how it felt to be alive in February 2020

The correct response to the title here is of course it depends who you are and what you did. But anyway; in a February when the big news story was the alarming spread of coronavirus/COVID-19, which history will tell us is either – (a) a pandemic like none seen since the 1918 flu outbreak which killed between 20 and 50 million people (quite a big ‘between’. that) or (b) an unfortunate but quite normal kind of illness which is causing inconvenience and a certain amount of tragedy but is mainly a media frenzy like SARS or Bird Flu, and will blow over soon – it seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns to talk about music and books etc. But as everyone knows, Nero didn’t really fiddle while Rome burned, and anyway, the big and relatively thoughtful thing I was writing during the Christmas holidays is no further forward and I mainly spent February writing things for other places than my own website, so there it is.

I just finished reading the newest edition* of Jon Savage’s brilliant England’s Dreaming which is as good as any music-related book I’ve ever read and made me realise how many parallels there are between now and the political situation in mid-70s Britain. Up to a point, that is. It would be hard, even I think for a conservative person, to see the victory of Johnson’s Tories as a return to some kind of sensible order in the way that deluded right wingers saw Thatcher’s victory – which did, it has to be said, render somewhat pointless the extreme right wing groups like the National Front & British Movement that had been growing in strength and influence throughout the decade. As with Johnson/the ERG and their wooing of the UKIP/nazi fanbase though, the reassurance that comes from seeing extremist groups losing popularity is  soured (to put it mildly) by having people in charge who appeal to that demographic.

*the latest revised edition is from 2005, and is the one to get – the excellent introduction, which addresses the ‘Englishness’ of punk within the wider UK setting, is itself quite dated, though more relevant than ever, and this version also contains a brief summary of that most surprising part of the whole Sex Pistols story – the band’s 1996 reunion.

Reading about punk – especially remembering the very tail end of it in the early 80s (i.e. seeing the stereotypical 80s fashion punks and skinheads and reading THE EXPLOITED/OI!/PUNKS NOT DEAD etc spray painted all over the place)  it’s hard to imagine the force the movement had in ’76-7. In my own era, Acid House/rave culture/etc has had an even bigger impact on music and arguably a comparable one culturally, but although it annoyed grownups and upset politicians it was never as deliberately confrontational or as alien and ugly as punk. Its figureheads, insofar as it had any, could certainly be ‘outrageous’ in a way, but Shaun Ryder and Bez swearing on TV was worlds away from the omnipresence of the Sex Pistols in the UK media of the 70s; not least because the Sex Pistols and punk had already happened. Pop stars being obnoxious in the 90s was not a phenomenon – and the Pistols, despite everything, were a recognisable thing – a pop group or rock band.

The public and the tabloids knew about the existence of acid house, and might be alarmed by the ‘acid’ aspect in particular – but as far as signing record contracts, being on TV or playing concerts went, there wasn’t much to report on. An interesting thing about the acid house/rave phenomenon was that, although a musical movement, the music and its makers barely featured in the moral panics that ensued, it was all about the audience. Whether this made it more frightening to the older generation, I don’t know. In the 60s, the Woodstock kids might have been seen as outrageous dirty, drug taking hippies, but maybe the fact that they were being ‘incited’ by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Country Joe etc in a field (much like the teenagers in the 50s were under the influence of Bill Haley/Elvis etc and punk kids in the streets were being led astray by Rotten & co on TV) gave a clear them/us or leader/followers divide and made it easier to condemn/contain/control them? This is an interesting thing that I should think about more – except that I’m almost certain that there will be a book out there by someone who has thought about it more and knows a lot more than I do about the 90s (the most I can say is ‘I was there’, I wasn’t mostly very interested in acid house etc at the time).

Anyway; certainly the punks were heirs to the hippies (not that they would have welcomed the comparison)  in that the visibility of the punk audience (who, whatever their claims of individuality, were clearly – especially by 1977 – dressing in emulation of other punks, of whom Johnny Rotten was the most visible example) marked them out as ‘other’. And made them a target of the authorities, as well as a flag for disaffected kids to rally to. The subtitle of England’s Dreaming – “The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock” is important. The Sex Pistols may not have the strongest claim to have invented punk, but in a sense that isn’t as true for other foundational bands, they were punk; their career trajectory; form band, play shows, cause outrage, record demos, cause outrage, sign contracts, appear on TV, cause outrage, get dumped by label, cause outrage get banned from venues, release singles, cause outrage, release album, cause outrage, split up, have a member die – within the space of around two years, is a microcosm of UK punk. The British punk scene was born with them and it essentially died with Sid Vicious; everything thereafter is either post-punk, second-wave punk or pastiche. Whether embodying a movement is an achievement as such is hard to say and in a way doesn’t matter, but what Savage documents is the way in which a youth movement – one with many and varied influences and antecedents – absorbed and expressed the anxieties of its time and in turn embodied and shaped them.

Away from that book, I’ll keep up with my pick of the most interesting things to be sent my way in February.

Out in April is a reissue of a noise-rock classic from 1995:

Caspar Brötzmann Massaker
Home
Southern Lord Recordings
Sounding something like The Birthday Party playing noisy free jazz, the Massaker are a brutal guitar-bass-drums (with minimalist vocals) trio; heavy on feedback, tense dynamics and churning distortion, but sometimes almost groovy and (very) occasionally kind of pretty. Home was their fifth album and it’s pretty similar to the only other one of their albums that I know, The Tribe, from 1987. Squally, angular and dark but with insistent percussion, it’s a great palate-cleanser for your ears after too much pop music.

 

 

I could say the same about this, very different but equally eccentric record:

JZ Replacement
Disrespectful
Rainy Days Records

Zhenya Strigalev (saxophone), Jamie Murray (drums) and Tim Lefebvre (bass) have made a frankly insane-sounding but weirdly addictive record that at different times reminds me of the John Zorn/Bil Laswell/Mick Harris jazz/grind band Painkiller, Ornette Coleman and King Tubby. But it also has the odd moment of funk, breakbeat and drum-n-bass. Nevertheless it’s amazingly coherent and although at times I thought Murray, Strigalev or Lefebvre was what made it so great, subtracting any one element would make it all collapse.  Recording something at once as familiar and peculiar as any song here (‘Guilty Look 3‘ is a great example) is a special skill. Disrespectful borrows from everywhere and yet somehow sounds like nothing else – and really that’s just what jazz is all about.

Perchta
Ufång
Prophecy Productions

This Austrian black metal project has a very specific local (Tyrolean) focus, but judging by its Facebook page is the brainchild of Italian ex-pat Fabio D’Amore of symphonic power metal band Serenity; which makes sense – for all its atmospheric/folkish elements (there are some very nice jangly clean parts), this is a theatrical, musicianly album which feels epic and polished rather than dark and brutal. The band’s name refers to a pagan goddess, and throughout the album an odd, witchy narrator pops up declaiming or whispering, who I assume is the woman in the artwork, who the promotional material refers to as “the front woman [who] will sermonize, face-painted in historical black garb with embroidered belt and cast-iron broom …”

Not really my cup of tea overall, which is a shame because I really like the idea of the Tyrolean folklore etc, but it’s extremely well done and has some very good tunes and with the usual excellent Prophecy treatment it will no doubt find its audience.

 

 

 

messages from the past for the future

 

Sitting down to write this, a month after breaking my leg and having to grapple with hitherto-unconsidered questions like ‘how do I usually sit on a toilet’? and one week before a General Election where my preferred of the apparently plausible outcomes is an unsatisfactory coalition government, it feels strange and maybe wrong to be looking backwards. But, disturbing and reassuring in more or less equal measures, I think it’s a good way to look forward to whatever happens next.

I remember as a child, looking at a stamp album that had belonged to (I think) my dad (or maybe his dad) when he was a child. Even for someone with no interest in stamps, and less interest in collecting them, it was a peculiar and fascinating book; unfamiliar places, people, even currencies. The thing that stands out the most in my memory though is a stamp from Bosnia, a name which at the time I hadn’t heard before and which sounded as unlikely and frankly made-up as countries like Syldavia and Borduria that I knew from Tintin books. That memory itself has a strange and silly quality now, but at the time (somewhere in the mid-80s would be my guess) Bosnia was as fantastical to a child (or me at least) as I expect the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia would be to Primary school pupils now.

classic cold war artefact: Iron Maiden behind the Iron Curtain laserdisc (1985)

30 years on from the series of revolutions that symbolically culminated in the destruction of the Berlin Wall (the free opening of the Brandenburg Gate itself happened 30 years ago last month) it’s perhaps only natural that those who remember those times should be thinking of them. If you grew up with the cold war in the background (that is, any time really from the years after world war two up until the end of the 80s), the war itself may have constantly ebbed and flowed, but the communist eastern bloc was, monolithically (technically at least duolithically, but that’s not a thing) omnipresent in a way that now seems as unlikely and distant as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was there at school (we had to learn about “East Germany” (the GDR or DDR), “West Germany” (FRG or BRD) and the differences between the two, the USSR /CCCP, the space race, the arms race, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ etc etc etc), it was there in sports (especially the Olympics, but “West Germany” was quite a big deal during the ten minutes that I liked football) and in entertainment. Usually this meant sinister, emotionless and robot-like communists being the bad guys in endless numbers of films and TV shows (classic example; Rocky IV, but see also Red Dawn, Red Heat ad infinitum – it was interesting, in a depressing kind of way to see this old view of ‘reds’ adopted, without irony in the third, inferior season of Stranger Things this year), but it wasn’t all bad – sometimes bands made a point of playing behind the Iron Curtain and talked about how great the audiences were; I remember Iron Maiden played in Poland, Hungary etc in the mid-80s which presumably was a logistical nightmare, but nice for their fans who mostly would only have been able to hear their music through unofficial or even (the same thing really) illegal channels.

A few things have brought that period, and specifically the GDR, back to me recently; Tim Mohr’s superb book Burning Down The Haus – Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Dialogue Books, 2019), the work of the German photographers Ute and Werner Mahler and the Ostkreuz photography group, interviewed by Kate Simpson in issue 90 of Aesthetica Magazine (August/September 2019), the TV shows Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86 which I just watched, somewhat belatedly and a series of John le Carré’s classic spy thrillers, notably A Small Town In Germany (1968).
The central realities of all of these things is pretty much the same; in East Germany, the state (specifically the secret police, the notorious Stasi) was watching you, and not only did they not care if you knew it, they wanted you to assume you were being watched.

East Berlin punks at Planterwald, approx. 1981 by Harald Hauswald (Ostkreuz Agency)

One of the most chilling things in Tim Mohr’s book is the way that, from the beginning of the 80s until its end (punk seems to have had an extended lifespan in the GDR, partly because fashions were slower to take root and spread where the majority of the media was under state control, but also because it remained – from the music to the image – genuinely oppositional and rebellious, rather than being absorbed into mainstream pop culture) the punks were, as often as not arrested because of informants from their own families or even the bands themselves. Nevertheless, after a slow start, the bands multiplied, but in a planned economy with full employment its slogans were something like the opposite of the UK’s punk bands; Too Much Future being the classic East German punk statement; more info here. As Mohr notes, long before the advent of GDR punk, informing for the government was something like an epidemic. In fact, by 1952 – that is, just four years from the official founding of the nation – the Stasi had already recruited 30,000 informants (Burning Down The Haus, p.2), and that figure would rise exponentially throughout the decades. This was the reality that artists like photographer Ute Mahler were working in;

Everyone knew that people were spying for state security. But nobody knew who. It could be anyone. We lived and breathed with this knowledge. In 1980, I stood at a May Day demonstration just below the grandstand. The demonstrators cheered at the government, which was on a podium above me. I got the impression that all the attendees were in agreement and were happy about it. Whilst editing the pictures, I discovered other faces in the crowd. That confirmed to me that you must look closely for what might be hidden.”

Ute Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p. 128

Action Force SAS figure, 1982: this creepy thing was one of the ‘good guys’

From a child in the UK’s point of view, the activities of the CND, the Greenham Common protestors, WarGames, Raymond Briggs’s When The Wind Blows and even silly things like the Frankie Goes To Hollywood Two Tribes video strengthened rather than diluted the sense that, beyond ‘the west’ there was a huge, sinister and implacable enemy. That video – bad lookalikes of Reagan and Chernenko wrestling – was absurd but actually made child me more aware of the seriousness of the global situation. For a start, I remember thinking the actors were bad lookalikes, but I knew approximately who they were meant to be and what it represented. Actually, although I was very familiar with Reagan I doubt whether I knew Chernenko by name; even now I had to look it up to write this as my only memories of a pre-Gorbachev Soviet leader relate to Andropov, for the simple reason that his name was funny. I vaguely remember him in association with a joking remark (when he died??) that “his hand dropped off”, but whether that was purely from the playground or from TV I don’t know. Even toys contributed to the doomladen atmosphere. The initial run of Action Force (the European release of GI Joe, although initially there was no back story or characters, just – as with the older UK Action Man – a lot of more-or-less accurate contemporary military equipment, including sinister SAS paratroopers with gas masks etc. As I was typing this, I remembered that I used to have a fairly extensive knowledge of the weaponry favoured by the Warsaw Pact vs. NATO troops, which is fun for kids. As far as I remember, although children’s entertainment in the UK wasn’t by and large as propagandist as Hollywood, there wasn’t anything much to counter the idea of the brainwashed, robotlike communist hordes, programmed by the state from birth. And, at no point before 1989 did it feel like that situation was about to change.

That feeling was as strong, or even stronger, inside the Eastern bloc, as Ute and Werner Mahler explain;

“The generations after us might find it hard to understand the complex workings of the GDR, as memory begins to move into the past. These new generations perhaps cannot imagine how one could live in such a country, where one could not officially say what we thought. … When we took pictures in the 1970s and 1980s, we would never have imagined that one day the GDR would not exist. At that time, we wanted to show life as we experienced it – just as it was. Today, the images act as documents from a vanished country. In this way, they are given a renewed sense of purpose.”

Ute & Werner Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124

Even, as Mohr explains, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi were making arrests in something like the usual way, although the state quickly descended into chaos. But maybe everything feels permanent when you live through it; I remember when, what felt like 1000 years or so into Margaret Thatcher’s reich, we had had the Miner’s Strike, the Falklands war, there were millions of unemployed and it seemed like I had never met anyone who liked Thatcher, or anyone who voted for the Conservative Party and yet, come election time they still won. Maybe it’s more significant that I don’t remember anyone I knew being especially keen on Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock? But anyway; my memory is that by 1988, there was no feeling that the cold war was going anywhere; by 1990 it was over. Until I was 23 my only conscious experience was of a Britain run by a Conservative government, and then that was over.

symbol from an 80s
cold war childhood
Bob Light and John Houston’s satirical Gone With The Wind poster, c.1981 – vividly brings back the era to me

One of the stranger things to find, looking back on the phantom communist enemy of my childhood is that, contrary to what appeared to be the case on TV at the time, the people of East Germany, discontented though they obviously were, did not necessarily want to become westerners. As depicted vividly in Deutschland 83 and even more so in Deutschland 86, Communism as practised through the GDR’s dictatorship was a failed ideal, but it remained for many, something like an ideal. The bands documented in Burning Down The Haus, like the immediately post-Communist East German club scene that Mohr experienced himself, were ‘radically egalitarian’. These were, after all, people raised in a system which preached the power of the people, and even enshrined in law the freedom of expression, although in practice it didn’t allow either of those things. Often bands or musicians – people who were routinely arrested, beaten by the authorities, held in prison awaiting trial for months and so on – had opportunities to flee to the west (or were even encouraged to by the authorities who couldn’t cope with them) but chose to stay and work for change. Fascism and consumerism were seen, not just by the authorities, but by the punks, as the enemies of freedom, and even when the punk revolt happened it was often aided by (which seems odd but makes a kind of logical sense) the Lutheran church, which had an uneasy but respectable existence within the state. This meant that not only the punks (who tended towards anarchism in the 19th century sense politically), but also environmentalists, peace activists and other dissidents the church protected and to a degree nurtured, were working under the auspices of an institution which also had essentially anti-capitalist principles at its heart.

Rebelling against a de facto egalitarian state in itself creates a strange situation, as Ute Mahler recalls;

“In the GDR, when the collective was praised as an ideal, we were all lone fighters. In this new society where individuality is so important to so many people – coming together is the key”  quoted in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124-7

And this is not really a paradox, even to an individualist; if the contrasting but ultimately similar oppressions of the 20th century, whether Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Communist China etc – have taught us anything, it’s that totalitarian power structures, of whatever political hue value conformity above individuality; but also that political progress requires subjected peoples to firstly insist on their individuality, but also to act in concert with each other, to combine their voices in order to be heard.

Perhaps because a general election is looming as I write this, reading about the lost world of the eastern bloc and its failures (mostly the same failures as capitalism to be fair; poverty, starvation, oppression etc etc) begs the question; what is the country that you believe in, if not a reflection of yourself and what you want? The Eastern punks were patriotic in the sense that they wanted the freedom to be themselves, in an East Germany that recognised the right to have dissenting voices and views, to improve the experience of East German citizenship for all. But, like everyone else, they shared their country with the other by-their-own-admission patriots who believed in a completely different country. If you consider yourself a patriot, you are probably living in a country with lots of other patriots whose country has the same name as yours, but whose beliefs and ideals are not the same as yours. Those who fought and died for [name a country] in [name a war] and those who fought and died for [name an opposing country] in [the same war] were fighting for the same thing, but they were also not fighting for the same thing. The people who fought for Britain against the Nazis and the people who fought for Britain against the Zulus both were and were not fighting for the same country, though on an individual level the end result – their deaths, and the deaths of their enemies – was much the same.
Somewhere in a previous, equally muddled* article I mentioned the poet Edward Thomas. Against the WW1 poetry of super-patriot Rupert Brooke, or the “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” humanism of Wilfred Owen, you have to balance the entirely personal patriotism of Edward Thomas;

 At the age of thirty-six there was no strong pressure on him to enlist, but in August 1915 he finally made up his mind… When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked him why, he scooped up a handful of earth and said, ‘For this.’
Andrew Motion, ‘An Imaginary Life’, in Ways of Life, Faber & Faber 2008, p.102.

And no doubt that was true. But what he fought for doesn’t change the fact that what he was injured for (he survived the war, minus an arm) was the global ambitions of the small group of people then running the British Empire. In the end his patriotism and theirs amounted to the same thing; but they were not the same thing.

Thomas’s kind of patriotism is the one that I think most matches my own; despite being a lefty internationalist I am quite a patriotic person. I love Scotland and value it not because it’s the ‘greatest country in the world’ (not that I’m saying it isn’t; just that the concept itself is utterly meaningless I think) and not because it’s beautiful – which it undoubtedly is, but so is every country I’ve been to – but because it is uniquely itself. It’s the big picture and the details; the texture and the atmosphere, the things I like and the things I don’t like. What I’m really saying I suppose is just that it’s the country I know best, the one where all of my responses to the world were shaped – which is of course not something to run up a flagpole and if one somehow did there’s no reason that anyone else in the world should want to salute it. But it is patriotism nonetheless. One of the many ironies of our particularly irony-ridden times is that on the whole, the conservative/nationalist parties of whom there are suddenly it seems very many indeed, are by and large those least committed to any kind of environmental/green policies. Strange because if, like the Conservatives nominally are, you are all about pride in your culture and your country and your history, but aren’t really concerned about the welfare of the actual, physical country as a piece of land then what do you even think you stand for?

So anyway; in the world of 1988, the world of 1990 seemed unthinkable, but it happened anyway, because people wanted it. I know that as 2019 draws to an end the world is full of people, in Chile, in Hong Kong, in Iran and Sudan, in the USA and the UK; in every country, who want thoughtful, compassionate, democratic government and not repression, corruption and leaders who are quasi- or actual dictators. Who want to be represented, not ruled. And it’s not impossible.

* when I read my writing it makes me think of that episode of Peep Show where a disgruntled lapdancer says “If you can’t sum up all the aims in the first line then they’re too diffuse.” I think my writing tends to be a bit diffuse.**

**See?

Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition 2019

 

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…

C Joynes & The Furlong BrayThe Borametz Tree
Thread Recordings

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.

Also in June (actually 31st May)…

Cellista – Transfigurations

Transfigurations is 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.

Elsewhere in June, I quite liked…

Wasuremono – Are You OK?
The Wilderness Records

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.

a conflict of ghosts

 

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 after Smells 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.

 

 

birds & murderers; raptorama

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.

Enter Title Here: unblocking

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.

 

11 June 1936: The International Surrealist Exhibition

Sheila Legge, ‘the Surrealist Phantom’,  photograph by Claude Cahun

Thursday, June 11th, 1936. Ominous context; the previous week, Mussolini had authorised his troops to kill prisoners taken in the war that followed Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Shortly thereafter, Haile Selassie, Emperor in exile, would appeal to the League of Nations against the Fascists, but of the 57 member states, only a handful imposed sanctions against Italy, one of those being the Republic of Spain, which, within a month would itself be shattered by civil war. Earlier that spring, Hitler had goose-stepped his troops into the Rhineland in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles; in London itself the alarm caused by the organised marches of Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, would, by the end of the year, result in the Public Order Act, banning the wearing of political uniforms in any public place. On that Thursday though*, in Trafalgar Square on a hot, clammy morning (June 1936 was notable for unsettled and unseasonal weather) a young woman with a head apparently made of flowers stood among the pigeons; a dreamlike, haunting, alarming and perhaps ridiculous figure; for dreamlike, haunting, alarming but definitely ridiculous** times. Underneath the flowers and wedding dress was a human being, artist and poet Sheila Legge, but on that day, in combination with that costume and a few accessories (a raw pork chop and/or just a prosthetic leg, depending which account you believe) she was the surrealist phantom*** and drew crowds to the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries.

Claude Cahun – Self Portrait (1929)

* sadly, also the day that Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian committed suicide

**For the next few years, while the tension in UK and Europe inexorably rose, there was also a more than normal amount of paranormal activity, with both the International Institute for Psychical Research and its rival the Society for Psychical Research logging record numbers of hauntings and reports of poltergeist activity. Also, it’s worth remembering that in the 30s, Hitler had a ‘Charlie Chaplin moustache’, rather than the other way around

***  or rather, a surrealist phantom; also present, though not exhibiting in the show, was Claude Cahun, one of the most enigmatic figures of 20th century art, apparently taking photographs, one of which is presumably the image of Sheila Legge used above

The incongruity of the flower-headed apparition was an embodiment of the intention of the surrealists as initially laid out by André Breton (master of ceremonies at the opening of the London exhibition) in 1924:

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor paperbacks, 972, p.14)

Yves Tanguy – I Am Waiting For You (1934)

For all of its apparent frivolity too, the flower-headed phantom was calculated to provoke a reaction beyond being simply an advertisement for an exhibition; its irrational beauty, Arcimboldo-meets-Dalí,  was manifestation as manifesto, remembering Breton’s railing against

“the hate of the marvellous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful”(ibid.)

 

 

Giorgio de Chirico, The Square (1913)

The exhibition offered the public many different kinds of marvellous; there were over 400 exhibits; paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’ as well as an array of ‘ethnographic’ items from diverse cultures around the world and ‘natural objects interpreted’. Around 60 artists were represented, including most of the ‘big names’ of European surrealism alongside a range of home grown British artists. It showed, too, that surrealism was always a broader church than its critics tended to give it credit for; less a style or set of styles (many of the artists represented were not necessarily surrealists per se) than a way of seeing, or a way of being, embodied in artworks as diverse as Giorgio de Chirico’s ominous dreamscapes, Hans/Jean Arp’s evocative wood reliefs, Constantin Brâncuși’s Vorticist-influenced sculptures and a generous selection of Picassos, from cubist masterpieces to his latest works, alongside iconic surrealist paintings by the group’s most prominent members and associates, including Dali, Max Ernst, Magritte, Miro and Klee.

Hans Arp – The Forest (1918)

The exhibition also included works by eleven female artists*; not a huge amount percentage-wise, but an extremely  significant proportion by the standards of the time; and among that ten were some of the most important artists of the era.

* Eileen Agar, Jacqueline B., Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Maruja Mallo, Meret Oppenheim, Grace Pailthorpe (hailed by Breton as ‘the best and most truly surrealist’ of British artists), Toyen,  Sophie Taueber-Arp, Margaret Nash, Gala Dali, Sheila Legge

 The exhibition was hugely successful, with over 25, 000 visitors attending during its month-long run, and it fulfilled what surrealism could be, both to its adherents and to its critics; it was profound, it was disturbing; it was also at times very silly.  Notoriously, Dalí gave an inaudible speech while wearing a deep sea diving suit from which he had to be rescued, while Breton and Paul Éluard delivered more comprehensible lectures, volume-wise at least. In the original manifesto, Breton had written, “We really live by our fantasies when we give free rein to them” but that was in 1924; if surrealism had started out in part as an offshoot of Dada, a reaction to the horrors of World War One and the rationalist values of the 19th century that had led to it, the atmosphere of the 30s was (and was felt at the time to be) distinctively pre-war.

Pablo Picasso – Seated Woman in a Red Hat (1934)
Constantin Brâncuși – The Chimera (1918)

The Surrealist group of 1936 (that is, the main group among the many surrealist groups of 1936, as Breton’s regular fallings out with those close to him led to a series of splinter groups) was, explicitly, a political organisation. Some key original members, such as the ‘prophet of surrealism’ himself, Robert Desnos (of whom Breton said “Desnos speaks Surrealist at will”) were opposed to the aligning of the group with a left-wing political cause, but Desnos’ fate – arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald before finally dying in Terezin concentration camp of typhoid in 1945 – showed that, for those without the financial means of Breton and Dalí, politics was not something one could easily avoid. But more than that, the nature of surrealism itself was incompatible with the totalitarianism that was marching across Europe:

“Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery…is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be…” Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) p.4-5.

Reuben Mednikoff – The Stairway To Paradise (1936)

 

Dalí – perhaps not surprisingly, given his aristocratic background – was less comfortable than Breton with the politics of the far left, but although often portrayed as a simple narcissist (wrong; he was not simple), he was very aware of the psychology underlying the ideological dogmatising(?) of Europe, arguing in 1935 that the moral hunger left by the weakening of state religion had led a people “systematically cretinized by machinism” and “ideological disorder” towards Hitler and his vision of the Third Reich. (actually what he said is far more Dalí-esque and funny; Hitler’s followers…

seek in vain to bite into the senile and triumphant softness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militaristic, and territorial back of any Hitlerian nursemaid. [This]irrational hunger…is placed before a cultural dining table on which are found only . . . cold and insubstantial leftovers.” The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935)

the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition; Dali in diving suit

As we have seen, Britain in 1936 was far from immune from ‘ideological disorder’ – but despite the fact that the British Union of Fascists was entrenched enough in society to be running an annual summer camp at Bognor Regis, the ideology was not all on the right. Breton, although vehemently Marxist, was not entirely comfortable with the polarising climate of the era, as his speech, The Political Position of Today’s Art given to the “Leftist Front” in Prague the year before the International Exhibition makes clear:

E.L.T. Mesens – Mask to be used for insulting Aesthetes (collage, 1929)

“These banners that have suddenly begun to flap over Europe, setting a common or social front, a single front or a red front over against a national front, the last battle formation of capitalism, are of a sort to imbue me more and more deeply with the idea that we live in an era in which man belongs to himself less than ever… [The Surrealists] find themselves in the face of a dilemma: either they must give up interpreting and expressing the world in the ways in which each of them finds the secret of within himself and himself alone – it is his very chance of enduring that is at stake – or they must give up collaborating on the practical plan of action for changing the world” April 1, 1935  Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.213

The same year however, perhaps more comfortable on his home turf in Paris, speaking to the Congress of Writers, Breton made it clear that he intended to have his cake and eat it;

“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.”

René Magritte – The Difficult Crossing (1926), shown in London

 

Considered leftist radicals by the right and as decadently bourgeois by the left, Surrealism was caught between two ideologies that both managed to miss the entire point of the movement. This was not a centrist organisation; it was radical, egalitarian and concerned above all with freedom, especially freedom of thought. Breton had written, “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.” (Manifesto of Surrealism p.9), but it was this ambiguity that troubled most of the opponents of Surrealism. The iconic Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who was represented by no less than 14 works in the exhibition,  shared Breton’s sentiments;

“People who grasp for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking ‘what does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response.  One asks other things.” (Magritte, Suzi Gablik, Thames & Hudson 1970, p.11)

Leonor Fini with her painting ‘Game of Legs’ which was exhibited at the London show

In fact, for all his aristocratic bearing (a quirk of personality rather than a representation of his actual background), Breton, with his touchstones of Marx, Freud and Rimbaud, was less elitist than the pro-Stalin communist intelligentsia of the British art world could be. The main criticism of upper class critics like Anthony Blunt (who, significantly, was covertly working as a spy for Stalin’s USSR at the time) was that Surrealism had no clear message and would therefore be difficult for the proletariat to understand, championing instead ‘Socialist Realism’ as the preferred avant garde art movement of the Communist Party.

This basic idea – ‘ordinary people won’t understand it’ – despite ignoring Breton & Magritte’s deliberate ambivalence towards ‘understanding’ – was still at the heart of critical attitudes to Surrealism as recently as Charles Harrison’s excellent English art and Modernism 1900-1939 (Yale University Press 1981). The division between the Surrealists (I really should decide when that word should and shouldn’t be capitalised) and the communist Artists’ International Association (AIA) is characterised by Harrison (p. 314-5) by the idea that the surrealists were reluctant to let go of the uniqueness of the artist and the artist’s vision; an idea which presupposes that the ‘proletariat’ is a kind of homogeneous mob which doesn’t share the individual uniqueness of artists. Breton, who was ultimately concerned with that uniqueness, never seems to have subscribed to the idea of the working classes as an unthinking and simple-minded mass. Indeed, his lifelong aim was to make an artist or poet of everyone.

But the idea of Surrealism as part controversialist nonsense, part artistic elitism persisted. Even Herbert Read – one of the pre-eminent art critics of the period, modernist, Marxist – despite being involved in the staging of the exhibition itself – tended to evaluate surrealism negatively in the revolutionary scheme of things, compared to pure abstraction, saying :

[Surrealism is]“a negative art… a destructive art; it follows that it has only a temporary role” whereas abstract art “has a positive function. It keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art” Five On Revolutionary Art  (1935, Artists’ International Association)

But in fact, Dalí in his 1929 Declaration had already pre-empted this criticism; “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision” and arguably the idea of a rarefied ‘pure art’ which is somehow divisible from human nature and human experience is one of those shackles.

Paul Nash – Harbour and Room (1932-6), one of several outstanding works by British artists at the show

Despite the negativity of parts of the leftist establishment, Breton was keen to stress in his Prague address that fascism was the enemy of all progressive art;

“Hitler and his acolytes are, unfortunately, very well aware that it was necessary not only to persecute Marxists, but to forbid all avant-garde art in order to stifle leftist thought even for a short time” Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.233

Wilhelm Freddie with one of the artworks seized by customs on their way to the exhibition

Ironically, despite the controversy surrounding Surrealism there was very little opposition to the London exhibition from the ‘establishment’ as such, aside from the seizure of some works by the Danish artist  Wilhelm Freddie on pornography charges. And although the AIA were not especially supportive of surrealism in general (as Harrison points out, “many of the aspirations of the AIA members were kept alive by a roseate vision of the conditions of art – and life – in Stalinist Russia” English Art and Modernism,  p.313), the differences between factions could be put aside when occasion demanded it; in November 1936 the Surrealists and the AIA together challenged the government’s position on the Spanish civil war in their Declaration on Spain by siding against the fascists. The two groups joined forces again in 1938 to exhibit Picasso’s Guernica in protest at events in Spain, significantly showing the painting not just in the New Burlington Galleries, but also in the Whitechapel Gallery in the heart of the working class East End.  (Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism, Phaidon 1997, p.346-9)

Toyen – Prometheus (1934)

Although largely male-dominated, the fact that the Surrealist group’s aims were to create a revolution in mind/spirit before, or simultaneous with, a social revolution meant that whereas for groups like the Communist Party, equality of the sexes was something to think about after the revolution had been won (an attitude christened ‘brocialism’ by Sarah Ditum in an excellent recent article for The New European issue #97, May 31 2018, p.19-21) ideas of gender and sex at both a conscious and subconscious level were central to the group’s work. Although this inevitably meant much objectification and a preoccupation with woman-as-muse, Breton’s championing of female artists was rarely paternalistic, even if it was as otherworldly as all of his writing;

“The cry for freedom received an absolutely noble and authentic answer in the work of Toyen, work as luminous as her own heart yet streaked through by dark forebodings.” Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, MacDonald & Co, 1972, p.210

Toyen in Paris, c.1925-6

The Czech artist Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) was represented in the London exhibition by two oil paintings and was definitive of the kind of artist drawn to the surrealist cause. Politically an anti-Stalinist communist, her work defies easy analysis, as did Toyen herself. Sometimes characterised by those who knew her as transgender, sometimes as an androgynous lesbian, sometimes as an almost femme-fatale-like heterosexual temptress (she could, pretentiously no doubt, be labelled sur-gender) her name, seemingly chosen for its non-gender specific quality – and the few photographs of her that exist, tend to encourage the mythologising of her rather than clarifying her true nature; and that is surely the point; had she wanted to be easily pigeonholed, she could have left something unambiguous behind.

Cecil Collins – Angel Images and Negative Spectres in Conflict (1933)

Browsing the catalogue of the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, with its mixture of high art (oil paintings, sculpture), photographs, found objects and disconcerting titles is to look into the troubled heart and dreams of a profoundly troubled time. The general perception of surrealism may be of something self consciously ‘weird’ but even that shows that if surrealism is anything, it is profoundly human. The fact that the work of an artist as idiosyncratic as Toyen could be seen by 25,000 people in London at a time when totalitarianism closed down independent thought across Europe and beyond, demonstrates that, despite the disapproval of the champions of socialist realism, surrealism was as revolutionary – and as successful – an art movement as there has been. After all, if a revolution doesn’t allow people to express their essential person-hood then why bother to fight fascism at all?

 

These are things I read before writing this:

Eileen Agar in France, 1937

Karla Tonine Huebner – Eroticism, Identity and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-Garde (2008). I can’t recommend this highly enough, incredibly enlightening and fascinating and you can read it all here

Andre Breton – Manifestoes of Surrealism (translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane, Ann Arbor paperbacks, 1972) Essential surrealist reading and fun, a lot of the time. I can never decide how much I like Breton, but when he’s good, he’s good

Matthew Gale – Dada and Surrealism (Phaidon, 1997) I think the best short overview of the two schools and their connections that I’ve read; he covers a lot of ground

Sarane Alexandrian – Surrealist Art (Thames & Hudson, 1970) A very personal look at the main surrealist movement by someone who was there for a lot of it. Alexandrian thinks quite deeply, but at the same time is absolutely Breton’s man, so some of the most interesting surrealists outside of the orbit of Paris don’t get much space

Dora Maar – The Simulator (1935-6)

Jennifer Mundy (ed.) – Surrealism – Desire Unbound (Tate Publishing, 2001) One of the absolute best books on surrealism I’ve read; fantastic essays, brilliantly illustrated.

Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, Hacques Vaché – 4 Dada Suicides (trans. Terry Hale, Paul Lenti, Iain White, Atlas Anti-Classics, 2005) Has very little to do with the actual article above but it’s such an amazing book & does give some authentic background to the earliest days of surrealism

all of the pictures in this article (apart from the photo of Sheila Legge) were shown in the exhibition – as far as I can tell; the names of  works in the catalogue aren’t always very reliable

Angel Planells – Midday Sorrow (1932)

Weekly Update: Complicated Comforts

For a variety of reasons, it is being a slightly stressful, sleepless time, so I’ve been looking at things that are, in a variety of perhaps complicated ways, comforting or soothing (to me). I suppose comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worry about external events. So, possibly comforting but at the very least distracting, hopefully. Here are a few of those things:

Listen to these:

HAV – Inver (Folkwit Records, releases 5th May 2017)

HAVI am not at all averse to folk music of various types, but I have to admit that on the whole I avoid the folk music of my own country. Partly it’s because most of the Scottish folk music I have come in contact with is dance music. I’m with Mark E. Smith on that one; I don’t want to dance (he may of course have contradicted that somewhere in the hundreds of albums he’s made since 1979). There are lots of kinds of dance music I do like, but the memory of Scottish country dancing at high school; of accordions, fiddles, ceilidhs etc; it’s just not for me. However, on their debut album, Inver, HAV make music that seamlessly combines the instrumentation and feel (and some of the tunes) of Scottish folk music with delicately atmospheric ambient electronica and field recordings and it is quite simply beautiful. Alternately bracing and embracing, it really seems to capture the feeling of the landscapes I grew up in, while also making the past (traditional songs like Loch Tay Boat SongPeggy Gordon etc) feel present and the present timeless; which is surely what folk music is all about.

Regurgitate Life – Obliteration of the Self (Truthseeker Music, out now)    

 

v200_Regurgitate_Life_Luke_Oram

This could hardly be more of a contrast to the HAV album; Regurgitate Life was once the technical death metal solo project of Sammy Urwin, but is now a duo (Sammy plus drummer Daryl Best) and not having to play everything really seems to have made Urwin experiment more with his guitar playing and composition. Whereas his (highly recommended) 2012 debut album The Human Complex was a brutally exuberant creation with more riffs per song than some bands manage per album, the new songs, without sacrificing their heaviness, refrain from throwing everything into every song. Instead, the riffs and melodies are put together as effectively as possible and the songs, for all their extremity, have far more depth than before. Also, I think this is the first Regurgitate Life recording where Urwin’s compositional and technical skills are used with the same kind of imagination he showed with Oblivionized. The Human Complex was intense, punishing and fun; Obliteration of the Self is more complex but also more complete and satisfying; a deeper, wider ranging and more considered but no less brutal death metal album; progressive without being boring. Oh, and Daryl Best’s drumming is superb throughout.

Dominic Lash Quartet – Extremophile (Iluso Records, out now)    

extrmDespite the title, after the squeaks and pings intro of Puddle Ripple (the first of several strangely tense Lash compositions), Extremophile as a whole isn’t especially extreme (unless you hate jazz in general I guess). It is certainly an imaginative and wide-ranging album, featuring both a peculiar and beautifully atmospheric jazz exploration of the already very peculiar 14th century French composition Fumeux Fume and an epic, incredibly effective version of Cecil Taylor’s Mixed Mixed. The quartet consists of Lash on bass, Ricardo Tejero (saxophone and clarinet), Alex Ward (surprisingly loud stabby guitar and clarinet) and Javier Carmona (drums and percussion) and across the seven tracks on the album they range from joyous exuberance to fragile melancholy to tranquil menace to chaotic tension. It’s a really good album.

Read these:

One of the reasons I love art history so much is that it encompasses so many things; art and history (duh), but also psychology, politics, religion, sociology, gender studies, sexuality… the list goes on. And when a really good writer combines all of these things in the study of art which is in itself fascinating, emotionally involving and intensely unsettling you have, essentially, a very good read; with pictures! One such book is Sue Taylor’s brilliant study of the German surrealist Hans Bellmer:

 

Hans Bellmer,The Anatomy of Anxiety (MIT Press, 2000)

bellmer

Whereas many of Bellmer’s admirers have sought to clear him of

 

Hans Bellmer 'La Poupee' (the Doll) 1934
Hans Bellmer ‘La Poupee’ (the Doll) 1934

charges of misogyny and paedophilia in his art, Taylor, who subjects the artist and his work to Freudian analysis, neither shies away from, nor seeks to simplify these elements in his art. Regardless of whether one regards Freud’s discoveries as a) not actually universal, but specific to a particular period/class, b) not right, or c) genuinely revealing the workings of the human mind, the approach works extremely well with Bellmer’s obsessive, symbol-rich work, relating the images closely to his biography and preoccupations, and uncovering layers of plausible meaning in the process. His art is disturbing, and was supposed to disturb; to deny its problematic aspects is to misunderstand it and ultimately underestimate and trivialise its power. Anyway; this is a really good book.

 

Also art history related, but somewhat different is:

 

Munch by Steffen Kverneland (SelfMadeHero, 2016)

Munch-A-Cover

A graphic biography of the great Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch, Kverneland’s book uses Munch’s own words and those of his contemporaries to create a vivid picture (literally) of the artist’s life, times and the genesis of his most famous works. The inclusion of Kverneland and his colleague Lars Fiske working out the artist’s complicated life through often amusing conversation makes it not just a biography, but also a book about writing (and drawing) a biography and as such it is a multilayered and hugely enjoyable read.

 

 

 

 

And why not watch this:

The Last Kingdom (series 2, BBC2)

 

uhtred

Okay, it’s not finished yet and could still turn bad, but after being dubious about the BBC’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall their adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories still makes me not grudge paying the license fee. It’s extremely well made, directed and acted, but for me what makes it is the central performance of Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbanburg; heroic but slightly comical, even a stint as a slave couldn’t kill his basic smugness for long.

 

Someone Of No Importance: Evelyn Waugh and inter-war Futilitarianism

 

The news that one of your favourite novels is being made into a film or TV show is never straightforwardly pleasurable; yes, there’s an excitement about seeing scenes from the page (and from your own imaginings of them) on screen, but there’s a certain amount of apprehension too. Nobody will look right (at first anyway), they may not sound right, and if you don’t like them you may be stuck with them whenever you re-read the book (especially if you didn’t have a particularly clear image of them in your mind in the first place or if, like me the image you do have often bears strangely little relation to the writer’s actual descriptions). Then there’s the tone and authorial voice/point of view, the inner life of the characters… It’s actually surprising there are any good adaptations of books. But there are many, the best of which (to me at least) are those that capture the essence of the book without necessarily being ‘faithful adaptations’ (Catch-22, Ghost World) or which use the book as a launchpad for the filmmakers’ own ideas (Blade Runner, Jaws). Most adaptations are of course neither of these. Which brings us to the BBC’s ‘not bad’ version of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

It’s first of all a strange book to have chosen; a black comedy whose fans – as with fans of JG Ballard’s Crash, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – know in advance to expect an approximate, rather than precise rendering of. Decline and Fall is not an extreme book in the graphic sense that those three are, but, like at least two of them, its humour is grounded in its unremitting unpleasantness and in the end it’s a bleak, essentially misanthropic, nihilistic kind of comedy, tellingly completed before Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. For a variety of reasons, though, ‘bleak’ isn’t how the TV version feels.

But before moving on to the show, it’s worth looking at why the book is the way it is. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s an exaggerated reflection of certain aspects of its creator’s personality and an expression of his sense of humour. Even post-conversion, when there is a modicum of compassion for some of the characters in his work, Waugh’s books – with the exception of Brideshead Revisited – are mostly funny but extremely mean-spirited black comedies full of caricatures and snobbishness made extremely funny by his writing style, and in his first few novels that’s pretty much all there is. The surprising depth of feeling in even these books comes from the fact that Waugh allows that his characters – even a relative cipher like Decline and Fall’s bland non-hero Paul Pennyfeather – have human emotions, even if they are rarely respected by others or the author. In Decline and Fall , the snobbishness, misogyny and the – to modern readers – strange treatment of child abuse in which certain pupils seem partly culpable in their encouragement of the paedophile (I hope that most of us would now agree that the victim of child abuse can’t really be complicit in it), can be explained pretty simply: it was the milieu that the young Waugh knew. His education at an all-boys public school and his subsequent university life and work as a teacher in (again) an all-boys public school were overwhelmingly male experiences and child abuse was, if not actually legal or even acceptable, then at least a tacitly accepted if not much written about part of public school life. Nowadays, we might find it odd for a writer to include that kind of thing in a book where the original author’s note reads ‘Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.’ but although the novel was self-consciously outrageous, the aspects that most trouble modern readers; abuse, misogyny, racism, were probably not that much dwelt upon in the late 20s.

The reason that Waugh’s comedies are so rarely successfully adapted into other formats is that their action is farcical, but not complicated. In 1920s comedy, PG Wodehouse is the obvious star, and his work lends itself naturally to stage and television adaptation thanks to his intricate joke-like plots (complete with a punchline at the end). The comedy is there in the story and the writer’s style is the dressing that brings it to life. Waugh’s early plots meanwhile are loosely constructed to non-existent and chaotic and often implausible (yet somehow also more realistic than Wodehouse) and his writing style is everything. It’s a weird, slightly unworkable comparison, but now that I’ve made it; with Wodehouse, his stories are like a kind of pantomime or fairytale, played out by characters the author loves and which are completely ludicrous but make perfect sense on their own terms. With Waugh, it’s often as though a real (perhaps even tragic) story about real people is being told by someone who finds the whole thing funny and has little to no sympathy for the fools and the predicaments they find themselves in. Wodehouse orchestrates the events like a stage director, while Waugh reports them like a condescending gossip. To me, he is the funnier of the two, but his presence is also necessary; if you remove Wodehouse the narrator from his stories, you are left with characters that embody the warmth and silliness of the narrator’s voice, acting out stories which are in themselves funny. If you remove Waugh you are left with people you never really know making fools of themselves in painful ways. If you had never read Waugh but only watched adaptations of his work, one might expect his books to read something like a posh version of Tom Sharpe; which they definitely don’t.

The other main reason that Waugh’s early books are the way they are is because he was part of that couple of generations who lived through the First World War, but who were too young to take part. The impact this had is undeniable and the British literature of the 20s and 30s is filled with very different books by very different writers which nevertheless have various things in common with each other and which I like very much.  The early 21st century may be in some ways a far more cynical time than the 1920s, but in effect it is both nicer and nastier. Most of us no longer accept the inequalities of the class system, or discrimination in race and gender. We are also no longer surprised that human beings can slaughter each other in their millions in mechanised ways; but while being used to that idea, it’s also true that, unlike Waugh’s generation, we (at least we in the UK) haven’t had the experience of half of the adult males that were there in our early childhood simply not existing anymore, or living in a country where almost every town and village doesn’t have a monument to those killed in a war we remember. A large part of the literature of the 20s and 30s consists of writers either trying to find meaning in a society whose way of life has been changed forever, whose old beliefs; in religion, in tradition, no longer seem to have any meaning, or of trying simply to escape the realities of modern life altogether. In the mid-to – late 1930s, politics would take centre stage in British literature, but for a period from around 1920 to 1935 the anxieties of the country’s younger writers were revealed in a series of strangely formless but oddly similar novels, which were once labelled ‘futilitarian’.

booox

These are my favourites, might as well do this chronologically…

Aldous Huxley – Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928)

antic

Huxley was in fact slightly older (20 when WW1 broke out, whereas Waugh was only 11) but he could not take part in combat due to his chronically bad eyesight. His early novels (I think Antic Hay is the best) make a very interesting comparison with Waugh’s, because at first they seem fairly similar; modern comedies where the storylines (such as they are) mostly revolve around the social lives of young, wealthy and irresponsible people. But the tone and content is very different. While Waugh was at school during WW1, with not only all the jingoism and propaganda that that entailed, but also the noticeable absence of adult male teachers and role models, for Huxley, WW1 was the period of Bloomsbury (he worked as a farm labourer at Garsington Manor, home of the society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell. For him, social life meant intellectual conversation; the discussion of art and modernism, conscientious objection, philosophy, pacifism. The comedy in novels like Antic Hay comes mainly from his satirical portrayals of the kinds of people he was mixing with but they are funny in both a broad way (the hero Theodore Gumbril’s invention of ‘pneumatic trousers’) and a deeper one (relationships and their difficulties). The main difference from Waugh is that whereas the comedy in a book like Waugh’s Vile Bodies arises from the somewhat desperate attempts of the main characters to have fun in the face of the meaningless void underlying modern life, in Huxley’s works the comedy arises from the characters’ often farcical and pretentious attempts at finding meaning through conversation, art and philosophy. The contrast between Huxley’s novels and an apparently very similar one – Wyndham Lewis’ great satire The Apes of God (1930) is especially striking because the milieu the books are set in almost identical (they knew many of the same people) and because, like Huxley, Wyndham Lewis was not nihilistic. He was however, immensely negative and the fact that he had seen active service in WW1 and was also himself a pioneering artist made him extremely impatient with what he saw as the wishy-washy dilettantism of the Bloomsbury artists and writers and their detachment from real life. The contrast between Antic Hay and The Apes of God is the difference between an affectionate Max Beerbohm cartoon and a merciless James Gillray caricature.

Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930)

Viles_Bodies

What makes these books distinctively post-WW1 is the nihilism at their heart. The younger generation of the 1920s were probably more different from their parents (products of the Victorian era) than any generation before or since (excepting maybe that of the 60s) and the tone of Waugh’s novels is resolutely modern and, despite its insistence on/preoccupation with social class, the feel is one of fragmentation and instability, especially in comparison with pre-War literature. When older people are presented, it is almost always as an archaic survival from a distant era. If the war is mentioned at all, its in an almost nostalgic way by people for whom it was the backdrop of their youth or childhood. The most surprising thing about Waugh’s books is the unexpected poignancy that comes from his mostly unsympathetic handling of his characters; Vile Bodies, probably his most determinedly unpleasant book, is also his funniest (aside from the grotesque later masterpiece The Loved One).

Anthony Powell – Afternoon Men (1931)

afternoon men

Of all the books here, Afternoon Men feels perhaps the least ambitious, but makes me laugh the most. I have read some of Anthony Powell’s other books (and started but not finished his Dance to the Music of Time series), but they just aren’t the same. The story is almost identical to those of Huxley and Waugh – a group of young people meet up socially and drink a lot, have affairs etc – although the social class of Powell’s protagonist William Atwater is lowly enough that he actually has a normal, office-based job – a rarity in any of these books. Atwater’s friends and acquaintances are the usual mixture of bohemian high society people but it is Powell’s abrupt, lightly modernistic writing style and feel for dialogue that makes it work so well:

“’I work in a museum’, said Atwater. He was getting sleepier and felt he ought to say something. He had begun to be depressed.

‘That must be very interesting work, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Isn’t it really?’

‘I often think of running away to sea.’

‘I think it must be very interesting.’

‘Do you?’

* * * *

‘What about your books?’ Atwater stood up. He could not do all the stuff about the books. He was too sleepy. He said:

‘There are these. And then there are those.’”

(Afternoon Men, p.35-6, 1963 Penguin edition)

As a writer, Powell is far more deadpan and less misanthropic than Waugh, but he creates a similarly poignant effect; it would be quite possible to film this novel and, used verbatim, the dialogue might still be funny, but what essentially makes the book work is the style in which it is written.

Cyril Connolly – The Rock Pool (written 1935. published 1936)

220px-Rockpool

The Rock Pool is the only novel by Connolly – best known as a literary critic – and it is one of my favourite books. Connolly was the same age and (more or less) social class as Evelyn Waugh, and the novel is the portrait of a snobbish young man of means who goes to the French Riviera to observe life in an artist’s colony, with the explicit intention of writing a period piece about the kind of carefree1920s-style life of leisure that no longer existed in the London of the 30s, but might still be going on there.  In fact, it isn’t  – and instead he finds himself drawn into the lives of the impoverished artists, conmen and bar owners there until it becomes clear that he is not the detached ironic observer he imagined, but has in fact found his niche and his people, whether he wants to have or not. In comparison with Waugh and even Huxley, Connolly is far more sympathetic to his characters and the tone is completely different from Waugh’s slightly contemptuous detachment:

“’Tell me, why do you come here if you are such a snob?’

‘Who said I was a snob?’

‘Why, everybody… I’m sure it must be very amusing.’

He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.”

(The Rock Pool, p.90-91, Penguin edition, 1963)

The fact that The Rock Pool is a product of the mid-30s and not the 20s is part of its charm. While Connolly’s contemporaries and peers were becoming interested in philosophy and science (Huxley), religion (Waugh) or politics and social commentary (George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, WH Auden etc), Connolly accepted, with insight, the aimless, aesthetic worldview of his 20s generation, even as it became obsolete.

Christopher Isherwood –  Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)

mr norris

Isherwood’s first two novels, All The Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) are also relevant here, but Mr Norris… (probably best known, with its semi-sequel Goodbye To Berlin (1939) as being the inspiration for the musical Cabaret) have more in common with the books described above. While both of his earlier books dealt specifically with the generation gap that had resulted from the First World War (and The Memorial is explicitly concerned with the effects of WW1 on British society), Mr Norris is, although very different in tone, essentially similar to The Rock Pool – a comical story about the adventures of a young upper class person out of his element. Although famous for its evocation of the politics and life of late Weimar and early Nazi Berlin, the novels were born from Isherwood’s desire – in 1929/30, rather than the mid-late 30s of the novels – not for any kind of social or political commentary, but to escape the milieu of upper class England and experience the hedonistic lifestyle of Berlin. As with most Waugh and Powell, the book’s main protagonist is less vividly drawn than the more extreme characters who surround him, and in many ways Isherwood accomplishes a kind of heightened, occasionally grotesque realism something like the Neue Sachlichkeit artists (Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Christian Schad etc) who were working in Germany in the same period, and whose paintings have often adorned the covers of his books. The fact that his books are partly autobiographical (and written in the first person, as ‘William Bradshaw’, Isherwood’s own middle names) means there is little of the distancing effect of Waugh and although there is much humour in Isherwood’s early novels, often at the expense of his characters, they are written with a warmth and compassion that makes them translate to the screen without losing too much of the feel of the novel – with the exception of the narrator himself, who suffers by being mostly a nondescript bystander, so that in Cabaret, the Christopher Isherwood/William Bradshaw character has to become the very different Brian Roberts.

oh – not chronological now, but also – Stephen Spender – The Temple (written 1929, published 1988)

220px-TheTemple

While Isherwood was in Berlin with WH Auden, their friend Stephen Spender found his way to Hamburg, seeking not only the hedonistic freedom of Weimar Germany, but also freedom from censorship. As Spender wrote in the introduction to the (very) belated first edition of The Temple, England in 1929 was a country where James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned, as was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. In going to Germany, his motives were at least partly artistic, and as he noted, “The Temple is pre-thirties and pre-political.” The same could be said of all of the novels discussed here. In that sense, The Temple sits strangely, but appropriately, in the company of the books of Waugh, Anthony Powell and co. In comparison with Isherwood’s Berlin stories, Spender’s novel is far more concerned with the inner life of its narrator and his Hamburg is less vividly drawn, but at the same time the book is far more explicit about sex than Isherwood (though to be fair Spender revised The Temple before publication in the 80s so it isn’t clear how much of the explicitness existed in 1929 – enough to prevent it from being published though). It’s a summery, if slightly troubled book, not improved by the author’s retrospective awareness of how fleeting the freedom it describes would be. Also, although Spender was himself far from humourless, there’s an earnest quality that makes the tone of the book unique in this list; it’s far more of a considered portrait of a time, than a story about some young people.

Decline and Fall – the TV show

decandeff

So, finally – to that TV adaptation of Decline and Fall. It wasn’t actually bad at all (vastly better than the mystifyingly titled 1969 movie adaptation, Decline and Fall…of a Bird Watcher), but despite all the positive reviews it wasn’t (to me anyway) right either; how come? Firstly, the book was published in 1928 and had a contemporary setting. That means that it is now a period piece, which on the screen, gives an instantly distancing effect. The twenties in particular (actually, the twenties and thirties; TV rarely discriminates between the two) has evolved a certain lighthearted and somewhat cosy screen presence on television over the years, from the nostalgic adaptation(s) of Waugh’s very different Brideshead Revisited to gentle Sunday evening drama of The House of Elliot to Jeeves and Wooster and even You Rang M’Lord.

Thanks to these shows and others like them (not to mention films like Bugsy Malone and The Great Gatsby in its various versions) there’s a kind of visual shorthand for the twenties, consisting of; striped blazers, flapper fashions, art deco, the Charleston and hedonistic and/or gormless aristocrats, the fantasy of being independently wealthy, plus the odd Moseley-inspired fascist and monocled lesbian; all of which fits Decline and Fall pretty well, in a superficial kind of way. But while nostalgia is, appropriately, an element in all of the aforementioned programmes (not so much The Great Gatsby, ironic given how the film version traded on the visual aspects of its high society settings etc), it should really have no place in Decline and Fall. Nostalgia can’t help being present though, just through the accumulation of period detail and the kind of broad acting that a comedy set among the upper classes in the 20s seems to require. This broad approach is again fair enough in a way, since Decline and Fall is essentially a novel where the characters are close to being caricatures anyway.

The most obvious place the book differs from the television adaptation is that in the book, the mostly innocent and bland fish-out-of-water main character, Paul Pennyfeather doesn’t have to be – and often isn’t – particularly likeable; the reader doesn’t have to like him or identify with him to find his story funny and anyway, Waugh makes it explicit that we are not seeing Pennyfeather at his best or most typical or indeed in his element at all. Considering the ridiculous (and at times heartbreaking) circumstances he finds himself in, his outbursts of bitterness are surprisingly few and far between. Presenting a not-very-likeable character having misadventures with even less likeable characters is not, however a particularly ratings-grabbing idea, so it’s not surprising the BBC didn’t play it that way. It would never have occurred to me to cast the comedian Jack Whitehall in the leading role, but the hapless/diffident/youthful/naive sides of Pennyfeather’s nature are not that far removed from Whitehall’s usual persona and I don’t mean it as an insult when I say he captures the somewhat one-dimensional, nonentity-like aspect of Pennyfeather quite well.

But, in the bigger picture, the fact that the BBC is spending money on an Evelyn Waugh adaptation at all may not really be a good sign. As Jon Savage wrote in 1986 (re. the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited):

Waugh’s elevation into legend – as the house god of literary London – has come at the same time as, and may have fuelled, a concerted ideological attack on the social gains of the whole post-war period.” (Jon Savage, Waugh Crimes, The Face, September 1986, in Time Travel – Pop, Media and Sexuality 1976-99, Chatto & Windus 1996, p. 206).

The adaptation of Decline and Fall in 2017 says as much about the current rise of conservatism as the success of Brideshead Revisited did about Margaret Thatcher’s mid 80s, both about the nature of the conservatism itself, and the ways society has changed since the last strengthening of the right.  The choice of Brideshead to capture a conservative zeitgeist was an obvious and safe one; Waugh’s least characteristic, if most successful novel, it is (or at least it can be easily adapted as) a straightforward nostalgic paean to/romanticisation of the leisured life of the aristocracy in the pre-WW2 period, the last time they could be seen as  the leaders of fashion and in a real sense ‘the ruling class’, with an Empire and subordinate classes to (literally) ‘lord it’ over. Then as now, the appeal of traditional ‘Britishness’ was strong, both with the kind of conservative, older elements in society/in charge and those who see progressiveness only in terms of threatening change/instability. Back in 1986, the ‘golden age’ of Brideshead Revisited was still remembered by the older generations, including many who were still active in the political life of the country.

But although the BBC made a costume drama, perhaps the most conservative television form, and although Waugh was a lifelong conservative and reactionary, Decline and Fall the novel, as discussed above, is hardly conservative at all; it doesn’t stand for anything, and its guiding principle seems to be that people are foolish and stupid and ruin their own lives and the lives of others without caring or even noticing. It’s a book which mostly gets away with its casual misogyny and racism because of its overwhelming misanthropy; if these people are laughable and stupid and ridiculous then at least he doesn’t show us anyone that isn’t; the fact that one of the book’s most likeable comic characters is a teacher who is not only a bad teacher, but a serial child abuser shows just what an odd choice it is for a BBC costume drama. The way the BBC tackled the more problematic aspects says a lot about where society is in 2017. In the novel, the (in modern terminology) paedophile teacher Captain Grimes’ abuse of the children in his care is seen by the other characters as distasteful and disreputable, as well as criminal, but is still seen as something one can be funny about. Somewhat surprisingly, this element made it to the screen more or less untouched, albeit without the flirtatiousness of Grimes’ favourite victim (as we, but not he, would see it), Clutterbuck. It is interesting though, to note that when reviewing the show, the word paedophile has almost always been replaced by the equivalent but somehow less inflammatory word ‘pederast’; somehow enjoying the comical exploits of a fictional paedophile might not be okay. It’s presumably the respectability of the source material (Decline and Fall may be outrageous, but Waugh is a pillar of British literature), the broadness of the comedy and the relative vagueness of the acts that makes it acceptable. And I think that’s right in a way; the element is there in the novel, it’s supposed to be and is uncomfortably funny in the novel (Waugh really was a kind of anti-Wodehouse at that point in his career), even though child abuse itself is obviously not funny. It can be assumed I think that the makers of the programme are not condoning anything, and hand-wringing self-censorship would not make the programme better; but there seems to have been a certain amount of that anyway, as we shall see.

Jack-Whitehall-Decline-And-Fall

As the misanthropy of the novel is reduced in the TV version largely because of Jack Whitehall’s sympathetic portrayal of Paul Pennyfeather, the misogyny of the book more or less evaporates onscreen, largely because the female characters are no more or less caricatures than the male ones, and are played by real women. In the book, the women are mostly predatory in one way or another and are strictly there to be admired, feared or despised – and the admiration always ends in disillusion. In Waugh’s mature books (even his best ones like A Handful of Dust) it could be argued that this feeling never significantly changes.

Where the BBC seems to have been most squeamish is with the novel’s racism. Although the anti-Welsh feeling made it to the screen more or less unchanged and again, partly neutralised by the fact that almost all of the characters were played so broadly, the episode featuring Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s African-American boyfriend Sebastian “Chokey” Cholmondley is more problematic. In the adaptation, Chiké Okonkwo plays the character exactly as written; he is articulate, urbane and enthusiastic about ecclesiastical architecture; but, when he says in the novel, “You folk think that because we’re coloured we don’t care about nothing but jazz. Why, I’d give all the jazz in the world for just one little stone from one of your cathedrals”, it’s supposed to be funny, not just because of the naivety of the lines, but because they comes from a black character. His entry into the book as Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s companion at the school games sets the tone for the whole episode:

“’I hope you don’t mind my bringing Chokey, Dr Fagan?’ she said. ‘He’s just crazy about sport.’

‘I sure am that,’ said Chokey.

’Dear Mrs Beste-Chetwynde!’ said Dr Fagan; ‘dear, dear Mrs Beste-Chetwynde!’ He pressed her glove, and for a moment was at a loss for words of welcome, for ‘Chokey’, though graceful of bearing and irreproachably dressed, was a Negro.” (Decline and Fall, p. 75)

Throughout the scene that follows, Chokey talks about church architecture, music and his race, and did so in the TV version, but the fact of his articulacy and the idea that his presence among high society people is in itself funny remains inescapable in the novel.  Also, what the BBC understandably didn’t include, was the way that almost every other character present comments on Chokey’s presence, or the abusive terms they use when doing so. I’m not sure what else they could have done while remaining at all true to the novel. On the one extreme, removing the single black character from a TV show in the name of  not upsetting people with racism would make no sense, and on the other, having Jack Whitehall say, as Paul Pennyfeather does in the novel, “I say Grimes, what d’you suppose the relationship is between Mrs Beste-Chetwynde and that n—–?” would – to say the least – have spoiled the show and made Pennyfeather a less sympathetic character than the BBC want him to be. But possibly they should have?

When writing about Waugh in 1986, Jon Savage wrote;

“It is extremely important that British culture develops a way of addressing the present and the future rather than the past, that recognises our pluralistic, multiracial society and our position, finger-in-the-dyke of trends in world politics” (Time Travel – Pop, Media and Sexuality 1976-99, Chatto & Windus 1996, p. 207)

and that’s still true – indeed, it’s more true now than it was even five years ago. But Decline and Fall isn’t it. Obviously, its anarchic vision isn’t as straightforwardly nostalgic and conservative in 2017 as Brideshead was in the 80s, but that’s partly because popular culture, post-Brass Eye, post-I’m A Celebrity and post-Operation Yew Tree is massively more coarse and more receptive to deliberate bad taste than the 80s was, or the 20s were for that matter. In its concern with period detail and its twee Jeeves and Wooster-ish execution, the makers of Decline and Fall have swapped the viciously funny nihilism of Waugh’s 1920s for a slightly cosy bad taste pantomime world which is equally as uncomfortable in its own very different way and leaves a comparable, but again different funny taste. Still; it wasn’t awful.

waugh_decline_440

 

Belated weekly update: If You Want To Feel…

So, I’m taking far too long faffing with the more (relatively) substantial things I’ve been working on, so in the meantime I will try to reinstate the weekly updates. Just to stop the whole thing becoming too repetitive, this one is in a very slightly different format from the usual playlist etc (though not massively different to be honest). So anyway; here are some things…

If You Want To Feel… slightly heartbroken, in a teenage kind of way…

Listen to – American Anymen + Lise – Oui EP

American Anymen + LIse - Oui EP
American Anymen + LIse – Oui EP

I love this beautiful little release. It’s a lovely collection of wistful, charming songs that reminded me in various ways of Daniel Johnston, Bright Eyes, Jad Fair, BMX Bandits and other groups whose work is similarly uncluttered and direct. People label this kind of thing twee, but if it is then I guess my feelings are twee, too. Oh – and this is available for FREE! 


 

 

If You Want To Feel… like you belong to the Multiverse…

Ethel Moorhead
Ethel Moorhead

Find out what was going on in your local area, in a period that interests you. It’s easy and fun, unless of course you find it difficult & boring. Previously I have read about The Beatles in Kirkcaldy (a surreal thought) but I was recently reading about about the local activities of the suffragette movement and discovered several things that I felt I should have known for years. Not only was a local railway station which I have been to many times rebuilt in 1913 after being burned down in (allegedly) a suffragette attack, but, more definitely, the prominent suffragette, Ethel Moorhead, has very local (to me) connections. She left her childhood home in Dundee to study as a painter in the studios of Whistler & Alphonse Mucha – which is interesting enough – but a few years later, after joining the WSPU, she was arrested many times, being subjected to the usual sadistic treatment under the ‘Cat & Mouse Act’.  After one of her lesser offences, she was locked up in a jail (nowadays just offices) that I walk past almost every day. She then proceeded to wreck the bathroom and flood the building. This happened in the town where I went to High School, but the (mostly very good) history teachers I had either didn’t know about it, or didn’t think it worth telling the pupils about. And yet, knowing this kind of thing makes history far more vivid and alive (and paradoxically ghostly) than the kind of standard issue textbook things that are (or were; not been to school for years) usually taught. Incidentally, I think the school really should have explained the horrors of the Cat & Mouse act. Saying women on hunger strike were ‘force-fed’  is not untrue, but doesn’t really capture just what the authorities were doing; especially here in Scotland.

 If You Want To Feel… like the 80s cyberpunk future  is still the future

Listen to – Anvil StrykezAnvil Strykez

Anvil Strykez
Anvil Strykez

I have written a review of this great album for Echoes and Dust so won’t say much here. But if you were living in an early William Gibson novel, or the kind of 80s cartoon that is at least 50% chase or fight sequences, this would be the soundtrack

 

 

 

 

If You Want To Feel…like simple concern for your fellow human beings is less important than political ideology

Look at every major political party in the UK right now. If however, you don’t want to feel that way, look at the many people and institutions fighting for the rights of people of all kinds and trying to improve the lives of people and make your own opinion known. There are probably more people fighting and campaigning for human rights and equality than at any time in the history of the western world; this is a good thing. One of the saddest things about UK politics in 2017 is that there are many such people even within the main parties; but on the whole, their voices are being made subordinate to the political aims of those parties.

If You Want To Feel… like the internet is like all the encyclopaedias in the world, only better 

Sign up for some of the many great newsletters put out for free on the web. Your interests may not be the same as mine, but I have never yet had a single newsletter from any of these without finding something of interest:

Messy Nessy – this site covers so many areas; culture, pop culture, history, art, architecture, society – and its regular newsletter is great

The New Yorker – you already know what The New Yorker is – brilliant journalism, politics, art, culture, cinema, fiction, you name it; they recently had an unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story for christ’s sake! For free!

FEMigré – Vonny Moyes’ blog is fairly new, but has already built up an extremely thoughtful & considered series of articles, looking at society & the world from a feminist viewpoint, which challenges not only the cultural status quo, but dogma of all kinds.

Gail Carriger’s Monthly Chirrup – mainly for fans of Miss Carriger’s books perhaps, but in addition to news relating to her steampunk fiction, the Chirrup often takes in Victoriana of all kinds, fashion and humour and is highly entertaining in its own right.

Zero Tolerance Magazine – okay, I write for ZT, but the newsletter includes lots of extreme metal-related news/offers etc as well as keeping readers up to date with the ZT blog

Museums & Galleries – most really good museums & galleries have worthwhile newsletters, the Tate & V&A etc are good but one of my favourites is The National Museum of Women in the Arts which has links to their excellent blog as well as the usual updates etc

If You Want To Feel… like you’ve run a marathon while being hit over the head with a hammer – but in a good way

Listen to Never – Demo 2017

Never - Demo 2017
Never – Demo 2017

Never are a punk band from Brighton and play intense, cathartic & exhilarating hardcore/noise-ish music with lots of heart. It makes you feel better by making you feel worse

 

 

 

 

 

If You Want To Feel… like the music scene in 2017 is as vibrant and essential as it always is, here’s a current playlist – why break with tradition entirely?

Ghost World – Ghost World (Svart Records)

ghost

 archetypically teenage neo-grunge, Finland’s Ghost World have made a fine debut album which, incidentally, includes my favourite ‘ooh’s of the year so far (on the track ‘Drain’, if you’re interested)

 

 

 

 

The Moon & The Nightspirit – Metanoia (Prophecy Productions)

TMATNS-MetanoiaBundle

Hungarian pagan folk music which is probably as influenced by fantasy as by actual folk traditions; but it’s a lovely, slightly spooky and thankfully not very cheesy album nonetheless.

 

 

 

 

Ummagma – Winter Tale/Frequency

ummag

Ummagma’s almost unclassifiable* mix of dreampop, shoegaze, ambient electronica, synthpop etc etc (*see?) is at its best on the Frequency EP, a collection of extremely fresh and delicate but never throwaway tunes made with the collaboration of luminaries such as Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins & OMD’s Malcolm Holmes. Winter Tale is jointly credited to Ummagma and equally-unclassifiable (or maybe not)  dreampop pioneers A.R. Kane; and  it sounds like both groups, which should please anyone who likes to float on a dreamy cushion of beautiful, harmonious noise.

 

 

 

wildcard: Coldfells – Coldfells (Bindrune Recordings/Eihwaz Recordings)

coldfells_Cover2

I’m not actually sure how much I like this yet; rough, harsh, Thorns-like black metal/doom with strangely melodic choruses. Hmm. A few listens in and the riffs and rough bits are great – the choruses take some getting used to, in this context though. But interesting and I’m sticking with it, so definitely not a thumbs-down.

 

 

 

Current Reading: I’ve been on an Orwell bender of late; currently reading his diaries, which are alternately great and dull, as one might expect of something that is in part a record of how many eggs his hens are laying etc.

Also –

  • The Vorticists (ed. Mark Antliffe & VIvien Greene)
  • Gail Carriger – The Finishing School (series)
  • Samuel Beckett (shorter prose works)
  • Steffen Kverneland – Munch
  • The New European (newspaper)

Current Viewing:

  • The Last Kingdom (series 2, BBC)
  • Logan (pretty good, if ridiculously violent & bleak)
  • Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Hitchcock masterpiece with Joseph Cotten at his charmingly sinister best

So anyway, enough for now? Until next time!