don’t violently kill people. But actually – maybe there are. I don’t want to brand anyone a psychopath particularly, but thinking about the kind of reality shows which focus exclusively on interchangeable, self-aggrandising, egotistical ‘personalities’ who – irony – have no actual discernible personality as such, just an insatiable appetite for self-publicity, maybe the non-serial killer psychopath documentary is just as prevalent as the serial killer kind. It’s a possibility.
As you’ll have noticed I am not a nature writer, and it doesn’t come naturally (nice choice of phrase) to me. I don’t read much nature writing either, unless you count William Horwood’s Duncton books, which I read many years ago. You don’t? Well, if you are interested in reading nature writing by people who are actually good at it, and excellent analysis of their work, there are lots of good things to be found here.
Vertigo (1908) by the Belgian symbolist Léon Spilliaert: it felt appropriate
Four months without a post is long even for me and for this always irregularly updated website. It wasn’t intentional and normally I probably would have at least filled the gap with a couple of playlists or something, but the fact is I’ve been experiencing something like writer’s block and I’m starting to get weird about it, so this is something at least.
I say ‘something like’ writer’s block because technically it really isn’t that; this year I’ve written thousands of words for various places (Zero Tolerance Magazine, Record Collector and some but not enough for the fantastic Echoes & Dust) and at the beginning of the year I had my usual burst of new year productivity and optimism that seems to have fizzled out.
It’s not that I don’t want to write, even less that I don’t have things I want to write about; I’ve had half-formed, half-alive ideas squirming around in my brain for months, so far stubbornly refusing to take an actual writeable-about shape, which is always frustrating. Normally my strategy (okay, not as organised as an actual strategy) would be to just write about something else. Change direction, clear the head, just write something – a playlist seems to be one of my go-to things, because they are fun to write and to think about, but although I have listened to a lot of music, both professionally (so to speak; ie as a reviewer/music journalist) and for my own entertainment, they haven’t inspired me to write any more than I had to for work purposes; not the music’s fault.
That said, I’ve put on some records and started writing. So why this mental state? There are various reasons, internal and external, for this. One obvious external one is (tempting to say *everything*) the current political climate. There are people (Ian Dunt is my favourite) who love to write about political turmoil and make gripping reading out of it; I am not one of those people it would seem. I feel engaged with current affairs up to a point, then swamped by and eventually numbed to them (for instance, I used to watch BBC Breakfast every day while getting ready for work, but the reinterpretation of ‘impartiality’ to mean finding someone who holds an objectionable view on every single topic has made the show feel a much less light way to start the day and now I usually put on whatever old sitcom Channel 4 is showing – within reason, obviously – or an old film. I’m not quite at the Good Morning Britain or Everybody Loves Raymond stage of mental fragility yet).
I think this numbness to current affairs is probably quite common and worse, it’s also counted upon to a degree by people in government. There are so many movements among people to disengage, to close off, to create separate little pools of alike-ness; basically the opposite of how I feel things should be. But although this kind of zeitgeist has the (one would think positive) effect of making those who oppose it more vocal, it ironically seems, like ‘Tortuous Convolvulus’ in Asterix and the Roman Agent, to breed a very isolating kind of discord where, despairing of any kind of broad consensus, the temptation is to avoid becoming entangled in debates at all and to take refuge in the comfortable and familiar – ironically playing into unchanging, status quo-rules spirit of the time after all.
Asterix & The Roman Agent (Goscinny & Uderzo, 1970) translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
And then, there’s Brexit. I have my own thoughts about Brexit, but only one that I’ll share here because god knows there’s enough stuff about it everywhere else. To me, the whole situation demonstrates one of the vulnerabilities of the UK’s particular version of parliamentary democracy (and perhaps parliamentary democracy in general; I don’t know enough about other countries to comment confidently). The particular vulnerability I mean is the way the system can essentially be hijacked by small groups of people who work within it and who have an axe to grind.
The referendum result and its legitimacy can be argued about ad infinitum, but the fact is that I am old enough to remember people protesting and/or marching about many things pre-2016 (war, taxes, air strikes), but EU membership wasn’t one of them, outside of the Daily Mail. And had the referendum not been called, people wouldn’t have been rioting in the streets demanding it. But a small number of MPs were able to pressurise the situation within parliament to make their pet issue into a national debate. A similar group (the same group?) could just as easily and I would guess just as divisively bring forth debates about things like the death penalty or drugs or abortion to the public realm – and I imagine they will, if they get the chance. But the EU was the issue that at this time affected their business interests and inflamed their xenophobia, so we’re stuck with it.
I am tempted to blame the Conservative party and UKIP for the situation simply because I detest everything they stand for; actually, I’ll just do that; it’s their fault. The very prevalent narrative that the days of entities like the EU are numbered also comes, not by and large from the voices of “the people” (and how would we hear it if it did? Yes online and in places like this; ie blogs that nobody reads – but except in extreme cases like riots etc, the voices of the people only become amplified after being filtered through politicians and governments before being heard internationally), but from the exact same kinds of self-interested parties as those who pushed Brexit onto the national agenda in the first place.
None of which is not to say that the views of pressure groups within parliament haven’t been foisted on the public before – and they certainly will be again. As far as I’m concerned though, the role of government is purely to represent the views and interests of the electorate and not to foist its own views onto it. As Brexit shows though, when that does happen, the people are essentially at the mercy of whatever party happens to be in charge and are even, ludicrously denied a say in events as they unfold because what they may or may not want now can’t be allowed to undermine what they wanted at a previous date. Good enough for general elections; the basis of our democracy, but not somehow acceptable when it applies to some random thing that the party in charge was seeking.
What is the solution? Well, some kind of serious parliamentary reform, which I imagine will eventually happen whatever the final outcome of Brexit is; but more than that, it would be nice if the idea that we are led or (worse) ruled by parliament could give way to the truth – or what should be the truth – of it: that we are represented, by people who work for us and are paid to put the views and interests of their constituents forward. But for as long as people talk and think about ‘Westminster’, or ‘Holyrood’, or ‘Brussels’ (forgive all the inverted commas; obnoxious) as if they are entities beyond their control that act in their own mysterious interests, it won’t change. Holding people to account isn’t a radical idea, it’s what democracy is supposed to do. Also, I think we should pay MPs “the average” wage, whatever that is and not more, but that’s another issue that could only be dealt with by the people who have a vested interest in not dealing with it, so enough about all that.
In the wider world, I felt liberated by the realisation that, after watching every season so far, I had no interest in what happened next in Game of Thrones. The same thing happened to me years ago after reading the first eight or nine(!) mammoth volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Game of Thrones is generally very Wheel of Time-ish and I think the problem – my problem, I should say, I have nothing against either the show or the books – is that if you read a lot of heroic fantasy fiction at an early age, it all becomes very familiar. The girl who resents being treated like a girl will become a great warrior, the underdog will get revenge on the cruel tyrant etc etc; nothing wrong with that, if genres weren’t generic they wouldn’t exist. But still.
I did watch the Avengers movies to the bittersweet end though, and liked most of them, though I feel that the series peaked with the intelligent and genuinely morally complex Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War and then dumbed down considerably for the overlong series finales Infinity War and Endgame. I liked Captain Marvel a lot though, despite the fact that what I really wanted was a film of Chris Claremont/Jim Mooney/Joe Sinnot’s Ms Marvel, set in the 1970s. Regarding the final (or final so far; there’s no way they will completely abandon a franchise that makes that much money) Avengers films, is it just me or is there (*very mild spoiler alert*) something fundamentally uninteresting and a little bit annoying about the concept of villains (and heroes, up to a point) who think that the world could be improved by just killing lots of people? It reminds me of the motivation of the ridiculous bad guys in films like Saw and Se7en (which I also detest) who sadistically punish people for what, not appreciating their lives or something? Because, like Thanos in Avengers (and Hawkeye too, in Endgame), somehow violently killing people isn’t itself one of the bad things in the world, it’s a way of making things better. Hmm. Inner 10 year old me enjoyed it, until it got boring near the end, though.
Otherwise, I’ve read (and more to the point, re-read; comfort reading is an effect as well as possibly a contributory factor to my general stagnation writing-wise) some good books, listened to some good music (again, old favourites, though I’ve heard some great new things too – Vivankrist’s Morgenrøde, the new Phantoms vs Fire, a compilation of Finnish post-punk & new wave music from the great Svart records, Gaahl’s Wyrd’s new album). And I’ve written this. Finally.
It’s that time of year again; I’ve had to make some end-of-year lists for various places, so this will be a short-ish version. 2018, like most years, has been a year full of terrible and excellent music and mostly there’s no difference between the two except for the ears hearing it.
But anyway, because I’ve decided to limit my own list here to things I haven’t seen represented on as many other peoples’ lists as I feel I should have so far. Here are a few…
If you’re a regular reader you may remember that Ghost World’s self-titled album was one of my albums of the year last year. That album was a completely unexpected neo-grunge masterpiece – all the more unexpected as I don’t look back especially fondly on grunge in general; but the combination of great tunes, punky energy and the heartbreaking teenage melancholy of singer/guitarist Liisa’s performances make the comparison to 90s grunge kind of pointless; this wasn’t nostalgic pastiche, it was a vital, new band playing their hearts out. Spin, is a great, but very different album. This time Liisa & co aren’t playing grungy music at all, although the album still stylistically indebted to earlier eras. In their publicity, Svart Records claim – not wrongly – that Spin looks back to the guitar pop of The Byrds and Big Star, but to my ears, it has more of the feel of the 80s/90s UK indie bands who were themselves indebted to those bands; either way, it’s an album full of the same kind of catchy, melancholy pop songs as the debut, only without the frazzled guitars. At its best – like the beautifully miserable earworm ‘Nightgown‘ (which brings back my teenage years vividly, if that’s a good thing) its every part the equal of its predecessor, even if it’s less of a bolt from the blue.
I don’t remember how I first came across Rorex Records, a Japanese label run by Eifonen, an experimental musician who has a hand in many or most of the label’s extremely eclectic releases. When going through the label’s releases it feels like overall there’s a focus on experimental electronica and drone, but then something completely random and different – bizarre lo-fi rap, noise rock or mutated jazz. Just Like This is different again; minimalist, clean piano and vocals exercises – sometimes beautifully melodic, sometimes awkward, but always clean, clear and beautiful, even at its most alien. Can’t vouch for the lyrics (they are in Japanese) but I think it’s lovely.
Back in August when it was released, I didn’t really expect this dusty, gloomy, antediluvian Peruvian death metal album to be in this kind of list, but it stayed with me.
It’s the whole package; there’s something about the crude, hewn-from-rock quality of the monolithic riffs, the majestically rust-encrusted bass tone and frontwoman/drummer Kultarr’s brutal roar, plus the perfectly apt artwork that makes it satisfying long after many ‘better’ albums have worn out their welcome.
I wrote about this at length here, so will try not to repeat myself. I first heard Swim back in January and am still listening to it in December. Slightly woozy electronica, often with a lo-fi Ryuichi Sakamoto-meets-Vangelis feel, it’s ‘retro’ without being nostalgic, full of wistful, poignant atmospheres and familiar-but-elusive tunes that feel half-remember from childhood. I really love it; in fact if I had to choose (but I don’t) this might be my favourite album of the year.
There’s an extended version of Swim which I was initially slightly dismissive of (hate it when people mess with albums I think are perfect already), but actually it’s the version I listen to now.
There was lots of good, but not lots of great black metal around in 2018, but the spirit-sapping second album by Ireland/Iceland’s Slidhr was one of the great ones.
Best heard as a whole, the album is a relentless blast through furious, cavernous darkness, melodic enough to to be memorable and affecting, but with a distinctive, bitter taste that doesn’t exactly leave one wanting more; an odd recommendation but there it is.
In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That quote popped into my head, in a sardonic kind of way, when I recently re-read the book that was the subject of this previous article, Richard Laymon’s Tread Softly. When reading books you first loved at an impressionable age, time makes Woodersons of us all; it’s the slightly eerie feeling of meeting old friends, only you have aged and they have stayed the same; except of course that in staying the same, they have changed too, because your perspective has changed. What once seemed profound may seem trite, what “you” once related to, you may not; re-encountering your youth – or even more so, your childhood – through books is as complex a feeling as looking at old photographs of yourself can be.
* to be fair to the Fonz, it would be hard for him to have this kind of perspective on the creepier aspects of his Fonzhood since, by the time he was in his 40s, the Happy Days “high school students” he lurked around were themselves in their 30s
What Wooderson specifically draws attention to, and what we are forced to do, is to relate to the things we once liked from the perspective of an older person. And this is where the “genre fiction” comes in. As a teenager, especially from the ages of I think 13 to 17, my preferred reading was, in order of importance, horror, heroic fantasy and science fiction. Recently, in addition to Tread Softly, I have re-read a few books that were among my favourites in my mid-teens (The Rats, Lair, Shrine, The Dark and The Fog by James Herbert, It and Carrie by Stephen King and Weaveworld by Clive Barker) and, for the first time, what struck me about all of them (ego alert) was that I am now older than all of the main protagonists, including the ‘grownups’ in It and the parents in Tread Softly. Which of course is partly because I am now older than the authors of those books were when they wrote them; a strange thought – it’s possibly just me, but I don’t think one ever feels older than an author whose books you read when young, even when their youth is obvious. Not that the age of an author necessarily correlates to the age of their characters, but there seems to be something about the horror genre in particular that makes writers simplify and sketch the main – non-villainous – characters, rather than draw them in vivid detail. Perhaps it’s because some degree of identification with the main character makes the horror more effective, and a certain amount of vague/generic-ness is necessary to make as many readers as possible identify with those characters. I think this is pretty much explicitly what James Herbert did with his ‘everyman’ heroes.
For a variety of reasons, it’s a strange thing to try to engage with your teenage taste in books, far more difficult than it is with music, or with the books one loved as a child. For a start, and with no disrespect intended to the authors, what has to be borne in mind with some of these books is that they weren’t necessarily (or definitely weren’t) aimed at the 14-15 year old who was reading them. When reading childrens’ books, adult me can be – CS Lewis’ Narnia books are perhaps the classic example – uncomfortably aware of the feelings and attitudes – the ‘adultness’ in fact – of the author behind the book. Sometimes – as with Jan Mark’s Thunder & Lightnings (there’s an insightful article about this excellent book here), or the best of Robert Westall’s novels – it gives me a new respect for a writer who until now I was mainly nostalgic about. Other times less so; for all the informative qualities, animal welfare concerns and anthropological information in Willard Price’s Adventure series (which I loved), the core idea of the two wholesome young American boys travelling the world, encountering its cultures with genuine (if occasionally paternalistic) respect and then catching its animals & shipping them off to zoos and safari parks, feels pretty uncomfortable. Far more so in fact than Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, where even child-me was aware of the dated imperialist attitudes and (in Bulldog Drummond especially) almost (or I’m tempted to think actually) parodic levels of jingoistic racism. But Willard Price wasn’t dealing in knowingly crass, simplistic thrills as “Sapper” was.
childhood favourites
He was a genuinely philanthropic, genuinely respectful, extremely knowledgeable naturalist and social worker and I did in fact learn a lot from his books. But one of the things I learned – and I don’t think it was a bad thing to learn – was that the enlightened attitudes of yesterday, although certainly preferable to the unenlightened ones – are not necessarily the enlightened attitudes of today.
the beginnings of horror fandom? Dracula’s Spinechillers AnnualJulio Vivas’ artwork for The Drowning Pond
My interest in horror was probably first awakened when I was still very much a reader of Biggles & co. I loved the Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual I had got for Christmas when I was (I think) 8 or thereabouts. Around that age I also loved the (vastly inferior 80s) Eagle comic horror spin-off Scream!(which only seemed in my world to exist as ‘specials’ and never as a regular comic) Nevertheless, various things from Scream!, most notably a somewhat folk horror-ish story called The Drowning Pond with its illustrations of a skeleton with flowers in its long hair is still very vivid in my mind. And here it is!
Non-comics-wise, I remember borrowing (Doctor Who author) Terrance Dicks’ Cry Vampire! And Wereboy! from the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.
“Zinja” Jesus.
Interestingly (I use that word advisedly, with the caveat; ‘to me’) my interest in gore was parallel to, but not at all dependent on horror. I remember in my English class, at the age of (I think) 12, having to write a story based on Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, and writing, under the influence of Robert Shea’s supremely dodgy Shike: Last of the Zinja books, about ninja rats attacking their enemies and slicing their intestines into ‘spaghetti’. So I was quite ready for James Herbert already.
Herbert wasn’t the first ‘adult’ horror author I read though. I think that was HP Lovecraft, who I came to through two sources he would probably have found incomprehensible. Firstly, heavy metal (he is quoted on Eddie’s gravestone on arguably Derek Riggs’ finest – and certainly my favourite as a child – Iron Maiden album cover, Live After Death (1985)) and I came across him again a little later, through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Not that I played it (though I would have liked to) but as a subscriber to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine (essentially, I now realise, for the pictures) I became aware of it and my interest in Lovecraft grew.
Derek Riggs’ finest (Iron Maiden) painting? Live After Death (1985) Lots of blue, lots of yellow & a bit of white; geniusGames Workshop’s 80s edition of Call of Cthulhu
Before reading any actual Lovecraft, I’m pretty sure that I borrowed the game itself in its hardback book edition from the local library (this would either be the Rats of NIMH year or the year after). Shortly thereafter I then borrowed (from the same library – Cupar) a hardback edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time and other stories and since then, Lovecraft has been one of the few writers I’ve never ‘grown out’ of, or lost interest in. As such, he fades from this article now except for two more observations; firstly, Lovecraft’s protagonists – sensitive, articulate, terrified – are clearly Lovecraft himself. The author died when only a few years older than I am now, but both Lovecraft and his characters will I think always feel older to me than I do. People – like Michael Moorcock (another teenage favourite) – who don’t like Lovecraft’s writing, usually don’t like the florid style and neurotic tone of his stories – the elements which to me are his real strengths as a writer and make his writing – although widely imitated – genuinely inimitable; no-one else captures that tone. Secondly, that first Lovecraft book I read had no illustration on the cover (on the whole I think Lovecraft has been badly served by artists and illustrators, though I love many of their efforts – and anyway it’s his own fault the illustrators so often fail). but two pictures were instrumental in making me want to read his work; there was the art for a Call of Cthulhu module called Green And Pleasant Land that was advertised prominently in WhiteDwarf, and a Les Edwards painting (possibly unrelated to Lovecraft in origin) used in the Call of Cthulhu book. (Edwards’ Croglin Vampire*, also used in the book was a superb picture too, though less Lovecraftian*)
Lovecraftian inspirations: the cover of a sourcebook for UK based Cthulhoid adventures (left; still love tentacle-meets-cricket) and a Les Edwards painting used in Call of Cthulhu
*Still very interesting however; read about the ‘real’ Croglin vampire here
So anyway; although I have very shadowy memories of reading the opening of Cujo (I think my mum had it) and seeing the film versions of Cujo and Christine, the first horror novels I remember reading in their entirety are James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and It. I remember an interview in FEAR magazine issue two, James Herbert said that the characters in his novels were ‘everyman’ – and in his early novels in particular, it’s a very specific kind of everyman; In The Rats (1974), we meet Harris, “teaching art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls. Jesus Christ!” and “At thirty two he was back [in the East End], teaching little facsimiles of his former self…” while in The Fog (1975) we find that “At thirty-two, [environmental investigator] Holman was still young enough to be angered by the seeming lack of resolution shown by his superiors when he himself had taken great risks to ferret out the proof they asked him to provide.” Variations on these characters – tough, working or lower-middle class, cynical about the motives of those in charge; thirty two – are essentially versions of the young(ish) James Herbert himself, which is understandable, and they were to appear in the majority of his books until the mid-to-late 80s, when he seems to have become interested in characters with a little more individuality. Those ‘everymen’ – Harris, Holman, Pender, Culver, Bishop – are little more than ciphers, characters made of a few (mostly) well-selected details but overall as relatively simple as the dangers they face – that is, rats, fog, more rats, a fog-like darkness etc.
When the stories get more complex, as with The Spear, The Jonah and the aforementioned Shrine, it’s noticeable that the characters do too. In Shrine, the hero, Gerry Fenn is actually younger than usual (29) but even more jaded; a wannabe tabloid journalist(!) who we first meet “tired, angry and a little drunk” and ranting about “rent-a-left” loonies. As a teenager I took James Herbert’s statements about politics at face value (this isn’t quite a quote but I’ll keep the inverted commas as what he said in that issue of FEAR was definitely something like “I’m not anti-right, I’m not anti-left, but those in power always look after themselves”). Now – especially after reading his final novel Ash (2012) perhaps the most unintentionally funny book I’ve ever read – Herbert’s apparently apolitical stance seems – like his everyman character and his ‘have your cake and eat it’ attitude to sex (describe it in titillating detail but punish the characters who indulge in it illicitly) – pretty reactionary, although his point about the powers that be is of course a valid one. But still; maybe the strangest thing about reading James Herbert as an adult is not the paranoia about what governments get up to, or the preoccupation with violent death; it’s that supposed everyman. I guess as a young teenager I saw him/them as simply ‘an adult’, but as an adult – and an older one than most of those characters are – I see him/them as… a bit of an asshole really, which mars the enjoyment of the books a little for me. But maybe just for me; possibly ‘everyman’ really is a centre-right-to-borderline-fascist asshole. Complicating things further, sometimes – as in Shrine and especially some of Herbert’s later books like Creed – it seems like we are definitely supposed to view the character as unsympathetic/unpleasant, which is odd in that it diminishes the effect of the horrors they experience to some extent; the effect is a little like those ‘ghost hunters’ type of TV shows, where noisy, aggressive people blunder around in the dark taunting spirits for not showing themselves and then scream like hysterical children at the least noise or drop in temperature; good.
icons of 80s horror
By contrast, Stephen King is interesting, in that the book that made his name – Carrie – has no hero at all to speak of, just Carrie herself, and the impersonal voices of the various documents that tell her story. As a teenager I wasn’t very keen on the book and found it, despite its brevity, far harder to read than It. I don’t think I really understood its popularity either. Reading it now, I find it far more impressive and effective, maybe because as a teenager, King’s insight into teenagers and their lives seemed unremarkable (ie I literally didn’t give it any thought) whereas now I think it’s one of the key features of almost all of his work that I like the most. In Carrie, as in It, the vividness of the horror is increased by the framing of the story. In It the story is being told “now” (although now is obviously the 80s) and segues into the 1950s sections in a self-consciously cinematic (or televisual) ‘flashback’ kind of way, whereas in Carrie, we know right from the beginning that Carrie’s story has already ended and become history. Although that sounds like it should have a distancing effect, what it actually does is give a feeling of reality. We don’t so much empathise with the characters as look on at their plight – but King is a good enough storyteller to engage the reader’s empathy without having to put them directly into the characters’ shoes.
Stephen King and James Herbert both brought a sense of modern-ness to the horror genre in the 1970s (not that they were the only ones, but for me they were the most important for the 80s horror fiction explosion, Herbert possibly less so in the USA), but they did so through almost opposite means. Both abandoned the gothic/melodramatic/romantic element of horror that had been at the genre’s heart, but after that, they part ways. Herbert is modern via the immediacy of his bluntly explicit descriptiveness; a very 1970s matter-of-factness; cold, harsh and almost industrial (the Throbbing Gristle of horror literature maybe?); horror with no politeness. Carrie, has a cold, clinical, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s entirely unlike Herbert’s – it isn’t about the viscera. With The Rats, James Herbert was telling a nasty story, as vividly and convincingly as he could, to make it feel real. With Carrie, Stephen King heightens the reality by saying this isn’t a ‘story’ at all; this is what happened. As a teenager I mostly preferred James Herbert, but as an adult I find that Stephen King is far easier to enjoy. From the adult perspective, King’s teenagers are still teenagers; in fact even more so than they seemed at the time; whereas Herbert’s adults are ciphers, or in his more developed characters, people who on the whole I just don’t like.
Although I mentioned James Herbert, Stephen King and Clive Barker as a kind of trinity of 80s horror in my Richard Laymon article, Barker is and always was the obvious odd man out of the trio. Firstly because – with a few exceptions – the standard idea of ordinary people encountering horrible things isn’t his primary kind of story. In fact the idea of ‘ordinary people’ isn’t one that I associate with Barker at all; not because (as far as I can tell) he is dismissive of everyday kind of characters, it feels more like he just doesn’t really believe in them. In Weaveworld (1987), the hero is to all intents & purposes ‘ordinary’ – “His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he’s universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre.” We first meet Cal trying to catch an escaped racing pigeon. A working class Liverpudlian in the 80s seems the very epitome of ordinariness, but as his name indicates, there’s always something a little otherworldly about Cal (even compared to for instance, the villainous, magic-using Shadwell, who fits in in Cal’s prosaic world far more easily than Cal himself seems to). I can’t remember if I felt this way about Cal, or the book itself when I first read it (another library acquisition I think, I certainly read it at the time of its first paperback edition if not before). He seems a younger, stranger character than I remembered; but then the whole book feels stranger. Not so much the overtly fantastical parts, but the Liverpool-set opening chapters.
Without thinking much about it, I had always assumed that Weaveworld was set “nowadays”, i.e. in the late-80s, when it was published, but there are odd mentions, such as the police arriving in a ‘Black Maria’ – I don’t know when the UK police stopped using black vans, but I know that even in my earliest recollections (late 70s/early 80s) they were white – that make the Liverpool Barker describes feel both specific and vaguely unreal. Is this intentional? Clive Barker grew up in working class Liverpool himself, in the 60s and 70s, but was not much older than Cal Mooney when writing Weaveworld (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he started writing it when he was 29 in fact). And yet; I remember seeing him on TV around the time the book was published and being surprised at his relative lack of a Liverpool accent; perhaps because of his background in theatre and experimental filmmaking he seemed at ease on television, but always has a hint of the otherworldly quality I associate with his work. Weaveworld has been ‘in development’ in Hollywood for years, but I’d say that unless they can somehow go back in time and get the young Clive Barker, the production will never have the right Cal Mooney. In fact this 1988 interview with both Clive Barker and James Herbert could almost be with “Mooney” and “Harris” and probably tells you everything you need to know about the differences between the two authors’ work; If Harris, Holman et al are James Herbert and the gritty urban settings of London and its environs are their natural habitat, then Cal Mooney equally is Clive Barker, and ghost-Liverpool and the magical world of The Fugue is his. And I’m not sure either author had it in them – at that time at least – to write convincingly about the world of the other, even if they had wanted to.
So what of it all? I don’t know; are there conclusions here? Reading favourite teenage books is like visiting your school long after you left it – everything is familiar, but smaller than you remembered. Genre fiction is by its nature somewhat generic, and is largely plot, rather than character-driven. Lovecraft again is an exception, because somehow his stories manage to be neither plot, nor character driven, so much as they are perspective-driven; sometimes the horror, omnipresent in his best work, has very little narrative to fuel it, just a tone of voice. The heroines and heroes of most of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi I used to devour as a teenager were mostly there as stand-ins for the reader, or for the writer. Most horror authors whose careers last any length of time start to write novels about writers, just as successful musicians start writing songs about being on tour. Going all the way back to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, the villains in horror have always been more memorable than the heroes (actually, Frankenstein is more complex than just hero/villain, but I’ll stand by it), in the 80s with horror cinema this becomes even more noticeable…
At some point a real conclusion will come to me and I’ll add it here; until then, the thing I love about these stories? I get older, they stay the same age.
There’s a moment in Peter Bagge’s immortal Generation X soap opera comicbook Hate¹ where a character says “That need to reclaim a dusty corner of your youth can be overwhelming at times” and even when I first read that in my late 20s, the truth of the statement seemed obvious; and of course the need only gets stronger as time goes by and your youth recedes into the distance.²
And those corners can be pretty dusty. Today, for the third time, I bought a copy of Richard Laymon’s Dark Mountain (1987). My introduction to this book now seems archaic, although it was fairly typical of its time. When I first read Dark Mountain, in 1988, horror novels made up the bulk of my reading. If I had had to name my favourite writers at the time I would probably have listed four main ones, in any order; James Herbert, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Shaun Hutson, although I had an open mind about anything that looked gory.
The first UK edition of Tread Softly, with Danny Flynn’s classic cover art
Like Dark Mountain itself, this is a very 80s story. When I first heard of the book, it was called Tread Softly and nominally by “Richard Kelly”, a pseudonym Laymon mysteriously (to me at least) used to write several novels of exactly the same type and in exactly the same style as the bestsellers he was known for, such as The Cellar and The Beast House. I have never read either of those, but they are worth mentioning because both titles are invariably appended to the phrase “Richard Laymon, author of…” in my memory³; I read the blurbs on at a lot of books back then.
I first came across Tread Softly via a negative review (oddly, not the only time I’ve been intrigued enough by a bad review to check something out) in Fear Magazine, an invaluable resource (that is, “a good magazine”) for horror fans such as myself in those pre-internet days. The review (not sure by whom unfortunately) obviously made an impression on me – I remember with apparent clarity (possibly not accurately, I don’t have my Fears anymore to check, alas) that the writer referred to ‘lashings of teeny sex’ (the selling point to me I would imagine) and concluded with ‘…a downbeat ending. Does nothing for the genre.’ (that last phrase makes me think it may have been written by Fear editor John Gilbert, whose concerns with literacy, imagination and quality pushed me towards writers like Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell and Nicholas Royle, where my instincts might have led me more towards Guy N Smith and – of course – Tread Softly). But it was one thing to read a review and see a cover picture (another selling point) in a magazine – how to get the book itself? In a way, this was possibly even easier then than it would be now for a young teenager with no money; I asked for it in my local library. Within a few days, I had my clammy adolescent paws on the WH Allen UK hardback copy of the book, its dust jacket pristine beneath the clear plastic protective cover. I remember distinctly mine being the first stamp on the card, which was obscurely pleasing.
Fear issue 1 with cover art by Oliver Frey
As that detail suggests, this whole story is one of those memories that is more vivid than it has any reason or right to be.⁴ There was no real frisson, I had no sensation of forbidden fruit; I had read far more extreme things, such as Shaun Hutson’s Spawn (borrowed from the same library, incidentally), one of only two novels to ever make me feel physically queasy (I got over it though. With the other one, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, I haven’t yet and hope not to). But still, it was exciting. The cover by Danny Flynn was eye-catching, if extremely typical of its era (partly, it turns out, because Danny Flynn painted lots of the covers that define that era for me, including the several key Shaun Hutsons) and a million times better than the style-less and boring edition I bought today), but part of the excitement was because of the resemblance it bears to the artwork of the thousands of alluring, generic slasher movies that then lined the shelves of video shops. It might be worth mentioning for younger readers, that video (rental) shops then existed in any town bigger than a small village, but even in small villages, the local ‘convenience store’ would usually have at least a couple of shelves of videos. These movies were all the more alluring because at that point, they were still beyond my grasp. It was odd to me then and is still odd to me now, that at 13 or 14 I could buy, borrow and read, without any adult objection beyond the odd funny look, books about any kind of violent or depraved act imaginable (which was good), but couldn’t rent even the lame, often almost bloodless Friday the 13th clones that were a staple of 80s horror cinema and which – surely – had little appeal to the over-18s they were in theory restricted to. In fact, the ideas in both the movies and most of the books I was reading were deeply conservative and (especially in the films) relied on the equally conventional reaction to them for what little shock value they had. And in fact, Tread Softly was – and Dark Mountain remains – more like an 80s teen horror movie than any other book I’ve ever read.
The story (two families, both with sulky teenage children, go on a camping trip in the wilds of California, where they are terrorised by a “swamp witch” and her depraved idiot son) and the structure of the book are, it feels, deeply indebted to the standard slasher movie. There’s a brief, establishing but fairly restrained prologue (couple attacked in tent), then the introduction of the families and the tensions within them, before the vacation – and the horror – begins. It’s extremely formulaic; the women examine their naked bodies critically in mirrors for the reader’s benefit, the men are ‘rugged’ and clear eyed, teenage boys are ‘athletic’, teenage girls have ‘smooth curves’ and pout sulkily – and extremely predictable. As with films though, you can get away with any number of well worn formulae as long as the execution isn’t boring. Tread Softly was rarely boring but, more surprisingly – by Shaun Hutson standards at least, and something else it had in common with the standard slasher film – it wasn’t all that bloody, really.
The story is fairly perfunctory, as one would expect; the group goes camping, the idiot son attacks them, is killed, the witch tries to avenge him, all against a backdrop of hot, insect infested summery swamps and simmering teenage hormones. The ending – spoiler alert I suppose – is kind of downbeat, but only in the bathetic sense that it’s actually upbeat; it’s unexpectedly happy and harmonious and lacks the final, punchy, expected-unexpected twist that a film would have had. But teenage me found it wholly satisfactory. In fact, I found the whole sentimental, nasty adventure extremely enjoyable. It may not have done much for the genre, but it did something for the part of me that enjoyed and still enjoys Friday the 13th Part 3 and Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach more than many obviously better movies. Clearly, when I read the bad review that lured me towards Tread Softly, I didn’t want it to be “good”, I wanted it to be exactly what it is; trashy and titillating and simplistic, and – with no insult intended – it didn’t disappoint me.
I didn’t buy the book at the time, but oddly, although better books (back then this would have meant things like IT,Weaveworld, Domain and Victims) and theoretically similar books (Rex Miller’s Slob springs to mind) came along, I never forgot Tread Softly. Why the appeal? No doubt it had something to do with the teenage protagonists and my own adolescence. That conservatism – the (mildly) dysfunctional families pull together and defeat the threat, the teenagers pair off as the reader is supposed to want them to, the arrogant characters become humble, the insecure ones find their courage and all is well with the world – has a deep appeal to teenagers. The formula of the teen horror movie – even the cynical twist ending that Tread Softly strangely lacks – wasn’t only there to sell more, similar movies. The comfort of the familiar, the safe scare is a huge part of the appeal of the genre to a young audience. As one gets older, that appeal fades (I find at least), but, from browsing in bookshops (I still usually have a quick look at the horror section) it would appear that the ‘young adult’ wing of horror fiction (now very much a specific subgenre) seems to be in healthier shape than horror as a whole.
the inferior 90s “Dark Mountain”
I have read a few other Richard Laymon books since, but although they were essentially very similar to Tread Softly, they were enjoyed (albeit to a lesser degree) and then almost immediately forgotten. But then, I didn’t read those when I was 14. But. At some point in the late 90s, I nostalgically bought Tread Softly itself in a charity shop, and though I found it sillier than it seemed before, it remained just as enjoyable and – far more unexpectedly – the emotional attachment to the hackneyed story and the sketchily drawn characters (or to my 14 year-old self?) remained intact. But – annoyingly (it was an original Richard Kelly edition) – I didn’t bother to keep it. Then, in the early 2000s, I ended up buying a copy of Dark Mountain. The title was wrong, the cover was wrong, but the book was still very much right. And then I let it go again; like it though I do, it never feels like a priority when having a clear-out.
Now, inevitably, I have bought it once more; seeing it, even in its inferior form, brought back the memories; of the book, of the library, of that bad review. And, having started re-reading it, the magic, more mysteriously than ever, is still there. This time it has the dubious bonus of being paired with an earlier Laymon novel, Beware! With fairly low expectations (I didn’t read that when I was 14 either), I’ll give it a go.
the incredibly perfunctory 2009 edition of Beware!/Dark Mountain – nice barcode placement!
**** 2021 Postscript****
Now, in the midst of a pandemic that the 14 year old me would have thought was like something out of a horror novel, although a surprisingly boring one, I finally possess the classic 1988 Richard Kelly edition again. Finally, because this time I feel like I’ll probably keep hold of it; but who knows?
back on the shelf – the 1988 Star edition
¹ That moment, fact fans, is in the bottom left hand panel on page 24 of Buddy Go Home! Vol IV of the complete Buddy Bradley Stories from Hate (Fantagraphics Books, 1997)
² There are several good articles about this and related subjects on the blog Into The Gyre, most recently this one
³ See also Burt Hirschfeld, “author of Fire Island” (not read) and Guy N. Smith, “author of Night of the Crabs” (read and liked)
⁴ Another pointlessly intense memory from the same period – essentially a memory of sitting in a room not doing much – was awoken in a Proustian kind of way recently by hearing the intro to Alice Cooper’s classic late 80s comeback single ‘Poison’ in a cafe
Further Reading; Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix is an excellent & highly entertaining book that’s well worth a look for any fan of 80s horror fiction, or anyone nostalgic about it
This will be short. There are so many great tributes online today, written by people who know a lot about Aretha Franklin, or who actually knew her. I am much sadder at her passing than I expected, even given the inevitability of it after the last few days of reports. So anyway, I can’t think of much to say really. The facts; like most people of my age I have been aware of her music in some way or another (radio, films, TV; everywhere) my whole life. At some point in my late teens or early 20s I got two cheap ‘best of’ compilation tapes (‘the 60s’ – with most of her best known hits – and ‘the 70s’, which was a revelation) at which point she became, and has since remained, one of my favourite singers.
I don’t think it’s too much to say that those tapes changed the way I think about music. Music is of course completely subjective; how much you like some singer or some piece of music has little or nothing to do with how ‘good’ it is; but be that as it may, there has never been a better singer than Aretha Franklin, and there never will be either.
beautiful Aretha in the 60s. Haven’t found who the photographer is, but will credit when I do
What a shock; I haven’t even slightly kept up with weekly (or even monthly) updates on here and now we’re in July already. Everything in the world seems so grim that it’s hard to actually do anything at all so I shall fall back on music. Instead of the (not very) usual playlists and so forth here’s a kind of 6-month catch up/review or “summer summary” or some kind of alliterative roundup of my musical intake of 2018 so far.
These aren’t necessarily going to be in my ‘albums of the year’ in December (always assuming there is a December this year), but here’s a selection of things that I think are definitely worth checking out from the last 6 months:
Firstly, and most unexpectedly -I really didn’t expect to spend months listening to atmospheric, oddly queasy/wheezy electronica – this is just a fantastic album:
I don’t really have enough knowledge to give a rundown of what Swim is for fans of*, but to me the album has an extremely evocative atmosphere, though what exactly it evokes is hard to say. It has something of the retro-futuristic feel of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack, if it was spinning on a dusty turntable with a wobbly motor in a dimly lit room; not that the tempos are as wonky – or the music as formless – as that description suggests. Somehow though, its blend of warmth, melancholy and forlorn familiarity has made it the perfect soundtrack to our current dystopian age.
Facts that you might want to know: Phantoms vs Fire is Thiago C. Desant, a Brazilian composer and graphic designer living in Italy. An extended (and just as good but not better) version of Swim is available here and you can also buy his excellent prints from the Phantoms vs Fire website.
* Press release says Tycho, Com Truise, Youandewan, Bonobo, Philip Glass, Japan, Mike Oldfield, if that helps
For the last couple of months a great source of brilliant music has been the Portuguese dark folk label Equilibrium Music. One of the label’s key releases of recent times has been the great Urze de Lume album As Árvores Estão Secas e Não Têm Folhas; and it really is beautiful.
Earthy, elemental (though not primitive) folk that reminds me equally of Sangre de Muerdago and Wardruna (without sounding much like either one of them), the album is simultaneously soothing and invigorating, if that is possible.
It has been overtaken for me though by the Equilibrium release I least expected to like, namely:
This amazing album is actually the soundtrack for a Greek theatrical production of (obviously) Shakespeare’s Macbeth by the ancient Greek/neoclassical/neofolk duo Daemonia Nymphae. As you might expect, it makes for a very strange and eerily archaic dreamlike vision of dark age Scotland viewed (or heard) through a prism of ancient Greek ‘world music’. I love it, even if/especially because the bagpipey bits (there aren’t many) are weirdly alien.
This year has seen the very welcome return of the Acid Jazz legends Corduroy with their new and same-as-it-ever-was album Return of the Fabric Four.
Same as it ever was c. 1992-4 that is, as the album is far closer to the mostly instrumental sound of Dad Man Cat and (especially) High Havoc than the more pop-song-focussed The New You! etc. It’s a really nice collage of camp, kitsch cleverness. And good tunes, naturally.
A couple of outstanding metal releases so far this year are:
I am (as I think most people probably are!) quite fussy about death metal, but without being retro in any kind of self-conscious way, De Profundis make music that would sit happily in the late 80s/early 90s death metal scene. The Blinding Light of Faith is an album that can hold its own in the company of any of the big names of death metal; superb, intelligent musicianship and songwriting – it’s a seriously impressive album.
80s veteran(s) Lizzy Borden (both a singer and a band) seem always to suffer from being mis-pigeonholed, whether as a glam band (he/they did have the image), Twisted Sister clones (ditto), or some kind of Alice Cooper-esque horror-metal act (partly the name, partly the image innit), but if you listen back to the best of the band’s 80s work, especially Love You To Pieces, they were really a classic metal band, more Iron Maiden-meets-W.A.S.P. than Motley Crue. On the new album Lizzy himself takes centre stage, singing better than he ever has – no mean feat – and playing all the guitars on what is a very song-based album. It’s not very heavy – more a kind of homage to bands like Cheap Trick and Queen than the early 80s Lizzy Borden sound. But it’s really good if you like that kind of thing, and it’s great to hear Lizzy really going for it after a couple of slightly patchy, compromised-sounding, ‘not bad’ records.
Away from metal, this is a really interesting, good album if you like – well, what? “Film soundtrack music” isn’t really a genre, is it, but that’s what Fire Behind The Curtain makes me think of. I’ve seen it described as neoclassical and minimalist too, but neither of those feels quite right to me. It’s a beautifully cohesive-yet-eclectic collection of mostly-instrumental pieces vary from haunting and bleakly forbidding atmospheres to warm and embracing melodies.
I can’t really write an awful lot about this album from the always-dependable I Heart Noise label, as I’ve only just started listening to it really; but so far I love it. It makes me think of Lou Reed, or Alan Vega covering John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album; sparse, forlorn, world-weary and a little bit sleazy.
What else? Lots of other good things; oh – Grid of Points by Grouper is great, but I forgot about it until just now. I was a bit underwhelmed by the new Immortal and Marduk records, though they are both pretty solid. I really liked the new albums by Tunjum and Uada, there’s a great Souljazz compilation of old hip-hop etc, I’ve been quite impressed by the recent Ill Considered album though I haven’t gotten used to it yet and… well, I’ll come back if there’s anything great I’ve forgotten!
A wise woman once sang “It’s not real if you don’t feel it”* and as far as the arts are concerned it’s as good a measure of quality as anything. But what is “it” that you are feeling? Is everyone feeling the same thing? Clearly not. Even the opinions of people who do like the same song, the same book, the same film, the same painting, are likely to diverge when it comes to the detail of what they like and how it feels.
*The Goonies “R” Good Enough, (Cyndi Lauper, Stephen Broughton Lunt, Arthur Stead, 1985
Part of the mission of modernism in the early 20th century was to free art from associations; from sentimentality, from tradition, culture, religion, politics – and to define it for itself. That was necessary, in order to break the endless repetitive staleness of academicism and/or lowest-common-denominator entertainment, and also because photography and recorded sound and near-universal literacy had all become significant factors in western society. Looking at the visual arts; if all that art does is to repeat what is already popular, to record and represent and recreate the visual and the actual, then how can it compare or compete with something like the camera which captures that external reality? And if that external reality, in the form of contemporary society, is something the artist rejects or objects to, then why use its tools and its language at all?
It’s hard to imagine, a century after the modernist explosion (say 1900-1939), the extent to which the arts were in thrall to academicism. Presumably that was because, having fought first for freedom from the world of manual labour and craftsmanship back in the late middle ages and renaissance period, later artists were keen to stress their respectability, their links to nobility, aristocracy and wealth. But access to that world came – not surprisingly – with rules, manners and forms of behaviour which settled, over the course of a couple of centuries, into rigid artistic traditions. Therefore, the artists of the modernist era were, like any revolutionaries, especially concerned with making their own manifestos and statements. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is a nineteenth century, essentially romantic/bohemian idea which feels remote from the milieu of modernism, but at the same time a theory of ‘pure art’ is found more clearly in something like Kazimir Malevich’s The Non-Objective World (1926) than in anything written by Théophile Gautier or Edgar Allen Poe;
“Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things”.’
Kazimir Malevich – Black Square (1915)
Though formulated later, this is the kind of theorising that helps partially to explain works like Malevich’s Black Square (1st version 1915). Un-controversially considered a masterpiece – and one that I myself like a lot – it nevertheless seems to me a work that gains enormously from some kind of context, even if all that context is, is the knowledge that it is in fact a painting by an artist. ‘Left to itself’, without any associations, if encountered ‘cold’, especially if it wasn’t in a gallery, it might just as easily not be ‘art’ at all. And while that isn’t a bad thing, a random black square encountered in one’s daily life doesn’t – depending of course on the individual who encounters it – have the intensity or pregnant quality that one can (repeat of previous caveat) feel standing in front of Malevich’s ‘Black Square’. But what Malevich does in his statement is to take the artist out of the art and anthropomorphise the art itself (“…it wants to have…”). This seems to me to negate – not unintentionally – what is meant by art at all. For myself, I prefer the German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s statement which, while it doesn’t even slightly contradict the idea of purely abstract art, puts the artist at its centre, rather than treating art as a kind of self-creating phenomenon:
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Landscape (1910)
“I know of no new ‘programme’…. Only that art is forever manifesting itself in new forms, since there are forever new personalities – its essence can never alter, I believe. Perhaps I am wrong. But, speaking for myself, I know that I have no programme, only the unaccountable longing to grasp what I see and feel, and to find the purest means of expression for it.”
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Kunst und Kunstler (1914) quoted Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Expressionists, p.21 (T&H 1972, transl. Mary Whittall)
If a painting hangs in a forest…
The three key factors here (for me) are creator-work-recipient. If the artists (Schmidt-Rottluff’s ‘personalities’) are trying to communicate something specific to the recipient with their work, then they either succeed or they don’t. If the artist doesn’t succeed in communicating what they intended to communicate – or if they aren’t thinking of the ‘end user’ at all, and are expressing their own feelings/ideas purely for their own reasons – they may (and probably will) still transmit something of themselves; a personality, an emotion or group of emotions, a mood or idea. But although in either case the work may be imbued with that power, it only becomes power when someone else is there to experience and/or interact with it. In material terms, the great masterpieces of painting, be it the Mona Lisa (oil paint on wood), or the Black Square (oil paint on linen) have little more intrinsic ‘value’ than a few tubes of oil paint or a piece of wood or linen. After the lights go out and the visitors go home, those paintings basically cease to exist as art. The alchemy that takes place when art finds an audience is what makes it art; at least, so it seems to me.
Malevich’s paintings at the 0,10 exhibition, Petrograd 1915. Black Square hangs where traditionally a religious icon would be displayed
So can there be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art? Short answer; intuition says yes, but experience says no. Alongside the disintegration of traditional academic rules, there has been the growth and persistence of the myth that, in order to break the rules of art, you must first understand and adhere to the rules. This idea has been strengthened by the fact that some of the iconic figures of modern art, like Picasso and Dali, have been immensely talented by the traditional, renaissance standards of art and could easily have made a career in academic painting; but so what? Would Guernica, looking exactly as it does, be a lesser work of art if it was the only painting Picasso had ever done, or if his immature works had been bland and unimpressive?
Top: Pablo Picasso – Science & Charity (1897) Bottom – Pablo Picasso – Guernica (1937)
Separating personal, aesthetic judgements of good and bad from objective judgements is almost impossible, A strong argument could be made for either one of the above images being ‘better’ than the other, especially since the emotional impact is entirely subjective. And separating these kinds of aesthetic judgements from moral ones can become even more complicated – can a work of art that is an expression of something ‘bad’ be good? If for example we discovered that Picasso was celebrating rather than mourning/protesting the slaughter and destruction at Guernica, would the painting be as good? And what does ‘good’ even mean in that sentence anyway? The idea that (for instance) a painting, or a song is “bad” is essentially meaningless, despite the fact that millions of paintings and songs are clearly very bad. They can never be demonstrably bad because, as Hamlet says, (and even the relatively short history of pop music proves) “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Even the most derivative, tuneless, unimaginative, moronic or amateurish song can and will be loved by someone, or many someones. And beyond people liking it, how can the quality of something like art truly be gauged? Yes, ‘liking’ can be a complex thing and is not the same as ‘admiring’ and yes, there are people with knowledge and expertise and highly developed critical faculties and so forth; but their opinion can no more prove a work of art is good than a restaurant critic can prove that a Michelin-starred chef’s finest creation tastes better than a Big Mac.
Despite the ‘golden ratio’ of the ancients, Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ and the Turner Prize, despite Grammys and Brits and Eurovision Song Contests, there is no logical ‘2 + 2 = 4’ type equation which can prove that “4” equals a good work of art. In architecture at least, a building either works as a building (ie it stands up and people can go inside) or it doesn’t, but even then, it would probably be easier to ‘prove’ that your local supermarket is logically ‘better’ as a building than Chartres Cathedral, rather than vice versa. But obviously (unless you are very lucky) it isn’t better than Chartres Cathedral. It feels too trite and easy to say ‘art is only as good or bad as an individual’s opinion of it’, but I can’t really do any better than that. You can’t make someone like something by telling them it’s good, however convincing your argument may be to you.
I also don’t think (though I am less convinced about this) there are good or bad reasons for liking a work of art, a song or a book, although there are certainly different levels of engagement. These are still subjective though; I like Citizen Kane but I love Robocop. Do I think Robocop is therefore the better film? Absolutely not. In the western world there is a kind of agreed pantheon of ‘great art’, codified by the way in which art history, English literature, cinema et al are taught in institutions and, at the lower end of the scale in books and websites of the corny ‘1000 albums/films you must hear/see before you die’ type, but in practice everybody constructs their own pantheon, with the ‘official’ ones being little more than a vague guide. I know that Robocop wouldn’t exist in the same form as it does without the innovations of Citizen Kane, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about either film. In reality, the only way to gauge (for example) the “greatest album ever recorded” is to have a public vote without offering a list of previously selected albums to choose from and then see who ‘wins’ – and I am sure I still wouldn’t agree with it.
Hans Holbein the Younger; Henry VIII (c.1537)
Over the years, it has often been considered that the ‘correct’ critical attitude is to remove sentimentality from judgements on the arts. That is one way – judging pictures on their composition, harmony etc, ignoring subject altogether, evaluating music on its structure, technical skill etc – but it is sometimes almost impossible to do. And really, thinking again of both the emotional satisfaction people get from songs, films, pictures they love, and the example of Malevich’s Black Square, is it even desirable to do so? Thinking of Black Square – to judge a work which has so much context; theoretical, spiritual, cultural and emotional – by the sum of its basic physical attributes is reductive, as well as boring. Likewise, a great portrait in no way relies on the viewer knowing anything about the sitter, but even so – is Holbein’s great Henry VIII (1537) more interesting and engaging as flat masses of colour laid out in a particular, intricate design on a two-dimensional surface, or as the impression and interpretation of one human being through the eyes, mind and skill of another? The answer for me is the latter, which is really both, since the technical aspects of the first option are anyway incorporated in the second.
Pogo and the Black Square
A debate that rears its head fairly often – and I guess will increasingly do so as information about everything becomes more readily available – is whether ‘bad’ people (or just bad people) can make good art. Unlike art, and despite the murkiness of morality (influenced as it is by essentially amoral and anyway changeable concepts like tradition, religion and culture) there are some people that we can probably agree are bad, or at the very least, ‘not good’. Here’s an uncontroversial opinion; John Wayne Gacy, the ‘killer clown’, rapist and murderer of around 33 young people, was – even if he was at the mercy of his own personality disorder – a bad person. He also made something that is as close to being ‘bad art’ as anything I can think of. The fact that his paintings are collected by people and have sold for serious sums of money has nothing to do with their quality as art and everything to do with their associations. You could of course say much the same about the Black Square. And if the imaginary passerby who unpreparedly encountered the Black Square also encountered one of Gacy’s paintings, how would the experience differ?
John Wayne Gacy – Pogo the Clown
Firstly, unlike the Black Square they would know immediately that Pogo the Clown was a painting made by a human being, and, if from a western background, they would probably recognise the subject matter. Because of this, Gacy is both at an advantage and disadvantage; an advantage because, no matter how the viewer feels about clowns, they have immediate ‘access’ to the painting – ‘I know what that is’. Disadvantage, because while the black square is a black square and therefore looks like a black square, Gacy’s clowns, portraits, skulls etc are – by the standards that most people judge art by – pretty amateurish. He wasn’t accomplished enough as an artist (I don’t mean just in a technical way) to communicate anything very deliberately. He wanted his paintings to bring joy into peoples’ lives; which seems unlikely, unless said people are serial killer fetishists or love clowns indiscriminately, so what the viewer is left with are essentially just his obsessions – or at least the ones he could express to his own satisfaction through his art.
Going back to my highly dubious creator-work-recipient idea of art, the creator, Gacy was (or said he was) trying to do something specific – to create bright and happy pictures to bring joy to the recipient. Whether he succeeded in this aim, regardless of who he was, depends on how one responds to childlike but sometimes enigmatic pictures of clowns. What he definitely did do was to transmit something of himself; a clear-cut but deeply alienated/alienating vision of the world; actually, without a world. His pictures don’t as one might expect, depict a simplified Norman Rockwell America, with the sun in the sky and a clown in the garden, but essentially just the clown; mostly in fact Pogo the clown, Gacy’s own alter ego, sometimes with an extremely cursory, but telling hint of a setting. Not a circus, or the suburbia of the childrens’ parties he haunted, but a hint of a dark, fairytale forest (the seven dwarfs appear in a particularly odd picture). These are clowns in the wild. The term ‘outsider art’ could have been coined for Gacy’s paintings. The other often-used term, ‘naïve art’ seems fleetingly appropriate, until one considers pictures like his paintings of Charles Manson, or even more so, of Tim Curry’s Pennywise from the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. Gacy may not have been a good painter, he may have been to all intents and purposes insane, but he was not naïve; he knew that he belonged to a pantheon of famous murderers, that he was the original killer clown, and he was flattered by the association.
John Wayne Gacy – Pennywise the Clown (1993)
But Gacy was chosen as an deliberately extreme example; even more extreme would be Hitler. Hitler’s serviceable but bland and slightly lifeless paintings are also highly collectable, despite lacking even the visceral ‘disturbed’ quality of Gacy’s. Whereas the innocent buyer might just be attracted to Gacy’s clowns for their kitsch, weird, outsider quality, Hitler’s works are best suited for what they were meant to be – postcards, unambitious souvenirs, illustrations. The lack of frisson they have as images is an indicator that the reasons people have for buying them have little to do with the pictures themselves. For, hopefully, a variety of reasons, these people are not buying ‘art’ at all, they are buying history.
The art didn’t abuse…
The world of actual ‘high’ art also has its fair share of murderers, rapists and so forth, and the question of whether their lives and actions invalidate their work is never really answerable. Apart from anything else, what about the legions of artists, musicians, writers whose private lives and opinions we know little or nothing about? Or artists like Andrea del Castagno, known for centuries as a murderer because of a mistake (whether malicious or not we cannot know) in Giorgio Vasari’s biography of him? At this distance of time it doesn’t really matter, even when talking about a definite murderer like Caravaggio. We don’t expect historical figures to have views, opinions and beliefs that we would find acceptable in the 21st century, although people of the 16th century certainly felt at least as strongly about murder as we do now.
When we get closer to our own time, things become more complicated. For me, it’s easy to disregard the achievements of, say Eric Gill*, because even without the knowledge of his child (and animal) abuse, his work isn’t really my cup of tea; graceful and stylish yes, but, given that he was a contemporary of people like Jacob Epstein and Constantin Brâncuși, also a bit un-dynamic, insipidly faux-modern and backwards-looking. And then, adding the context, knowing about Gill’s religious beliefs, a bit churchy, and then, knowing about his abuse of his daughters, hypocritically pious too; it leaves a bad taste. Which doesn’t stop people from loving it, and nor should it; the art didn’t abuse anyone. (This short article by Waldemar Januszczak is very good on Gill I think).
Left:Jacob Epstein – Rock Drill (1913) Right: Eric Gill – Stations of the Cross (1913-18)
But one of the points about Gill is that even his apologists probably wouldn’t, these days, hold an exhibition of Gill the artist without at least acknowledging the problems with Gill the man. More my cup of tea, and more relevant to now, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will be hosting an exhibition of Emil Nolde’s work this summer. German Expressionism (or in Nolde’s case, German-Danish Expressionism) is one of the areas of art I love the most and, although Nolde is not one of my favourite artists I will be excited to see his work. But. Emil Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party. That of course doesn’t change his paintings, but it makes them – and the exhibition – problematic for several reasons. The main reason for me, is that, in its pre-exhibition publicity at least, the NGS makes no mention of his Nazism whatsoever. That might still be okay, I suppose, if they didn’t include this little snippet in their bio:
“This exhibition…covers Nolde’s complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called ‘unpainted paintings’, works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich, when Nolde was branded a ‘degenerate’ artist and forbidden to work as an artist.”
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler – self portrait (c.1930)
There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this detail. But there is also the ghost of fellow Expressionist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, murdered at Sonnenstein castle in 1940 as part of a government programme to eliminate the mentally ill, and of German-Jewish painters like Charlotte Salomon and the surrealist Felix Nussbaum, murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 and 44 respectively. As a member of the Nazi Party (and an enthusiastic one), Nolde was to an extent complicit in their deaths. For Nolde, ‘entartete kunst’, a policy that he didn’t necessarily oppose in general, meant he had to paint unobtrusively, in private and couldn’t exhibit his work until after the war. For those artists it meant a death sentence, for many others it meant harassment or exile. A more wide-ranging exhibition in which Nolde’s paintings bridge the gap between the work of his fellow ‘degenerates’ including perhaps some of Nussman’s Auschwitz paintings, and the art of Nazi-approved painters like Adolf Ziegler or Conrad Hommel would be a strange and indigestible (and chronologically back to front) thing perhaps, but I think that failing that kind of an overview we, at the very least, shouldn’t be encouraged to feel sorry for Nolde that he had to work in secret because of the actions of the government he supported.
Felix Nussbaum – Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (1943)
Is Nolde’s art then ‘Nazi art’? No, or at least not in the same way that state-sponsored art under Hitler was. It isn’t didactic, realist or heroic. Nolde saw expressionism and therefore his own painting as definitively German, and was deeply moved by colour, which he equated with emotion. The works of his which I like best (which, maybe coincidentally long pre-date even the idea of the Third Reich and belong to the period when he had recently been in contact with the younger artists of Die Brücke) translate that emotion into intense and visionary land- and seascapes. These pictures feel utterly free of the ideology of Nazism – but that said, even under Nazi rule, the German ideal of the nude Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture) and ‘oneness with nature’ was respectable in a way that was unthinkable in the UK, so the apparent freedom of the painting need not be reflected in the kind
Emil Nolde – Autumn Sea (1911)
of egalitarian ideals that artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner expressed in their art. If expressionism can be seen as the ultimate kind of subjective painting; where the aim is ultimately to make the viewer feel what the artist feels by filtering a subject through the distorting lens of their individual perception, then Nolde’s paintings show the world as it was felt by someone who could write, in 1938;
As to the question of how easy it is to like Nolde’s ‘unpainted pictures’, I’ll have to wait for the exhibition.
How do you solve a problem like Morrissey (it solves itself)
The Nolde exhibition is only one reason that these issues have been on my mind recently; the other, more personal one is Morrissey. Now, Morrissey is clearly not John Wayne Gacy, or Adolf Hitler, or even Emil Nolde. Nor is he, unlike Varg Vikernes, whose music I also like some of, a murderer or actual Nazi. But I never felt let down by any of those people; with Varg I knew about him before I ever heard his music, I have no emotional investment in it, whereas Morrissey’s recent utterances seem completely at odds with the worldview of his earlier music; which is not his problem, or his fault. I simply interpreted what I wanted to from the art he created, just as it’s possible to look at Emil Nolde’s work and see beauty and freedom there, even if that freedom and beauty is diametrically opposed to the views he professed in his non-artistic life.
I first listened to The Smiths and Morrissey when I was 17, although I was aware of them/him years before. Of all the music I loved as a teenager I think Morrissey’s was the music I identified with the most. I loved The Cure and Joy Division and The Fall probably as much, but their music was – I suppose because it’s less lyrically straightforward – less personal to me. To this day, Morrissey’s lyrics (up to the mid 90s at least) are engraved on my memory and I certainly know more of his lyrics by heart than any other band or artist’s. It’s been very clear for a while now (and murkily apparent for much, much longer) what kind of person, politically, Morrissey is. And that’s fair enough; he is entitled to his views, even if I think he’s wrong and don’t feel inclined to fund him any further (I still think he is more complex than his worst detractors would say, but so what?)
It’s not really any use to say as some people do, that there are artists out there making great work who don’t have extreme right wing views. Obviously that’s true; but unless their art speaks to you personally, why would you care? And most of the time, one has no idea what opinions or beliefs of an artist are anyway, unless they specifically say so. To me personally, art that is explicitly political/religious or politically/religiously-motivated rarely connects on a very deep level; and to paraphrase Cyndi again, it’s not real unless I feel it. But I always felt The Smiths’ music, deeply, and much of Morrissey’s solo stuff too, though it is less critically acclaimed. His recent/latest statements in the press just don’t seem like the words of someone who could write “It’s so easy to laugh/It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind”, but that’s people for you.
Initially, several controversies ago, I decided that although I wouldn’t actively avoid Morrissey and his works, I would no longer buy them in a way which would financially benefit him; mean and possibly unfair I know, but that’s people for you too. I am not someone who is going to burn records, CDs and books, or even throw/give them away in disgust, if they have ever meant anything to me. But then came the latest and most crass Morrissey interview (so far) and I got to the point where I’d actually be kind of embarrassed to buy anything Morrissey-related at all. It’s not so much (as one example out of many) the factual inaccuracy of statements like “Hitler was left-wing” – people have been saying moronic things like that (Hitler was a Zionist etc etc etc) for many years. It’s the fact that, as with those who claim the death toll in the holocaust has been exaggerated, people like Morrissey seem to think that this amazing revelation is in any way relevant to the things his regime did and how one should feel about it. As with (irony!) people who taunt vegetarians with ‘Hitler was a vegetarian’, it spectacularly misses the point; Hitler is not famous because he’s a vegetarian, any more than he’s famous for his ‘left-wing’ views. And you know that, so don’t be so stupid.
But anyway, in the end my fears that the unhappy soundtrack to my youth/life would be tainted only came half true. When Morrissey songs popped up in a shuffle I found that, without any feeling of revulsion, drama or anguish, I just didn’t want to hear them anymore. The connection seems to be gone, without regret and possibly with the relief that I was never – despite the fact that I even, unrepentantly, like his autobiography – one of those Morrissey obsessives. Maybe one day my love of his music will come back, maybe not. As Cyndi says, it’s not real if you don’t feel it and, right now I just don’t, so it isn’t. Ho hum.
the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.
I am (as I think most people probably are!) quite fussy about death metal, but without being retro in any kind of self-conscious way, De Profundis make music that would sit happily in the late 80s/early 90s death metal scene. The Blinding Light of Faith is an album that can hold its own in the company of any of the big names of death metal; superb, intelligent musicianship and songwriting – it’s a seriously impressive album.
80s veteran(s) Lizzy Borden (both a singer and a band) seem always to suffer from being mis-pigeonholed, whether as a glam band (he/they did have the image), Twisted Sister clones (ditto), or some kind of Alice Cooper-esque horror-metal act (partly the name, partly the image innit), but if you listen back to the best of the band’s 80s work, especially Love You To Pieces, they were really a classic metal band, more Iron Maiden-meets-W.A.S.P. than Motley Crue. On the new album Lizzy himself takes centre stage, singing better than he ever has – no mean feat – and playing all the guitars on what is a very song-based album. It’s not very heavy – more a kind of homage to bands like Cheap Trick and Queen than the early 80s Lizzy Borden sound. But it’s really good if you like that kind of thing, and it’s great to hear Lizzy really going for it after a couple of slightly patchy, compromised-sounding, ‘not bad’ records.
Away from metal, this is a really interesting, good album if you like – well, what? “Film soundtrack music” isn’t really a genre, is it, but that’s what Fire Behind The Curtain makes me think of. I’ve seen it described as neoclassical and minimalist too, but neither of those feels quite right to me. It’s a beautifully cohesive-yet-eclectic collection of mostly-instrumental pieces vary from haunting and bleakly forbidding atmospheres to warm and embracing melodies.
I can’t really write an awful lot about this album from the always-dependable I Heart Noise label, as I’ve only just started listening to it really; but so far I love it. It makes me think of Lou Reed, or Alan Vega covering John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album; sparse, forlorn, world-weary and a little bit sleazy.
transmit something of himself; a clear-cut but deeply alienated/alienating vision of the world; actually, without a world. His pictures don’t as one might expect, depict a simplified Norman Rockwell America, with the sun in the sky and a clown in the garden, but essentially just the clown; mostly in fact Pogo the clown, Gacy’s own alter ego, sometimes with an extremely cursory, but telling hint of a setting. Not a circus, or the suburbia of the childrens’ parties he haunted, but a hint of a dark, fairytale forest (the seven dwarfs appear in a particularly odd picture). These are clowns in the wild. The term ‘outsider art’ could have been coined for Gacy’s paintings. The other often-used term, ‘naïve art’ seems fleetingly appropriate, until one considers pictures like his paintings of Charles Manson, or even more so, of Tim Curry’s Pennywise from the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. Gacy may not have been a good painter, he may have been to all intents and purposes insane, but he was not naïve; he knew that he belonged to a pantheon of famous murderers, that he was the original killer clown, and he was flattered by the association.
