Sparks In Electrical Jelly

James Blackshaw and James Tiptree Jr.

2012-01-28T23:39:00.010Z

A forthcoming LP from the brilliant twelve string acoustic guitarist and chamber music composer James Blackshaw has just been announced, and I was excited to discover that he's named the album, Love Is the Plan, The Plan Is Death, and all of its six tracks after science fiction short stories by James Tiptree Jr. Blackshaw has drawn his titles from literary sources before. 2009's The Glass Bead Game comes from Hermann Hesse's novel set in a future world in which monkish scholars and intellectuals devote their lives to a complex game which encompasses all life and thought. 2010's All Is Falling seems to reference Samuel Beckett's 1956 radio play All That Fall, the demands for the production of the sound effects for which led to the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. 2007's The Cloud of Unknowing, meanwhile, is named after an anonymous 14th century work of Christian mysticism, and is typical of Blackshaw's tendency towards titles which allude to spiritual and mystical, although he firmly denied any personal religious faith or belief in an interview in The Wire in October 2006.

James Blackshaw - Love Is the Plan, the Plan is Death

Tiptree was the pen-name of Alice Sheldon. She was the child of colourful society parents (Herbert Edwin Bradley, and attorney and explorer, and the writer and adventuress Mary Wilhelmina Hastings Bradley), and worked with US Intelligence Forces during the war, going on to spend a brief period with the CIA in the mid-50s. She abandoned this direction, although her decision to study experimental psychology, in which she attained a PhD, could be seen as tangentially related. She was also interested in the nature of human visual perception, and its aesthetic dimention, having been an artist earlier in her life. Her doctoral studies fed into the subtly and deeply troubling story The Man Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats, which dissects the psychology of evil (or the weakness which permits evil) with great acuity. She began writing science fiction short stories in 1968, choosing a male name (she picked the surname, Tiptree, at random, noticing it on the lid of a jam jar) as a mask, and perhaps also as an experiment in testing the expectations of the SF world, still dominated by men at the time. It was also a good way to go unnoticed, and thus not have to bear the pressure of being a pioneer female writer in the field, and attracting unwanted attention as a result. This disguise was maintained until 1977, when her true identity was uncovered (against her wishes - she referred to the anonymous period as her 'James Tiptree retreat'). She wrote as both Alice Sheldon and Racoona Sheldon in the 80s, with some reduction in intensity,although the stories are still fine and worth reading. Everything ended in 1987. Her husband, Huntingdon Sheldon, with whom she had lived in a close and mutually supportive relationship for over 40 years, was drifting away from her, declining into the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. In an act which was seemingly pre-arranged and agreed upon, she shot him and then turned the gun upon herself. Love is the plan, the plan is death.

Tiptree's best stories are incredibly powerful and intensely felt works, often meditating on mortality, loneliness and the gulf between individuals and the sexes. They use science fiction's devices and props to great allegorical effect. The Women That Men Don't See and The Screwfly Solution are both devastating commentaries on the position of women in society and underlying male attitudes to them - the first heartwrenching and the second utterly terrifying. The heightened emotional tenor of her short stories bears comparison with Harlan Ellison. Like Ellison, the intensity of her fiction and the lyrical, burning language in which it was written couldn't easily be sustained over longer lengths, and she was at her best in shorter forms. Also like Ellison, she gave her stories baroque and poetic titles, which make for ideal, evocative song titles. Blackshaw has chosen The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone from Tiptree's first short story collection, Ten Thousand Light Years From Home (1973). Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, and And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways are from Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), A Momentary Taste of Being and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (my God, what a story that one is) from Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978) and We Who Stole the Dream from Out of the Everywhere (1981). Blackshaw could have chosen from the equally striking story titles I'll Be Waiting For You When The Swimming Pool Is Empty, Faithful To Thee, Terra, In Our Fashion, And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side, Mother In The Sky With Diamonds or The Girl Who Was Plugged In. I look forward to reading these astonishing stories to the accompaniement of whatever music Blackshaw has been inspired to create from them.

Tender Buttons, Trish Keenan and Gertrude Stein

2012-01-27T11:53:00.013Z

A little over a year has gone by since the untimely passing of Broadcast singer and writer Trish Keenan. Browsing in a bookshop the other day, I noticed a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, which had exerted a great influence on her approach to lyric writing, and to making music in general. Never one to disguise the source of her inspirations, she wrote a song called Tender Buttons, and Broadcast’s fourth LP took its title from it. I was interested to read Stein’s work (which can loosely be described as a prose poem) and trace some of the ways in which its style and its ideas about associative, semi-automatic writing, sound and sense translated into the Tender Buttons (and Witch Cults of the Radio Age) songs. And so I began to beat a trail through its knotty, meandering text – as you can too (it’s over here at Project Gutenberg).

Gertrude and Alice in Paris

Stein wrote Tender Buttons in 1912 whilst she was on holiday in Spain with her lifelong partner Alice B Toklas, whom she had met five years earlier, and with whom she lived in Paris. It’s a work which deliberately dismantles the structure and sense of language, and which has no readily definable sense of progression or cumulative meaning. It incorporates a strong sense of serious playfulness – wordplay and the delight in toppling and tumbling the blocs of language. There is certainly no story here, nor any comprehensible depiction of reality as it’s generally perceived. Stein’s work is of its nature hermetic. It expresses the specificity of a unique individual consciousness (all individual consciousnesses being unique) with all its private accumulation of experience, opinion, and self-regard, revised and edited in memory. With no attempt at explanation, clarification or contextualisation, this is an internalised self-portrait, viewing the world seen from a particular perspective and further refracted through personal linguistic association. Such unapologetic and unedited hermeticism ultimately leads to a cul de sac, to isolation and artistic solitude, and is not a form which is worthy of pursuing beyond the occasional experiment. The personal insights which the techniques of semi-automatic writing and unconscious word association provide have to be shaped and recast, or placed in a more universal context in order to communicate with other people with any degree of clarity. Trish seems to reflect upon the danger of becoming isolated in a private world of hermetic meaning in the line ‘in autosuggested pathways you are caught’ from the Tender Buttons song I Found the F.

An obvious comparison with the prose style of Tender Buttons would be the stream of consciousness passages in Ulysses (Stein and Joyce knew each other in Paris, although they didn’t exactly get on) which attempt to encompass the mercurial rush of the mind’s associative, semi-conscious buzz and chatter in unpunctuated prose. What structure Tender Buttons has is created by its division into three sections labelled Objects, Food and Rooms. Within these categories, subheadings are collected; a random assortment of objects, some of a surreal and largely notional nature; and a menu of foodstuffs and accompanying words associated with the act of eating (dinner, cooking, cups, breakfast etc.). The Room section has no sub-headings, proceeding in a series of discrete paragraphs, ranging from single sentences to lengthy passages. It is defined by a general sense of domestic interiority and spatial awareness, with words such as corners, table, drawer, chair, floor, roof, door, chair and looking-glass rooting it in a particular sense of place. The sense of a self located in a particular domestic space comes through in various of Trish’s lyrics for Broadcast songs, from the title of their second single, Living Room, to the lines ‘interpret the rooms’ from Tears in the Typing Pool’, and ‘in today’s room with today’s view’ from ‘The Be Colony’. It is also present in Trish’s story Life of a Dummy, in which the interior voice of Marie says ‘my room caverns me. I hear the corners of it’.

Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Picasso

The fractured nature of Stein’s prose, its shattered syntax, reflects her attempt to pay attention to and bring to bear all of her senses in recording her impressions and thought processes, and to continuously shift the angle of her perception. She was an enthusiastic patron and collector of modern art, and an early champion of Picasso and Braque when their work was still receiving general condemnation. She later affirmed in her 1938 book on Picasso that Tender Buttons was an attempt to create a literary equivalent to the prismatic effects of cubist art. Commenting that it was her ‘first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense and eliminating rhythm’, she seemed to view it as both a visual work, with the look of the words on the page being a part of the whole, and a semi-musical one, in which the words come to life when read out, aloud or in the head. There is a rhythm in it, too, with lines varying in length, and commas and other punctuation sporadically if unconventionally used. But it does avoid the traditional metrical cadences of poetry or incantatory prose. It possesses a more elastic rhythm, the shifting, rolling, asymmetrically accented beats of free jazz – Rashied Ali rather than Elvin Jones.

Its method of following associational lines of thought has led to the idea that Tender Buttons is a piece of automatic writing, a direct outpouring from the unconscious with little mediation on the part of the conscious mind. Stein had shown an early interest in experimental psychology, and studied the subject from 1893-7 at Radcliffe College (an educational college for women formally connected with Harvard) under the tutelage of the renowned and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James. She took part in some experiments into what became known as Normal Motor Automatism. This phenomenon was observed when the subject’s attention was divided between two activities, both requiring intelligent engagement – say writing and conversing. One or other would exhibit a form of automatism in which the normal structures and controls of consciousness would break down and a ‘second personality’ would appear to manifest itself. These experiments (and Stein’s co-authored paper about them) later formed the basis of an argument put forward by the psychologist BF Skinner in a 1934 article accusatorily entitled ‘Has Gertrude Stein A Secret?’ Skinner was a behaviourist with the view that human beings were programmable through the scientific application of a series of positive and negative reinforcements. Such techniques could be used by a rational and benevolent technocratic elite comprised of the likes of Skinner to shape society. He cast his ideas in fictional form in the utopia Walden Two, where they lead to a paradise of human happiness. Such dreams immediately dissipate when exposed to the air of the real world, of course. Given his belief that the mind was a mechanism open to moulding and manipulation, it suited him to suggest that Tender Buttons was a piece of automatic writing, akin to what Stein had produced in the Normal Motor Automatism experiments. She denied that this was the case. The abandonment of grammatical form and meaning and the seemingly random leaps of loosely associational sense may have been akin to the products of automatic writing. But this was a piece produced under conditions of intense concentration rather than deliberate distraction or dissociation. This concentration extended to the act of writing itself, the physical production of words on paper. The appearance of these words on the page suggested further variations or connections, so that the piece becomes as much about language itself and its translation into written form as it is about the expression of a particular mental state, conscious or unconscious, as it passes through a series of instants.

Whilst acknowledging that she made extensive use of automatic writing (‘that’s where most all of my lyrics come from’, she said in a September 2005 Wire Jukebox interview) and other associative techniques such as cut ups in the development of song lyrics, Trish was also wary of ceding the creative process to unconscious forces. Talking about the role of improvisation and chance in the making of the Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP, she suggested that ‘because we had a loose concept and a title first, we explored a place once removed from the notion of the automatic – more like improvisation with restraints’. She pointed to one method of writing in an automatic style within particular controlling and guiding parameters in the Wire Jukebox interview. ‘You get a list of adjectives’, she said, ‘a list of nouns, and a list of verbs. You choose a meter and a rhyme scheme and you have to have a few internal rhymes in four to six verses…once you get the structure of sentences into your mind, your automatic writing improves – that just keeps it in check, short lines’.

She was interested in the dissociative effects of automatic writing, the sense that it brought forth a ‘second personality’ as Stein put it. ‘Suddenly you’re not yourself’, she enthused in a Wire interview from October 2009, ‘as though you’ve created another you’. This pleasure in discovering new aspects of your personality and need to create alternate identities to inhabit and from which to create was a major theme in her writing, and was reflected in the changing nature of her stage persona. Different forms of ‘I’ turn up in her songs. The nature of personal identity, the sense of self, is also central to her story Life of a Dummy, which was published in the literary and arts paper The High Horse in the mid-noughties. This is an absurdist tale set in Madame Tussauds, its genesis in a piece of reportage about he discovery of the missing heads of the Beatles’ waxwork dummies. It is structured as a fragmented, three-layered narrative, each layer written in contrasting style. It’s a modernist form which embraces multiple perspectives and modes of writing, drawing from Stein’s early innovations. In one strand, presented as if it were a transcript of a TV show, complete with audience laughter, the Beatles dummies go through their wisecracking routines in Hard Days Night fashion. Paul becomes increasingly reflective and distant from the others, however, retreating into himself until he can no longer be heard by the others – the sensitive Beatle. Another layer records, in diary form, the observations of a museum worker, who notes the political wrangling and personal manoeuvring of various showbiz (rather than showroom) dummies (principally Diana Dors, Humphrey Bogart and Tom Jones) as they jockey for favoured positions in the display. The final layer is the interior monologue of that same worker, Marie Michaels, a ‘mid 30s sizzler from the Midlands’ according to the newspaper which George reads. The same paper reveals that she had stolen Paul’s head and communed with it in her bedroom. Marie’s inner thoughts reflect on the idea of an autonomous self, one which in this case has become interpenetrated with that of Paul McCartney, and by extension with the fantasy figures of popular culture in general. Just as Paul grows silent, heard only in Marie’s head, so she begins to see herself as reflected in his writing and persona. ‘If only we had a universe of our own’, she muses. ‘Separate and not found-out’. She comes to realise that the version of Paul which she has taken ownership of is in fact hollow (‘all that space inside you won’t fill up’) and that it is she who inhabits him, who creates her own self (‘I collect my own past Paul. I am my own first person’). Still she cannot help but see part of herself through his elevated, romantic perspective, however, and wishes that he would ‘write me alive into a song one day’.

Mirrored selves

This preoccupation with creating new identities, partly constructed from the fragments of a pop cultural or art historical past, or of maintaining the integrity of the self, is a recurrent one. It’s a way of breaking from the limitations of background, class, cultural or familial expectations. Finding freedom through ceasing to be yourself, or rather transforming into new selves – allowing yourself to be subject to change. The song Corporeal, from the Tender Buttons LP, revisits the dummy theme in the lines ‘we are mankind, we are mannikin’, with further reference to ‘the strings of my autonomy’. In Arc of a Journey, the question is asked ‘can I see more than what I’m programmed to be?’. The repeated refrain of Subject to the Ladder may even be an allusion to the spiralling staircases of our DNA. Mirrored selves and fractured identities abound (with mirrors making regular appearances in Trish’s lyrics). The notion of a refracted and distanced perspective on the self, as if viewed by another, separate persona, is suggested by the lines ‘a prism is only walls’, and ‘I am iris and the lens’ from I Found the F, and in Colour Me In from the Ha Ha Sound LP, with its uncertain attempt at self-reassurance, ‘I must be real because somehow I feel that I’m just the idea’.

Stein’s flow of words in Tender Buttons is drawn into a euphonious whole through the use of alliteration, assonance, variation and repetition, creating a linguistic structure of sound which bears its own justification – bypassing the need for direct, rational meaning. Perhaps this was the kind of thing Trish had in mind when she wrote of ‘model euphonic paradigms’ in The Black Cat, a song from the Tender Buttons LP which alluded to the destabilizing logic of nonsense in the work of another writer – Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. You can hear the assonance in a phrase such as ‘a single mirror, a manikin’, with its progression of pinched ‘i’ vowel sounds; or in the violent k sounds of ‘a jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king’; or in the kaleidoscopically shifting vowel sounds of ‘out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question’. Such connectivity through assonance is found in the Broadcast song The Be Colony from the Witch Cults LP, with the short a’s and sibilant ss’s of the line ‘asses, ashes and classic glasses’, repeated with slight variation, the word ‘nurses’ replacing ‘asses’. Sometimes simple and playful rhymes break through, such as ‘pick a ticket, pike it’, or the childlike ‘a sister is not a mister’. There are lots of words beginning with a hard c sound, which makes an emphatic, percussive impact, like the sound of a crisply struck cymbal. These are strung together into phrases such as ‘cold coffee with a corn’, ‘a cape is a cover’, ‘a climate, a single climate’, ‘careful and curved’ and ‘a can containing a curtain’. Trish drew on the sound qualities of c words in her lyrics for Tender Buttons, which provide their own inbuilt staccato rhythms and inflections. She lists these words like beads on a necklace, the repetition of the hard consonant serving to emphasise the variations in the following vowel sounds; ‘the comb, the calm, the colour, the cortex’. Coal, the word which sets the word train into motion, may well have been triggered by lines in Stein’s Tender Buttons. She writes early on in A Piece of Coffee from the Objects section, ‘the clean mixture is white and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether’; and later ‘color is in coal…coal any coal is copper’. Trish also juxtaposes the words coal and colour in the lines ‘the coal, the coal light, the colours, the caress’. The harshly repeated phrase ‘die cut’ at the end of the song sounds likes the commands of a director making a film collage – abruptly ending and juxtaposing (and colouring?) small fragments of image and sound. Burroughs and Gysin style cut ups were another compositional technique which Trish used. She said of the song Libra, the Mirror’s Minor Self in an interview in The Wire at the time of the release of the Witch Cults LP that ‘the words were a cut up of my horoscope’. The science fictin song Arc of a Journey from the Tender Buttons makes reference to writing techniques which sidestep conscious control: ‘automatic oracles’ which give access to ‘verbal hemispheres’ and ‘a mnemonic game’ which expresses ‘the axis of feeling’.

The chiselling of the hard c sounds in Tender Buttons is alleviated by a verse in which the softer f consonant dominates (it’s a song which is full of f and c words which don’t have to be dipped out on the radio). ‘The fen, the fine, the fin, the defend, the fawn’ is a word list which offers a shifting, subtly morphing series of word sound rooted around the ground of the f. The choice of the f seems to follow on from Stein’s line ‘a window has another spelling, it has ‘f’ all together’. Trish also wrote the song I Found the F on the Tender Buttons LP, which opens with the line ‘I found the fragrance separate from the flower’. The balance of soft and hard consonant sounds reflects the general contrast offered throughout of hard and soft words; a contrast contained in the very title Tender Buttons. Tender here can imply either physical or emotional softness. It’s a word which appears in various contexts throughout the poem. This contrasting of soft and hard runs through all three sections, including phrases such as ‘an elastic tumbler’, ‘all the handsome cheese which is stone’ and a can containing a curtain’. The title A Piece of Coffee in the Objects section treats a liquid as if it were solid and divisible. Masculine and feminine qualities can also be ascribed to these hard and soft contrasts, as Stein seems to suggest in the sentence near the beginning ‘callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men’. The malleable meaning and grammar of Tender Buttons could thereby be seen as attempting a feminisation of language and of writing. Tenderising it and rendering it more pliable, the better to put it new uses, shaping it into new forms. This would seem to tie in with comments which Trish made in the Broadcast feature in the October 2009 issue of The Wire (number 308). She observed that ‘what excites me now is the female voice playing games with words and vocal sound while managing to anchor deeper philosophical concerns…they seem to gesture towards the absurd and playful at the same time as having a kind of fearless form experimentation’.

This malleability can also be found in the questioning tone which frequently emerges, and which further denies the rigidity of assertion, statement and absolute certainty. Common suppositions are abandoned as linguistic meaning and structure is uprooted. There are repetitive lists of what is? and why is? clauses: ‘Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting’ and ‘why is there no necessary dull stable, why is there a single piece of any colour, why is there that that sensible silence’. We are also asked to entertain certain notions: ‘suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is’ (pigeons are a recurring subject of the poem), or ‘suppose an eyes’. Once the questions start, they stream out in an unending, conjoined ribbon. Like children newly learning about the world by answering every statement with a ‘but why?’

Sense and supposition is also destabilised through the odd juxtaposition of jarring or seemingly incompatible nouns, verbs and adjectives, each torn from accustomed meaning in its odd and unexpected company, and new and startling associations created as a result. ‘The difference is spreading’, as Stein puts it. ‘Glazed glitter’ sounds like the kind of word collision which Mark E Smith might come up with (indeed, it’s close to Glitter Freeze, the title of his song on the Gorillaz LP Plastic Beach). We are also confronted with ‘a method of a cloak’, ‘peeled pencil, choke’,and ‘a substance in a cushion’. Nouns are made strange by adjectives which nudge them form their usual orbits: ‘the serene length’, ‘the sudden spoon’ and the ‘cunning shawl’. This seems to allow them to take on a life and character of their own, beyond mere functionality. There are also definite but strange and nonsensical statements and assertions along the lines of ‘rhubarb is susan’, ‘no eyeglasses are rotten’, ‘an elegant use of foliage’ (which could make a kind of sense in certain horticultural contexts, I suppose), ‘the alteration of pigeons’ (vivisection or genetic manipulation?) and ‘a blind agitation is manly and uttermost’. The nineteenth century French writer Comte de Lautreamont wrote of something being as ‘beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’, a statement taken up by Andre Breton as a credo of surrealist intent. It could equally be applied to Stein’s linguistic grafting. This idea, adopted by the Surrealists, of disrupting habitual ways of seeing or thinking, and of constructing new patterns of perception and consciousness also corresponds to Trish’s expressed views of psychedelia as a way of reaching altered states through artistic rather than chemical experience. She talked, in an interview in The Wire in October 2009, of ‘the idea of psychedelia as a door through to another way of thinking about sound and song. Not a world only reachable by hallucinogens, but obtainable by questioning what we think is real and right, by challenging the conventions of form and temper’.

Sometimes Stein seems to be collecting words and assembling them together according to some hidden logical system. Allowing associations to emerge from words and the ideas which they embody, she makes of her mind a subconscious cabinet of curiosities. Like one of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages of seemingly unrelated objects contained within a box, and therefore inviting us to make connections, the positioning of these words next to each other on the page imply some secret correspondence. The idea of such an assemblage is made explicit in the final Rooms section, in which Stein writes ‘there was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made’. Trish uses this in her Tender Buttons, beginning the verse which steers from c to f with the preface ‘the collector’ before listing her gathered words. The covers of the single America’s Boy and of the Tender Buttons LP depict her placing words on a transparent board, the curator and arranger of her own personal language.

She also makes much use of colour, another engagement of sensory perception, prompting visual associational triggers. She writes lines such as ‘any little green is ordinary, ‘a corn yellow and green mass is a gem’, ‘why is a pale white not paler than blue’, and ‘a plain hill, one is not that which is not white and red and green’, the latter suggesting some kind of Fauvist landscape. Trish also used colour in her lyrics. This is captured visually on Julian House’s cover for the Future Crayon compilation, with its prismatic raindrops on a grey background, one filled with a neatly arrayed spectrum of coloured pencils. This links in directly to the song Colour Me In from the Ha Ha Sound album, in which the opening line, ‘I am grey, still on the page, oh colour me in’, is followed by the paintbox being opened to shade the hills green, the sky blue and the heart red. Stein’s ‘little green’ is also extracted and inserted into the non-c verse of the song Tender Buttons (‘the collector, the green, the fine…’).

Stein also used repetition in an insistent way, underlining the materiality of certain objects or the stability of certain ideas or concepts, or revising and refining others. So we read of ‘a dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey’, as if she’s defining its precise nature as her perception of it grows clearer. She tells us ‘book was there, it was there. Book was there’, as if we might doubt her, and that ‘a steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason’. Some favourite words are scattered throughout, such as tender, china, cheese and clouds (clouds also being a favourite of Trish’s, which turns up in several Broadcast songs, Ominous Clouds being the most obvious). Sometimes words seem to get stuck, as if Stein has become fixated upon them, hypnotized by some quality they possess. They are caught in a stuttering loop which anticipates the repetitions of sampling. The cogged mechanisms of the mind temporarily become locked in their turning ratchets, juddering back and forth before freeing themselves once more. So, we get ‘this which is so not winsome (that ‘so’ making it sound uncannily modern) and not widened and really not so dipped as dainty and really dainty, very dainty, ordinarily, dainty, a dainty, not in that dainty and dainty’; ‘little sales of leather and such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful’’ and ‘aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers’. You can imagine that last sentence as a sampled and savagely spliced and edited vocal playing over some digitally created rhythm.

The use of words and their placement alongside each other in accordance with their sound and scansion as much as with any sense they might make immediately suggests music, and pop and rock lyrics in particular. There are references and allusions to music throughout Tender Buttons. The phrase ‘dance a clean dream’ could very well sum up the entire work, and I can certainly imagine it as a line in a Broadcast song’. Stein also writes ‘this is a sound and obligingness more obligingness leads to a harmony in hesitation’, and ‘so the tune which is there has a little piece to play’, and also ‘a cup is readily shaded, it has in between no sense that is to say music, memory, musical memory’. The latter seems to imply that music and memory don’t conform to conventional logic or sense. Elsewhere she adds ‘harmony is so essential’ and that ‘no song is sad’. Whether the latter means that the very act of singing is in itself joyous, or that to have no song is a sad thing is ambiguous. Then again, all sense is provisional and open to negotiation in the poem. Stein herself became involved in setting words to music, writing opera libretti, and enjoying a particularly fruitful artistic partnership with the American composer Virgil Thomson. Her libretto for his 1933 opera Four Saints in Three Acts follows the mixing and realigning of language of Tender Buttons, although in a slightly less absolute and uncompromising style.

By the end of the final section of Tender Buttons, the effort of constantly shifting perceptual points of view and avoiding established or reflex patterns of language and meaning begins to show signs of wearing down. Perhaps this is deliberate. The Room focuses on the domestic space, and a sense of being at home turns the mind towards the comforting and the familiar. The abstraction of the previous sections begins to form into blurry, impressionistic word pictures, language beginning once more to coalesce into more conventional sense. We get the vague picture of actual places, and atmospheres specific to a particular time. Stein details a scene with ‘a bridge a very small bridge in a location and thunder, any thunder’, which could be a landscape on the wall or in the mind. She also observes that ‘this cloud does change with the movements of the moon and the narrow the quite narrow suggestion of the building’. We get the impression of someone in a room in a house using her imagination and her linguistic powers to expand her consciousness beyond its confines. So, from the chairs and the doors and the table linen and the spoons, and all the other domestic objects and interior architecture which is mentioned, we get to paragraphs which imagine landscapes, and different climates (‘climate, climate is not southern, a little glass, a bright winter’). Near the end, the mind soars into the night sky, questioning and wondering: ‘star-light, what is star-light, star-light is a little light that is not always mentioned with the sun, it is mentioned with the moon and the sun, it is mixed up with the rest of time’. This expansion of the mind from the domestic and particular to embrace the cosmos is echoed in Broadcasts’ song Arc of a Journey, in which Trish sings of the ‘constellation of Orion, a picture with a past, a future so vast’.

Trish’s writing was always highly evocative, drawing on a variety of influences, Stein’s included, but always retaining a distinct identity of its own. It sparked off rich imagistic associations and spun profoundly playful wordgames. I’m sure she would have gone on to write and publish more poetry and prose alongside her songwriting had she been granted more time. But we are left with what we have, and those are riches enough.

Kosmische Musik, English Apocalypses and Cosmic Cowboys

2012-01-26T00:26:00.010Z

What a wonderful selection of LPs turned up at the Oxfam music shop in Exeter today (and a very big thankyou to the generous donor). There were some prime examples of Kosmische or Krautrock music from the late 60s and 70s, including the LP with the track which gave rise to the genre’s dubious English label. This is Mama Duul Und Ihre Sauerkrautband Spielt Auf from the Amon Duul album Pyschedelic Underground. Amon Duul was in the fact the name of a Munich commune with radical artistic and political aims. Its music tended to reflect the non-hierarchical ideology of the commune, with large groups of people gathering to indulge in endless freeform guitar, percussion and chanting sessions. One of these was recorded in 1968, and resulted in the Psychedelic Underground album, as well as several subsequent releases, including the double LP Disaster/Luud Noma, released on the BASF label in 1972. Those who favoured a more focussed and disciplined approach to music (and, it’s probably fair to say, had more musical talent and imagination) split off, but held on to the Amon Duul name. They became Amon Duul II and released some of the classics of the Kosmische genre at the heavier, guitar-based end of the spectrum. The only record of their’s which we’ve got in this batch is Made in Germany (the single LP version), however, a 1975 attempt at a more poppy direction which is generally considered to be a bit of a misfire, but might be worth a listen nevertheless. The Amon Duul commune reflected the darkening tenor and shift towards violence of the counterculture in Germany, playing host at various times to members of the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, as singer Renate Knaup recalled during the excellent BBC4 documentary on Krautrock.

Faust were another German band whose music arose from communal living conditions, although their ensconcement in a house-cum-studio converted from an old school in the rural setting of Wumme was always directed towards artistic rather than political ends. Known for their pounding rhythms, minimalist approach to harmony and use of non-musical sound from radio static to heavy industrial machinery, they mixed this experimental approach with the odd snatch of tuneful psych pop. They also had a strong graphic sense, and their first LP was released on clear vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve, with the band’s name placed alongside the black outline of an x-ray of a human hand, lyrics printed in red unobtrusively running beneath that. We haven’t got that one, but we do have The Faust Tapes, with its equally eyecatching Bridget Riley op-art cover, and its cut-up and collaging structure, juxtaposing fragments of song with percussion, manipulated tape sounds, noise and instrumental improvisation. The Faust Tapes originally cost 49p in the shops. Outside the Dream Syndicate, a collaboration between Faust (well, most of them anyway) and Tony Conrad was a little more expensive at £1.49. It offered two sides of heavy drone, pounding percussion overlaid by the single held-tones of Conrad’s abrasively bowed violin. Conrad was a member of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate in New York, and as such was a pioneer of minimalist music, although relations with Young have subsequently deteriorated over issues of ownership of recordings made at the time. His face glares in monochromatic close-up from the sleeve of the LP, a rather more intense, less friendly variant on the cover of the Terry Riley LP A Rainbow in Curved Air, in which his bonce rises above the landscape like a benevolent sun. Riley appears in a duet with John Cale (who played alongside Conrad with Young), on the LP Church of Anthrax, which we’ve also got in, another album of sidelong drones, with rhythmic propulsion here given by Riley’s avant barroom piano.

The electronic end of Kosmische music is provided by Kraftwerk, with their second LP, its cover boasting the simple but striking graphic image of a green bollard. Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider had been left on their own at this stage, original member Klaus Dinger having left to form Neu with Michael Rother, who had also played with Kraftwerk in live performances. The music is still feeling its way towards the cool electronic modernism with which they would become synonymous, and meandering flutes, guitars and violins and experimental tape manipulations still play a significant part here. However, the extended Kling-Klang is a pointer towards things to come, and also lent its name to the studio into which Schneider and Hutter would disappear for lengthy stretches of time to perfect their perfectly formed pieces of man-machine music. Like all of their first three records, this has never received an official release, presumably failing to meet their exacting standards of painstaking perfectionism, so this is a rare opportunity to get an original copy. If Kraftwerk grew into the electronic classicists of German music, then Klaus Schulze, as an early member of Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream and subsequently as a prolific solo artist, represented its Romantic aspect. We have his third LP, Blackdance, with its somewhat corny cod-Dali cover. In fact, this contains as much acoustic guitar picking and percussion as it does synthesisers. Julian Cope included it in his top 50 in his book surveying German music of the 60s and 70s, Krautrocksampler, confessing that ‘as a 17 year old, this record was my seduction LP, the only one I had…it’s easy to spend an entire evening just flipping Black Dance back and starting again’.

Florian Fricke, the main creative force behind Popul Vuh, largely put aside synthesisers from an early stage. His music blends improvisation and composition, combining piano, electronic guitar with chamber music arrangements often incorporating sacred vocal sounds. His soundtrack for the 1979 Werner Herzog film Nosferatu includes the lengthy piece Brothers of Darkness, Sons of Light (Bruder des Schattens – Sohne des Lichts), which begins with ominous, subterraenean vocal chants shadowed by mournful oboe and punctuated with dripping, splashing cymbals, before transforming into a circling piano and guitar figure which takes us out into the sun, haloed with a burred haze of sitar and tamboura. Gorgeous sacred music, slowly ascending towards transcendent peaks, and a perfect accompaniement to the Caspar David Friedrich inspired landscapes of Herzog’s film. This one’s made it onto the Oxfam online shop (through the auspices of my trusty compadre Kevin) and you can find it here.

From the same era in England we have a few albums by Van Der Graaf Generator. The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other displays the light and dark side of Peter Hammill’s writing, with the beautiful, plaintively hope-filled ballad Refugees set between the alternate apocalypses, future and historical, of Darkness, White Hammer and After the Flood (one to compare with Peter Gabriel’s Here Comes the Flood). H to He Who Am the Only One is a title which indicates Hammill’s interest in science fiction, religion and mythology, and the album is shot through with these themes, from the monsters of the deep in Killer to the fabular cast of The Emperor in His War Room and the metaphysical cosmic terror of Pioneers Over C. There’s still room for another of his extended, heartfelt ballads, of the sort which found a place in his solo LPs, with House With No Door. Hugh Banton and Dave Jackson’s unison organ and saxophone lines create a uniquely dense and powerful sound, and guest Robert Fripp adds characteristically jagged and surprising guitar lines here and there. A slightly later record from the mid-70s is Still Life, followed up on the themes of the earlier LPs, with Pilgrims a companion of sorts to Refugees, and Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End (with its nod to Arthur C Clarke’s classic novel) continuing Hammill’s use of SF to meditate on transcendence and immortality.

Heading over the pond, we’ve got early Byrds escapee Gene Clark’s lost and rediscovered mid-70s classic of cosmic country pop No Other. Strength of Strings and Lady of the North are soaring songs with the full glimmer of orchestrated and chorally arranged production surrounding Clark’s gently cracked croon. Take a pedal steel glide above the clouds. The Grateful Dead are present in the form of the slightly underwhelming form of Bear’s Choice, Bear being their resident chemist and wayward genius Augustus Owsley Stanley III. He chooses to focus on the Dead’s R&B side, with Pigpen to the fore – always the least interesting aspect of the band to my ears. I expect you had to be there. There’s some pleasing, low key acoustic numbers on the first side, however. The first two solo LPs from Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia, Ace and Garcia, are here. Ace is a Dead album in all but name, with the various members playing throughout. Garcia’s sees him trying out all the instrumentation, with only drummer Billy Kreutzmann on hand to help out, and essaying a little studio experimentation and electronic tape music as well. These LPs contained many of the songs which would remain concert favourites for years to come: Weir’s Playing in the Band, Cassidy, One More Saturday Night and Looks Like Rain, and Garcia and co-writer Robert Hunter’s Deal, Bird Song, Sugaree and Loser. For a bit of Tex-Mex psych, there’s a couple of LPs by The Sir Douglas Quintet, whose whimsically British sounding name did little to disguise the fact that his was a Hispanic and Texan band through and through.

There are a few records by Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Beefheart’s Clear Spot sees the good Captain aiming for a degree of commerciality, with a slicker production and more direct songs. The results lack the poetry and colour of other records, and Beefheart seems preoccupied with more carnal and earthy matters, neglecting his visionary side. Fortunately, this returns in the later LP Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), the bracketed title track of which memorably creates a crooked rhythm from the juddering swish of windscreen wipers. Floppy Boot Stomp and When I See Mommy I Feel Like A Mummy are irresistibly childlike and infectious. The cover features one of Beefheart’s paintings which would come to occupy his creative talents (as plain old Don van Vliet) in the place of his music (and there are further sketches on the insert lyric sheet). Zappa is present in the form of that old perennial Hot Rays, with Frank sporting a bowler which the pidgeons seem to have got to on the inside cover, striding past the gates of Buckingham Palace. His more scabrous and unappealing side is revealed on the ‘comedy’ of the new Mothers Fillmore East June 1970 album (other portions of which, featuring John and Yoko, turned up on their Some Time in New York City LP), and the 1977 Zoot Allures, which at least has the lyrical, filigreed guitar instrumental interlude Black Napkins.

Finally, we have the third and final of Throbbing Gristle’s original Annual Reports, 1978’s DOA, which mixes their usual, rather desperate ‘industrial’ attempts at being as shocking as they possibly can (the usual mix of fascism, disease, child murder and disfigurement) with more interesting experiments with found sound, tape manipulation and the poppy electronica of the Abba tribute (sort of) AB/7A. If this included the repellent porn calendar insert included with the initial pressing, it would seemingly be worth huge amounts of money. Thankfully it doesn’t. Coming almost up to date, we also have a copy of Boards of Canada’s second LP from 2001, Geogaddi, it’s artificially time encrusted electronica spread across five sides of vinyl, the sixth being inscribed with the figures of a man, woman and child resembling the etchings on the gold plate attached to the side of the Voyager space probe. All this and more should be in the shop in the next few days, so if you’re in the area, pop in and have a look.

Indo-Jazz Fusions, The Travels of Travis and the Doctor's Forgotten Adventures

2012-01-22T12:33:00.014Z

Some good records have been donated to the Oxfam Music Shop in Exeter of late, and have made their way onto the online shop. There’s a copy of the 1976 LP Doctor Who and the Pescatons, a spoken word record in which the then current Doctor, Tom Baker, narrates a story written by Victor Pemberton. He’s certainly come up with a great monster name, evoking images of large fishy beings exuding a powerful odour. The scaly critter with large, luminous green saucer eyes rising from the waters of the Thames on the cover would tend to confirm this association. Baker is joined by the late great Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane, and Bill Mitchell as Zor, a simple, monosyllabic monster monicker which suggests subtle intelligence is not a salient feature of this particular alien menace. The record was engineered by Robert Parker and Brian Hodgson of the Radiophonic Workshop, who provide incidental sounds and atmospheres. The music was composed and played by Kenny Clayton, apart from Ron Grainer's (and Delia Derbyshire's) legendary theme music, of course.

More spoken word tales come in the strange form of a 1959 half-speed 16 rpm LP (presumably allowing more running time) on Top Rank/Vanguard in which Nelson Olmstead reads some of Edgar Allan's Poe's classic horror stories and gothic poetry. A good cover, in which the swooping, sharp-fanged bat seems to oddly echo Edgar’s hair and the rounded collar of his sober jacket. Many of Poe’s key works are sampled here, with a fair few having formed the basis of Roger Corman’s cycle of adaptations in the 60s; namely The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat and The Strange Case of M.Valdemar (all featuring in whole or part in the anthology film Tales of Terror), The Raven (well, yes, a very loose adaptation, played for laughs) and, perhaps best of all, Ligeia, filmed as The Tomb of Ligeia.

There are a couple of interesting East West fusion records from the 60s. Ravi Shankar was the pioneer and inspiration, of course, and we have his 1962 LP Improvisations in which he plays variations on his evocative and touching theme from Satyajit Ray’s 1955 film Pather Panchali, the first of the trilogy about the progress of the Bengali village boy Apu. He’s joined by West Coast jazz flautist Bud Shank on this one, who also takes part in the full on fusion of Fire-Night, which also features Dennis Budimir on guitar, bassist Gary Peacock and Louis Hayes on drums. Peacock was in the early days of his musical career here, which would see him playing with Albert Ayler on the free jazz classic Spiritual Unity, form a musical partnership with Paul Bley, make a couple of beautiful duet albums with Oregon guitarist Ralph Towner and, from the 80s onwards, settle down into the long-term renown of Keith Jarrett’s Standards trio, where he somehow manages to ignore the pianist’s incessant moaning and wheedling. Ravi engages in a different sort of fusion on Karnataki, blending Northern Hindustani classical music with the Southern Caranatic style.

We also have a copy (the second one which has come our way of late) of a more British take on Indo-jazz fusions: not John Mayer and Joe Harriott’s well-known recordings, but a record with the dubious title Curried Jazz made by a temporary grouping known as the Indo-Jazz Ensemble. This features the great British (well, Canadian, but he’s been based in Britain since the 50s) trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, who celebrated his 82nd birthday last week, and is happily still in fine form. The group also features Ray Swinfield on flute, an Australian musician who moved to England in the 60s. Swinfield was a regular member of Johnny Dankworth’s band and a prominent figure on the 60s British jazz scene. He was also a tireless session musician, and featured on The Beatles’ Penny Lane. He recorded with Johnny Pearson (who died just last year) on many of his KPM library recordings, and I’m fairly sure he is the flautist bringing a touch of the pastoral to the brave new high-rise world of Mary, Mungo and Midge, which used selections of Pearson’s ‘Mini’ tracks (Mini Walking, Mini Clarinet, Mini Movement etc.). He teamed up with Kenny Wheeler again along with a great group of jazz musicians to provide the soundtrack for the varied adventures of Mr Benn. His contributions are particularly effective in the balloon race episode, with the lovely theme accompanying Mr Benn and his cohort’s dreamy drift through the clouds. The music which propels chase scenes or conveys bustling activity is a particularly tricksy and fastpaced piece of lightning bebop, expertly played in faultless ensemble. There’s a bit of breathy flute exotica over a tom-tom rhythm in The Hunter episode, and even a blast of raucous, atonal free jazz chords in the Spaceman story. ‘Mr Benn and the spaceman ran back to the spaceship, the noise was so terrible’, Ray Brooks observes in his narration, perhaps a reflection of common percepetions about the wilder shores of freeform jazz improvisation in the 60s and early 70s. This is definitely music worthy of the attention of Mr Trunk for a potential future release. Swinfield released one LP under his own name in 1968, One For Ray, which featured compositional input from Barbara Moore, she of the Barbara Moore Singers, who also produced some of the most distinctive library sounds of the era. The solarized and dazzlingly colour-drenched photographic cover is unmistakeably of its time.

We have the soundtrack LP to Lindsay Anderson’s sprawling, surreal 1973 film O Lucky Man!, which follows the picaresque misadventures of Malcolm McDowell’s Travis through the various levels of society and murky professional masonries in the England of the time. Alan Price’s band turn up at various intervals (with Helen Mirren in tow) and look on with distanced amusement, and the songs provide a jaundiced commentary on the proceedings in a traditional theatrical manner. Travis, who Anderson would take into one final film in 1979, Britannia Hospital, first appeared in If…, full of anger and firy, romantic rebellion. We have the LP Missa Luba, recorded by the Congolese vocal group Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, which contains the Sanctus which Travis repeatedly plays as he waits to make his move. It even turns up on the jukebox (probably only the jukebox in his head) to console him after he’s received a resounding slap from Christine Noonan’s dark-haired roadside café siren.

The Modern Jazz Quartet’s The Sherriff is notable for its fantastic cover, designed by Polish artist Stanislaw Zagorski. Zagorski also designed many Polish film posters in an era when Eastern European poster design was at a real artistic peak. These posters often avoided direct representation of the film’s content, aiming instead for a telling image or piece of surrealist association which would evoke the spirit of the picture. Skulls often seemed to feature, particularly when it came to Hitchcock movies. There’s a great book of Polish film posters in Exeter library for any in this neck of the woods who wish to explore further. Zagorski also designed the cover for the Velvet Underground’s Loaded LP, the one with the roseate clouds floating up from the subway entrance. The music of The Sheriff includes some Brazilian tunes, de rigeur for the time (1963), although the Quartet, as befits their restrained classicism, steers away from the standard bossa favourites and opts instead for one of the pieces from composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras suite.

When it comes to undiluted strangeness, its impossible to outweird The Residents. The compilation Ralph Before 84: Volume 1 gathers together a variety of material from the anonymous San Franciscans originally released, via their Cryptic Corporation, on their own Ralph Records lable. Matt Groening is a big fan, and The Residents have probably influenced his skewed view of the world's inherent oddness to a great degree. He included them in his All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2010, and they put on a compelling show, strange, theatrical and musically disconcerting. These tracks are taken from the LPs Residue, Duck Stab/Buster and Glen, Subterranean Modern, The Tunes of Two Cities, Fingerprince, Title In Limbo and the imaginary anthropological study Eskimo. It’s a good and wide-ranging general introduction which even includes a James Brown cover, It’s a Man’s Man’s World. Needless to say, it differs significantly from the original, and further covers of easy listening and rock and roll standards I Left My Heart in San Francisco and Jailhouse Rock warp the originals in wonderful ways.

More theatrical musical comes in the form of The Incredible String Band’s U, recording the original psych folk band's touring song and dance show, or 'surreal parable' as they style it. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson are joined by Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechnie, along with dance troupe Stone Monkey, amongst whom is Malcolm leMaistre, a future member of the band. The record was produced by Joe Boyd. Whilst it’s generally accepted that they overreached themselves with this ambitious multi-media project, Williamson's Queen of Love and Invocation are fine songs, the former featuring some lush orchestrations, and they stand up alongside the band's best. Changing Horses was the 1969 follow up to the double album Wee Tam and the Big Huge, which had found them at their creative peak. This is a bit of a comedown, dominated by lengthy, multi-part epics written by Heron and Williamson, neither of which really cohere in the way that A Very Cellular Song had on The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. This was the LP in which Williamson and Heron’s other halves, Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechnie, joined the fray. The cover photo, by Janet Shankman, is perhaps the definitive representation of the Edenic, rainbow-coloured hippie idyll which the likes of the Incredible String Band dreamed of and tried in a muddled way to achieve in the late 60s. Both LPs were produced by Joe Boyd, the architect of the British psych/folk/rock sound of the era, who provided similar services for Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan.

North Carolina singer-songwriter and producer Teresa Trull’s debut LP The Ways A Woman Can Be is an interesting and inspiring record of 1970s feminism. It was released on the Olivia Records label, which was run by women for the benefit of women, giving them a supportive environment free from the usual pressures and prejudices of the music industry. The songs address the issues of the women’s movement at the time, and there is a strong sense both of celebration and of self-questioning. The music is soulful and bluesy, with a hefty brass-based backing band, loudly getting the message across without the usual introspective singer-songwriter quietude. We also have The second LP by Throwing Muses, House Tornado, centring around the formidable songwriting presence of Kristin Hersh, at this time also ably abetted by Tanya Donelly in pre-Belly and Breeders days. They both provide songs, sing in a powerfully declamatory style and play angular, off-kilter guitars, creating a whirlwind of circling, rhythmically offbeat sound. The distinctive paintings and collages on cover and insert were created by the artist Shinro Ohtake. And that’s all for now.

The Secret Garden at the Bike Shed Theatre

2012-01-20T11:42:00.009Z

The Bikeshed Theatre (named after the sizeable bicycle shop beneath which it lies – more of a bike hangar, in fact) in Exeter staged a richly imagined adaptation of The Secret Garden earlier this week. It was performed by the Dorset-based troupe Angel Exit Theatre, and it marks the centenary of the publication of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s well-loved novel, which has steadily grown in reputation over recent decades to achieve recognition as one of the major twentieth century works of children’s literature. I had vague memories of the mid-70s BBC TV adaptation, but was entirely unfamiliar with the book, and thus came to the story largely without any preconceptions; The ideal blank state in which to approach any story.

Burnett’s tale has a harsh underlying lack of sentimentality, centring around two children who are both, at least initially, intensely unlikeable. Mary Lennox grows up in Imperial India, the neglected child of parents who show her little love and leave her lonely and brittlely introverted. When they both die during a cholera outbreak, she is left for alone in the house for a while before being discovered and shipped off to England in the cold company of the fearsomely dragonish Mrs Medlock. She begins life again in a rambling old Yorkshire mansion on the edge of the moors, the home of Mr Craven, a remote uncle whom she has never met before, and who has no interest in making her acquaintance now that she has come to stay. He is merely doing his duty as an Edwardian gentleman in agreeing to look after her. Left largely to her own devices, and wishing to escape from the stultifying atmosphere of the neglected, labyrinthine house, she explores the grounds and becomes fascinated by a walled garden which seems to have no entrance, and whose existence nobody seems willing to acknowledge. A robin leads her to a buried key, and she uncovers a door when she disturbs a sweep of ivy. The wild garden she discovers within becomes her sacred space of imaginative play, and draws her out of the stubbornly inward, arrogant insularity which has led her to be so dismissively rude towards Martha, the maid, and Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener. These two take on the role of surrogate parents, but her closest companion becomes Martha’s son Dickon, a gentle-spirited local nature boy, who has a tamed fox as a familiar. She lets him into her secret world (and was Kate Bush’s song Under the Ivy maybe drawing out the potential underlying symbolism of this scenario, in an Angela Carter fashion?) and together they set about nurturing the garden back into life.

Back in the house, Mary is disturbed by pained wails winding through the night corridors. Conquering her fear, and dismissing Martha’s denials, she traces their source to a room in which a sickly boy is confined to his bed. He is Colin, the son of Mr Craven, who is apparently afflicted with a deformity of the spine, and believes that he is withering towards an early death. He is a pitiable creature, and no-one pities him more than himself. Sealed in his bedroom universe, he gleans all that he knows of the world from his books. Mary joins him in his bookish explorations, and in turn tries to coax him out into her secret world. She and Dickon entice him with tales of the garden, and when they finally manage to trundle him out to it in a wheelbarrow, he is entranced by the enclosed, magical world. As time and the seasons progress, he begins to regain some of his strength, filled with new vigour as the garden springs into life, as if, under careful tending, he has himself become a part of its perennial growth and renewal. It had been a place beloved of his mother, who had grown roses there. But she had fallen from a favourite perch in a bower and died from resulting complications. The garden subsequently became a dark space, associated with death as well as with a life whose absence was still rawly felt. It was closed off and declared a no-place, erased from the garden’s map; painful memories sealed and buried. Ben Weatherstaff, the archetypally surly, no-nonsense Yorkshire gardener (akin to Geoffrey Smith, a regular on BBC radio 4’s Gardener’s Question Time, which my parents regularly tuned in to) had honoured her last requests and returned to surreptitiously prune the bushes and keep it alive in the form in which he had helped her to create it. But the creeping spread of his rheumatism eventually made of the wall an unscaleable barrier, and the interior grew wild and untamed, more briar than bloom.

Mr Craven spends much of the story travelling hard across the world, attempting to diminish the continuing pain at the death of his wife through physical distance. But as Colin’s health improves and the garden blossoms, he begins to hear an insistent voice urging him to return home. When he does, he finds the children in the garden, and Colin now able to walk again. His spirit is also transformed by the sight of the garden, his wife’s space which is once more full of the life she sowed in it (her son included), and the crippling melancholia which has for so long weighed heavily upon him begins to lift.

It was immediately clear (through the haze) upon entering the small, vaulted cellar auditorium of the Bike Shed Theatre that Angel Exit intended to engage all the spectator’s senses. The Indian environment in which the story starts was conjured with tamboura drones and billowing clouds of incense smoke. Already, outside in the bar area, we had come across scattered paper flowers and leaves and draped and entwined stretches of cloth patterned with floral designs which had led us to the theatre doors and prepared us for entering a different world. The incense created a heady, intoxicating fug (not a word you get to use so much these days) which immediately transported you elsewhere. Its lingering miasma in the opening scenes also served to suggest the sickly sweet pall of disease hanging in the air as the outbreak of cholera spread. Incense was pumped out again to usher us back into the story after the interval, taking us away from the smells of the bar and café. This time it evoked the rich, somnambulant scents of a hazy summer day, with the secret garden in full flower. The recurrence of scents drew the two worlds together, Mary having discovered the particular beauty and fascination inherent in the new world which she had at first utterly rejected. The exotic and the miraculous are everpresent, and can be revealed in the seemingly everyday and ordinary.

Observant statues - Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete

Angel Exit created a magical space upon the stage with minimal means, the parsimony with props necessary for a travelling company balanced by the imagination and ingenuity with which they were put to use. The illusion of depth and distance was given by the movements and gestures of the cast, who drafted architectural and garden plans in the wake of their regard. Poles (which would later become garden implements) were held up and shifted over and across to suggest the maze of corridors through which Mary was guided when she first arrived at the Craven house. Pictures and empty picture frames were lined up at head height to give the impression of the walls from which they hung. The faces of the actors positioned within the frames provided instant portraits. Their heads turned to follow Mary’s progress as she passed them by in a manner which immediately brought to mind the living statues and caryatids in the castle of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete. Such a comparison was further struck by the chorus’ formation of living furniture, of bedposts, washing line poles or even railway carriage luggage racks; static and rooted yet still observant.

Interior domestic appurtenances were swiftly re-arranged and recast to become aspects of the tamed natural world of the garden. A carpet’s dark weave, patterned with gloomy, dull colours representing the airless, lifeless world of the house was flipped over to reveal a strip of greengrocer’s grass on the obverse side, which served as the emerald baize of a well-tended lawn. Chests of drawers drawn out became bushes and vine covered walls, and the interiors of cupboards, doors spread wide open, became shady bowers under which characters sat. Long bolts of cloth were unrolled and hung and draped in undulating, criss-crossing banners, their floral designs appropriate to the season: spring blossoms and summer roses. Soft, stuffed props of a semi-abstract nature resembling the knots of thorn which appear in Graham Sutherland paintings were scattered throughout, inside and out, taking on forms appropriate to their context. They suggested objects on dressers or cupboards (brushes and hangars), mounted antlers (or antlers placed upon the crown of a head), roots, branches and rose thorns.

The members of the small cast each took on a variety of roles, Mary excepted, her presence on stage being continuous. The Lady Bracknell-like Mrs Medlock, loosely draped in a dour, floor-length black dress topped by a floppy black hat and veil, was a natural for a drag act, in the manner of Alec Guiness playing Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets. The actor later became the puny child Colin, a role at the opposite extreme from Mrs M’s formidable and forbidding aloofness. He played him in a broad, clowning style, initially communicating in a series of breathless, animalistic whoops, and warding off potential contact with wheeling and wholly ineffectual karate chop gestures. Mary herself conveyed fierce and scornful self-containment by remaining for the greater part of the play with shoulders tensely hunched and arms held firmly and petulantly, fists clenched, by her side. This stance was only temporarily dropped when she exploded into motion in sudden foot-stamping tantrums. Eventually, this wearying rigidity began to relax as she opened herself to her surroundings and responded to the kindness and patience of those who inhabited them, discovering beauty in the world and allowing it in.

All of the cast also took their turn (Mary once more excepted) in a lively chorus, which served several purposes. They told us of the characters’ actions, motivations and feelings; bridged gaps in the narrative; noted the passage of time; commented on the action in classical dramatic style; and moved and transformed props. They also acted as living props themselves, holding up the blossom-speckled material or giving shape to the bed with suspended curtains, or striking acrobatic poses to combine into a garden hedge. In Angel Exit’s very Pagan reading of the book, they were like nature spirits, arms veined with rooty brown tendrils, leaves and feathers crowning their heads, woven into wild hair. Their eyes were made up to appear in the almond-shaped style of Victorian and Edwardian fairy paintings, as depicted by the likes of Richard Dadd, Arthur Rackham and Richard Doyle. They creep out of and return to the backstage shadows, creatures caught in the periphery of vision. They are not sympathetic or compassionate observers (this is not what the characters need at first, anyway), seeming largely indifferent to the plight of those the edges of whose story they haunt. Occasionally their comments take on a mocking tone, but they are never malevolent. They are not active participants, maintaining the distanced, coolly measured perspective of the wholly other.

Simple puppets were used for the lightly anthropomorphised birds, animals and reptiles with which the characters commune, and which seem to guide them at key moments (the Robin indeed leading Mary to the key to the garden gate). The snake in the opening Indian section circles Mary as she lies in what appears to be a fever dream (an opening which allows for the possibility that all that follows is indeed but a dream within a dream). It rattles and hisses as if it is trying to tell her something. She sees it and tells it that she does not fear it. It’s a dialogue which anticipates her later communications with the robin in England, and once more links the two worlds; the standard Kipling exoticism of India with the mystery found within the commonplace in a Yorkshire garden. The snake, in its fearful, poison-tongued aspect, seems to be a harbinger of the death of her parents. But it is also a creature which has represented change and rebirth throughout the ages and across cultures, and thus presages the transformation of her life.
The robin is manipulated by the actress who plays Martha, who makes it flitter from branch to rake head with convincing birdlike skittishness. She also shifts from Martha’s Yorkshire accent to an avian trilling which contains auditory hints of human language. The fox is a sinuous wind of bristly material with a vulpine snout at its head, which is made to glide and weave across the stage in Dickon’s wake. There is also a miniscule puppet of Mr Craven, which stands in for the actor playing the role during part of his endless journeying. It slowly ascends the Alpine slope of an upward sweep of curtain, whose creases are crevasses and folds escarpments. Its tiny form symbolises the insignificance of man in the face of the spectacle of the Romantic sublime in all its terrifying grandiosity. It also represents Mr Craven’s own diminished and desolate spiritual state. His self-punishing journeys and his confrontation with immensity and the void is a dead end. He needs to return home to discover that nature can also reveal itself on a human scale, against which a sense of meaning can more appreciably be measured.

This was a performance which also incorporated much choreographed physical movement, which often approached the condition of dance. On her trip over to England, Mary was handled like a piece of baggage, her body remaining rigidly straight as she was lifted, spun around and deposited, a passive and unyielding ballerina. The motion of the train in which Mary and Mrs Medlock travelled was conveyed by a rhythmic bounce, ending with a tilting forward sway as it came to a juddering halt. There was a certain amount of miming involved in the opening of invisible doors and the negotiating of phantom garden walkways. The chorus also prowled and leapt in a very balletic manner, sprites treading lightly upon the ground, creatures of the air as much as of the earth.

This was a thoroughly engaging, charming and heartwarming piece of storytelling. Angel Exit Theatre brought the world of the book to life with great imagination and invention, bringing their own particular perspective to the story. They drew out its Pagan aspects, its English nature mysticism (I don’t know to what extent these are apparent in the novel). It is a rewarding and worthy way of celebrating the centenary of The Secret Garden’s publication, marking the continuing fascination exerted by an enduring classic of children’s literature. The company continue on their tour through January, February and March, ending up in Poole in Dorset in April.

Peter Zinovieff on Inside Out

2012-01-14T00:16:00.010Z

Zinvovieff with the Synthi 100

It’s great to see British electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff in this clip from the Cambridge regional programme Inside Out (starting about 17 minutes in), which shows him still exploring and dissecting new (or old) sounds – in this case, the clanking, steaming pistons of a Victorian gas pump engine. He’s interviewed in his house, which looks very nice indeed, painted in calming blue-sky tones with an open-sided staircase climbing up along the wall. It looks like it could be akin to the sort of farmhouse in which Daphne Oram set up her Oramics studio. It’s here that he works in his computer-based studio which, as he points out, offers him a magnitude of bytage (?) several million times greater than he had at his disposal when he first started making music with a computer in the early 60s. Vintage black and white footage shows him setting off his cabinet-sized computer on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank (which also affords us a glimpse of the NFT, below Waterloo Bridge, as it was at the time) to play a piece of programmed systems music in a concert of electronic music. And is that Tristram Cary introducing the piece from his commentator’s booth perched above the auditorium? Those familiar with the Trunk Records compilation Fuzzy Felt Folk will probably be familiar with the sprightly, bouncing tune with its organ-drenched chorus used as the backdrop to some of these old BBC clips. It’s The Troll by Reg Tilsley, originally a piece of library music available from the de Wolfe label, which someone evidently felt was appropriate for the quirky nature of Zinovieff’s inventions.

The EMS VCS3 synthesiser

Cary was the co-founder with Zinovieff of EMS (Electronic Music Studios), where they developed the VCS3, an early model of synthesiser (the VCS stood for voltage controlled synthesiser). He also joined up with Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, then both working for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to form the independent electronic music studio Unit Delta Plus in 1966. This was how the VCS3, or ‘Putney’ as it was popularly known, came to be used as part of the Workshop’s sonic arsenal. Although it was only officially purchased on the say-so of Workshop head Desmond Briscoe in 1970 (at a knockdown price of £300), Hodgson and Derbyshire had been using their own instruments since 1967. They’d bring them into the Workshop studios and take them back to Unit Delta Plus in the evening. These small magic boxes provided many of the special effects for Doctor Who and other programmes in the latter part of the 60s. One of the great benefits of the VCS3 was its portability, something which, for all its manifold virtues, could not be said of its successor, the Synthi 100. This was a far larger affair which expanded considerably upon the VCS3’s capabilities. When the Radiophonic Workshop bought one (Briscoe having rapidly become a convert to EMS’ wares) the door to the studio at Maida Vale had to be widened to allow for it to be wheeled in and installed. It was christened the Delaware, in honour of the road in which the studios were located. It can be heard to great effect on Malcolm Clarke’s music for the Sea Devils, as well as on his fanfare opening the 1975 Radiophonic Workshop album, La Grande Piece de la Foire de la Rue Delaware. Delia Derbyshire also used it to striking effect in a live performance of Workshop music presented in the presence of the Queen at the Albert Hall in 1971. Her piece for the centenary of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, using a Synthi 100 borrowed from Zinovieff, set the stalls trembling with its low bass notes booming out of large speakers, particularly during a recording of the launch of the Apollo 11 rocket, perhaps setting Her Majesty’s jewellery rattling.

The VCS3 and its later offshoot the Synthi AKS (which added a sequencer and an octave controller and could be handily folded up into its case) were enthusiastically taken up by 70s pop and rock bands such as Hawkwind, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music. Their easy to use, intuitive controls (far easier to master than a Moog, at any rate) allowed for a wide range of electronic textures to be added to the standard rock instrumentation. The facility with which anyone with an ear could produce a musical noise was possibly what led Brian Eno (who used it in Roxy and beyond) to declare himself a non-musician. Zinovieff himself was no fan of pop or rock music, but was happy to find his and Cary’s inventions proving to be so popular. Composers like Stockhausen and Harrison Birtwistle came to use his studios, and he was able to use the income to pursue his own compositional ambitions, as well as inventing and researching new means for creating innovative sound. Keeping such a small and idealistic enterprise afloat proved difficult, however, and EMS eventually went bust in 1977. Zinovieff didn’t compose any further electronic music for many years, the equipment being simply too expensive. All of which makes it so gratifying to see him now, with the full, affordable potential of the modern computer at his command, blending mutated Bartok field recordings with the iron and steam rhythms of an old pumping engine. He’s clearly lost none of his exploratory imaginative power.

Arthur Machen on Night Waves

2012-01-11T23:07:00.010Z

There was an interesting item in the Radio 3 arts magazine programme Night Waves the other night in which Iain Sinclair and Stewart Lee discussed the writer of the supernatural Arthur Machen with host Matthew Sweet, author of the entertainingly discursive meander through popular British cinema Shepperton Babylon (it's not included in the summary of the show's contents, but you can find it about 20 minutes in). This was to mark the publication of a Penguin Classics volume of Machen’s uncanny fiction, The White People and Other Weird Stories, which will sit neatly alongside the publisher’s previous annotated collections of Algernon Blackwood, MR James and HP Lovecraft. As with those volumes, a scholarly introduction and extensive footnotes are provided by ST Joshi. It’s a measure of Machen’s relative obscurity (and thus enhanced cult status) that it has taken so long for him to join their august company. This collection has an foreword by Guillermo del Toro, a proselytiser for the weird in classic and contemporary form, who helps to nurture it and maintain it in decadent bloom. The cover revels in what Stewart Lee describes as a 1970s heavy metal satyr, a link to del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth which is clearly trying to use his popularity to push Machen to a wider audience. Given del Toro’s well-informed dvd commentaries on his own films and on the likes of Vampyr, its evident that he is adept at tracing lines of continuity in the tradition of supernatural and uncanny literature and film, and he brings Machen in as a prime progenitor of that tradition here.

Lee has previously owned up to his Machen obsessions in his confessional article My Life on the Shelf. Measuring the components of his impressive library of books and music, he reckons on owning 3 feet of Machen books, a considerable girth given the general scarcity of his work in print. It’s not as wide as the 6 feet of music by The Fall which he’s amassed,but then the discographies of certain bands do tend to proliferate and grow wildly and wilfully out of control. Mark E Smith is also a fan of occult and supernatural fiction, as witnessed by this video recently posted on Weird Brother in which he gives a cosy fireside reading of The Colour Out of Space. Lovecraft was also a huge admirer of Machen’s work, and comments in his long 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, ‘of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness’. He goes on to quote from Frank Belknap Long’s poem On Reading Arthur Machen, a paean to the enchantments cast by his writing. The English composer John Ireland was also greatly influenced by Machen, and as Rob Young observes in his book Electric Eden, he felt that ‘no-one who had not read Machen’s fiction could properly understand his music’. The Hill of Dreams and The Happy Children had a particularly strong impact upon his imagination. His 1933 piece Legend, for piano and orchestra, was dedicated to Machen, and inspired by a vision he had whilst picknicking on Harrow Hill on the Sussex Downs, the site of an old bronze age hill fort. He saw a group of children in ancient clothing dancing before him. He looked away, and when he turned back, they had gone. The music evokes the dramatic landscape and, with its swelling, romantic piano figures, the manifestation of the old, layered stories and half-remembered mythological figures which are inscribed in it. Writing to Machen to describe his encounter with these mysterious, otherworldly apparaitions, he received the brief, scribbled affirmation ‘oh, you’ve seen them too’.

Machen’s distanced interest in the occult and in the underlying matter of British mythology, alongside his marginal life in London literary society make him an obvious object of interest for Iain Sinclair. He postions him as a writer of ‘London wanderings, and edgelands, and disappearances’. A typical Sinclair character, in other words. His projections of the city are layered over an older landscape, that of his Welsh upbringing, Sinclair suggests, with a deep and richly strange archaeology of resonant myth. Sinclair recalls his days as a London bookseller, with his stall in Camden Passage in Islington. Machen was always in great demand (this was the mid-70s through to the mid-80s), partly because his books were largely out of print and difficult to dig up. Many copies came on the market through Jon Savage, author of the history of the Sex Pistols and the emergence of punk England’s Dreaming. This points to further secret connections with deeply rooted English dissenting traditions of defiant strangeness which emerge at different times in different forms. The sparseness with which Machen’s work has found itself in print has added to the mystery surrounding it, and led to what Matthew Sweet called the fetishisation of the book. We’re lucky enough to have several volumes of the 1923 Caerleon editions of the Works of Arthur Machen in Exeter Library, which means we can read the likes of Far Off Things, Fragment of Life, The Inmost Light, Hill of Dreams and The Great Return. There’s also a 1915 edition of The Bowmen and Other Legends of War. The story The Bowmen features spectral archers from Agincourt coming to the aid of British soldiers in the First World War trenches. Genuine reports of such sightings began subsequently to be reported, fiction seeping out into the real world and influencing people’s war-stunned perceptions. Machen might protest that these were merely the products of his imagination, and not his version of actual myths, but he came to realise that he had let loose a new set of archetypes into the world, and went on to use them as such. It’s great to have a volume from the actual time that such myths were being formulated and spreading beyond his control. Another indication of the vital value of public libraries in keeping long out of print works available to the general reader.

Iain Sinclair uses Machen’s best known story, The Great God Pan, in his novel Landor’s Tower He superimposes it over the associative flow of the narrative and allowing the power of its language to temporarily ensnare the narrator in its initial, terrible experiment, which releases the ancient spirit of the dark woods loose in modern day London, embodied in the young woman who was subject to the doctor’s abominable surgeries. Sinclair quotes Machen’s description of depthless worlds opening up within and beyond this one, ‘a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship sailed (to my belief) since Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath’. He had previously used William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland to similar effect in Radon Daughters. In both of these occult tales of cosmic terror and ecstasy, rifts are opened in the normative surface of the world, revealing greater, timeless underlying abysses. Sinclair uses them to hint at the intoxicating, spellbinding power of reading itself. The magic of the word effecting changes in perception through carefully forged language. With The Bowmen, such changes seemed actually take form in the world, the imagination made manifest. Landor’s Tower finds Sinclair (or the story’s narrator, a version or aspect of the author) travelling beyond the orbit of his familiar London territory, returning to the Wales of his childhood, tracing a transition similar to that made by Machen himself. It’s easy to see why he has such an affinity for the Welsh writer who moved to London to establish himself.

Machen’s interest in the occult led him to join, for a short span of time, the fin de siecle circle of those seeking some secret mystery patterning the world, the Order of the Golden Dawn, in 1899. Here, he was able to mix with the likes of WB Yeats and his fellow author of supernatural tales Algernon Blackwood. Machen’s studies were always more a matter of curiosity and distanced interest than Blackwood’s more committed questing, however. He maintained a healthy scepticism about all matters occult, and later wrote of the Golden Dawn that ‘the society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent and imbecilic Abracadabras’. He was not a believer, and his stories remained dreams rather than expressions of a spiritualist worldview.

Sinclair sees Machen’s stories as offering efflorescing worlds born (or reborn) within worlds, in which he splices together his own personal mythology, formed of his observations of his urban surroundings, and his interest in the deeper layers of British Matter compressed beneath them. The White People exemplifies this layered quality, the Germanic folk stories at its heart emerging from the everyday in a manner memorably described as ‘viscous’. Stewart Lee talks of the sense in Machen’s work of a corruption of the spirit resulting from city or suburban life, with its fixed daily routines and mechanised rhythms. Natural forces tend to reassert themselves, both in the world and in the psyche. Sinclair refers to the story The Inmost Light, in which Machen writes of ‘the deformities of London’, and points to his portrayal of a patterned city, with a Welsh or old English landscape underlying its modern, industrialised (now finance industrialised) carapace. Stewart Lee draws attention to the element of hackwork in some of Machen’s writing, which included journalism turned out for the London Evening News, not necessarily to decry it, but to make it clear that he was a working writer who had to make ends meet (he had a family with two children to keep). Both declare their appreciation of The London Adventure, Or the Art of Wandering , a piece of observational autobiography and literary urban cartography, which is available in Exeter Library in a 1924 edition (the year of its publication, in fact, so presumably a first edition). It was written for money, but became almost a meditation upon its own creation, and the need to bring it to a conclusion. He was, to an extent, the archetypal impoverished artist, periodically starving in his lonely garrett, with all the aura of romanticism and actual squalor that such a state entails.

Both of these Machen aficionados seem entranced by his work for its very intangible quality, for what it almost but never quite reveals, both in terms of its hints at other, vaster realities, and in terms of the nature of the author himself; The detailed, occasionally even banal surface which slowly begins to phase into something other, revealing suggestive layers of great mystery emerging from below. Stewart Lee sums up this sense of reaching towards something which remains always just beyond the mind’s grasp by suggesting that there’s an unknowable centre to Machen’s work. Which is why his stories have always woven an addictive spell, and continue to do so to this day.

Books of the Year

2012-01-03T16:45:00.011Z

Briefly, the best of last year’s reading gathered together and marshalled into vague categorical connectivity:

Arcane Detectives: Senior, Cultivated Fogies Remaining Defiantly Out of Step with the Times:After You With the Pistol and Something Nasty in the Woodshed by Kyril Bonfiglioli (being the further adventures of art connoisseur and gourmand with a relaxed approach to legality Charlie Mortdecai. Not as funny or affecting as the first, Don’t Point That Thing At Me – a title which gives some idea of its tone – but undeniably amusing, nevertheless).
The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler (my introduction to the delightful detective duo Arthur Bryant and John May, and the Peculiar Crimes Unit, which is run according to their old-fashioned credo. This one rivals William Heaney’s (aka Graham Joyce’s) Memoirs of a Master Forger as a guide to London pub lore.

Magical Adventures Beyond the Borders of Empire:
The Warlock of the Air and The Land Leviathan by Michael Moorcock (the adventures of Oswald Bastable, Edwardian soldier of the British Empire, as he stumbles into alternate versions of the contemporary – ie 70s – world).
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Historical version of the alien encounter, with Japan as a place of ancient and sometimes dark magic)

Bookish Big Apple Boys Discovering Life and Love Through Literature:
Allen Ginsberg: A Biography by Barry Miles (I turned to this after seeing the film Howl. Full time 60s mythographer Miles portrays Ginsberg in a much more forgiving light than he did Kerouac, or indeed Zappa in his overly judgemental biography of him).
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (beautifully life-affirming novel setting Oscar’s genre dreaming against the brutal, controlling power of dictatorships. Differing values facing off against each other, as they do rather more triumphantly in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control).

Fins Des Siecles and Recurrent Decadent Dreams:
Nights at the Circus and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (the beginning of my projected re-reading of the works of the divine Angela. Turn of the 19th century journeys across Europe and through the American apocalyptic landscape).
Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand (Hand brings the Goddess to life once more, as seen through the eyes of Rossetti, Swinburne and Burne-Jones, and returning to latter day Camden Town).

The Epic and the Incidental: The Long and Short of Alasdair Gray
Lanark
Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Ends of Our Tethers (a re-reading of Gray’s superb epic, semi-autobiographical blend of painful realism and equally painful fantasy, recasting Glasgow as a labyrinthine purgatory. Plus short stories, fabular, observational or wryly playful).

Self-reflective Explorations of Genre and its Subjective Worlds:
Yellow Blue Tibia and Splinter by Adam Roberts (Both playing with narrative form and expectation, the former colliding fantasy and realism, and the latter ending with a remarkable, sustained section written in the second person singular future tense).
Silent Land by Graham Joyce (essentially an extended Twilight Zone style story, but with cumulative emotional power which is, in the end, overwhelming. A dissection of the true nature of long-lasting love).

Metropolitan History and Imagination – Mapping the Mental Landscapes of London:
Concrete Island by JG Ballard (Robinson Crusoe by the Westway. A powerful modern myth written by someone very much in control of their material – ignore the scurrilous knives out John Baxter biography).
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (a greatly enjoyable fantasy introducing the occult division of the Met, and featuring the semi-divine embodiments of London’s rivers)
Hackney, That Rose Red Empire by Iain Sinclair (the London mythographer finally zeroes in on his own home territory)
End of the Line edited by Jonathan Oliver (tales of terror on the underground by the likes of Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Ramsay Campbell, Nicholas Royle, and Conrad Williams. Find out what lies beyond those mysterious doors, or lurks in the darkness of the tunnels).

Cultural Crosstalk and Historical Reflections:
State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook (Sandbrook moves out of the 60s as examined in his previous volumes Never Had it So Good and White Heat, and looks at the history, politics and culture of the Heath era. Includes much use of Doctor Who, from its overtly politicised Pertwee era, as analogy and example).
Retromania by Simon Reynolds (thought-provoking polemic which remains in two-minds as to whether the obsession with the past which it is highlighting might not actually be so bad after all).
Sinister Resonance by David Toop (Finding music and sound present in the silent forms of literature and art. Includes much about the importance of the element of sound from unidentified sources in supernatural fiction)

Marking Mervyn Peake’s Centenary Year:
Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake (going beyond Gormenghast and into the frightening world of modernity)
Titus Awakes by Maeve Gilmore (Mervyn’s wife Maeve takes a few of his fragmentary pages and notes and extends them into what is very much her own story)
A Child of Bliss by Sebastian Peake (Mervyn and Maeve’s eldest son recollects his parents and his own childhood)
Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold by Malcolm Yorke (biography from a writer who has also written much about Neo-Romantic British artists)
Vast Alchemies: The Life and Works of Mervyn Peake by G Peter Winnington (biography from the editor of Peake Studies, now considered the definitive work by the Peake family and by Michael Moorcock, although it lost out at the time of first publication to Yorke’s work, and wasn’t allowed to include illustrations or quotations).

Demonstrating that Great Children’s Literature is Simply Great Literature:
Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve (the four volumes of Reeve’s richly imagined and characterised tales of ambulatory cities in a post-apocalyptic world)
Clay by David Almond (adolescence, religious faith, bullying, local mythology and, as always, the primacy of the imagination in this fable, simply told but with undercurrents of great complexity)
Black Jack by Leon Garfield (another of Garfield’s beautifully told gothic tales of children in 18th century England)
The Dark Flight Down by Marcus Sedgwick (more gothic atmospheres, set in a gloomy city of indeterminate geographical and historical location, and with our hero and heroine from The Book of Dead Days finding their way through the palace of a decadent Emperor seeking immortality)
Gifts by Ursula le Guin (a variant on the magical worlds of Earthsea from one of the finest SF and fantasy writers for readers of any age)

Films of the Year

2011-12-31T00:55:00.012Z

I didn’t see many films at the cinema this year, partly because there wasn’t a great deal to tempt me out. I did enjoy Richard Ayoade’s debut feature Submarine, a wry coming of age tale set in an isolated coastal town in Wales told by a pubescent narrator who is perhaps not as smart as he thinks he is. Howl mixed colour, black and white and animation to capture the kinetic energy of Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem, and of his tumbling speech in general. The film lent visual rhythm to Howl’s biblical cadences and breath-length proclamations. James Franco was excellent as Ginsberg, capturing his blend of loquaciousness, exhibitionism, and endless, agonised self-analysis. Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In was an uneasy horror story, akin to George Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage in its tale of an obsessive surgeon turning his skills to terrible ends in the name of his daughter. Almodovar uses to the full the generic elements lightly touched upon in Broken Embraces, once more playing provocatively with ideas of gender. Antonio Banderas was coldly calculating as the surgeon, his passions kept firmly under check where once they would have been put on uninhibited display, when both he and Almodovar were younger men. We saw the film at the Duke of York’s Picture House in Brighton, a fabulous Edwardian cinema established in 1910. It’s still there in all its unpartitioned glory, with an option to sit up in the stalls, elevated above the hoi-polloi in the main gallery. A real architectural treasure. We inadvertently happened upon the premiere of Francois Ozon’s Potiche at the bfi Southbank, having become aware of a small crowd gathering around a hastily erected hoarding outside. Thus we had the delightful pleasure of seeing Catherine Deneuve in the flesh (Ozon was there too, but was inevitably in her shadow). La Deneuve lingered only briefly, as it began to rain and she wasn’t about to let her coiffure be dampened. An umbrella was swiftly produced and she was ushered inside. The film displayed her light comic talents, her characteristic coolness set against the broadly farcical antics unfolding around her. She proved an effortlessly elegant jogger, and her disco routine with Gerard Depardieu, increasingly stout and barrel-like, was priceless. We Need to Talk About Kevin saw the return of director Lynne Ramsey, and thankfully her poetic cinematic eye was still very much evident. The camera hazed in and out of focus, and bathed in deep reds from various sources, capturing the subjective viewpoint of Tilda Swinton’s constrained, passively suffering mother. She was excellent as ever as a woman trapped within other people’s notions of motherhood as a sacred and natural female state with which she feels absolutely no affinity. Like The Skin I Live In, it was really a horror film in respectable clothing, Kevin himself a complete blank, a malevolent and manipulative monster who might as well be the child of the devil.

The Duke of York's Cinema, Brighton

Elsewhere, I revisited some classic British horror. Death Line took us down into the underground, branching off into the abandoned tunnels purportedly branching off beyond Russell Square tube station. Actually, the film was largely filmed at the recently closed Aldwych station, as one of my father-in-law’s many railway books reliably informs me, with further scenes shot at the Bishopsgate Goods Yards just off Brick Lane. The animalistic figure who haunts the tunnels, last of a line of navvies buried in a cave-in and left for dead, emerging to feast on the flesh of hapless late night travellers, elicits our pity and disgust in equal measure. There is a neat parallel drawn between worlds above and below, and Donald Pleasance’s bigoted, class-conscious copper is a wonderful character – loathsome and yet strangely likeable in the same paradoxical way as the subterranean cannibal. The Wicker Man was enjoyable as ever, as much a fictional anthropological travelogue, detailing the colourful facets of a pagan community, as a horror film. Christopher Lee seems to relish his role as Lord Summerisle, glad to cast aside his cursed Dracula cloak in favour of a hardy tweed and, at the end, a colourful frock, in which he cuts a merry caper. It struck me this time that Sergeant Howie is not entirely the hapless fool that he is made out to be. After all, he retains his faith to the bitter, burning end, whereas Summerisle’s paganism is demonstrably a fiction, cobbled together by his ancestors to keep the islanders in line; An opiate if not for the masses, then for the remaining duped feudal subjects of this very traditionally minded Lord. Blood on Satan’s Claw marries some glorious framing of the English countryside, a brilliant score by Marc Wilkinson, underlined with woozy ondes-martenot, and a depiction of 18th century rural life as harsh and unforgiving, the cruel atavistic behaviour into which the young villagers fall a product of environment as much as the influence of a sketchily depicted devil. There’s a double Doctor Who connection here, too, with Anthony Ainley, the Master of the late Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, playing the pallid vicar, and Wendy Padbury, Patrick Troughton’s brainy companion in the 60s, as the unfortunate Cathy.

There were a couple of entertaining Amicus omnibuses which I hadn’t seen for some time: Torture Garden, with Burgess Meredith as the gleeful, fortune-telling fairground huckster (the fortunes all turn out badly, of course), and Tales from the Crypt, with the heavyweight luvvie presence of Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper – a far cry from the EC comics depiction of a demented, bulging-eyeballed skeleton. Peter Cushing’s performance as the gentle old man Arthur Grimsdyke, persecuted by his upwardly mobile neighbours, is quietly hearbreaking, and his vengeful return from the grave is grimly satisfying. Hammer make-up maestro Roy Ashton’s creation of the shambling, hollow-eyed revenant is a brilliant piece of work on a tight budget. Patrick Magee is also wonderfully eccentric as the leader of a group of blind men in an institution which, under its new, ex-military head, becomes more like an internment camp. His repeated, uninflected ending of every sentence with ‘Major Rogers’, appended as a sullen afterthought, makes the script sound like it comes from a Pinter play, or piece of absurdist theatre. The Major’s final fate is an ingeniously nasty piece of poetic justice, quite extreme for an Amicus film. Another film familiar from 70s BBC horror double-bills (of the sort which the Classic Horror Film campaign is trying to bring back) was Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, an unfeasibly entertaining adventure from Hammer’s late period. Brian Clemens blending of the romanticism of gothic and swashbuckling forms seems entirely natural (unlike the later attempt to dovetail gothic horror and martial arts in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires). The film has its tongue lightly in its cheek, but not so much that it becomes mere hollow camp. John Carson is excellent as Kronos’ old compadre Dr Marcus, nobly undergoing a variety of tests to determine the particular manner in which the strain of vampirism with which he has been infected can be destroyed. And Caroline Munro is as quietly bewitching as ever as the gypsy girl who becomes embroiled in the good Captain’s search for the source of the local vampiric plague, inevitably falling for his steely Scandinavian charms.

Daughters of Darkness - Delphine Seyrig as art deco vamp

More Hammer came in the form of The Vampire Lovers, with Ingrid Pitt imperious as Carmilla, imbuing her with dreamy allure, fierceness and pathos. It was one of a number of films featuring female vampires which I saw. Frisson des Vampires and Fascination (well, not vampires in this one, although they do drink blood) served to pay tribute to Jean Rollin, who died this year. They both have the usual blend of dreamlike poetic imagery, crude exploitation and clumsy action, but are always worth watching for their occasional and unforgettable surrealist scenes. In Fascination (for which I had to try and ignore the German dubbing with which my copy was lumbered), this includes a cloaked Bridget Lahaie advancing across the bridge over a castle moat sweeping a scythe before her. How did Rollin find, and gain access to, all these fabulous ruined castles, I wonder. He certainly made the most of them, bathing them in purple and green light and lovingly framing them, with his characters moving through their corridors and down their staircases with measured step. Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness centred upon a sensuous and knowing performance by Delphine Seyrig, and art deco vamp with a decadent sensibility as much as a thirst for blood. The grand out of season hotel in which she and her current chosen partner reside, with its great empty lobbies and sweeping stairways, and the deserted, windswept beaches of Ostend over which it looks out constitute a setting which could have been imagined by Paul Delvaux or Rene Magritte. I also saw a lost Hammer classic which I'd never come across before, Joseph Losey's The Damned, this one imbued with the spirits of Elisabeth Frink (whose sculptures are featured) and Paul Nash. Oliver Reed's dandyish thug, striding through Weymouth with furled umbrella swinging in a jauntily menacing manner, anticipates Malcolm MacDowell's Alex in Clockwork Orange. With big science hidden away in ancient landscapes, this conjures a very British apocalypse, haunted by Porton Down and Aldermaston.

There were ghosts, too. Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black remains terrifying. Its haunted house is not merely remote and ramshackle, but cut off each night by treacherous tides and chill estuarine mists. The spectre’s sudden appearances, and the doom which they effect in the world, are carefully spaced throughout the story, and create an atmosphere of overwhelming dread, culminating in her screaming, close-up rage as she hovers inexorably towards the poor lawyer, lying sick in his bed. I belatedly got around to seeing Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage, a Spanish supernatural tale with underlying strains of Catholic guilt. The Awakening was almost like a direct response to that film, the female protagonist’s potential entrapment as mother within a ghostly family viewed as a chilling prospect rather than some kind of spiritual fulfilment. Andy Robinson conjured up spectres closer to home in the houses, streets and parks of Exeter, appearing in half-glimpsed edge spaces and reflective surfaces in his assured and long laboured-over debut feature The Forewarning. I also managed to see some of the MR James Ghost Stories for Christmas, broadcast by the BBC in the early 70s, and repeated at various times thereafter: The Stalls of Barchester, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and, best of all, A Warning to the Curious (briefly available on a bfi dvd a few years ago, and still in the Devon Library system). Peter Vaughan’s portrayal of a quiet, reserved man who has recently lost his clerk’s job after many years of hard work, and who turns to his lifelong hobby of archaeology to try and turn a much-needed profit (the innkeeper looks disapprovingly at the worn soles of his shoes, which tell the tale of his poverty), makes his final fate all the more affecting. It is so undeserved, and the revenant spirit so mercilessly and malevolently vengeful. These films were playing on the screen in the bfi Southbank bookshop over Christmas, but in an Australian edition. For some reason, the BBC refuses to release, or license for release by another company, these quintessentially English ghost stories in this country. Which pointless intransigence frankly makes downloading them an entirely reasonable option. They are also available to watch at the bfi mediatheques, if you’re lucky enough to have access to them.

Fantasy of different and more gaudy nature came in the films of Guy Maddin, several of which I saw: Archangel, Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and Cowards Bend the Knee. Pastiches of silent movie appearances (the softened borders, intertitles and coloured tinting) are shaped to serve Maddin’s own inflamed ends. Melodramatic tales of thwarted passions, incestuous desires and incipient madness are played out against fantastically artificial landscapes. Both camp and sincere, intoxicating and absurd, they create their own self-enclosed worlds. Cowards is one of his pieces of utterly unreliable autobiography, with exotic hairdressing salons staffed by wise and erudite barbers, domineering mothers, and ‘Maddin’ himself as an ice hockey hero led astray by a sly temptress. Also revelling in its artificiality, and with additional knowing asides to camera (a level of self-referentiality which Maddin never indulges in), and with a similar love of colourfully eccentric costume and elaborate set-dressing was Sally Potter’s Orlando, her adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-hopping, cross-dressing and gender-shifting fantasy. Perhaps a little overlush in parts, and tipping a wind at the audience once too often, the scenes set on the frozen Thames in Elizabethan London were undeniably gorgeous. A different approach to historical film was taken by Ken Loach in his adaptation of Leon Garfield’s Black Jack, which seemed to think that period authenticity and a feel for character lay in draining the people of all expressivity and the story of all drama.

There were plenty of films set in London, from the ersatz East End of Oliver to the real one of Sparrows Can’t Sing; the Soho of Espresso Bongo (a really great Cliff film, perhaps because Cliff is largely peripheral and his character a bit of a berk) and of The Small World of Sammy Lee (with Anthony Newley authentically clammy and desperate); the swinging sixties London of Smashing Time, Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London and The Pleasure Girls (with Anneke Wills, William Hartnell’s ‘swinging’ Dr Who companion Polly, and, rather more implausibly, Klaus Kinski as a coolly flash underworld kingpin); the demented end of 60s meltdown of Herostratus, whose wild and uncontrolled experimentation was more miss than hit, and the post 60s reflection and self-questioning of Barney Platts-Mills’ Private Road, with Bruce Robinson in his acting years. Meanwhile, the Ealing classic The Lavender Hill Mob offered fascinating glimpses of the bombed out rubble of post war London.

Eastern European and Russian films formed another theme. Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Legend of the Surami Fortress were brilliant Georgian conflations of myth, spectacle and psychodrama. Alexsandr Dovzhenko’s 1928 silent film Zvenigora also excavated the myths of Ukrainian land and history, to sometimes magical and sometimes numbingly propagandistic effect. Two lighthearted comedies from the Czech new wave of the 60s, Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde and Jiri Menzel’s rubbish dump-set Larks On A String were subversive through their very concentration on human rather than political values, as well as in their gentle mockery of the pomposity of officialdom. Szindbad and Morgiana were colourful films, the one impressionistic the other expressionistic. Szindbad was a Hungarian story collaging the subjective impressions of a life looked back on by a dying Casanova. Morgiana was a Czech horror story centring around two sisters of diametrically opposed character – one fair and seemingly innocent, blessed with good fortune; the other dark, bitter, and full of murderous schemes. It’s a riot of over the top colour and costume, a sinister fairy tale with an all-seeing cat (whose low-level perspective we sometimes share) which seems possessed of a calculating intelligence of its own. It also boasts a score by Lubos Fiser, who composed the music for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Finally, Katalin Varga was made by an English director, Peter Strickland, but was clearly inspired by Eastern European cinema. It made atmospheric use of leftfield music by the likes of Stephen Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound, and of the rural Romanian landscape to tell its dark, fable-like story of bloody revenge and its inevitable price.

Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg

I saw a number of Japanese anime films, including The Secret of Mamo, featuring the irrepressibly amoral and apelike superthief Lupin III. Here, he ends up in a supervillain’s city-sized lair which seems to be furnished with many of the great art treasures of the world, and through whose classical, gothic and baroque passages and stairways an aging Hitler seems to be wandering. The anthology film Memories was a mixed affair, with the outstanding story being the first, Koji Morimoto’s Magnetic Rose, set in another internal, artificially created world, found this time inside a drifting spaceship. The best of these anime films were directed by Mamoru Oshii. Angel’s Egg was an early effort, a beautiful and largely wordless exploration of a surreal landscape, filled with chequered plains, ranks of stone statues, flying fish and old, crumbling European streets, and through which a small girl in Victorian dress runs with a translucent blue egg. Innocence: Ghost in the Shell II unfolded worlds contained within worlds in dizzying succession, the artificial and the real becoming indistinguishable and meaningless distinctions. Straying occasionally into tiresome scenes of the blowing things up with big guns variety, it was nevertheless worth it for the stunning parade float sequence and the gorgeous design of the palace floating on the lake – and for Kenji Kawaii’s brilliant score. The Sky Crawlers was an existential tale of eternally youthful air aces, lost and bewildered and lacking any purpose or real sense of what’s going on in a world predicated on constant corporate war as all-consuming spectacle. Always, in Oshii’s films, the love of a good bassett hound is at the heart of it all – simple and unconditional.

Three Hitchcock films spanned his British and American years and showed how diverse and yet how thematically consistent he was: The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent and To Catch A Thief. The latter was Hitch at his most inconsequential, but also probed the easy Cary Grant charm as he had done previously in Notorious and Suspicion. My Ingmar Bergman fixation was satisfied by watching Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night and Summer With Monika, all of which formed a fitting tribute to his first great collaborative cameraman Gunnar Fischer, who died this year. There were also lesser but still enjoyable efforts, Three Strange Loves and All These Women. The latter is an out and out slapstick farce, a corrective for those who think Bergman is unremittingly gloomy – although it has to be said, it does open and close at a funeral. I caught up with two recent films by favourite directors of mine: Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. Me and Orson Welles was an old-fashioned putting on a show movie, with all the trials and tribulations leading up to the rise of the curtain on the opening night and the triumph of art and toil over all the odds. Jarmusch’s film attracted a good deal of negative press when it came out, but I absolutely loved it, far more so than Coffee and Cigarrettes and Broken Flowers. It was a film of classical restraint, beautifully framed and composed and full of haunting visual and verbal rhymes and correspondences. It worked as a dreamy travelogue of its Spanish locations, picking out odd and peripheral details, and also as a study of its star, Isaach de Bankole, much as John Boorman did with Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Basically setting an elliptical artistic approach to the world against a materialistic, controlling one embodied by Bill Murray and his followers, it shared the mystical mindset of Dead Man, possibly another reason why it was disliked. Boris’ miasmic guitar noise replaced that of Neil Young in Dead Man to great effect.

In How I Won The War, Richard Lester began to use his kinetic, madcap pop style to serious moral ends in an absurdist depiction of the follies of war, although it was a little too scattershot and unfocussed to be wholly effective. O Lucky Man was Lindsay Anderson’s sprawling, modern day picaresque tale. It followed Travis, possibly unrelated to the revolutionary schoolboy of If…, although still played by Malcolm MacDowell. He goes out into the world, compliant, eager, anxious to please and make his mark. Anderson uses the same mixture of realism and fantasy as he did in If…, with Alan Price and his band acting as chorus and providing an oblique commentary with their songs. Finally, having started the year with the all-singing Dickens-lite of Oliver, we ended it with a fine adaptation of another classic – The Muppet Christmas Carol. As Matthew Sweet succinctly puts it in the current issue of Sight and Sound, ‘anyone who remains unmoved by the sight of Michael Caine accepting the gift of Beaker’s scarf is surely some species of psychopath’. A fine way to anticipate the Dickens bicentenary year.

Drift Records of the Year

2011-12-17T10:29:00.008Z

The estimable Drift Records has released its annual best of the year list, which always offers a good guide to some of the best music released in the previous 12 months. This has directed me towards some fine things in the past, notably last year’s Holkham Drones by Luke Abbott, an excellent collection of spiralling, gently pulsating electronica. The shop itself can be found nestled at the top of Totnes in Devon, at the point where the central medieval road curves narrowly around having ascended from the bridge over the Dart, passed the covered Elizabethan walkway and the postwar town hall (it’s all very Belbury Poly here), and skirted around the mound of the Norman motte, crowned with its circular castle wall. It’s always a very friendly place, with good music playing, and boxes full of new vinyl to browse and admire the covers of. There’s also an excellent dvd hire club attached, which offers an enticing range of cult and world cinema alongside more mainstream fare.

I’ve come across a number of their top 100 choices this year. Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues (no.4) was a continuation of the latterday Crosby, Stills and Nash sound found on their debut. The sun-drenched harmonies which suddenly break out as the instruments fall away and the words ‘one day in Innisfree’ are sung (a Yeats reference?) on the otherwise jauntily countrified Bedouin Dress is magical, and I like the little burst of improv sax skronk towards the end – a hint of a new and potentially controversial direction, perhaps? Jonathan Wilson’s Gentle Spirit (6) also has a 70s LA pastoral spirit, evidently popular in Totnes, which channels the spirit of America and Jackson Browne. The light, bubbling guitar line running through Desert Raven is impossibly and immediately infections and can’t help but raise a smile. More beautiful harmonies are forthcoming from the Sparhawks on Low’s C’mon (9), a lighter effort than their previous LP Drums and Guns, whose confrontation of the darker, more oppressive currents of the times necessitated a concomitantly harsher sound. The tone here is set by the beautiful celeste melody opening the first song, Try To Sleep. The sparse and simple snare drum, bass, organ and guitar sound (with a touch of folk banjo picking thrown in for good measure) looks back to Secret Name and before. Mimi Sparhawk’s vocals are particularly lovely throughout. Alan Sparhawk still throws in the odd admonishing line, taking on a female viewpoint in Witches and pointing a finger at ‘all you guys out there trying to act like you’re Al Green – you’re all fools’. A vintage Low album.

I look forward to hearing tune-yArDs (and yes, you do need to typograph it thusly) whokill (11), the alias of singer/songwriter/performer Merrill Garbus, having found her solo set completely entrancing at an ATP festival a couple of years ago. PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake (13) has won many plaudits over the course of the year, all of them completely justified. It’s a complex and conflicted suite of songs about war, land and nation, and incidentally stands as a validation of the continued relevance of the album as a unified work. Battles were intent on demonstrating that they could do just fine without Tyondai Braxton’s contribution on Gloss Drop (15), and undoubtedly did so, although I found its relentless knotty density a little wearying over the long haul. It’s best in small doses. Arbouretum were a big discovery for me in the latter part of the year (largely courtesy of Exeter library), and The Gathering (17) upped the heaviosity quotient of their folk-inflected rock, heading straight off into full-on, distortion-blurred, massive guitar trio riffing and single-minded soloing, all of which took me back to my teenage metal years – but in a good way.

Metronomy are a local Totnes band, and therefore likely to win favour, but they deserve their position. The English Riviera (19) makes reference to the local Torbay coastline, an area which singularly fails to live up to its marketing monicker. The album thankfully steers well clear of the didgeridoo and drum circle music you’re in danger of encountering if you visit the town, opting instead for danceable pop with some nice keyboard hooks which keep the sound varied and interesting. Rome by Dangermouse and Daniele Luppi (21) has been one of my favourites of the year, an LP which employs some of the veteran studio musicians who worked on the soundtracks to Italian films composed by the likes of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai in the 60s and 70s. Essentially variations on a single, swooningly beautiful melody, it is, naturally enough, lushly cinematic, and makes good use of the contrasting voices of Jack White and Norah Jones. Blanck Mass (35) was another oft-played favourite, a solo project by Benjamin John Power, splintering off from the Fuck Buttons. It has all the intoxicating sweep of the Buttons, but extracts the martial beats. It’s a mesmeric, miasmic LP of analogue electronica, a perfumed fog of an album (as the cover seems to suggest) in which to lose yourself in directionless drift.

John Maus’ We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (34) hovers between 80s synth pop pastiche and parodic pisstake, with Maus adopting the portentous baritone of a Phil Oakey or John Foxx, intoning repetitive lyrics such as ‘and the rain came down’ with enough conviction to somehow lend them sombre majesty. Mogwai’s cumbersomely titled Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will (59) mixed massive, crunching guitar attack and plangent melodicism to exhilarating and emotional effect, mournful and angry by turns. Oneohtrix Point Never’s (aka Daniel Lopatin’s) Replica (67) wrongfooted, and therefore disappointed, me at first, differing significantly from the warm analogue synth sounds which I’d loved on Rifts and Returnal. But once I got used to the difference, to the aural collage of its rough assemblage of samples, sometimes smooth and seamless, sometimes jaggedly fitted together, I found it a bracing and absorbing listen. Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath 1972 (76) was one long fade out, a series of slightly melancholy drones, blurry and distorted around the edges, with minimal, Enoesque melodic sketches laid on top. I’ve heard parts of Johann Johannsson’s The Miner’s Hymns (96) on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone. It’s a soundtrack with echoes of Arvo Part, again filled with a mournful sadness, naturally enough given the subject. I shall have to check out Barn Owl’s Lost in the Glare (89) next year, as it’s been recommended to me and is in the library – the name alone is enough to arouse my interest, anyway. A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s Cervantine (77) continued this New Mexican band’s exploration of Eastern European folk music, with accordeon blending with violin and blistering brass in labyrinthine tunes played within strange (to my western ears) time signatures.

A good selection again, with plenty more to explore. I would have included The North Sea Radio Orchestra’s gorgeous album I A Moon, which I bought at the shop this year. It’s probably too late for the inclusion of the Trunk Records release of the music from the 70s children’s TV programme Fingerbobs, which Mrs W was delighted to come across. Perhaps they’ll find space next year for the delightful songs of Gulliver, Scampi, Fingermouse and Flash.

Russell Hoban

2011-12-16T12:28:00.007Z

Russell Hoban, who died earlier this week, was the author of two timeless books, The Mouse and His Child and Riddley Walker. The latter is a post apocalyptic science fiction novel published in 1980, when cold war fears were rising once more. Set in England many centuries after a nuclear war, in the midst of a long and continuing era of barbarism, it is remarkable for its inventive recasting of the English language, shaped as if it had been lost and slowly built up again. This linguistic form is in itself a moving portrayal of an individual, and by extension, of humanity, trying to begin the process of resurrecting a decimated civilisation and culture. Some aspects of the old world persist in almost unaltered form. Riddley watches a Punch puppet show at one point - the most basic of violent entertainments surviving along with the basic urges and impulses it depicts. Only Judy's name has changed, as she mutates into Pooty. Everything begins with the word, which allows for the expression of the finest ideas, but also the most dangerous. In telling his tale, in all its raw directness of thought and expression, Riddley begins to inscribe the human story into recorded history once more, starting the slow ascent from the new and long dark ages. The lengthy, freeform opening sentence probably determines whether or not this is a book whose language you'll be happy to puzzle your way through: 'On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen'. I remember going to see a dance piece at The Place in London way back in the 80s which Hoban had written for the stage, and which I think was probably The Carrier Frequency. It involved a lot of splashing about in water, which represented the surface of another post-apocalyptic world, which this time had seemingly been subjected to flooding. Scaffold towers rose from the central pool, up to the platforms of which the dancers sometimes climbed. It was all utterly bewildering, and I had little idea of what was going on. But it was strangely beguiling, nevertheless, working on the imagination of my youthful self in a suggestive, abstract and mesmerisingly associative fashion. I went along on the strength of Hoban's name, having read Riddley Walker after it was included in David Pringle's 1985 critical survey Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (and yes, it is self-evidently a science fiction novel even if it is 'literary'). At my age then, I might have been a little out of my depth for such avant-garde goings on, but it's an experience I still remember - and something entirely other from the sort of things I would normally have gone out to see.

The Mouse and His Child is one of the great children's books of the post war period, telling the tale of a father and son, conjoined clockwork wind-up mice, and their travels through a forbidding and dangerous land. They meet an oddball cast of characters - tramps, rats, crows, kingfishers, elephants and frogs, not all of whom treat them kindly. Hoban's world of anthropomorphic creatures is far from the comforting world of The Wind in the Willows. This is a harsh fable shot through with a sense of mortality (the clockwork must wind down in the end) and a concomitant compassion and awareness of the preciousness of life and the need to grasp moments of joy as they occur. It is simply written yet intensely felt and deeply emotionally affecting, and contains more genuine wisdom than many an adult novel. It's outlook on life, as hard as it can sometimes be, is best summed up by its final line: "'Be happy', said the tramp". It was one of my mother's favourite books. I shall re-read it this Christmas. Peace.

The Awakening

2011-12-16T11:40:00.011Z

WARNING: contains spoilers
The Awakening, written by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy, who also directs, is an English ghost story set in the aftermath of the First World War. Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), a strong-willed and independent modern woman, has taken it upon herself to be the scourge of occult charlatanry and fake spiritualism, exposing the methods of mystification, the table-tapping trickery through which people are fooled into believing that they are once more connected with people who have passed from their lives. She has become something of a minor celebrity, having written a book detailing her investigations which was a great popular success. Having thus gained a widespread reputation as a ghost hunter and demystifying detective, she is hired by a teacher, Robert Mallory (Dominic West), to employ her methods at Rookford, an isolated boys’ boarding school in the north in which he works. The spectral apparition of a boy has been appearing in a succession of school photographs and haunts the night corridors, its presence seemingly leading to the death of one pupil. Florence expects to discover some elaborate schoolboy prank, or sceptic-baiting hoax, and Mallory, in calling upon her services, is also apparently seeking a rational explanation. There are complex currents of repressed emotion running through the school, and she soon finds herself being pulled into their undertow, and finds it difficult to leave or find easy answers to the mystery. When the school breaks up for the holidays, she is left in the great, empty mansion in which the school is housed, with only Mallory, Judd the groundsman (Joseph Mawle), Maud the nurse and housekeeper (played with typical quiet restraint by Imelda Staunton) and one pupil, Tom, for company. As well as whatever else may be present.

The Awakening is a ghost story of self-conscious classicism, with many of the traditional and familiar elements intact. There is an isolated manor house, cheerlessly grey and labyrinthine, with a full compliment of locked rooms and concealed passages and basements; a still, stagnant pool with an old and disused boathouse offering a shadowy, secluded space at its edge; dark woods and twisted rhododhendron thickets bordering the grounds, forbidding places even before night begins to fall; and a journey across bleak and sparsely populated moorland to arrive at the school. It is just the kind of setting in which Florence would expect a supernatural drama to be played out. When we first meet her, she is anonymously taking part in a séance, which unfolds with all the stagy spookiness of old-fashioned cinematic illusion. There is carefully masked illumination to highlight certain actions and direct attention away from others, sepulchral set dressing to evoke a supernatural mood, simple special effects and atmospheric sound, mechanical stage props, and transformative make-up and key lighting to create a suitably cadaverous pallor on the faces of the actors. Florence contemptuously tears open the curtains to throw daylight across the shadowy room, dispelling the otherworldly aura and laying the mechanics of the performance bare. It is as if someone were to slash the cinema screen and stand in front of the projector making mocking hand shadows.

When Florence is invited to Rookford, she anticipates coming across a similarly elaborate theatrical set up, played out on a larger stage. Part of the sense of narrative anticipation lies in the question of how her disbelief will be challenged, and whether it will be worn down. Volk’s script and Murphy’s direction also makes play with the classic ghost story elements, with allusions to various scenes from the relatively few notable cinematic examples of the form. The ball bouncing down the stairs has echoes of similar children’s balls thrown by an invisible hand in Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill, Peter Medak’s The Changeling and Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Pale faces pressed to the windowpane also make an appearance in Charles Gordon Clark’s adaptation of MR James’ Lost Hearts in the Ghost Stories for Christmas sequence, in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, and again in Kill Baby Kill. A figure suddenly turning to reveal hideously deformed features is something of a horror film staple, and is used (on a regular basis) in John Irvin’s Ghost Story and in The Others. Two minor characters, a couple with the surname of Vandermeer, would also appear to tip the hat to contemporary curators of the weird in literature and other forms, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. The all-pervasive sense of knowingness, whilst never spilling over into empty parody or pastiche, is given a rationale in the final revelation that the genuine hauntings also have their theatrical aspect. Its part of the humanisation of the spirit world that its inhabitants are allowed to have a playful side, as much as the children who participate in the original ‘fake’ haunting. The smeared, open-mawed and gaping socketed visage which has caused so much terror is in fact the ghostly boy pulling faces. He is playing a role as much as anyone else.

Stephen Volk’s script is in some respects a period version of his TV series Afterlife with the roles reversed. In Afterlife, Alison is a troubled medium who receives messages from the dead and is sometimes able to see them. She becomes an object of study for Robert, a lecturer in psychology, whose treatment of her as an academic case implies a distanced standpoint of objective non-belief, which begins to shade into active hostility as he becomes more personally involved. He is interested in mediumship as a social and psychological phenomenon rather than in any possibility of a spiritual dimension. Florence is like Robert but is more actively hostile to spiritualism and the paranormal, wanting to expose rather than merely document the practices of mediums, and dispel the superstitious belief in hauntings to which they claim to be sensitive. Believing that they are inherently fraudulent and self-serving, she sees them as purveyors of emotionally manipulative exploitation (the view of many censorious souls towards cinema over the years). Not all of those who are saved from such exploitation are necessarily grateful for her interventions. The woman who was the client at the séance subsequently strikes her. The solace offered by the medium, the hope of renewed contact with someone whom she loved, has been abruptly torn away, leaving her with emptiness once more. The film has a prefaratory text explaining the rise in interest and participation in spiritualism in the wake of the huge loss of life in the war, and through the flu pandemic which coincided with its ending. People cling to necessary illusions in order to make life bearable. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’ as TS Eliot put it in The Four Quartets.

The Awakening also resembles Afterlife in its humanisation of the supernatural, of the ghosts which it manifests. Afterlife, in the course of its two series, used its supernatural premise to unflinchingly explore some of the most traumatic and emotionally shattering experiences of life, confronting fundamental fears and universal anxieties, with death in its varied guises being the ultimate unspoken reality underpinning them all. Need, desire, jealousy, hatred, longing and loneliness – the whole panoply of human emotion – are common on both sides of the spiritual divide. The hauntings in Afterlife and The Awakening give form to feelings which are too overwhelming to bear ordinary expression. In The Awakening, this is at least partly the national trauma and benumbed daze of the war’s aftershock. There is an element of the ghost story which dovetails, to a greater or lesser extent, with the detective story. The nature of a haunting, its origins in a particular event or feeling which has yet to find resolution, has to be discovered. When this discovery has been acted upon, the haunting can be brought to an end, the case closed. Both Florence and Alison are psychic detectives in their own way, and both are ultimately working towards a resolution of unspoken traumas in their own childhoods. The confrontation of initially terrifying intrusions into the rational world allows them to face their fears and find an empathic connection with the inhabitants of the world beyond. Fear is dispelled through understanding and compassion. Alison lays ghosts to rest, helping them to move beyond the material world in which they have become temporarily trapped. Florence is dedicated to laying more material spirits to rest, figuratively whipping away the white sheet to reveal the prankster beneath. Both ultimately face their own ghosts in the form of monstrous parents – Alison her terrifyingly manipulative mother, the manner of whose death is designed to create an unbreakable bond; and Florence her murderous father. Human psychology as much as supernatural emanation is at the heart of these hauntings.

Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofornes

The 1920s setting allows for an examination of the way in which notions of masculinity and femininity, and the roles of men and women, were changing (at some levels of society, anyway). Florence is very much the embodiment of the new woman, self-confident and assertive in pursuing her own ends. She dresses in mannish clothes, is curt and to the point, unconcerned with any need to appear demure and retiring in speech and manner. She smokes cigarettes, not waiting for someone else to light them, and doesn’t even use a holder! She is the primary protagonist of the story in an active way, not in the passive sense of female characters up until this juncture. With her scepticism and sardonic manner, she exhibits traditionally male traits which complement her dress, and go against the idea of women being more ‘sensitive’, ‘open’, and ‘understanding’ (all of which could be qualities ascribed to Alison in Afterlife). She attracts opprobrium from some people she encounters, just as women were viewed with resentment if they tried to maintain their position in the workforce into which they’d been welcomed during the war. The fear of women’s growing independence is dramatically expressed in the huge painting which hangs above the stairs at Rookford: Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofornes, in which the Jewish heroine is in the process of effortfully cutting off the head of the Assyrian leader, whom she has first seduced. A castration image, Freud would no doubt hastily have concluded. It’s a choice of picture that suggests that the single sex school and the household which preceded it is a hotbed of repressed feeling and sexual anxiety. The groundsman at Rookford, Judd, is portrayed as a weaselly man, impotent and cowardly, an anti-Mellors (the groundskeeper in DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover). His only way to display his manhood in the face of Florence’s open disdain is to attempt to rape her. Mallory looks like the standard rugged, heroic figure, handsome and a little distant. But he is also vulnerable, his stutter giving him a hesitancy suggestive of a lack of self-assurance. He becomes the object of her gaze when she finds the peephole bored into the wall of the bathroom, and it is only later on that she willingly offers herself to what she believes to be his regard before the same hole. He prises open his old war wounds until they bleed, a modern day fisher king figure whose unhealing wound is connected with the surrounding malaise.

The war is itself seen as a crisis in Victorian and Edwardian ideals of masculinity. Mallory may take his name from the explorer George Mallory, the mountaineer who died during an ascent of Everest – a heroic man who also shared the open sexuality of the Bloomsbury group, having affairs with both men and women. Then again, it could also refer to Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers books, set in a girls’ boarding school. Judd is a troubling figure. On the one hand, the war is seen as being a prolonged and horrific nightmare, a slaughterground upon which men’s lives were meaninglessly thrown away. It created a new mistrust of the establishment and their motivations and fomented revolution on the continent. On the other hand, Judd, who is cast in an unsympathetic light throughout, is seen as despicable coward (by Florence as much as by anyone else) for having faked injury to escape his fate as expendable cannon fodder. Judd is like Mallory’s shadow self, a manifestation of his fear and loathing, and of his attitude to the war and its aftermath, which remains unspoken. He is representative of the psychological rupture of war, its explosion of meaning and purpose, which are left to lie in rubble and ruin. Judd is always seen outdoors, often in dark, liminal places such as the moorland, the woods or the rhododendron thickets, whereas Mallory is generally to be found within the school building. Mallory’s evident dislike of Judd is first made manifest when the latter is seen up a ladder leaning against the side of the building. It as if he has come to close, pushing up to the boundaries of Mallory’s world. When Judd assaults Florence in the woods, Mallory finds himself mysteriously locked into his room, from which he can only escape to the roof to impotently look out. It’s as if his ignoble, bestial self has been let loose. There’s also a class element to the Mallory/Judd dualism. Judd, like Lawrence’s Mellors, is a working class figure with a pronounced northern accent, and Mallory’s disease with him is partially a reflection of this fact. Mallory’s wartime suffering, horrific through it is, is given a certain noble cast. It’s the suffering immortalised in verse by the likes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon – the sensitive officer class. Judd was supposed to be one of the foot soldiers who died namelessly in the mud, their bodies never to be recovered. That he evades this anonymous fate results in his being held in contempt, not least by Florence, his survival regarded as a negation of his manhood. The malaise of violent masculine authority is traced back to the paternal atrocity which is the singular event lying at the heart of the Rookford hauntings. The roots of this individual tragedy, which has scarred Florence’s life and which she has suppressed for years, are thus linked with the wider international tragedy of war, which has affected her as it has affected everyone, directly or indirectly. Mallory is trying to suppress his memories of the war; his fellow teacher Malcolm McNair, a man with a bitter aspect, may also be haunted by it, his persistent hacking cough perhaps a constant physical reminder of a trench gas attack.

Haunted houses are often repositories of repressed emotion, physical edifices built from unconscious materials. Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, and Robert Wise’s adaptation of it as The Haunting is a classic example, with the house itself seeming to possess a malign persona which amplifies and absorbs Eleanor’s self-negating, unassertive character until she is a spectral aspect of its unnatural architecture, a lonely ghost walking its corridors. Similarly, in Nigel Kneale’s TV play The Stone Tape, the bricks of an old building act as a kind of receptor for violent emotion, a storage battery for terror and nameless dread. In The Awakening, the house becomes a metaphorical locale for the attempt to strip Florence of her self-assurance and wordliness, to return her to a pre-war notion of female domestication. Like Eleanor, Florence is confronted with her own underlying anxieties and nagging sense of self-doubt. Her boyfriend, whose offer of marriage, made from the front, she rejected, has died in the war. Her choice of independence is thus shaded with guilt, as if she was somehow, through her rejection, responsible for his death.

A large doll’s house takes on a sinister import as the film progresses, with Florence reluctant to approach too closely and see what’s inside. When she does, she has the ontologically vertiginous experience of seeing a direct representation of what she has experienced, including a figure of a woman peering into a small doll’s house. It seems as if some godgame is being played out, the demiurge of the house toying with her sense of self and her perception of the nature of reality. This vertigo, of the world as she knows it receding rapidly before her eyes, is also experienced by the lakeside, where she loses the keepsake given to her by her dead boyfriend. Gazing into the water, she impulsively rolls in, sinking below the surface. Is it a suicide attempt, or has she been drawn in by some mesmeric force? The metaphor of the doll’s house as representing women’s imprisonment within the domestic sphere was most famously explored by Henrik Ibsen in his play The Doll’s House. Here, it serves a similar purpose, Florence being slowly led towards permanent entrapment within Rookford’s walls. It is partly her discover of an old doll containing a musical box which triggers her memories of what had happened to her as a child in this house. The sounding of the box’s chimes had been what alerted her father, in the midst of a murderous psychotic breakdown, to her hiding place. For him, she was his fragile doll, and with the disruption of his perfect domestic set up, occasioned by his own philandering, he intends to smash everything that was a part of it. The housekeeper, Maud, who was also there in the house during Florence’s childhood, desires to have her two spirit children with her forever, and attempts to poison Florence as she has poisoned herself, so that they will be a spectral family, a permanent aspect of the house. She is expressing, in extreme form, the idea that the woman’s place is in the home. A letter in the January 2012 Sight and Sound, responding to the previous month’s review, pointed to the ambiguity of the film’s ending, in which no-one seems to see Florence as she walks through the school, term now reconvened and the corridors full of bustling activity. We never actually see whether Mallory succeeds in rescuing her, and for a moment wander whether she is actually dead. But there seem to be definite indications to the contrary. For a start, she has regained her confident air, striding in a self-assured way with a smile upon her face. The chaplain, who talks about her without acknowledging her presence, has treated her with distanced disapproval from the start. She leaves the building and gets a cigarette from Mallory, which he lights for her, an acknowledgement of a degree of comfortable dependence. Her indulgence in a material pleasure such as smoking gives us firm assurance that she is still in the land of the living. And her independence is confirmed when she calls for a car to take her away from Rookford – awakened and out in the wide world again.

On the Trail of Arthur Conan Doyle

2011-12-09T00:35:00.012Z

I seem of late to be haphazardly falling in the footsteps of Arthur Conan Doyle, happening upon memorials marking various moments of greater or lesser import in his life. A couple of weekends ago, making our way back from the Royal William Yard in the Stonehouse area of Plymouth, we started to notice small lengths of coppery metal embedded in the paving stones of Durnford Street, a late 18th century road lined with smart Georgian terraces. They bore inscriptions which, upon closer peering inspection, revealed themselves to be select sayings of Sherlock Holmes. These fragmented quotations passing by beneath our feet revealed various facets of his complex character: his rationalism and empirical scientific methodology; his fear of or indifference towards women; his need of excitement and danger to stimulate a mind too easily clouded by melancholia; his sense of drama and love of rhetorical flourish; and his underlying sense of moral order. The rationale behind this seemingly random street decoration became apparent as we reached number 96, where a plaque informed us that Durnford Street was where Conan Doyle had first set up in medical practice. In fact, this practice was at number 1 Durnford Street, but since that building no longer exists in its original state, number 96’s well-preserved façade serves to give us an idea as to what it would have looked like.

Conan Doyle had studied medicine at Edinburgh University, from which he had graduated in 1881. He signed up for a brief and unhappy stint as a ship’s medical officer aboard the Magumba, part of the African Steam Navigation Company’s fleet bound for the west coast of the continent. After this uncertain start to his career, he was only too happy to receive an invitation from George Tournavine Budd, a flamboyant senior student at Edinburgh whom Doyle had become friends with, to join him in a new practice he was setting up in Plymouth. This was opened in Durnford Street in April 1882, and Doyle stayed with Budd and his wife in a grand residence in Elliot Terrace, an imposing mid-nineteenth century block of white-washed housing on the north west side of the Hoe commanding a sweeping view over the Sound. The luxurious appointment of this dwelling is indicative of the extravagant standards of living which Budd, the scion of a wealthy medical dynasty whose profession he inherited as a birthright, was accustomed to enjoying. He was, by all accounts (including Doyle’s), something of a rogue, albeit a periodically charming and frequently brilliant one. He prescribed medicines which, thanks to lucrative deals with pharmaceutical companies, were his major source of income, with carefree abandon. Doyle disapproved of such flagrant profiteering and their partnership, and friendship, soon hit the rocks. Doyle took a steamer from Millbay Docks sailing to Portsmouth in June, and set up in a practice of his own in neighbouring Southsea. It was here that he began writing in earnest, producing what would become A Study In Scarlet, published in 1888 and marking the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. So did the highly colourful George Budd have any influence on the creation of the great detective? It’s usually said that the primary figure who inspired Holmes’ character was Dr Joseph Bell, whose lectures Doyle attended at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, and under whom he worked as an intern. But perhaps some of Budd’s self-assurance and wayward methods of diagnosis, his offhand manner with his patients, also coloured his creation. The divergence in personality between his eccentricity, noisy flashes of inspiration and ostentatious display and Doyle’s quiet and methodical manner may certainly have informed the odd couple equilibrium of the Holmes and Watson partnership, even if that proved more successful and longer lasting. It might seem a trifle opportunistic to memorialise such a brief stay in such an expansive way (not just one house, but a whole street). But we are talking about the creator of possibly the most famous fictional character in the world. The impulse to draw attention to any connection, no matter how tenuous, is nigh on irresistible.

Durnford Street, Plymouth

Exploring the rather more grandiose Georgian streets of Marylebone in London a few months earlier, we came across Conan Doyle’s old consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street. This was marked by a plaque in green rather than the more commonly seen blue, put up by Westminster City Council and the Arthur Conan Doyle Society. Doyle had left his Southsea practice to set up as an opthalmologist in London in March of 1891, having had a brief period of study in Vienna. He’d had to swiftly concede that his grasp of German was woefully inadequate to the task of comprehending the lectures he was attending. Nevertheless, he felt he had sufficient knowledge, combined with practical experience from his work in Southsea, to establish a practice. He installed himself and his family in apartments in Montague Street, opposite the British Library, and set out to his Wimpole Street rooms across the divide of Tottenham Court Road each morning. He was later to claim that he had virtually no patients, with a waiting room in which no-one waited, and whilst this was undoubtedly an exaggeration, he did find himself with plenty of time to write. The literary endeavour to which he was most committed at this time was his novel The White Company, a lengthy historical romance of noble derring do set during the Hundred Years War in the reign of Edward III. It was a great success during his lifetime, a bestseller for a good while, but has not lasted well, now appearing turgid and overburdened with descriptive period detail.

2 Wimpole Street, London

He had already published two Sherlock Holmes novels by this time, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, which had found a degree of success. In 1891, whilst working as an opthalmologist in his Wimpole Street consulting room, he submitted two short stories featuring Holmes and Watson, A Scandal In Bohemia and The Red-Headed League, to the newly launched Strand Magazine. The Strand was first published in December 1890 and combined journalistic articles, profiles of well-known figures and copious illustrations. But at its heart was fiction, and its literary editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, immediately recognised that he was onto a good thing with Doyle’s Holmes stories and commissioned him, with a handsome financial incentive, to write four more. The first two stories, published in July and August, were a huge success. The mass popularity which the Sherlock Holmes short stories so swiftly achieved was intimately bound up with their regular publication in The Strand, and it was from this point that the worldwide Holmes phenomenon blossomed. It could have been tragically short-lived, however. Doyle caught a bout of influenza, epidemic throughout London, and a disease which could claim a high mortality rate in Victorian times. He recovered, however, and whilst recuperating made the decision to abandon his career as a medical practitioner to concentrate on his writing. By June, he and his family had moved south of the river to a sizeable villa in South Norwood. His opthalmological endeavours in Wimpole Street had lasted barely 3 months, but these rooms can make a good claim to be the birthplace of Sherlock Holmes as a literary phenomenon and iconic fictional character.

The College of Psychic Studies, Queensberry Place, Kensington

The College of Psychic Studies was one of the buildings open to the public during this year’s London Open House weekend, and as it fell on our route between two other destinations, we stopped off to explore. What lover of supernatural fiction, of psychic detective stories featuring Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, could resist such an enticing open invitation. We were shown around by the amiable president, who pointed out the spirit trumpets, ouija boards and planchettes, relics of old methods consigned to historical display the cabinets. We passed many a portrait of former august members, a well as framed examples of automatic writing, channelled drawing and painting, and photographs supposedly capturing ectoplasmic manifestations in full spew. The College was originally known as the London Spiritualist Alliance, and was founded in 1883 at the behest of the wonderfully named Rev. Stainton Moses. It changed its name to the College of Psychic Science in 1955, finally becoming the College of Psychic Studies in 1970. Conan Doyle had long been fascinated by Spiritualism and the occult, although he initially maintained a position of determined scepticism. He had rejected the Catholic faith of his parents, but was evidently searching for a belief system to replace it with. He took a brief interest in Madam Blavatsky’s theosophical movement, which seemed to hold an attraction for many writers and artists, but concluded that her ideas were too vague and ill-formed. He needed something which offered more certainty. In 1887, he attended a séance with a medium who he felt revealed personal information, in the form of automatic writing, which no-one else could have known about. From this point onward, he began to adopt a more open attitude towards Spiritualism and its claims to offer channels of communication with the spirits of the dead.

Sir Oliver Lodge - tuning in to the voices in the Aether

He remained circumspect about his developing beliefs for many years, aware of the potential damage it might do to his reputation, but ‘came out’ as a Spiritualist at a meeting of the London Spiritualist Alliance in the autumn of 1917, chaired by his friend Sir Oliver Lodge, a fellow member of The Ghost Club, another organisation dedicated to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. Lodge is a fascinating character himself, a proponent of the theory of the all embracing medium of the Aether and pioneer of radio wave generation and transmission. These new phenomena, of disembodied voices floating in an invisible and apparently dimensionless space, were themselves suggestive of spirit worlds, a conjunction of the worlds of science and the occult. The period of the First World War saw such an overwhelming loss of life, both in the trenches and as a result of the pandemic of Spanish flu which swept the country, that many sought solace in the belief held out by Spiritualists and other mystics that those who had been so suddenly and savagely taken away could be contacted, and final goodbyes properly exchanged. Lodge lost his son Raymond in the war in 1915, and wrote several heartbreaking books claiming to detail his communications with him in the afterlife. Doyle, who had lost his sister Annette to influenza in 1890, saw his son Kingsley die from the flu in 1918, followed shortly afterwards by his brother Innes. The emotional impulse to find evidence for a continuation of life beyond death was clearly very strong. He had maintained a patriotic view of the war as a noble enterprise right up until the end, all evidence to the contrary, and wrote a six volume military history, whose final instalment was published in 1920, and which has been largely forgotten, so uncritical is its approach. This bullish outlook is reflected in his stance on Spiritualism, too. Once he had set his mind on something and determined his views to his own satisfaction, nothing was likely to divert him from his dogmatic path.

Conan Doyle became an energetic evangelist for Spiritualism, travelling the world to spread the word, engaging in lively debates which, as a highly accomplished speaker, he invariably won. He wrote regular articles for Light, the journal of the London Spiritualist Alliance, and was its president for much of the 1920s. The Association became more firmly established geographically when it found a permanent base in 1925 in a four storey Victorian terraced house (in the Second Empire style, we were informed by the president, himself and architect) in Queensberry Place, Kensington. A year later, Conan Doyle, then in the midst of his presidency, published his compendious 684 page History of Spiritualism, which no doubt graces the shelves of the College’s extensive library, alongside such occult volumes as the Malleus Maleficarum, Madame Blavatsky’s and the output, fictional and (purportedly) otherwise, of adherents of the Order of the Golden Dawn such as WB Yeats, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. All this in addition to works by less esoteric and more homely modern mediums in the Doris Stokes line, more intent on bringing a little comfort into people’s lives than penetrating the great mysteries.

The Cottingley Fairies

Conan Doyle’s wholehearted embrace of Spiritualism made him a tireless and forceful advocate. But his single-minded absorption in the belief system he’d chosen to adopt, and his refusal to countenance dissenting voices led him to fall frequently into injudicious credulity. He seemed at times to be setting out to embody GK Chesterton’s dictum that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything’. This could prove embarrassing to those he was vocally supporting, the publicity which he inevitably attracted subjecting them to more ridicule than they already received. His best remembered stumble into foolishness and absurd gullibility involved his validation, in the December 1920 edition of The Strand, of the photographs taken by two girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, of fairies capering at the bottom of their Yorkshire garden in the village of Cottingley. Certain as ever of his rightness in the matter, he later elaborated on his position, developing fanciful notions of the nature of fairy realms as if they were real insights, empirically arrived at. His 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies was tersely described by Russell Miller in his biography The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle as ‘undoubtedly the nadir of his non-fictional work’, sounding embarrassed on his behalf. But Arthur Conan Doyle’s tenure as president of the London Spiritualist Association and his support of its work in the face of ridicule and even legal action (he appeared as a supporting witness at the trial of two mediums, Claire Cantlon and Mercy Phillimore, accused of vagrancy under an obscure law defining fortune tellers as beggars) means that he is still a presiding presence at Queensberry Place. There is a dedicated Arthur Conan Doyle Room in which a signed photographic portrait prominently hangs alongside other memorabilia.

Conan Doyle himself turned up in some footage shot at his Sussex home, playing with his dogs, in a short preface to the 1925 film of his novel The Lost World. This played in the Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre with an atmospheric synth score by John Garden. It’s chiefly memorable, Wallace Beery’s splendidly grumpy and pugnacious portrayal of Professor Challenger aside, for Willis O’Brien’s stop motion dinosaurs. Long before Spielberg’s Lost World, with its CGI herds of sauropods, O’Brien had massed hordes of triceratops and allosauruses stampeding across a plateau to escape the fires of an erupting volcano, the predators occasionally taking advantage of the panic and leaping onto the backs of the herbivores.

Alongside chance encounters with the geographical markers of Conan Doyle’s life, career and beliefs and glimpses of him on film, I’ve been enjoying Jeremy Brett’s wonderful portrayal of the great detective. It’s a wilfully eccentric performance which makes of Holmes a self-conscious actor at the centre of his own drama, full of manic gestures followed by lengthy funks. Edward Hardwicke’s Watson is the long-suffering friend who has to put up with his demanding and inconsiderate behaviour in the knowledge that it is the necessary condition for the continued functioning of his remarkable mind. In modern terms, Brett’s Holmes would be classified as having borderline behavioural difficulties and obsessive compulsive traits. In The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Holmes fakes a serious and potentially fatal fever, hiding the spurious nature of his illness from Watson in order to ensure the authenticity of the Doctor’s feelings when calling on the aid of a dangerous and sharp-witted adversary. His pitiful, whimpering requests for Watson’s ministrations, broadcast from the couch across which he has limply draped, says much about the relationship, however. Brett’s Holmes is a needy character, evincing an emotional dependence on Watson which he can never fully admit to. In The Golden Pince-Nez, Watson is absent (and here the TV adaptation differs significantly from Doyle’s story), his place taken by Charles Gray’s imperious Mycroft Holmes, very much the solicitous elder brother, naturally assuming a position of superiority. Holmes is all at sea, and relies on his brother’s prompts to prod him in the right direction and get to the bottom of the case (another featuring the settling of old scores incurred in far flung climes on English soil). I love the scene at the end of The Red Circle in which we see Holmes standing at the back of a theatre box, unobserved by any other, listening to a dramatic operatic aria. This is a momentary coda to the TV episode which draws from the final line of Conan Doyle’s story, in which Holmes says to Watson ‘by the way, it is not eight o’clock, and a Wagner night at Covent Garden! If we hurry, we might be in time for the second act’. Brett’s Holmes’ eyes are rhapsodically closed, his body overwhelmed by waves of painful emotion as he listens to the music. He suggests a character of great complexity, self-consciously concealing its troubled depths with a mask of cold, ascetic rationalism and analytical rigour.

The adventures of Holmes and Watson are as popular as ever, as demonstrated by their transportation into 21st century London in Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ BBC series and Anthony Horowitz’s new and warmly received Holmes novel The House of Silk. We’ve also been selling Holmes audiobooks online at the Exeter Oxfam Music shop on a regular basis recently, read by the Actorish likes of Roy Marsden and Christopher Lee (who told the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, appropriately enough). We’ve still got a couple left at the moment, both read in the distinctive and commanding tones of Robert Hardy. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes takes four stories from Conan Doyle’s second collection: The Adventures of the Yellow Face, The Stockbroker's Clerk, The 'Gloria Scott', and culminating in The Final Problem,Conan Doyle’s futile attempt to kill his creation off in a struggle to the death above the Reichenbach Falls. There are also four stories from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, which really was the final collection of tales featuring the great detective, published in 1927: The Adventures Of The Three Gables, The Three Garridebs, The Lion's Mane, and The Retired Colourman. A further selection taken from various collections features The Adventures of the Three Students, The Sussex Vampire, The Greek Interpreter, and Charles Augustus Milverton. These are stories which really benefit from a characterful reading, just as the illustrations by Sidney Paget and others added an extra dimension to them in The Strand. Holmes and Watson are always just waiting for someone to conjure them from Doyle’s undemonstrative prose and bring them to life – so that once more, the game will be afoot.

Wire at the Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter

2011-12-07T00:36:00.003Z

And Exeter on the 30th

Wire played at the Phoenix Arts Centre last week, their first visit to Exeter since 1979. They were supported by Talk Normal, a female guitar and drums duo from Brooklyn with the immaculate new/No wave stage names (at least I am presuming they’re assumed) Sarah Register and Andrya Ambryo. Ambryo plays circular, roiling rhythms on her spartan drumkit, her tubthumping stuttering into off-kilter patterns as it incorporates pauses, hopsteps and added beats. Sometimes she stands up to beat the drums, bringing to mind the steady pounding of Moe Tucker with the Velvet Undergroung (if this is any longer a cool comparison to make after her recent born again Tea Party outburst) or a more frenzied version of Mimi Sparhawk from Low. Her drumming gives the music a tribal feel, a ritualistic air furthered by her occasional sharing of shouted call and response vocals, directed upwards to the pendant mic, and the semi-darkness in which they were shrouded for the whole set, relieved only by low and baleful red lighting. Register played her guitar as a white noise generator, turning up the distortion and reverb to produce a more or less constant wave of sound which flooded around the propulsive drum patterns. She intoned rather than sang over the top, vocals curt and unmelodic. They finished with style by turning the background interval music back on whilst the feedback was still dying down, and immediately set about packing their equipment away, dissipating the low-lit performance mystique which they had built up. It was only a show, after all.

Wire wandered on with little ceremony and got down to business straight away, with no time wasted on introductions. They were a trio tonight, with Bruce Gilbert having called it a day, possibly for good. This left Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Gotobed, although is should be added that they were joined on this tour by Matt Simms. He looked like he’d arrived from a different musical world, another band, another era. Hunched in ecstatic absorption over his guitar, his long hair covering his face, he’d have seemed equally at home crunching out riffs and launching into heavy solos in a stoner rock band. But he filled out the sound to good effect and remained self-effacingly in the shadows at the side of the stage. The regular Wire trio remained bracingly efficient and chary of rock gestures, keeping communication to a minimum and swiftly progressing from one number to the next. Bass player Graham Lewis, a fashion school graduate from a while back, sported a fetching Scottish Glengarry cap in recognition of St Andrews day. Colin Newman looked bookish and studious in his spectacles, referring to what looked like a notebook on a small lectern at the end of each song. At the end of the show, he lifted it up and it became evident to me, as it probably had to everyone else from the very beginning, that it was a compact piece of digital wizardry, the flicking over of pages really the closing and opening of programmes or adjustment of settings. Robert Gotobed looked ascetically gaunt as ever, wearing a vest top in anticipation of the sustained athletic task of keeping up his concise, driving rhythms with unflagging precision.

Wire have self-consciously subjected themselves to many transformations over their stop-start history, with the result that you never know quite what you’re likely to hear at one of their concerts. They combine the cerebral and the visceral, producing music of the head and the gut. They also occasionally produce music of the heart, although their songs are generally too lateral, inquisitive and playful to be openly emotional. There will always be many, both young and old, yearning of a blast of the early, angular punk, a nostalgia which is antithetical to Wire’s progressive ethos. The refusal to retread old ground is what has kept them together, despite several hiatuses. When they reached the end of one particular road, they went their separate ways, meeting up again when they’d found a new route worth exploring. The original and retro punks get a fair sampling of what they’re here for tonight, however, resulting in an outbreak of pogoing at the front of the hall. The likes of Pink Flag are still startling in their stripped down brevity. They say what they have to say and then stop, without indulging in unnecessary repetition. The abrupt end of some songs can still bring you up short, though. Drill, from their second phase in the 80s, is a song which is elastic in its timing. It relentlessly pounds towards an endlessly and tantalisingly delayed resolution, reaching towards the conclusion of a verse before an anticipated chorus which never arrives. On this night, it didn’t stretch out into one of the lengthier excursions; this was a medium-sized Drill, just long enough to exert its pummelling effect of stunned hypnosis. You either give in to it or it drives you to distraction. The former is the preferable choice.

Red Barked Tree

It was the more melodic and even poppy side of Wire which came to the fore on this occasion, however. I sense that this is the mood which prevails on their recent album Red Barked Tree, although I confess I’ve yet to hear it. Newman’s tuneful ear and pleasantly light vocal style were much in evidence as he became the de facto frontman. He sported an attractive sky blue guitar whose pastel colour seemed to suit this more open, less aggressive aspect of their music. It also pointed to the importance which visual and graphic style has always played in Wire’s art (and art is an apposite word to bandy about when talking of the group). The guitar sound was also light, lent an airy jangle by whatever technology was being used to shape it. The likes of Map Ref 41°N 93°W and Outdoor Miner sound like the more adventurous end of early 80s pop, exploratory (as Map Ref’s cartographic title suggests) without being afraid of lyricism. The lyrics are also allusive, playful, revelling in the sound of words and sentences, and sometimes plain good fun. Having said that, the sound balance, or possibly just the nature of my hearing, meant that I couldn’t make out many of the words on this night. Lewis took the vocal lead on a couple of songs, his deeper baritone, with its echoes of John Foxx, goth scowlers and even Phil Oakey contrasting nicely with Newman’s lighter tones.

Newman replaced his blue guitar with an oval-bodied white model, familiar from Pink Flag days and photos, for a few numbers, which betokened a shift to a more raucous sound. He became a little more animated towards the end, and both he and Lewis put aside their distanced stance to exchange a few words with the audience, evincing a genuine sense that they were having a good time. They played the rock game sufficiently to come back for two encores. The raw fierceness of the Send LP was reserved until the end, with 99.9 (I think) exploding into a splintered roar, its dying feedback squall sculpted into howling electronic noise, sending us all out with ringing ears – the music reverberating beyond the venue, fading away sometime in the night, in dreams.

The Clock Keeps Ticking: 11.15 'til 12.45

2011-12-06T15:17:00.014Z

Peter Fonda about to discard time in Easy Rider

I returned to Plymouth and The British Art Show 7 a couple of weekends ago to see another segment of Christian Marclay’s 24 hour film The Clock, whose screened collage of time contained and observed within movies and TV programmes remains congruent with the daily passage of time in the real world. Having previously witnessed the events of the late afternoon, this time I caught the period between 11.15 and 12.45. One of my speculations, voiced in previous comments below, was answered. Peter Fonda looks meaningfully at his wristwatch in Easy Rider before discarding it onto the rocky New Mexican ground, affording us a clear glimpse of the time: 11.38. Young Lukas Haas also attempts to cast aside the tyranny of time in the TV movie David and Lisa, after first having told his psychologist, played by Sidney Poitier, that he has invented an atomic watch which will tell the precise time for centuries. Poitier suggests that people might not want to be constantly reminded of the passing of their lives, which leads Haas to rail against time and mortality, finally throwing something at the grandfather clock in the corner of the office and shattering its face. It’s also clock smashing time in the Laurel and Hardy short Dirty Work, in which Stan, inadvisably left to look after the fireplace end of their chimneysweeping enterprise, knocks a heavy carriage clock off the mantelpiece. His frantic efforts to silence its loud and incessant chiming culminate in his wrapping it in canvas and bludgeoning it with a handy nearby shovel. Stan also wanders vacuously through the corridors of the County Hospital in which Ollie has been laid up, an absently approaching nemesis with a bag of hard boiled eggs and nuts in his hand. The clock in the lobby behind him clearly indicates the time, counting down the minutes until his friend will be plunged into yet another nice mess. A recovering Ollie will later ruefully and wearily repeat Stan’s vaguely stated reason for visiting at this time: ‘You had nothing better to do, so you thought you’d come and see me’.

Stan tries to silence time - Dirty Work

Late morning and early afternoon seems to be a time when mortality preys on the mind, perhaps a side effect of low blood sugar mood dips as lunchtime looms. Columbo has a blood pressure check up at the doctor’s, admittedly more to test out a few theories requiring medical know how than to allay any health fears. There are a couple of chill post mortem scenes in grey mortuaries in which slabside analyses are made before small gatherings of ruminating detectives, and the time of official conclusions noted. There is an agonisingly drawn out wait as the bureaucracy of execution is observed, leading up to the release of gas into a sealed chamber, ending a young woman’s life. Another life is ended as a body drops through the trapdoor of a gallows with shocking suddenness. Emmanuelle Beart returns as a very solid ghost, a revenant returning to the house in which she committed suicide in Jacques Rivette’s L’Histoire de Marie et Julien. Colin Firth’s college professor in A Single Man disconsolately addresses his bored students on the theme of anxiety in literature, the sense that a life can pass in which no-one listens to or really cares about you or anything you say. He is evidently not talking in the abstract, but articulating his own feelings.

Going through the motions - Bergman's Winter Light

This is the part of the day when time hangs heavy for some, and seems to move with a weighty slowness, as if affected by a dense gravity. In The Breakfast Club, the rebellious students set off a group whistle-along of Colonel Bogie, the theme from A Bridge Over the River Kwai, to alleviate the dullness of their confinement in the library. The church organist in Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light glances at his watch whilst he plays, the pitifully meagre congregation muttering the words of the hymn whilst Gunnar Bjornstrand’s priest, his faith hollowed out and scoured away, goes through the minimal motions of religious observance once more. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the elevator carrying Michael Rennie’s celestial visitor and Patricia Neal, the woman whose son has been helping him, judders to a halt. Asking her what time it is, she replies ‘almost twelve’, and he casually notes that the worldwide stoppage that he has instigated through ‘neutralising’ all electrical activity has taken effect. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf slumps in a shadowy café, hiding away from the daylit world outside. He glances listlessly up at the clock, but pays it little heed, his day lacking any sense of urgency or purpose. Humphrey Bogart looks nervous and twitchy in a cheap apartment room, waiting for a fateful knock upon the door. When it comes, he hesitantly walks over and opens the door, but we never get to see what is on the other side. The Clock does this with several sequences, teasingly creating tension without resolution and making you want to discover the original film to find out just what does happen. This is certainly the case with Five Minutes to Live, the bank heist thriller in which Johnny Cash’s psychotic hoodlum holds the manager’s wife hostage, waiting for the phone call from his accomplice which will tell him the ransom money has been successfully transferred from the bank vaults. As the minutes tick away, events at the bank spin out of control, and the hapless employee who has been brought along for the ride is left saying ‘you don’t know what you’ve just done’. Does the wife live, or does mad Johnny get to pull the trigger which he is so evidently eager to squeeze?

The end of time - Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone

The bank is one of the hubs of the daytime business world, the centre through which the flow of commerce is channelled, and it is such a place in which Burgess Meredith’s meek and unassuming clerk works in Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone story Time Enough At Last. A bibliophile whose greatest joy in life is reading, he is never afforded the chance either at work or at home, having to snatch what quiet moments he can. One such involves taking his lunch in the sealed environs of the bank vault, and it is here that he is shaken by a sudden seismic tremor. He emerges to find himself the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, the city a blasted ruin around him. Wandering about in a state of existential fear which is typical of most characters in the Twilight Zone, he talks to himself and begins to go mad with loneliness, until he stumbles across the remains of the city library. It’s here we find him in The Clock, surrounded by a literary calendar made of neatly piled up books divided to fill the months of his solitary years. ‘At last I have time’, he says with a resurgence of hope. Marclay doesn’t show us the conclusion of this conte cruel, however, in which this terribly poor sighted man drops his glasses in his excitement, smashing the lenses. ‘It’s not fair’, he quietly whines to himself, ‘it’s not fair’. The effective loss of literacy marks the final and absolute collapse of civilisation.

The rhythms of the business day are also felt in Wall Street, in which Charlie Sheen’s eager yuppie, after an endless wait, is told that he can have five minutes with Mr Gecko. He adjusts his appearance in the mirror, and gears himself up to make an instant and lasting impact. In The Hudsucker Proxy, head of the company Waring Hudsucker sits at the far end of the long boardroom table high up in the glass and steel corporate tower over which he has presided. He has a slightly unhinged smile fixed upon his face, and is psyching himself up to use the table as a runway, launching himself through the window and into a brief flight down to the sidewalk many stories below. We don’t witness this plummeting flight in The Clock, but see Paul Newman’s cold and calculating corporate shark peering down through the broken window (which, given the cartoonish nature of much of the film, might as well be in the shape of a wildly leaping, spreadeagled man), happy at the successful conclusion of this board meeting. At the other end of the business spectrum, a rank of assembly line workers mechanically rise in perfect formation to make way for the next shift in Rene Clair’s A Nous La Liberte.

If this is the time at which the wheels of commerce are already busily turning, for others, more attuned to a nocturnal clock, the day is barely beginning. We see Paul Newman again, younger and in a white vest rather than a grey suit, sprawling in bed and marvelling at the fact that his companion is up and working on her art. Another bleary eyed couple pull back the sheets, she commenting that she is normally an early morning person, and that, as he clearly is not, this is never going to work out. In another room in another film, in a seedy, crowded apartment block, a woman awakes, sees the lateness of the hour and immediately starts to hustle her bedside partner out, panicking that he might be seen by her returning husband. The pleasures of the previous night have faded, their memory rejected in a desperate rush to reassert a façade of dull daytime normalcy. Forest Whittaker’s lone urban samurai in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog gears himself up for the day with some rooftop zen routines. Meanwhile, Bill Murray’s neurosis-ridden Bob leaves his apartment in the late morning, bidding goodbye to his beloved goldfish Gill and forcing himself out into the world in What About Bob?

Timing L'Arlesienne - The Prisoner

The hours in which the day has built into full bustling business is also the time for spying and detection, for observing purposeful forays and transactions, piecing them all together to form coherent stories. We see Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoin Doinel in Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, furtively dodging through the streets of 1960s Paris as he follows the woman identified by his client at the detective agency which he has haphazardly ended up working for. He is the most amateurish of detectives, peering over newspapers, dashing into doorways and slowing and accelerating his pace in the most conspicuously suspect manner imaginable. In Laura, Dana Andrews’ seedy, down-at-heel detective looks disinterestedly at Vincent Price’s collection of fine art objects, a sneer irremovably fixed to his face. When he meets the unctuously eager to please Price, he doesn’t bother to disguise his proletarian contempt for such fancy display. Columbo, meanwhile, goes through his deceptively polite and apologetic rounds of questioning, sidling towards the seemingly inconsequential but crucial point. Here, he examines the identical LPs of Bizet’s L’Arlesienne from which Number Six has assiduously sampled the opening motif in the Village shop’s listening booth, checking his watch as he does so (the time is twenty to twelve). Surely there must be some hidden message. ‘You say he was timing them?’ he asks the shopkeeper. Some variation in tempo, perhaps. Patrick Macnee’s Steed prowls around a seemingly deserted airfield in The Avengers, the silence broken by the sound of a receding milk float which draws his attention to the dead body of Roy Kinnear’s amiably bumbling tramp. In The Prisoner episode Hammer Into Anvil, Patrick Cargill’s thoroughly unpleasant Number Two is driven to a state of paranoid apoplexy by Number Six’s apparent communications with his superiors. Another eerily deserted setting forms the backdrop for the 80s Twilight Zone revival story A Matter of Minutes, in which Adam Arkin and Karen Austin find themselves shifted four hours ahead of the progress of present time. The familiar elements of the town in which they live are being assembled around them, reality seemingly a hastily constructed set with props introduced as required. How will they get back in phase with the normal flow of time? Or will they be edited out now they have glimpsed what goes on behind the curtain?

Traintime in Grand Central - The Palm Beach Story

Railways and Westerns both continue to feature, with the two sometimes combining. Claudette Colbert’s looks around the vast temple of Grand Central Station in Preston Sturge’s The Palm Beach Story, looking for the train on which she can escape from New York and her husband, and the person who’ll provide the money for a ticket. Tom Courtenay’s back stage dogsbody pleads with the engine driver to delay the departure of the train for a few moments to await the arrival of The Actors in The Dresser. He receives short shrift, and the train begins to steam off, only to shriek to a halt at the commanding thespian tones of Albert Finney’s Shakespearean veteran, whose bellowing cry of ‘stop that train’ echoes throughout the station. Colin Firth plays the characteristically flustered and awkward Englishman standing on a London platform with Irene Jacob, both realising that their respective friends aren’t going to turn up for their holiday and deciding to take the train together anyway. In a horrifying scene from Richard Lester’s sceptical San Francisco summer of love drama Petulia, a Mexican boy runs from the ticket booth at which Julie Christie is buying him a ticket to send him back to his own country, dashes out between the ranks of Greyhound buses idling at the station, and is run down by a passing car.

The time of the accident - Petulia

In No Country For Old Men, Josh Brolin’s modern day cowboy waits in the desert with a pair of binoculars, looking to observe the outcome of a drug running exchange. In Once Upon A Time In The West, Henry Fonda black-clad villain paces warily through a deserted Western town, trying to pick out the hidden bounty-hunting gunmen who are trying to kill him. Charles Bronson looks laconically on, remarking ‘time sure flies – it’s already past twelve’, thus drawing Fonda’s attention to the shadow of a rifle falling on the face of the clock painted onto the side of a building past which he’s walking. It marks out time where none yet exists on clocks without hands, in a frontier civilisation still in the process of being constructed. The pendulum propels time towards a fateful midday in High Noon, which provides a climactic moment around which others gather in the countdown to the clock striking twelve, a northward pointing meeting of the hands which seems designed for dramatic conclusions.

Carbine sundial - Once Upon A Time In The West

As we cross the threshold of midday, we move into the flexible period of lunchtime. Meryl Streep presides over a family table reluctantly and sullenly gathered. ‘Say grace’, she prompts, to which her teenage daughter sardonically bites back ‘grace’, plunging headlong into her food. Two Chinese men wordlessly chow down bowls of noodles in a streetside bar, chopsticks a blur of motion. Dustin Hoffmann’s autistically precise Raymond in Rain Man notes ‘of course, lunch time 12.30’. His yuppie brother Charlie, played with consummate narcissism by Tom Cruise, is too busy striking deals on the phone to pay him any attention, and Raymond marks the passing of that all important median dining moment, halfway between 12 and 1, with a note of rising distress at routing and structure disrupted: ‘of course, now 12.31’. Presumably if we’d stayed on a little longer, we might have seen the pub lunch (six pints of beer and four packets of peanuts) which Arthur and Ford down and scoff in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as they await the end of the world, Ford making the profound observation that ‘time is an illusion; Lunchtime doubly so’.

Watches and clocks take on an elevated emblematic or symbolic importance at various points. Christopher Walken’s imposing general tells a young boy the rather insalubrious tale of how his father’s watch has been kept safe through years of war and imprisonment before passing it on to him, a precious heirloom bearing a weight of family history. Matt Damon and Alain Delon play Patricia Highsmith’s amoral character Tom Ripley in adaptations of The Talented Mr Ripley separated by almost 40 years. In the 90s version, Ripley lies on his hotel bed and stares at the clock which represents for him the easeful elegance which his rich American acquaintances effortlessly exude. In the 1960 French version, retitled Plein Soleil, Delon’s Ripley looks at his new friend’s stylish watch with similar envy. A loquacious customer in a jewellers shop looks at watch after watch, unable to make up his mind which one he wants. He directs the assistant’s attention to one behind the counter, swiftly sweeps the whole display tray left on top into his briefcase and scarpers. It’s a rather unsubtle attempt to steal time. The thief in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is rather more expert and artful, and we see the various hiding places in his spartan room where he has stashed his plunder. A stolen watch is strapped around the leg of a table, revealing the time. Roger Moore’s watch proves to be a lifesaver in The Man With the Golden Gun, a handy Q gadget which includes a mini circular saw. This cuts through the ropes which suspend him above the inevitable shark tank into which he is being lowered in a typically overelaborate supervillain execution method which favours poetry over practicality. Marclay seems to have slipped up at one point, the clock on a mantelpiece in The Browing Version some 20 minutes ahead of real time in. But then Michael Redgrave’s traditionalist teacher notices the error and sets the hands back, a true conservative. Robert Powell’s Richard Hannay tries to literally stop the progress of time (or at least its horological demarcation) in the 1978 remake of The 39 Steps, climbing out on to the glass face of Big Ben and hanging on to the big hand as it approaches a quarter to twelve, the time at which the chimes will ring out, on this occasion triggering off a large explosive device. It’s perhaps the ultimate of many appearances made throughout The Clock’s duration by Big Ben, that instant signifier of London as a location as well as handy background indicator of the time of day.

Stopping the official progress of time - The 39 Steps

Actors are seen at various stages of their lives, making startling leaps in age, growing old or rejuvenating before our eyes. The more actorly take on widely different personae whilst stars remain essentially the same throughout. Dirk Bogarde is a northern-accented, calculating gentleman’s gentleman in The Servant and a high-collared Regency dandy in another film (possibly A Tale of Two Cities?) We see a young and self-assured Richard Gere choosing from his extensive wardrobe in the 1980 Paul Schrader film American Gigolo, and an old, grey and downbeat version from more recent times (The Mothman Prophecies?) Dustin Hoffman is Raymond in Rain Man from 1988, and is seen in early 70s youth riding a bicycle alongside a river, a clock attached in a back basket. Paul Newman is youthful in black and white in the 50s in a white vest and older in colour in the 90s in a sober grey suit. Al Pacino crops up from time to time, although at this point in The Clock’s day, he seems to be mostly present in later grizzled form.

And so it goes. The clock ticks on, sweeping through film history, crossing generic boundaries and travelling around the world, taking in all life as projected through the cinematic lens. A sprawling work of art which manages to be about pretty much everything – just like in the movies.

Shelagh Delaney and Lindsay Anderson: From A Taste of Honey to If... on the White Bus

2011-12-02T11:49:00.020Z

Shelagh Delaney, who died on Sunday 20th November, provides a link between two of my favourite films, A Taste of Honey and If… A Taste of Honey was her first play, which she wrote when she was 18 in a short break from working full time in jobs such as shop assistant, cinema usherette and photographic lab assistant. She was never happy when critics and journalists pointed this out (as they invariably did), since it tended to paint her as some sort of doubly freakish prodigy, remarkable both for her youth and for her ordinary background and self-motivation, and carried with it a faint whiff of patronisation. But her origins and experiences did directly inform her work, and also provided hope and inspiration for others in similar circumstances. Not least amongst them was Steven Morrissey, who featured her on the cover of The Smiths single Girlfriend in a Coma and the compilation Louder Than Bombs, and who drew directly from her writing. Her short story All About and To A Female Artist, a collage of extracts from letters and reviews, real or imagined, shows the downside of being held up as such an example, with vituperative and snarky criticism abutting needy, desperate or simply unhinged communications, which assume common experience and feeling. Delaney’s failure of her 11 plus and subsequent marshalling into a secondary modern school, which focussed on practical rather than academic schooling, setting its pupils up for the home or factory, also demonstrates the damaging divisiveness of that post-war educational system. It was only through her own efforts and self-belief that she was able to rise above its rigid expectations.

Having completed A Taste of Honey in a short burst of intense and intuitive creativity, she made the serendipitous decision to send off to Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles at the Theatre Workshop. She had read about their troubles with the Lord Chamberlain, at that time still the arbiter of what was acceptable for the English stage, over the play You Won’t Always Be On Top, which was set on a building site. Their evident preference for drama depicting the real lives and thoughts of ordinary people over the conventions of genteel drawing room plays structured around well-bred and mannered conversation appealed to her. Ironically, a rundown church depicted in the 1960 BBC Monitor programme Shelagh Delaney’s Salford advertises a performance of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit on its noticeboard, just the sort of play against which A Taste of Honey set itself (without necessarily dismissing it out of hand). She couldn’t have chosen a better place to get a theatrical education than the Theatre Workshop. Littlewood and the cast worked through her script with her, developing the characters and adding new elements where they seemed appropriate. Some of the dialogue was trimmed down if it was felt that it didn’t work in performance, but they were careful to retain the essence of Delaney’s structure and style, and her best lines were all kept in. Which thankfully leaves us with such gems as: ‘I’m not talented, I’m geniused’; ‘The only consolation I can find in your immediate presence is your ultimate absence’; ‘I hope you exercised proper control over his nautical ardour’; ‘In this country there are only two seasons, winter and winter’; ‘I can’t stand people who laugh at other people. They’d get a bigger laugh if they laughed at themselves’; ‘My usual self is a very unusual self’; and ‘I feel like throwing myself I the river’ – ‘I wouldn’t do that – it’s full of rubbish’. Delaney gained immensely from the collaborative experience of creating a play as a work to be shaped and altered through rehearsal and discussion, and was entirely at ease with this process. In the BBC Monitor film Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, directed by the late Ken Russell and broadcast on 25th September 1960, she affectionately refers to the Theatre Workshop as being ‘a daft lot…a marvellous lot of people…quite different from the usual actors’.

King and Queen of Salford - Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin in A Taste of Honey

The play was a huge success when it was first put on in the East End of London at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, where the Workshop were encamped, opening in May 1958. Frances Cuka played the young Jo, taking her first faltering steps into the adult world of love, work, and motherhood, with Avis Bunnage as her feckless mother Helen, with whom she is constantly sparring. Murray Melvin, who had only joined the Workshop a year earlier as a student apprentice, found his dream role as Geoffrey, Jo’s kindly friend and alternative ‘mother’ (or the ‘big sister’ to which she likens him). Delaney writes these characters with a warmth and humour which makes them real and likeable, for all their faults. They are much more than illustrative bundles of social problems or mere mechanical vessels for the author’s political views or opinions. They are the sort of people amongst whom she grew up, and whom she has observed with sympathy and understanding. The play moved to the West End in 1959 with the same cast, and was then filmed a couple of years later by Tony Richardson for his Woodfall Films company, with Delaney collaborating with him on the script. Melvin returned in the role which he had made his own, and for which he won a best actor award at Cannes. Frances Cuka and Avis Bunnage didn’t make it to the screen (you can see them both in Littlewood’s sole film Sparrows Can’t Sing, however), with Dora Bryan playing Helen and Rita Tushingham making a wonderful Jo, dreamy, moody, joyful and sharp-tongued by turns. The two rooms between which the two acts of the play are split are opened out considerably in the film, which makes richly atmospheric use of its Manchester and Salford locations, with back to back terraces, cobbled streets, smoking factories and mills, and small barge and large ship canals. The influence of Free Cinema films such as Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland, Lorenza Mazetti’s Together, Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys, and Richardson’s own Momma Don’t Allow (made with Reisz), several of which were filmed by A Taste of Honey’s cameraman Walter Lasally, can be seen in the kinetic scenes of Blackpool larks (complete with a laughing automaton dummy booth out of O Dreamland), a fairground ride in which the camera’s point of view sends us spinning around beside Geoff and Jo, in the observation of the Catholic parade progressing through the city, the roving close-up tracking dancers across the ballroom floor, and in the chanting, hollering hordes of urchins which swarm around the characters wherever they go. We also see Jo’s resentful and wholly inept participation in a netball game at school at the start of the film, and her mixture of dreaminess and rebellion in the classroom, all of which serves to lend her a rather solitary individuality different from that which is framed in the play in reaction to the other characters. The film even affords the opportunity for her and Geoff to escape the city for the afternoon in a double-decker bus, running up onto the moorland heights and taking a candlelit tour of the caverns below.

A couple of years after the release of the Taste of Honey film, Delaney published a collection of short stories called Sweetly Sings the Donkey. Its wry tales, with their keen depiction of the details of the everyday, contained hints of autobiography and personally observed characters. Their cast of sickly and bullied children, desperate letter writers, fantasisers and dreamers, and detached tourists show a sympathy for and identification with the outsider and those who look on and observe life. The bullying and abusive teacher who is the title character of the story The Teacher enjoys mocking the physical characteristics of his pupils which make them stand out. The unnamed narrator notes that ‘I was the tallest child in the school, so I was ‘the long streak of nothing’’ – a direct reference to Delaney’s childhood sensitivity to her own height, with the story itself perhaps marking a small piece of score settling. Another story, The White Bus, also features an unnamed narrator, and is in part a riposte to the good burghers of Salford who complained about the negative image with which they felt she had tarred the city. A young woman, who is readily identifiable as Delaney, returns from London to Salford, where she boards a magic bus which turns up to whisk everybody off on a selectively edifying tour of the city, presided over by the Mayor. He asks the quietly observant narrator ‘aren’t you that girl – the one who writes?’ When she replies in the affirmative, he chides her for ‘writing all this sexy stuff about this city. Unmarried mothers and things and homosexuals – you’ve given us a bad reputation in the eyes of the country, you know’. Despite his surface disapprobation, he proceeds to get rather excited about meeting her, and she has to ask him ‘would you stop feeling my leg, please?’ Delaney in fact remained greatly fond of Salford, as she made clear in the Monitor film. Whilst she regretted some of the changes being wrought upon the city, she revelled in the vitality and spirit of its people.

Riding The White Bus

The White Bus was made into a short film by Lindsay Anderson, with Delaney again collaborating on the script. Anderson had been very enthusiastic about A Taste of Honey when it was first performed by the Theatre Workshop, particularly enjoying the anti-realist elements; the addresses to the audience and the personal musical motifs to which characters danced on and off stage. He brought a sense of playful cinematic surrealism to the fore in The White Bus, creating deliberate distancing with absurd or fantastical intrusions, anticipating the tone of If… The White Bus was supposed to be part of an anthology film, combining with related segments made by Tony Richardson and Peter Brook (who both, like Anderson, were associated with the world of the theatre) based on other stories from Delaney’s collection. This was a popular form at the time, with major European directors contributing to the likes of RoGoPaG (an ungainly acronymic title referring to its directors Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and one Ugo Gregroretti), Spirits of the Dead (three Poe tales, including Fellini’s celebrated Toby Dammit) and Paris Vu Par… (views of the city of light by, amongst others, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol). According to Lindsay Anderson in Never Apologise, a collection of his writings, Richardson and Brook tried to outdo his offering, and in their efforts completely abandoned Delaney’s work, presumably in order to go for some big auteur statement. ‘The subjects they chose were not good’, Anderson curtly noted (Brooks’ was a tale of a Wagnerian opera singer trying to reach the theatre on time and Richardson’s a mini-musical with Vanessa Redgrave), and they effectively dissipated the unifying structure of the film. The result, which was to have been called Red, White and Zero (coming close to anticipating Kieslowski’s colour trilogy) was shelved by United Artists and as a result, The White Bus, too long to be a short and too short to be a feature, has been little seen and remains unreleased.

The other Shelagh - Patricia Healey

Anderson and Delaney’s collaboration went well. They hit it off from the start and had an enjoyable working relationship (not always easy with the notoriously spiky but intensely loyal director). As Anderson points out in his 1994 commentary on The White Bus, included in Never Apologise, ‘I liked Shelagh very much; we got along well, although, once shooting was under way, she didn’t say much…I think she felt that the actual making of the film wasn’t really her bag’. Nevertheless, much of the dialogue from her story remains, as does its structure, its absurdist atmosphere and its mockery of petty authority, with its stilted and pompous rhetoric, overconfident self-assertion and foolish formal frills. Anderson wanted to make the autobiographical dimension of the story plain by having Delaney herself play the young woman returning to her hometown and boarding the bus which turns up from nowhere in nowhere. Actually, the protagonist of the film is first seen as an office worker in the Shell Building on London's South Bank, making her more of an everywoman. Delaney wasn’t comfortable with the idea of appearing as an actor, however, and suggested her friend Patricia Healey instead, who proves to be an excellent stand-in. She’s a striking presence, taciturn and at a slight remove from all that goes on around her, a wry observer very much in the manner of Delaney.

Christine Noonan in If...

The White Bus was Lindsay Anderson’s first film with Czech cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek, who had shot Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighing and Milos Forman’s A Blond In Love and The Fireman’s Ball in his native country. He would go on to shoot If… and O Lucky Man! with Anderson. The White Bus lays the stylistic and thematic ground for If… It contains sudden and startling shifts from black and white to colour, familiar from the later film. These are present in a more consciously fashioned form, and perhaps give the lie to the claim that their use in If… was more a matter of chance and necessity than artistry. Even if there was an element of happenstance in the filming of If…, these sudden tonal changes had already been used to great effect. As Anderson puts it in Never Apologise, referring to the use of colour interludes in The White Bus, ‘it was this precedent that gave me the assurance – when Mirek said that with our budget (for lamps) and our schedule he could not guarantee consistency of colour for the chapel scenes in If…- to say, ‘well, let’s shoot them in black and white.’ In other words it was not (of course) just a matter of saving time and/or money’. The short bursts of colour in The White Bus often act as interludes between scenes, as when we see the children ushered across the road by a lollipop lady. They also highlight the flames of foundries and explosions, the burning oranges of molten metal, and the multi-coloured palimpsest of peeling posters outside the Odeon. The Mayor’s speechifying in The White Bus echoes that of the head, chaplain and teachers in If…, the official view of the city, country or world. He’s like Peter Jeffrey’s headmasters, walking the grounds with his select elite of senior pupils, all the while delivering a state of the nation address (‘Britain today is a powerhouse of ideas, experiment, imagination’). Such Wilsonian sentiments are also reflected in The Mayor’s reference to ‘the world of tomorrow’ and his gestures towards acknowledging social and technological change, as long as they continue to remain within the boundaries of tradition. There’s certainly much of Delaney’s language in these speeches, as well as in the dialogue of the boys, with all its freewheeling non-sequiturs and unfocussed, intuitive rebellion, its mixture of romantic dreaminess and flippant sarcasm. It’s probably a little fanciful to draw parallels between Christine Noonan’s raven-haired waitress revolutionary in If… and Delaney or her alter ego Healey, although they do all share a quiet blend of reserve and self-assured strength.

The White Bus also shares If…’s use of a circumscribed environment to represent the wider structures of the country or the world as a whole. It’s opening shots of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament make its state of the nation intentions plain. It is also reflected in the international cast of the tourists, with rank-signifying floral, top and bowler hats mixing in with characters dressed in traditional Japanese and African robes. Both films move for a time beyond their narrowly defined worlds. Travis and Johnny in If… break out of school and run into town, initially handcuffed together like escaped prisoners (or like Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser being taken to trial in 1967 in an iconic photograph later turned into a painting, Swingeing London, by pop artist Richard Hamilton). The ordinary sights of the modern 60s high street seem alien and strange to these boys who have been inculcated into the antiquated traditions and rituals of the school (and by extension, of the British establishment) day after day. We see that strangeness through their eyes, almost as if they are time travellers arriving from the past. And perhaps these shrinelike displays of consumer goods, objects of desire set upon their pedestals, are unnatural after all, dreams which offer more than they can ever deliver. Travis and Johnny play out their rebellion in front of them, miming the knife fight scene from Rebel Without A Cause, improvising a fatal ending.

Watching life through the window

In The White Bus, the young woman leaves the farcical civil defense display which she has been marshalled into watching at the end of the tour, and wanders through the streets of the kind of Salford which Delaney had depicted in A Taste of Honey, The Lion in Love and the stories of Sweetly Sings the Donkey. She crosses waste grounds and playgrounds, and walks along rain soaked terraced backstreets. She sees a frustrated young man (played by Barry Evans, who would express similar frustrations in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, this time in Stevenage) failing to have his way with a young girl in a rubbish strewn alley. Another girl plays a piano in a front room directly abutting the street, exemplifying the solitary self-education of Delaney and those like her. In the front room of another house, another window view illuminating moments of people’s lives, an old woman shaves her husband with an electric razor (an artefact of Wilson’s Britain). It’s a sacred composition, he with his eyes cast up in saintly contemplation, she looking at him and offering us her profile, a picture of patient, angelic tenderness. As the evening draws on and the street lights flicker into life, the young woman wanders into a corner chippie, where she sits as the couple who run it put the chairs up on the tables, closing up around her. The final lines of dialogue, which they speak, are taken directly from Delaney’s short story. The man suggests they leave the tidying up until the next day, since they are both tired and want to rest. His wife recites a repetitive mantra as she sweeps up: ‘If we don’t do Saturday’s work till Sunday, we won’t do Sunday’s work till Monday, we won’t do Monday’s work till Tuesday, we won’t do Tuesday’s work till Wednesday, we won’t do Wednesday’s work till Thursday, we won’t do Thursday’s work till Friday, we won’t do Friday’s work till Saturday and we’ll never catch Saturday’s work again’. They are caught up in the regimented progression of their working week, constantly chasing their own tails. As Travis says in If…, caught up in a very different but equally inflexible regimen, ‘when do we get time to live, that’s what I want to know’.

The human animal

The White Bus travels through an illustrative and emblematic landscape of English environments and pastimes, from the office to the railway station, the factory to pastoral parkland, with football, gardening, craft hobbies, music and literature (and kendo) in the background. Arthur Lowe’s Mayor (Lowe was a constant presence in Anderson’s films until his death shortly after the filming of Britannia Hospital) intones lines from the Bible (Proverbs 4:7) as he enters the city library, saying ‘wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with thy getting, get understanding’. It’s a quote which is also used as an opening chapter title in If…, and is cast in a rather jaundiced and ironic light in both films. Wisdom is the last thing that anyone is likely to get in If’s school, whilst the Mayor in The White Bus immediately follows his high minded sentiments with the outraged aside to the librarian ‘you’ve got some disgusting books in here’. Wisdom and understanding must clearly be got within strictly defined limits. The dignitaries and worthies on the tour enter the city museum, where they are seen scowling and peering at the stuffed birds and mammals, to which they are compared in intercut juxtaposition or framed proximity. A bowler hatted gent stops beside the skeleton of an ape ancestor, and a genteel elderly lady hisses aggressively at a small monkey on a branch. The human animal still lurks beneath the ostentatious surface display of civility. This exposure of underlying violence and primitive impulses revealing themselves through the cracks of civilisation can also be seen in the final bloodless bloodbath at the end of If… Here, a similarly floral-hatted old lady picks up a submachine gun and fires round after round at the crusaders up on the roof, spitting out ‘bastards, bastards’ as she does so. The museum exhibits also find their analogues in the stuffed crocodile the boys carry to the bonfire, and in the specimen jars they find locked in a cupboard in the basement – the secrets of nature hidden from them.

A bad day at the office

The outright absurdist fantasy of The White Bus also looks forward to the more bizarre, distancing (and very funny) aspects of If…At the beginning of The White Bus, the young woman hangs herself above the office desk at which she has been typing, only for the cleaners to carry on regardless around her. We then cut back to her at her desk, alive and well but clearly in need of imminent escape. It’s reminiscent of the scene in If… in which the headmaster brings the boys into his office to give them a stern talking to (‘now I take this very seriously indeed’) after they’ve bayoneted the Chaplain to death on wargame manoeuvres. He then pulls out a large drawer from which the selfsame Chaplain rises, allowing them to formally apologise to his recumbent form with a conciliatory handshake. The incongruity of formally attired men and women walking around busy industrial factories, traipsing up steeply inclined gantries and riding on slow moving cranes looks forward to the knights in armour and robed and mitred bishops in If’s final founder’s day massacre. This piece of disrupted pageantry also finds its routes in the chaos of the civil defense display, which becomes a little too close for comfort, and which brings the tour to an explosive end. Armed conflict is staged as spectacle, the tourists sitting in a small stand to watch these training routines which bring war to the waste grounds of Salford. As the carnage reaches its climax, all but the Delaney character are turned into faceless dummies – a transformation which pays homage to the finale of Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, in which the guests at the school’s prize giving day, which is wrecked by the student anarchists, are also mocking guys.

Goya in the English landscape

The White Bus is shot through with a very English Romanticism, a reflection of Anderson’s traditional heart, beating beneath his anarchic, non-conformist exterior. When we get to the pastoral surroundings of the park, he stages several tableaux recasting classic works of European art in an English setting: Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe, Goya’s The Straw Man and Fragonard’s Girl On A Swing with oak and beech trees, long green grass and cloud piled skies. There is a similar sense of pastoral reverie in If… when the boys escape to the countryside on a stolen motorbike. They take a dreamlike ride through the fields, carrying the waitress they’ve picked up between them, standing erect with arms flung wide open as if she’s flying. Both films also use music and non-naturalistic sound in such a way that it takes over the soundtrack completely at times, opening up dream spaces within the course of the action. In If…, this takes the form of Travis repeatedly playing an extract of the Missa Luba, a Congolese mass recorded in 1958 under the auspices of a Belgian priest. This gives it an odd resonance as it plays whilst the camera gazes at a picture of an African revolutionary, which Travis has pinned to the board on which he collages the inside of his head. The Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, its prime minister Patrice Lumumba murdered a year later with the assistance of colonial forces intent on protecting their mining interests. Whenever this music is played (and it miraculously turns up on a jukebox in the roadside café Travis and his friend Johnny stop at) it relegates the objective world, and probably reality itself, to the background. It’s the soundtrack to Travis’ dreamworld, in which his nascent desires and rebellious fantasies are played out. Similarly, the eclipse of the world’s noise by music and sound in The White Bus signifies the young woman’s subjective viewpoint. This is also indicated by her occasional donning of spectacles, which would seem to act as a symbolic visor protecting her from the comforting propaganda issued by the Mayor and his cohorts, propagating his rose-tinted worldview. As the bus drives past new blocks of residential high-rises, the tour guide comes out with the standard post-war brave new world rhetoric about clearing slums and creating new communities. She admits to the unpopularity of such housing, but notes that ‘we are gradually breaking down this resistance’. This is undoubtedly Delaney speaking, articulating her views about the unresponsive intransigence of local planners, whose determined and patrician social engineering, paid little or no attention to the views of those whose lives they sought to shape. She makes it quite clear in the Monitor film that she finds these new developments sinister and inhuman, a controlling imposition upon people’s hometown and life.

Pastoral joy ride

Perhaps The White Bus is more Anderson’s film than Delaney’s, the work in which he developed his caustic satirical surrealism. But its distinctive visual style, with its surreal and absurdist eye, is built up from her literary source material, and from the substance and structure of her script. Its sense of the absurd, its distanced, observational perspective, its rebellious spirit and refusal to defer to the demands of authority, its celebration of the spirit of ordinary people and its conviction that life is to be lived in each and every moment comes from Delaney as much as it comes from Anderson. These two artists, coming from opposite ends of the social spectrum, she from a secondary modern, he from the prestigious public school of Cheltenham (where If… was shot) found in each other a common spirit. Their collaboration left its mark on Anderson, and perhaps If…’s scriptwriter David Sherwin was also influenced by A Taste of Honey. The film certainly lacks some of the more macho aspects of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Room At the Top and Look Back In Anger, other potential influences from the kitchen sink movement. There is assuredly something of Delaney’s spirit inhabiting the corridors of If…’s school, bringing humour and tenderness to what might otherwise be an intolerably male environment. She managed to bridge the very different worlds of A Taste of Honey’s kitchen sink humanism and the public school revolution of Travis and his crusaders in If… From Salford to Cheltenham and all stops in between. Sanctus.

Harold Budd and The Necks in Exeter

2011-11-25T11:49:00.005Z

Harold Budd, Werner Dafeldecker and The Necks came to The Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter to play on Wednesday, brought together under the aegis of the Sound and Music organisation in a concert which recognised the affinities they have with each other. The evening was given its own uncapitalised title, time being, a heading which pointed to the one of nature of this musical meeting, as well as alluding to its improvisational nature. Time is an important element in the work of Budd and The Necks, and they are both capable of creating an atmosphere in which it seems to be held in suspension. Harold Budd often labours under the ambient label, although he is only ambient in the sense that Eric Satie and Debussy are ambient, composing piano or keyboard pieces which conjure rich and evocative atmospheres rather than concentrating on definite melodic and harmonic structure and development. The Necks are an Australian trio of long standing, having been together since 1987, and comprise Chris Abrahams on piano, Lloyd Swanton on bass and Tony Buck on drums. It’s the classic jazz trio line up, and there’s certainly an element of jazz in their approach. Their music is totally improvised, with no preconceived or composed material brought to the stage. But it is a take on jazz which stretches its improvisational time out, allowing a piece to unfold at a deliberate and reflective pace with changes introduced gradually and additively. Nothing is sudden in this music. It has sometimes been likened to minimalism, as motifs are frequently mulled upon in a repetitive way, but the attention to small details and nuances of sound tend to belie such convenient categorisation. In the end, it is what it is – Necks music.

Werner Dafeldecker is an improviser on bass and electronics, and is something of a middleman here. Like many improvising musicians, he has worked in a wide variety of contexts and formed many connections with a disparate set of musicians. He has played with Necks pianist Chris Abrahams in the leftfield rock trio Autistic Daughters, and was one of David Sylvian’s collaborators on his Manafon LP. Harold Budd’s recent records Perhaps and Avalon Sutra have been released on Sylvian’s Samadhi Sound label, an acknowledgement of his abiding influence. Dafeldecker has also recorded with Stevie Wishart, on of improvised music’s few hurdy gurdy players (I’d say only, but the eclectic Japanese noisemaker Keiji Haino made a scorching album with an amplified, feedback-splintered version of the instrument) and leader of the sublime medieval group Sinfonye; on the same LP (Mikroton from 2009) with AMM and modern classical pianist John Tilbury; with laptop glitch manipulator Christian Fennesz on the apocalyptically prescriptive LP Till the Old World’s Blown Up and A New One is Created; with Otomo Yoshihide and other Japanese technological mavericks (many of whom performed at the Phoenix some years back in the Contemporary Music Network tours Japanorama and Turntable Hell) on My Dear Mummy from 1999; and, perhaps inevitably, with arch-collaborator Jim O’Rourke, America’s answer to Brian Eno. Harold Budd first recorded on the latter’s Obscure label, releasing The Pavilion of Dreams in 1978, which Eno also produced. He has also collaborated with a number of like-minded souls: with the Cocteau Twins on The Moon and the Melodies, and later with the Cocteau’s guitarist Robin Guthrie; with Jean Cocteau fan Bill Nelson and Andy Partridge of Westcountry pop pastoralists XTC; with fellow American composers Daniel Lentz and Ruben Garcia; with Ultravox founder John Foxx and ex-PIL bassist Jah Wobble; and, on two exquisite records from the early 80s (The Pearl and The Plateaux of Mirror) with Mr Eno himself. Dafeldecker adopts the Eno role tonight, taking to the stage first with Harold Budd. There are no introductory remarks, which is a shame; given the mellifluous murmur of Budd’s voice revealed through his readings of poetry (both his and others) on several of his recordings, it would have been good to hear it in person. But after a brief nod of acknowledgement, it was straight down to the music.

Although it was Budd who had taken sole billing for their duo, it was Dafeldecker who took front stage, standing before the table upon which his small boxes of digital wizardry were laid. Budd sat at his piano, which was positioned with its rear end towards the audience. Perhaps in a deliberate act of self-effacement, which shifted the emphasis on to his musical partner, he was largely eclipsed by the tilt of the open lid, reduced (from where I was sitting) to an emblematic glimpse of his thick mop of white hair and white-shoed feet. Dafeldecker began proceedings by delicately tweaking a few nobs and adjusting the sound levels of the amplifier, small and undemonstrative gestures which created a roiling hiss of static sounding like rain hitting the ground, and added an underlying drone of humming bass. Throughout, he provides enveloping aurorae of sonic shimmer and distant rumbles from thunderous stormclouds, sound effects for wide horizons. His gradually constructed intitial soundscape provides a bed upon which Budd, an inert observer for the first couple of minutes, can begin laying his distinctive billowing, rippling chords, extended and Debussyesque. They are harmonically quite static, content to rock and drift in the swells, the more structured progressions of other performances and recordings left back on land in this new, more provisional and fluid improvisational environment. Echo and reverb blurs the sound, leaving it hanging for extended moments in the air, the aural equivalent of Russell Mills’ slowly shifting images which are projected onto a screen above the musicians at the back. Mills provides another Eno connection (with Eno, the usual five degrees of separation can generally be narrowed down to about two), having produced covers for his albums (including The Pearl), as well as those of David Sylvian. Both Budd and Eno (and Sylvian) have joined him in his Undark musical projects too. His projections are full of soft blues, yellows and reds and are suggestive, in their porous horizontal divisions of colour blocks, of skies, lakes, deserts, mountains and seas. At one point, they seem to form into the outlines of one of Munch’s depictions of luminous Nordic coastlines. The introduction of more clearly defined formal elements (vertical dividing lines, squares and circles) bring to mind the colour fields of the abstract expressionists such as Clifford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

The soft-edged blurring of sound and image makes this the music of weather, ambient in the sense of evoking atmospheric states and the nebulous coalescence, movement and dissipation of clouds or waves (again, reminiscent of the Debussy of Nuages or La Mer, or the Ravel of Une Barque sur l’Ocean). Dafeldecker took Budd’s chords and subjected them to various manipulations, looping, making them hover in vaporous suspension, bending through a tweaking of the circuits and transforming them into something other. He briefly took up the bass, but used it anything but a virtuoso style, detuning a string to pluck one slack, reverberant note, which was fed back to add more rumbling undertow. Budd sat out at intervals whilst what he had produced was put through its metamorphoses, until Dafeldecker once more created a field above which he felt he could set those chords drifting once more. After about half an hour, Dafeldecker allowed the loops to wind down and fade away, the clouds wafting off and our vessel washing ashore. It was an arbitrary point at which to stop a piece which had no natural point of closure, not theme to return to or climactic chord to reach. But there was enough of this rich and intoxicating duet to leave the senses satiated.

After the interval, the three musicians of The Necks came onstage and stood or sat still by their instruments for a few moments before starting, as if waiting for someone to make the first move to break the silence, sounding out the auditorium to decide which direction to take. In a piece of total improvisation which will grow from this first gesture, it is a weighty decision to make. Chris Abrahams began by playing a repeated, Budd-like rippling piano chord. Then, perhaps taking a further cue from Budd, he dropped out, and Lloyd Swanton swayed slowly between two notes on his bass. A duet built up with Tony Buck, who played gently on bronze bowls, using the soft headed mallets which he played with for most of the set, and seemingly agitating chimes and cowbells with his feet (all of this activity was mysteriously taking place below his drum set, behind which he crouched). The array of dampened and jangling percussive sounds which he produced evoked Alpine rurality or the play of breezes, perhaps heralding storms to come. This was a performance which shifted through various different sections, lacking the cohesion and unity of some of The Necks’ improvisations. There was a tension evident at certain moments, with the music rising and falling, leading to subdued intervals in which it was uncertain as to which directin it would take next. This was a creative tension, however, and the refusal to settle into an easy groove worked in the music’s favour, and made for the perfect conjunction with the shifting meteorological moods created by Budd and Dafeldecker in the first half.

Abrahams brought the piano back into the mix after the bass and mini-gamelan had built up momentum, and led the music in another direction. He and Swanton asserted themselves at periodic junctures, channelling the improvisation into a new configuration which the others would pick up on and build upon. Abrahams kept within a narrow range in the centre of the keyboard for much of the time, but as the piece progressed, began to slowly migrate through the octave, increasing the intensity as he did so. From its delicate beginnings, they moved through hypnotic swirls of sound, with Swanton taking up his bow and providing sustained underlying tones, and into a stormy section in which he ferociously strummed power chords on his bass as if he were in a stoner metal group. The grimace on his face suggested that this was not something he could keep up for long. Buck provided a pounding Mo Tucker accompaniment, and Abrahams hammered the repeated piano chords, sending overtone shards splintering into the air. It took on the ritualistic air of one of Charlemagne Palestine’s strumming music pieces for a while, although thankfully leaving no blood on the keys. Finally, having reached a thunderous climax, the storm passed and calm reasserted itself. Abrahams’ chords slowly died away, Swanton’s last bass note resonated into silence and it was left to Buck, who had by this time taken up his drumsticks, and had been playing shimmering patterns on his cymbals, to draw things to a conclusion. His final, steady taps on bronze bowl, cymbal and chimes were like the last pattering, arrhythmic drops of a rain shower, bringing the concert around full circle from Dafeldecker’s opening cloudburst. We left refreshed and invigorated, and outside the weather was fine, a clear and warm autumn night.

British Art Show 7 in Plymouth

2011-11-23T10:18:00.017Z

Part Two

A short stroll around the corner from the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery brings you to the Plymouth College of Art. Here, Edgar Schmitz once more provides spacey sounds and a nebulous visual loop at the threshold, ushering us into a space apart from the familiar world outside. Brian Griffiths’ sculptural installation is pitched in the gallery, a ragged and mouldering canvas strung from wall to wall, filling the space. The tent is formed into the shape of a bloated, decaptitated head, with eyes slashed in front and ears and muzzle pinned out by taut guy ropes. It looks like the flayed and padded hide of a monstrous Mickey Mouse. Grubby and faded, it is a totemistic object grown sinister through repeated use, now exuding an air of diseased malignity. The dark, gaping holes of its tent flap eyes and its dumb, mouthless muzzle make it look like a death mask, a grotesque taxidermic imitation of life. Campers’ badges sewn onto the back trace a ritualistic trail of towns and cities through which this sick visage has toured, infecting them with its grim, nihilistic stare.

The next venue in the Show’s tour of the city is the Plymouth Arts Centre. To arrive here, you have to cross the permanently busy roads which circle the central boulevard of the post-war city plan, skirt the bizarre assemblage of off-kilter and wholly unrelated decorative facades which front the Drake’s Circus Shopping Centre, pass the bombed out church now marooned on a traffic island, and descend through an underpass and into the stained concrete grottoes of the bus station. The Arts Centre is housed unobtrusively in a couple of terraced Georgian houses on the outskirts of the Barbican area. Down in its basement gallery a selection of drawings Mick Peter and Alasdair Gray. Peter’s work tends to be split into two panels, akin to the layouts of comics. The drawings themselves also share the boldly outlined forms of comic book imagery, with a similarly limited colour palette, in this case red and black. This gives them a direct immediacy, together with a vaguely propagandistic look. There is continuity between the panels, but the division marks some transformation or shift of emphasis, which makes for a contrast between upper and lower sectors. In Talbot’s Room, an impossible tree house is perched on a flimsy upper branch of a leafless winter tree, reached by a long, spindly ladder which is itself planted precariously on the roof of a dilapidated shack. The shack is elevated on makeshift scaffolding, tilted along the incline of a steep slope down which it looks likely to toboggan should one of its unstable frame of criss-crossing props be knocked away. The whole structure is a study in tenuous and provisional balance, subject to complete collapse at any moment, and held up more by hope more rational and skilfully realised design. In the upper panel, two bare branches of the tree extend, their jagged lines expanding to form two roughly sketched eyes which look like they might have been extracted from a protest banner or poster, daubed on with urgent vitality. All the dangerous, makeshift architecture and hazardously knocked together platforms have been created in order to ascend to the perspective of this elevated, godlike vision. In another picture, a country stile straddles a dry stone wall, which has been constructed with whatever mineral materials lay close to hand, its haphazard form a matter of expediency. It is a jumbled assemblage of different shapes, sizes and textures, chaotic but nevertheless interlocking to create a temporarily stable order. The two upward pointing poles of the stile extend into the upper panel, and following the line of one, like following the end stars of the Plough to find the pole star, directs our attention to a hovering object floating weightlessly in the sky. It is the hollow framework of an open-sided dodecahedron, one of the ideal Platonic solids, its pentagonal shapes folding together in perfect symmetry to create a twelve sided geometrical object, a reflection of changeless heavenly order. This contrasts with the cluttered scree and timebound regolith of the earthly flux below, fashioned by human hands into more contingent and changeable patterns.

The author, playwright, poet, essayist and artist Alasdair Gray was represented by seven of his portraits, whose simple and boldly outlined bodies and features and striking colour contrasts made them the perfect partner for Peter’s drawings. The economy with which he conjures the character of his sitters (and they do tend to be seated) and the broad areas of clearly defined colour with which he surrounds them, making them stand out all the more assertively, reflect his longstanding preference for painting murals, which have graced various sites around Glasgow, from synagogues to chip shops, churches to underground stations. This economy of effect also echoes the clarity of his precise and uncluttered prose. The subjects of these portraits are a mixture of friends, literary acquaintances, and models from Glasgow School of Art and elsewhere. Two are taken from a series of studies he made of may Hooper, who modelled for him in 1984, and for whom he seemed to feel a particular affinity. In his book A Life In Pictures, he remarks that he intended to fill a small book with portraits of her. He also notes that he used a thick-nibbed fountain pen, which allowed him to vary the thickness of the outline and thus suggest the solidity of the body without recourse to shading, which would intrude upon the simplicity of the drawn figure.

May In Black Dress on Armchair portrays her in the same manner familiar from the strong women of Gray’s fiction; calm, assured and relaxed, with hands folded in her lap and head resting lightly but alertly on the back of the chair. May On Invisible Armchair finds naked, her support magicked away from beneath her, floating weightlessly on the aether. Gray surrounds her with monotone background of blue acrylic, as he does in the previous portrait, which here makes it look as if she is ascending into or floating upon the summer skies. It is evidently an element in which she is comfortable, her passage through it effortless and natural, raising a quiet smile of relaxed pleasure. The tone of her flesh derives from the unadorned manila brown of the wrapping paper which Gray has used, enhanced by the contrast with the enveloping background colour. He has often used unconventional surfaces to draw and paint on, seizing upon whatever was readily available, whether it be wrapping paper, newspaper or the reverse side of wallpaper rolls. He admits, in the autobiographical book gathering together a generous selection of his art A Life In Pictures, that ‘even nowadays, when I can afford good quality cartridge paper, it still makes me uneasy and self-conscious because too expensive to risk spoiling’. The unconventional materials are put to imaginative and idiosyncratic use, their particular colour and texture lending their own quality to the picture where the surface is allowed to nakedly reveal itself. It perhaps even helps to suggestively hint at the direction the composition might take, in much the same way that the shape and texture of the walls, floors and ceiling of a building would guide the form of his murals. The May pictures were completed in 2010 (‘with the support of my recently acquired art dealer’ as Gray lets us know in A Life In Pictures), a lengthy gestation period from their original drawing in 1984, which may be partly down to a certain reluctance on Gray’s part to bring a work to a definitive conclusion, partly due to the conflicting demands arising from endemic impecuniousness, and partly due to an abiding anxiety about possibly spoiling the effect of the original drawn delineation of the figures with further detail and colouring.

Alasdair Gray - Andrew Gray Aged 7 and Inge's Patchwork Quilt (copyright the artist)

The portraits often incorporate carefully stencilled words marking names and dates which, along with the details of dress and furnishings, act as memorials of a moment or a very particular time and place. In the case of the picture Teacher, Historian, Poet, Angus Calder, this acts as a final memorial, the dates 1942-2009 marking the span of his life and the portrayal of his final days lending him dignity in death. The words on the pale chalk blue of the background (the fading world) give the portrait context, telling us that Calder is ‘in an Edinbourg care home where he died, and is here murmuring recollections of Nairobi University’. From the bedbound constraints of the end of his life, he travels back through the expansive continents of his memory. It’s a compassionate and calm portrait, a visual obituary tribute which asserts that character and personality persist right up until the end. Blue Denim, Christine and Dan Healey, Rex Scotorum has both the title subjects sitting calmly at a table, straight and upright as if enthroned and facing their courtiers. He is nude and potbellied, folded hands covering his modesty, head topped with a crown and long beard trailing in sinuous lines – A very Blakean figure. Mick Broderick, painted in 2008, sits in a chair, but has none of the relaxed, easeful presence of May. He is serious, guarded and wary, with arms and legs defensively crossed. His face looks out at us from an indirect angle, and with a suspicious cast to the features, eyes giving a sidewise glance of measured appraisal. The portrait of Alasdair and Ann Hopkins proudly declares its delayed period of completion, the words Drawn 1982: Painted 2009 inscribed on the background. The subjects sink side by side into their sofa, he relaxing with a whisky, she cradling a blissfully dozing white cat in her lap, a picture of domestic comfort. The cushion provides an area of colourful patterning, which can also be found in curtains and carpets and clothing in other pictures. In Andrew Gray Aged 7 and Inge’s Patchwork Quilt from 2009, this patterning resides in the coverlet which shares equal top billing with his son. This is a memory piece, with detail recollected from decades ago, revivifying the quilt, which glows with the freshness of new creation and what Gray describes in A Life In Pictures as ‘the bright heraldic colours I most enjoyed’; Colours which once more recall the vivid immediacy and striking impact of his murals.

The final part of the Show takes you out of the city centre and, if you choose to walk, leads you on an interesting trail across the Hoe and around the back of the Mill Bay docks, where bundles of coniferous tree trunks always seem to be in the process of being loaded or unloaded. You cross over into the Stonehouse area of the city via the imposing 18th and 19th century grey stone blocks of the marine barracks, wend your way through neat rows of early 19th century terraced houses until you come to the grand arch, bestrode by a triumphant 13 foot statue of William IV, which leads into the Royal William Yard, built between 1825-33 and ‘by far the most impressive single architectural group in Plymouth’ according to Nikolaus Pevsner. The extensive compound was created according to the needs of the Victualling Board of the British Navy in order to provide its sailors with the food and drink they required, and have a place to preserve and store it. Of the various old breweries, bakeries, mills and storehouses which have now been converted to flats, offices and restaurants, the exhibition took place in the connecting halls of the slaughterhouse, where up to 100 cattle met their end every day in the mid 19th century (memorialised by a couple of carved bulls heads on the rear of the entry arch) – an appropriate setting for the cutting edge of modern art, although thankfully there are no butchered Hirst beasts here.

Mick Peter in the slaughterhouse

The first thing which draws your eye when you walk in is Mick Peter's large, bright red sculpture, which looks like it might have been dipped in a vat of fresh blood, and which contrasts strikingly with the grey stone walls. Its singular primary colour gives it some sense of continuity with his red and black drawings seen in the Arts Centre. He has modelled a couple of architect’s tables, raised to a vertically sloping angle. The sharp points of set squares are embedded in them, as if they’ve been thrown like darts, and they stick out like the fins of geometrical sharks. What looks like a half-melted saw forms an undulating bridge between the two separate tables, linking them like the hemispheres of the brain. These objects, normally solid and the bases for creating structure and order, seem soft and mutable, caught in the act of imitative transformation, or at the beginning of the process of changing into something wholly other. You sense that its colour is one thing that it can’t alter, however. Opposite is a standard laminated metal bench of the sort commonly found on railway stations, seemingly constructed with the deliberate intention of denying anyone the chance of getting too comfortable. At one end, the plastic lamination has been burned away, leaving a scorched circle of metal. This is because, at certain intervals, a naked man walks by and sets a small fire at one end, perching on the other to watch its chemical flames. The whole then becomes the stage for a sculptural tableau, with contrasting elements of flesh, metal, plastic and fire. It is the work of , who in 2008 created , and incredible installation for which he filled an empty flat with liquid copper sulphate, which covered its surfaces with deep blue crystals, turning a very ordinary locale into a glittering, enchanted cavern. This was a similarly startling and imaginative idea, but the naked man failed to make an appearance whilst we were there, so it remained in ideal form only.

Haroon Mirza has constructed an audio sculpture made up of discrete elements which nevertheless connect with each other to make a unified whole. Various media through which music and sound can be played are brought to bear. A record player spins the Joy Division LP Unknown Pleasures, identifiable through its label, with its pulsar waveform mountain range. The needle is kept stuck in the playout groove by a sticker, which acts as a buffer, creating a rhythmic loop of crackling white noise. Another, tilted, turntable slowly turns, the elevated record balanced at the tip of its spindle acting as a cog which connects with a long dangling flex from which a naked lightbulb is suspended. The record carries the lit bulb around in an elliptical revolution, is if it were part of a phonographic orrery. The bulb passes over a transistor radio, tuned between stations, causing it to emit bursts of hissing static with its 40W solar flares – the sound of the universe’s background radiation, a more chaotic music of the spheres than that envisaged by Pythagoras. Another record lies flat on the top of a spindle, slowly revolving, a black vinyl plinth awaiting some heroic statue or fetishized commodity display. The back of a pick up arm abrades it from below, creating grinding repetitive noise rhythms. Behind the cluster of gramophones, a CD player rests on a tall stack, its disc skittering through a digital stutter which never manages to resolve itself. The media of tape and television are covered by a recorded performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape played on an old set, the volume turned down to render the old man and his spools dumb. The screen points away from the other elements, leaving Krapp in circumscribed, self-created isolation. The whole assemblage is occasionally flashed with strobe lighting, a reference to Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis’ epilepsy, which the artist himself has also suffered from in the past.

The Otolith Group consists of artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (can two people really be considered a group? Perhaps the Otolith duo sounded a little underpowered). They have made a short film called Hydra Decapita, which combines various layers and interposed stories and narratives to make connections between the Atlantic slave trade, art and imaginative fictions of escape and historical reconfiguration. Atmospheric film shot along the rocky coastline of Cornwall evokes the sublime terror of the sea and creates an ominous backdrop to the event which is the historical crux of the piece: the throwing overboard of 133 slaves who had fallen sick from the Zorg slave ship, in order that the company could claim insurance for the loss of a now devalued cargo. This is linked to Turner’s 1840 painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, which the Victorian critic John Ruskin extolled in his 1843 volume Modern Painters. Eshun talks of Ruskin defending and celebrating this painting. I’m not sure whether he means on a formal level, or whether he is implying that the picture is somehow in itself part of the fabric of the slave trade (which had recently been abolished in most of the British Empire at this time) and its justifications. Selected lines from Ruskin’s review are sung by Anjalika Sagar, expressing the sublime beauty of Turner’s painting, which seems to suggest that the suffering of the slaves is ignored. A more complete and representative quotation from Ruskin’s writing would have made his feelings about the subject clear. He goes on to set the ‘nobility’ of the painting in a moral context, suggesting that the tempestuous elements are ‘advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as is labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror’. The romantic sublime here is a terrifying, engulfing force to which the slaves have been thrown, and the arm and chains sinking below the waves in the foreground, lit by the glow of the setting sun, raise explicitly accusatory hands which gesture towards the slave ship departing on the horizon. It is a picture full of pity and horror, the latter perhaps made a little too explicit by the exaggerated monstrosity of the giant fish which gather for the feast – but exaggerated effect is part and parcel of propoganda. Ruskin was given the painting as a present, but later sold it because he found it ‘too painful to live with’.

Hydratic worlds - return to Drexciya

The Otoliths draw on the mythologies behind the music of Drexciya, a duo who emerged from the Detroit techno scene and shared its science fictional imagination. They invented an aquatic world, Drexciya, into which the offspring of the drowned slaves were born, a fantasy of escape which rewrites history. This is elaborated into an alternate cosmology here by a voice filled with a rather desperate stridency, cryptically identified as Remnant of a Hydrogen Element. He is heard spinning assertive theories and stretching the boundaries of scientific credulity whilst the camera remains still within a womblike cave, looking towards its curved mouth; a place of safe retreat from which to be reborn into a newly created world. The voice talks of a waterworld surrounding a star in a vast shell, insisting that this is possible, as if conviction is enough to make it manifest. Another, more resigned voice sends reports from some future moment, possibly in a post apocalyptic or politically oppressive world, her attempts at making sense of recorded archives appearing as semi-coherent text on the screen. There are also interludes in which we see flowing water shot in extreme close-up in such a way that it resembles flashing, glinting streaks of light. These appear like background static initially, and are accompanied by the detuned white noise of coded numbers radio stations. Just as voices emerge from the background sound, so the visual static resolves into the chaotic flow of water, noise resolving into comprehensible signal in a way that echoes in microcosm the complex elements of the film as a whole – although the degree to which meaningful pattern becomes apparent may well differ from viewer to viewer.

One Work: An Exhibition for Modern Living by tvnportal

Matthew Darbyshire’s An Exhibition for Modern Living creates an enclosed show room within walls of white shelving and fills it (and the shelves) with exemplary domestic objects reflecting the taste for shiny, mass-produced glitz and glamour, a collection of glittering totems of lightly held values. Artificial and cheaply manufactured materials predominate, with plastic, chrome and porcelain the smoothly presiding textures. There are pink curtains, a pink felt-lined phone, an array of plastic hourglass drum stools, a curtain of trailing gold discs, paper globe lanterns lining the floor like beached bouys, neatly paired and laid out designer trainers, a gold lame jacket hung up ready for a night out, white and pink elephants, and a sequined union jack cushion. White ceramic Buddhas, pink felt Christs and a gold-plated Ganesha point to a shallow and bogus religiosity which has been reduced to cheap commodification, consumer icons in this temple of kitsch. The title of the installation is taken from a 1949 exhibition which sought to point the way towards a bright and rational post war modernist future in which new design would create the shape of a new world. Such dreams of modernist purity have been transformed into the jumbled variety of objects on display here, which are possessed of a uniform characterlessness despite their seeming diversity, and form part of a comfort zone of reassuring blandness. In the centre, a chair rests on a small patch of artificial grass, a parodic fragment of the pastoral in this denatured, anaesthetised Eden. On the other hand, you could view it all as being just a load of camp fun, a counterblast to modernism’s earnest seriousness and lack of visible humour. The smooth, soft-edged, and shiny lightness of its squared off space and contents makes a notable contrast with the rough hewn grey stone walls with surround it. It seems that it is this enveloping colourlessness and incipient, cheerless gloom (these are the walls of an old slaughterhouse, after all) which it is trying to fend off with its distracting surface sparkle.

The final work which you come to in this part of the Show is Christian Marclay’s The Clock, an appropriate point of culmination given the widespread acclaim that it has garnered, including winning the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale art exhibition. It’s a 24 hour film collaged from myriad movie and TV clips, all of which contain some reference or allusion to time, and the appearance of clocks and watches in many of which (observed or unobserved) is synchronised with the actual time of its projection and viewing. If a character on screen checks his watch and sees that it is 10.30, you can do the same, and find that the time actually is 10.30. It’s an idea which needs no justification, exerting its own absorbing fascination and being sheerly enjoyable in its own right. It throws up odd juxtapositions of genre, era and mood, and reveals the central role which time plays in the movies, and the kind of scenarios in which it’s an important factor. Westerns include a good deal of waiting, a natural enough consideration given the difficulty of travelling to and from the minimally civilised outposts of the wild frontier. Railway stations are also a recurring location in which time and waiting are inherent, and in which clocks are naturally prominent. There are many films in which a rendezvous is set, and we share the tension of a character wondering whether it is going to be kept or not, with nervous glances at the advancing minutes. Ticking bombs and hostage situations, or any scene involving a countdown or deadline, have a more urgent timebound tension, with clues having to be uncovered and solutions hunted down within a prescribed period. The film develops its own rhythms, with periods of relative inactivity and reflection punctuated by bursts of more frenetic action. Morning, afternoon, evening and night all have their own filmic moods and atmospheres, and different genres tend to find their own natural time of day to inhabit and come to life in. Certain key times suggest themselves; it would certainly be interesting to see what happens around midnight and during the witching hour. We saw a segment lasting from 4.30 until 5, a period which sees the end of school and of office hours, with the resultant anticipation of being liberated from routine and preparing for the excitements of the evening ahead.

The Clock is, above all, a gift for the film buff. The buzz of recognizing favourite films, or the vexation of trying to recall just where this or that scene comes from is a real pleasure for the cineaste, as is the anticipation of what will come next, or when certain moments will turn up (what was the time when Harold Lloyd was hanging from that clock face? And what did Peter Fonda’s watch say at the moment that he dashed it to the ground at the beginning of Easy Rider, rejecting the constraints of time?) Whilst we were watching, there was a wildly disparate range of films and actors. Denzil Washington was sitting moodily, waiting for something or somebody, at various points throughout. There were scenes from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes and Mystery Train, characters tending to a good deal of hanging out in his films. Shelley Duvall turned up in Robert Altman’s Three Women and Thieves Like Us. Humphrey Bogart waited in vain for Ingrid Bergman at a Parisian station in Casablanca, whilst elsewhere the 4.50 from Paddington was expected in the eponymous Agatha Christie adaptation. People also waited for trains to arrive bearing fateful passengers in High Noon and Once Upon A Time In The West. Ingrid turned up again in Gaslight, worrying that she was losing her mind as details of her house were subtly altered around her, whilst Betty Davis prepared some domestic mind games of her own in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Both Dickie Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde leave buildings in fifties or early sixties England, looking shifty and checking the time. George Chakiris from West Side Story can be seen mooching around at various junctures, looking unreal and airbrushed in Technicolor tones. We voyeuristically follow John Lithgow’s killer in Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, his murderous garrotte extending from his watch and thus affording us frequent glimpses of the time. We see Jean-Pierre Leaud grow up, playing Antoin Doinel as a boy in Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and as a young man dodging the Parisian traffic in Stolen Kisses. Jack Nicholson clock watches his final few office minutes away until retirement in About Schmidt, whilst Steve Martin endures the agony of waiting for his dithering boss to come to a decision, acutely aware that his chances of catching the flight he’s booked on are narrowing by the minute in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Maggie Cheung sways along the street in Wong Kar Wei’s In The Mood For Love, a film which seems to unfold in a permanent state of temporal suspension. Juliette Binoche potters about in her Parisian attic room in Alice et Martin, and Peter Cushing leans against a fireplace in an elegantly appointed Victorian parlour, waiting for someone or perhaps just musing. Christopher Lee, meanwhile, takes measured steps away from Roger Moore in The Man With The Golden Gun as they pace out an old-fashioned duel. Robin Williams sits in his study waiting silently for Matt Damon to open up in Good Will Hunting, and River Phoenix stares out over the desert horizon I My Private Idaho. A young Mel Gibson races up and down the trenches at various intervals in Gallipoli, finally arriving just too late to deliver his most vital message. Timothy Spall sits in his stationary taxi, staring out at the world beyond his windscreen in a daze of uncomprehending disconnection and dull depression in Mike Leigh’s All Or Nothing. Patrick McGoohan tries to convince disbelieving onlookers that they are about to get blown up by a bomb. John Simm’s Raskolnikov tries to sell his watch to the old pawnbroker he will murder in Crime and Punishment. Robert Redford manages to stop time, smashing the stadium clock with a mighty slow motion stroke of the baseball bat in The Natural. Bank clerks wait for closing time in an episode of The Twillight Zone, whilst Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour pass the time on a warm summer’s day in the shade of gazebo in writer Richard Matheson’s Somewhere In Time (just having a title which references time is sometimes enough to warrant inclusion). The time to come flickers in LED digits on the dashboard of Harrison Ford’s ascending car in the future city of Blade Runner. And so on.

Controlling time - The Thief of Bagdhad

In a key thematic scene from Alexander Korda’s Thief of Bagdhad, Conrad Veidt’s crafty vizier Jaffar explains to Miles Malleson’s foolish sultan why his new time-telling toy is such a potentially ruinous and revolutionary invention. ‘I hope this dangerous device will never be allowed into the hands of the people’, he pointedly muses. ‘If people once begin to know the time, they will no longer call you the king of time. They will want to know how time is spent’. ‘Oh you’re right’, the sultan witters, ‘the people must never know’. Time is money and its possession is power. As we approached 5 o’clock, this particular section of The Clock’s 24 hour cycle built to a climax with the final duel from Sergio Leone’s For A Few Dollars More. Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel faced off against Gian Maria Volonte’s psychotic bandit Indio, with Clint Eastwood acting as rifle-bearing arbiter, opening the stopwatch which has been a central motif throughout and setting off the melancholy music box waltz the cessation of which marks the point at which the gunfighters may open fire. The usual Leone play of wide angled shots moving in to close-ups of narrowed eyes and twitching fingers is intercut with various scenes of individuals and groups waiting and watching in a state of suspended anticipation. Many of them have been encountered already in the last half hour (there’s Denzel again). It grants the ritualised duel in the middle of a desolate nowhere a large and rapt audience, where usually only the man with no name is present as a taciturn and expressionless witness. It’s an inspired piece of editing, funny and suspenseful, with Ennio Morricone’s stirring score synchronising perfectly throughout, and its conclusion is a fitting point at which to exit. I’d love to see some more of The Clock. Later sections must be more difficult to catch, falling as they do outside gallery hours, although there was a 24 hour showing during the Art Show’s residency for the hardy and dedicated insomniac.

Into the blue - Keith Wilson's Zone 1

Outside, behind the slaughterhouse and looking out onto the boat dotted harbour, you could find Keith Wilson's Zone 1. This consists of two parallel winding walls made out of steel, which form a narrow corridor, just wide enough to walk through. Its contours apparently model those of the Picadilly Line as represented on Frank Pick’s famous map of the London Underground system. Its interior walls are painted the same royal blue as its diagrammatic equivalent. In the context in which it is placed here, however, it more resembles a cattle run, guiding the beasts to the slaughter in the stone houses beyond, or perhaps acting as a channel directing waste viscera out into the harbour and thence into the sea. On the other side of the slaughterhouse, sculpted white cattle graze on the grassy quadrangle, seemingly nothing to do with the British Art Show exhibition. You could imagine them being driven through this passage, possibly being daubed blue in the process. But the blue of Wilson’s Zone also fortuitously mirrored the blue of the clear skies, and suggested the undulation of waves on the water. Squeezing through its winding space was a symbolic way of exiting the Art Show. It was an eclectic and wide ranging survey, encompassing all manner of media and modes of expression, an ideal primer for someone such as me who knows relatively little about what’s going on in the contemporary art world. I certainly enjoyed the underlying element of the fantastic, the science fictional imagination suggested by the Wellsian subtitle. Not everything was engaging or absorbing (and how could it be without being tailored specifically to an individual’s particular tastes and interests) and some of it was frankly baffling in the traditional modern art style. I have tended to ignore those works which left me indifferent and about which I have nothing to say other than a quizzical ‘huh?’ These may be precisely the things which affect you in a profound way, of course. It was great to have this show venture beyond the usual cultural boundaries and into the hinterlands of the South West, and the trail across the city between venues made it an exciting art adventure. Hopefully the schoolkids and students who were present also got something out of it, and some seeds of inspiration were planted in their imaginations. It continues until the 4th December.

Beware The Weird!

2011-11-21T16:08:00.004Z

I really enjoyed this review of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s The Weird anthology, published on The Guardian site on Friday. It’s a skilled and sustained pastiche of the hyperbolic and adjectivally excitable style of HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and others from the Weird Tales era, with its author Damian Walter adopting the persona of the doomed writer scribbling his final, half-crazed explanatory notes in some dank subterraenean passage before They find him once more. Unfortunately, its wit seems to have been rather lost on many of The Guardian readers commenting on it below, who dash off accusations of pretentiousness and obscurity. Actually, Walter conveys the fact that the anthology brings in authors beyond the usual literary suspects (‘weirdness I had not even dared to conceive’) such as Rabindranath Tagore and Eric Basso, and stories by those usually associated with the literary mainstream (‘the eruption of weird in the work of otherwise mainstream writers’) such as Daphne Du Maurier, Ben Okri and Joyce Carol Oates. There’s a subtle dig at the elevation of China Mieville to the status of The Guardian’s official advocate of SF, fantasy and the weird, the genre writer it’s acceptable to read (‘Bow now before the Mieville. BOW! BOW!’), and whose theorising gives it academic credence. Neil Gaiman is amusingly posited as the benign, genial force set in Gnostic opposition to the pitiless rigour of the Mieville’s ascendant demiurge. If you don’t comprehend the basis of the pastiche, there are plenty of links (or portals, to get in with the spirit of the thing) to get you up to speed. So ignore the carping voices, and enjoy the different approach of this witty and well-informed review.

The Forewarning

2011-11-18T12:24:00.008Z

The Forewarning, which received its premiere showing last week, is trumpeted as Exeter’s first independent feature film, a claim which immediately invokes feelings of local interest and pride in a city not necessarily known for great cultural achievements. What it certainly is for its writer, director and producer Andy Robinson and the dedicated team which he gathered around him, is a labour of love. Andy strove assiduously over a period of six years to make this film, starting (and ending) with a budget of bugger all and filming and editing in the cracks of time available between holding down a full time job and raising his daughter alongside his wife, to whom he formally apologised before the premiere (a playful apology only, since she has offered vital support and encouragement throughout). The film follows the parallel lives of two focal characters, David Matheson and Sam Beaumont, whose lives are seemingly disconnected but whose paths vector in on each other during the course of the film. David has received a heart transplant after years of poor health, and it seems that there may be some supernatural agency at work, a vestigial presence which has somehow remained inherent in the physical blood and sinew of the organ. This guides him towards some mysterious purpose in a life which has otherwise lost itself in directionless drift. The story is about the matter of the heart, in metaphorical as well as medical terms, and Andy uses the supernatural elements to quietly examine the effects of death on the living. Both the main characters live in a numb hinterworld of loss, in which they exist in a state of self-doubt and negation. David is haunted by a strangely calm doppelganger, a still, self-possessed figure dressed in an immaculate suit of angelic white. It remains an ambivalent figure, frightening for him in its strangeness and its intimations of death, but never directly threatening. Sam’s ghosts manifest themselves through the digital fragments which are left behind in our highly technologised age, pixillated phantoms caught on mobiles, voice messages from beyond the grave. Her partner leaves a trail of cryptic crossword clues which lead to places connected with the progress of their lives together; everyday locales which are now haunted places in which associative memory has accumulated like an age-grown patina of moss or lichen. For other characters, different associations conjure up the lost. David’s mother grows emotional at a picture of a chalkboard covered with complex equations calculated by her deceased daughter in law. They are an outward expression of a part of her self which she finds beautiful and true, a mind which comprehended the essential order of the universe.

The well-tailored ghost

Both Sam and David are alone in the world, isolated figures disconnected from everyday human interaction through grief, anxiety and fear. Andy creates subtle connections between these lonely characters throughout the film, without having them actually meet. Both visit the cathedral green. Sam puts herself through a punishing session on an exercise machine treadmill, a neat metaphor for a life stuck in exhausting stasis. David enjoys his newfound health by running along the ordered concrete planes of the Exe flood channel, the ghost-presence of his donor subliminally suggested by his replication of the reflexive gesture of tapping the top of an aluminium post as he passes it. Whilst Sam spends much of the film seeking the answers to a crossword which leads her on a journey across town and through her life, David quietly and unobtrusively provides the solution to his mother’s Times puzzle, suggesting that he may prove instrumental in the reconnection of her fragmented emotional self. The whirligig static eddies and whorls of static on an untuned TV screen also seem to form a conduit between the two, as Sam presses her hand to the chaotic visual noise. It looks like it might push through to some other side, in the same manner that Jean Marais pushed through a mirror into the world beyond in Cocteau’s Orphee. The scene also recalls James Woods’ intimacy with a mutable TV screen in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. An associative cut to David’s sudden startled awakening implies the disturbance of some porous membrane through which the two are connected – the thin walls between the chambers of a heart, perhaps.

A life in pieces - the fractured self

The story makes much of the play of chance, counterbalancing themes of science and superstition in a Nigel Kneale-ish fashion. The keyring, which is the slowly revolving focus of the very effective opening credits sequence and which plays an important part in the story, is a twisted and tangled ball of metal wire which resembles a model of an electron particle cloud - a higher order emerging from seemingly chaotic motion. The tossed coin which lands on its edge (an impressively realised effect) points to a universe in which stranger complexities multiply beyond the simple binary choice of heads or tails. David’s wife was a scientist, which leads to the introduction of the ideas of quantum physics and parallel universes. The potential branching of alternate realities from the divergent outcomes of every moment is essentially a theoretical expression of the age old balance between the operation of fate and the shaping of one’s own destiny, which is central to the story.

There is also a definite sense of spiritual yearning in the film, a desire to find meaning beyond the manifest physical realities of the world, but not within the traditional religious traditions. Sam and her partner drank at the George’s Meeting House, a pub converted from an old 18th century Unitarian chapel, although they never went there on a Sunday, in deference to his parents’ beliefs. Sam also discards her St Christopher’s medal, which is a kind of parallel keepsake to the atom cloud keyring, after her partner’s death, a rejection of the idea that any power might reside in it, and of the faith which it embodies. The cathedral is a looming presence in several scenes, and (without wishing to divulge too much) the notion of self-sacrifice is, of course, central to Christianity. Even the book which Sam unpacks from the box of her partner’s belongings, Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, is in keeping with this sense of yearning. It’s central idea of elevators ascending through the heavens and into space tinges his usual hard SF rationality with a hint of mysticism.

Influences - Rod Serling's Twilight Zone

The introduction of the strange into the everyday (or the rendering of the strange in everyday terms), often as a reflection of the troubled psyches of its protagonists, was also characteristic of the 60s TV series The Twilight Zone. Andy acknowledges its influence in the surnames of his principal characters, Matheson and Beaumont. These pay homage to Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, two of the show’s finest writers (speculating that the Christian names make reference to Sam and Dave, the duo who sang Soul Man and Hold On I’m Coming is probably taking things too far). The programme also informed his decision to film in black and white in order to recreate some of the same sombre monochrome atmosphere. Beaumont’s own life ended tragically as he was ravaged with a mysterious illness which destroyed his mind and body, leaving him dead at the age of 38. The shadow of death which hangs over the film, and David’s own fear in the face of his fragile health is perhaps informed by this, as well as by the dark tenor of and air of angst and paranoia pervading much of Beaumont’s fiction. On the other hand, the romanticism which often comes through in Matheson’s episodes is also present. Andy certainly captures some of the quiet eeriness of the show, as well as the centrality of character to its storytelling, its exposure of deep-rooted anxiety, longing and fears. You can imagine the camera point of view swinging around at the end of the film to pick out the sports-jacketed figure of Rod Serling, hands clasped before him, informing us in his unmistakeable clipped and crisply articulated tones that Sam and David have found what they searched for; not in the centre of Exeter, but in the heart…of the Twilight Zone.

The dark imagination - Charles Beaumont

The film, for all its eeriness and supernatural trappings, is at heart a romance, however. Albeit one in which the objects of affection are largely absent. It’s an unashamed tearjerker in places, evoking strong emotions. In this, it is greatly assisted by the restrained and affecting performances of its two lead actors, Richard Perry and Marina O’Shea, as well as by Rebecca Crookshank’s warm and sympathetic portrayal of Jo, David’s old university acquaintance who helps him in his attempts to uncover his destiny. They, and Andy, avoid melodramatic histrionics, keeping instead to a more controlled display of feeling – subtler, more effective, and much more difficult to act, I should imagine. Andy pulls back from the overwhelming expression of Sam’s sorrow when the trail leads back to her old house. His camera discretely observes her collapse to her knees in the teeming rain from an upstairs window, the raindrops on the pane standing in for her tears, with her calm voiceover telling us that some things are just too painful. A passerby stops and stoops to ask her if she’s alright, a small act of everyday kindness which makes the scene all the more moving. It’s in the tradition of scenes in the movies in which rain symbolically conveys strong emotions, from the climaxes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Blade Runner (which perhaps unwisely spells the symbolism out in its ‘tears in the rain’ speech) to the more restrained shots of raindrops running down the windows in In Cold Blood, expressing the feelings which the character cannot articulate. Was it fortunate happenstance that the skies opened on the day of shooting, or did Andy patiently wait for a suitably sodden day. I suspect the latter is probably the case.

The lines of fate

An incidental pleasure for residents of Exeter is the imaginative use of locations. The cathedral and its surroundings exert an inevitable gravity. We also get to see the Mill on the Exe cycle bridge, with its oversized grinding stone acting as a suspension counterweight; the leafy parkland of Heavitree cemetery; the steep and narrowly precipitous stone steps by the side of the catacomb slopes (very much in the style of The Exorcist); the reflective shard of the Riddle Book sculpture, with the clone town blandness of the high street an appropriate site for a hallucinatory nightmare; a quiet backroad with a pillarbox embedded in the wall, symbolic of a sense of permanence, solidity and home (all the things which Sam has lost); the cool and rational interior spaces of the Peninsular Medical School; and the elevated platform of Polsloe Bridge station (halfway to Heaven?) from which the railway track dips and rises in a straight, predetermined line, heading towards the estuary and coastline. There are also many visually inventive details, which reflect Andy’s keen and cineliterate eye and his (Orson) Wellesian delight in mastering the medium. He even manages to make the Sidwell Street arcade, one of the shabbiest areas of town, look interesting with a carefully framed deep focus shot lining its tiled pillars up alongside each other. The shot from ‘inside’ the pillar box, looking out at Sam peering in, is effective in itself, and also serves to convey the idea of an unreachable place, of frustrated attempts at communication between realms which are nearby but separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The scene in which David talks of his past, and of his shame at proving unable to rescue his wife from drowning, is played out in a room in which the light from a table lamp with a moving ‘propellor’ lampshade casts strobing shadows onto the ceiling, enhancing the hypnotic feeling of being held by vital revelation. It’s reminiscent of the effects of motion created by the devices of early pre-cinema, praxinoscopes and zoetropes, which is suggestive of David’s digging deep into the buried recesses of his psyche to excavate suppressed and painful memories. Throughout, Andy’s framing is precise and carefully thought out, the result of a painstaking and perfectionist approach.

Before the film’s premiere, Andy modestly proclaimed that the film was a collaborative effort involving many of those present in the audience, cheekily and pre-emptively going on to add that ‘if you don’t like it, you’ve only got yourselves to blame’. Whilst this is true, there’s little doubt as to who is the controlling auteur here – the writer, producer and director and no doubt provider of tea and biscuits as the occasion demanded. So here’s to you, Mr Robinson (sorry, I just had to) and to the next project.

British Art Show 7 in Plymouth

2011-11-10T15:18:00.011Z

PART ONE

The British Art Show is a five yearly survey of contemporary art being created in these islands, which travels around selected cities in an attempt to counterbalance the gravitational pull of the capital and show new work elsewhere in the country (although the Hayward Gallery in London is one of the stopping off points this time round). This is its seventh incarnation, and it has made a rare detour beyond the cultural barrier of Bristol, venturing into the hinterlands of the South West and pitching up in Plymouth (as you can see from the youtube video here). This may be something to do with the Dartington Arts College decamping to Devon’s largest city, a consolatory bonus for what was otherwise a disappointing piece of economically motivated centralisation. The Plymouth College of Art actually plays a minimal part in the proceedings, the smallest of five sites around which the art is distributed. The disparate whole is given a loosely connective theme through the title In the Days of the Comet, the title of HG Wells’ 1906 novel. This was written after his initial burst of intense creativity, during which he wrote the concise, richly imagined and metaphorically resonant science fiction novels for which he is best remembered (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man and The First Men In The Moon). In the Days of the Comet’s science fictional premise, the transformative green vapours of the passing body’s tail bringing renewal and hope to a tired world, is a device which enables Wells to didactically elaborate upon his utopian political and sexual ideals. It is a transitional book, which combines his novels of character and social observation such as Kipps and Love and Mr Lewisham, with his increasingly self-important tendency to set the world to rights exhibited in SF utopias such as A Modern Utopia, The Sleeper Awakes and Men Like Gods. These are little read these days, so the Art Show’s chosen title gives it a sense of belatedness both in terms of its implication of living in the end days, and of the sense (whether intended or not) that the best lies behind us, that we are drifting through a period of cultural anomie in which contemporary art often fails to connect beyond a small and cosy clique. The science fictional element, communicated via Wells’ title if not his book, prompts artists to look beyond this moment into possible futures, to imagine alternative ways of seeing the world, and of representing that vision in new and startling ways. Which is what artists should be doing anyway, of course. Not all the participants take up the underlying theme, rightly refusing to be bound by prescriptive demands. But there is a definite imaginative thread to be traced between various of the works on display which evince a science fictional flavour – the scattered fragments left in the wake of Wells’ comet.

The show is certainly well-advertised, with a large banner being the first thing you see as you leave the station, enlivening the dark grey concrete of the car park with which you are immediately faced. Even more impressive is the huge banner which is draped down the side of the Civic Centre, visible at the end of the long post-war pedestrian boulevard leading down towards the Hoe which is central to the post-war city plan. An impressive vote of confidence in the exhibition’s popular potential, it also serves to positively highlight the virtues of the 1962 building, whose recent grade II listing has caused considerable controversy. The first site you arrive at is in the equally impressive modern edifice of the University’s Roland Levinsky Building, which was opened in 2007, with its burnished copper exterior punctuated by variably sized and spaced vertical and horizontal windows. This houses the Peninsula Arts Gallery. The first of several interstitial works by Edgar Schmitz set in the thresholds and intermediary spaces of the galleries, was ironically the victim of the unusually sunny weather in a city whose weather forecast seems permanently set to ‘partly cloudy’. The projection in the lobby was thus bleached out by sunlight dazzle. Wolfgang Tillmans’ large picture Freischwimmer 155 immediately catches the eye as you walk into the gallery, and could be specifically designed to illustrate Wells’ story (it would make a good book cover). It’s miasmic, Brownian swirl can be seen, in this context, as the vaporous trail of the comet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the inspiration for the exhibition’s subtitle. The means of its production also echoes the blend of science and spirituality in Wells’ novel: It is a photographic image created without the usual camera equipment, instead producing an image by exposing the photographic paper itself to controlled shafts of light. Tillmans also produces a series of collaged news and entertainment images pressed beneath glass in museum like display desks. Art students were milling around these, listening to a seminar and remaining stubbornly dumb when asked for their opinions – perhaps it was too early for their brains to have engaged fully. This made it difficult to appreciate these reportage collisions of the terrible and the trivial, whose immediacy we were perhaps, in context, being asked to view as if from the historical perspective of citizens of the future. David Noonan’s large untitled tapestry adopted techniques usually associated with crafts to present a monumental representative image in a traditional style, rather like Grayson Perry does on a smaller scale with his ceramic pots and vases. It seems to depict a street scene in an African or Middle Eastern country, or possibly an imaginary city. The meaning is unclear, and the withholding of an explanatory title suggests such ambiguity might be deliberate, encouraging the viewer to make up her own story. The whole is woven with black and white threads, and rather perversely includes peacocks amongst its elements. Again, perhaps this is an encouragement to the viewer to colour it as they will with the unlimited palette of the mind’s eye.

Wolfgang Tillmans (copyright the artist)

Luke Fowler and Toshiya Tsunoda’s Composition for Flutter Screen immediately took on an air of mystery and ritualistic expectation as we had to part heavy black curtains and make our way in darkness into the space in which it was installed. The flutter screen was a loosely fixed white expanse of silky taffeta, which was periodically set into billowing motion by a fan at the side. A light shining on this screen from the other side highlighted its sheen and shadows, casting the moving contours of the material into dramatically contrasted patterns and emphasising the waves rippling across its surface. The whole seemed to be capturing a materialisation of breeze, of the currents of the air. Elevated speakers on either side produced two low-pitched tones of varying duration, and with a crackling aura of burry static. They sounded like foghorns, or Tibetan horns, their baleful braying sending a muffled aural beacon through the fog or clouds of the flutterscreen. Projections were cast onto the screen, all of them images of elemental evanescence and change, conveying the intangible and less solid qualities of the world – a moth’s strobing wings, water filling a glass, its protruding meniscus trembling, candles, the sky and telegraph wires. These images were blurred and did not always immediately reveal their true nature. The lit surface and the movements of the screen made it seem like it was itself a liquid surface, the projections as if refracted beneath, like the sequences of objects viewed under water in slow-panning motion in Tarkovsky’s films Stalker and Nostalgia. A group of primary school children were sat watching this one, occasionally giving each other bewildered or amused looks, before their teacher quietly ushered them out. I wonder if it will linger in their minds. With its repetitions of image, sound (including the soft whoosh of the fan) and rippling motion, it certainly exerted a hypnotic effect which increased the longer you sat before it.

Across the busy road from the very modern Roland Levitsky building is the more stolid Edwardian brick façade of the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, all backward looking, weighty baroque, which it the location for the next segment of the show. It provides a neatly incongruous setting for a modern art exhibition with its eyes on things to come, leading my thoughts towards the long-disused museum discovered by the narrator of Wells’ The Time Machine in the distant human future of the Morlocks and Eloi. Walking up the stone staircase to the first floor gallery spaces, we hear a cosmic music cue from Edgar Schmitz, a short sigh of electronic sound which is another of his occupations of inbetween spaces. It acts as a prelude, arousing anticipation and ushering us into a new zone, separate from the local archaeology and natural history displays below, with their flint spearheads and stuffed birds. The first thing you see upon entering the gallery in which the Art Show is housed are a series of sculptures by Sarah Lucas, perched atop brutalist breezebock plinths in prefab emulation of the elevated display of classical statuary or urns, which she’s called NUDS. They look like grossly fleshy tangles of extruded phallic meat, magnified versions of the curly mounds of sandy deposit left on the seashore by wee beasties burrowing beneath the surface. On closer inspection, these turn out to be made from tights packed full of white fluff. What looks to the casual eye like heavy and rocklike marbled material is in fact soft and pliable. A chap was crouched below these, sketching their edgeless organic forms on a large piece of paper and effectively setting them against the rigidly ordered grid of the old gallery’s roof struts and columns. Lucas’ relish in grotesque distortions of the flesh is carried across into the paintings of Milena Drajicevic, which she labels her Supplicant series. These head and bust portraits subject human features to disturbing alterations, turning mouths into rigid pillarbox slots or obscuring the face entirely beneath layers of cabbage-leaf growths. These appear like the results of mutations, alien fungal diseases or strange future fashions for self-erasing genetic manipulation. Phoebe Unwin also paints vaguely fantastical figures, creating hybrid or distended forms. The surface of her Man With Heavy Limbs is divided in to four equal areas. Three are patterned in an op-art style, with harlequin grilles of black and white and grey, and contain the limbs and torso of the seated subject. The top left quadrant crams in the head and upper body, leaving the whole looking very bottom heavy, and leaving the impression of a rather brutish giant.

George Shaw - Blocked Drain (copyright the artist)

George Shaw’s paintings are devoid of human figures, depicting the marginal and on the surface uninteresting nowhere spaces of his Coventry upbringing. They are made with Humbrol enamel paints, the kind which would have been used to paint a completed Airfix plastic model kit, which gives them the gloss of photographic prints. Such associations with childhood, both in subject matter and material, point to the construction of memory models, the gloss the transformative sheen of nostalgia. These suggestively empty places, the unpaved tracks running behind gardens and the fenced-off, rubble-contoured construction sites, are areas of great imaginative potential. Just as, in childhood, they were used as a stage for stories, games and adventures, so they are now ready to be filled with memories, real or invented. Ian Kiaer’s piece was something of a puzzle, composed of several discrete and scattered elements which challenged the viewer to put them together and make sense of them. Big shiny panels hung on the wall, a mirrored shop display plinth was attached to the floor, near to which a shower of small, bright circular spots dotted the wooden floor tiles, with what looked like a white-walled modernist mouse cage or fancy chocolate box positioned at the far edge of the whole assemblage. Perhaps sensing that a little explanation was needed to ward off peremptory dismissal, a helpful member of the museum staff came over to point out the relation of the work to Konstantin Melnikov’s modernist Moscow house, built in the late 1920s, of which she showed us some pictures. The yellow panels and circles suggest the play of light through its varied rectilinear and lozenge-shaped windows into its cylindrical interior. Melnikov’s futurist art and design fell foul of Stalin’s iron vision, with the imposition of a style which reflected the monolithic power of the state condemning him to internal exile and creative death. The tiny representation of his house is dwarfed within the gallery room, which is made to appear imposingly monumental in comparison, could easily be crushed by a stomp from the foot of any passing visitor. But it casts magnified areas of light, suggested by the other elements of Kiaer’s installation, its influence radiating beyond its own physical decline. I still wasn’t entirely convinced by the whole thing, however, which seemed to me to hog too much of the room to little real effect. Perhaps it needed to the sun to shine on it to bring it to life.

The centre of the room was dominated by a ramshackle structure erected by Spartacus Chetwynd. Disappointingly, this turns out to be an invented monicker, the artist’s real first name being Lali. But its still a great title to work under. Her mother is Luciana Arrighi, a film production designer. I wonder if she’s any relation to Nike Arrighi, so effective as the bewitched Lilith in the 1968 Hammer film The Devil Rides Out? Chetwynd’s work was an elevated shack constructed on a platform, its walls made out of old, discarded windowframes, giving it a patchwork look echoed by the rug on the floor. The whole can be folded away and transported on the platform, and there is a photo which shows it erected in a field. On the way up the stairs there were a couple of stray round portholes stood upright beneath the museum’s lengthy window, eliciting an initial ‘you call this art?’ response. Upon encountering this mobile home of which they are a detached element, they come to seem like spare wheels, or components which have yet to be discovered and incorporated. The house is like the dwelling of some post-catastrophe band of nomads, scavenged and built from the ruins.

Charles Avery (copyright the artist)

Charles Avery’s installation also has a post apocalyptic air to it. He’s set up a tableau, a 3-D freeze frame, in a large vitrine, whose metallic frame rises into geometric, crystalline shapes at its apex. The bottom is covered with drifts of greyish sand, which a crouched examination reveals to be layered in chiaroscuro gradations, like a reject souvenir from Alum Bay. The vitrine’s crystalline frame in grey metal makes it seem like a magnified version of a particle of these sands – a world in a grain. The sedimentary layers, drained of all colour, form the base of a blasted landscape, with wiry, dessicated growths spiking up through the surface. The tableau played out upon this bleak lunar desert relates to a text pinned on the wall opposite, which tells an explorer’s tale of journeys to a mysterious island, a locus of the weird, and the adventures he has there with his idealised female companion, Miss Miss. The story is fractured and vague, perhaps an insight into the confused mental processes of its narrator, and offers only tantalising hints as to the true nature of the imaginary world it depicts. It could be seen as an exploration of the creative process itself, the workings of the imagination made manifest with all its naked and unedited subconscious urges given symbolic form in the frozen fragment of story preserved in the glass cage. In this, it is a variant of some writers of old pulp SF and fantasy, whose rough-hewn and vividly imagined scenarios inadvertently projected powerful fears and desires in new configurations reflecting the spirit of the age, all of which amounted to a literary form of naïve art. Of course, many more writers in these genres wrote with a great deal more conscious control over their material. The tableau presents Miss Miss (an old shop dummy who more resembles a Miss Selfridge or Chelsea Girl) strikes a weary pose before the forked branches of a dead tree which suggests she’s been travelling for a long time through this unforgiving wasteland. Her backpack lies open and discarded behind her, its contents spilled. Before her, a snake leans on the sand, propped up on its single arm. Is this the end of Miss Miss? It’s a strange scene, full of genre surrealism which is enhanced by the fact that we don’t really know what’s going on. Like Miss, we are stranded at the mid-point of a story whose beginning and end we may never know.

Karla Black’s sculpture is also composed of sedimentary layers, this time of earth, the stuff of temperate rather than desert climes. It is open to the gallery air, unconfined by the containing, protective encasement of glass. Its stepped levels, with their subtle gradations of earthy colour, are textured with pebbles, clods and grains, providing naturally rich detailing. They rise to form the shape of an Incan ziggurat, with a flat plateau on top. This was dusted with what looked like yellow sherbet dab, with a scattering of brightly coloured sweet shards – sulphurous and gemlike mineral deposits. The whole could be a great geological formation or ruined temple on an alien planet, or simply a monumental chocolate cake. The schoolchildren in the gallery, let loose to draw what most caught their fancy, loved this one and had to be kept back from investigating too closely. It did have that quality of making you want to leap up on top and declare yourself king of the castle. The incongruity of soil heaped up on a well-polished parquet floor gave it a naturally intriguing air, with its indeterminate boundaries challenging the preciousness of immutable ‘do not touch’ modern artworks. Surely some of the loose crumbs of earth chaotically fringing the mound had tumbled down from the slopes during its period in the gallery. It’s a sculpture subject to the wider geological processes of erosion and the universal force of gravity, its form changing by the day, resisting attempts at anything more than superficial tidying and maintenance.

Simon Martin’s videos focus on the changing effects of slowly moving light sources on static objects. He shoots a lemon as if it were an astronomical body, observing it as it goes through phases of eclipse – a citrus moon or ascorbic asteroid. The shifting areas of shadow and light throw certain features into sharp relief. As with the moon, the divider between light and darkness brings out detail with preternatural clarity, highlighting the lemon’s pitted surface, its own craters and plateaux. In Martin’s other video, an African mask has its mouth, nose and eyes hollowed by richly dark shadows as the light source makes its steady sweep across its stern visage. This highlighting is reminiscent of the old movie keylighting through which cinematographers sculpted Marlene or Greta’s faces into exquisite masks. The bulky black boxes of the Trinitron TVs become like modern techno extensions of the ancient mask (although they themselves are like venerable relics in the speeded up historical time of the modern technological age). Black wood is backed by a distended skull of black plastic. The lemon, on the other hand, takes on a distinctly fleshy aspect at certain phases of its cycle, its sensuous curve contrasting with the foursquare black plastic moulding in which it is framed.

Elizabeth Price - User Group Disco (copyright the artist)

A door at the side of the gallery led into a dark space through which children were forbidden to pass. This promised forbidden and illicit pleasures, but was presumably because of the strong language and sexual references in Emily Wardill’s film Game Keepers Without Game. We saw the last 10 minutes or so of this 76 minute film, which had received its premiere at the Spacex Gallery in Exeter the previous year. It featured disembodied conversations and reveries, some quite explicit, spoken whilst the camera focussed on small details of dress, furnishings and décor. Without wishing to give the end away (which is precisely what I’m about to do) it all concludes with a shocking image of someone lying in a pool of their own blood, an axe embedded in their head. I’m not sure what led up to this gory conclusion, and I didn’t feel like sitting through the whole thing on the hard wooden bench to find out. The fragment I saw was intriguing enough, but I’m not sure about the wisdom of showing lengthy films as exhibits in art galleries (I must admit, I never sat through it in Exeter either). Perhaps I’m a fogeyish traditionalist, but I think a cinema with comfortable seating would be a more appropriate setting. Around the corner from this partitioned area, heavy curtains parted to let us into another room in which a film was projected, this time Elizabeth Price’s shorter 15 minute User Group Disco. This took place in what purported to be a Hall of Sculptures, with lines of text occasionally flashing up providing an accompanying commentary, as if the whole thing were a guide book to a museum of the future. These announcements had an authoritative air, partaking of the academy and the corporate boardroom. They were applied to a series of familiar domestic objects – whether kitchen implements, spinning LPs or ceramic female figures – which were lit against a dark background and made strange by their isolation and treatment as artefacts of a bygone civilisation. The kitchen implements were made to spin and roll as if components of a great mechanism set into action, and the camera roved around the objects in atomic orbit, giving the whole film the feel of a dance of perpetual motion. Pulsing, moody music finally broke out into A-ha’s Take On Me, which really set everything vibrating, giving these objects reverentially filed away in the mysterious Hall an uncanny life of their own.

Coming up...Alasdair Gray's portraits and Christian Marclay's 24 hour film The Clock.

Weird Fiction Review

2011-11-07T01:15:00.013Z

Here’s a very promising new website which has been opened by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer called Weird Fiction Review. It is the online brethren of the Weird Fiction Review journal edited by ST Joshi. Joshi is an expert on HP Lovecraft, often seen as the godfather (although the lord knows what gods they might be) of twentieth century weird fiction, and also, in his 1939 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, one of its earlies theorisers and historians. Joshi has edited, introduced and annotated a couple of volumes of Lovecraft’s stories for Penguin Classics, The Call of Cthulhu and Dreams in the Witch House, each adding the post-title enticement ‘and other weird stories’. He’s also gathered together a fine crop of Arthur Machen’s pagan reveries in The White People (again with the ‘and other weird stories’ addendum), a collection of American Supernatural tales and two annotated volumes of MR James’ ghost stories. That all of these appear in Penguin Classics editions tends to mean that they are shelved alongside the likes of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, thus pointing to certain affinities all might have with aspects of one another’s work. Such company lends these authors of The Weird (I guess we should capitalise it to give it categorical authority) the official heft of literary acceptance, placing them within a history of literature extending way beyond the boundaries of the modern realist novel or short story of character, which have come to be viewed as an inherently superior form. The Penguin Classics also encompasses the likes of Beowulf, a collection of English Mystery Plays, The Arthurian Romances, The Sufi narrative poem The Conference of the Birds, The Niebelungenlied and Japanese No dramas after all. Plus some fellow called Shakespeare, whose plays contained many a weird and uncanny incident. Joshi’s journal would appear to offer a furtherance of this accumulation of academic weight, presenting a persuasive case for weird fiction being worthy of wider and deeper consideration.

The Vandermeers clearly think this too, and the website seeks to define The Weird as a distinct substrata of the fantastic, separate from other seams such as horror, science fiction, heroic fantasy or magic realism. It may draw on any of these, of course, and they from it. The Venn diagram of the fantastic has many interlocking circles and zones of intersection. The Weird’s very mutability suggests that it is as much about general mood and approach as it is a generic mode. The Vandermeers point to The Weird as embodying ‘the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition’. They’ve gathered many examples for their new anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories which, in its impressive monumentality, attempts a definitive delineation of the genre’s contours. It spans the years from 1907 to the present, roughly the period in which science fiction also developed from its uptopian and scientific romantic roots into the genre recognisable to all today, thus pointing to a parallel evolution. The Weird is perhaps the irrational flipside to science fiction’s rationalisation of the fantastic, its troubled subconscious. SF takes place in a universe which operates according to some assumed set of natural laws, even if some of these are invented. The Weird attempts to peer beyond the veil of the natural world or warp the material of consensus reality. And if it spurns the rationalized fantasy of SF, then its also tends to eschew the secondary worlds of fantasy, with their pastoral or sublimely Romantic landscapes. If it does create worlds separate from our own, it tends to head straight for their urban centres, finding the grimy, smoking industrial heartlands. Its cities often bear a resemblance to real world locales, past or present. For many, the teeming warrens of Dickens’ Victorian London provide the model. For M.John Harrison’s ever-changing Viriconium, Manchester and fin de siecle Paris merge, and in Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris, New Orleans, Venice and maybe a hint of Prague.

A follow up of sorts to their 2008 anthology The New Weird, the new collection dispenses with the prefix, which was useful for a time in helping to identify a new wave of fantastic fiction which revelled in its own baroque and grotesque creations and shared certain common influences. The Weird, with a few extra years hindsight, embeds these modern manifestations within a deeper history, stressing continuity more than novelty. We start off with an extract from Alfred Kubin’s 1908 story The Other Side. Kubin was also an artist, producing strange and disturbing images full of death and grotesquely distorted sexuality, and this points to the important influence of the visual arts on The Weird. Symbolist artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Max Klinger, Arnold Bocklin, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon produced pictures which drew from the darker or more vividly realised worlds of the imagination, and these are often crying out for weird tales to be spun around them. Bruno Shulz, whose 1937 story The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass is included here, was also an artist, producing a series of shadowy glass prints (etchings made in black gelatine spread on a glass plate) for The Book of Idolatry in 1920. Leonora Carrington, whose 1941 story White Rabbits is in the anthology, was another visual artist. Indeed, this was primarily how she was remembered when she died earlier this year. Her fantastical imagery was, by the middle years of the twentieth century, defined as surrealist, the contemporary expression of the Symbolists’ fin de siecle fever dreams. The visual aspect of The Weird is acknowledged on the website, with an art section which has begun with a selection of paintings by the New Orleans painter Myrtle von Damitz III, whose monstrous grotesques could have inhabited the blurred landscapes and jewelled interiors of the Symbolists.

Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows (1907) and MR James’ Casting the Runes are two well-established classics of English supernatural fiction. The central narrative conceit of James’ story was incorporated into Jacques Tourneur’s otherwise loose 1957 film adaptation Night of the Demon, whilst The Willows provided the title for Ghost Box artists Belbury Poly’s debut full length LP, with the story posted for a time at the Ghost Box website (you can now uncover a collage of photos with an accompanying extract from Arthur Machen’s The White People). The so-called hauntological music of the Ghost Box artists and their ilk (Demdike Stare, The Moon Wiring Club, Mordant Music, July Skies and others) and of new/psych/freak (take your pick or make up your own alternative) folk artists and bands carries the blood of The Weird in its veins (or its analogue circuitry), and provides a choice of possible soundtracks. Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919), whose inclusion in the anthology testifies to the enormous shadow which the Czech artist’s absurdist tales have cast over weird fiction, inspired another musician. Frank Zappa recommended that his listeners read it somewhere in the densely designed sleeve of the Mothers’ LP We’re Only In It For the Money. Belgian writer Jean Ray has two stories selected, The Mainz Psalter (1930) and The Shadowy Street (1931), which I’d be very interested to read having seen and greatly enjoyed Harry Kumel’s 1971 film adaptation of his god-haunted house novel Malpertuis. Jerome Bixby’s It’s A Good Life (1953) and Charles Beaumont’s The Howling Man (1959) both provided the basis for memorable episodes of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, perhaps the finest showcase for The Weird on TV. Mervyn Peake’s Same Time, Same Place, published in Science Fantasy magazine in 1963 and posthumously included in the miscellany edited by his wife Maeve Gilmore Peake’s Progress, makes the commonplace setting (in its time) of a Lyon’s Corner House tea room seem strange and foreboding. Peake is another writer of weird fiction who was also an artist, and this story is an example of his ‘head-hunting’ (the search for interesting and odd heads, rather than just faces, to sketch and spark the imagination) transposed to literary form. You can hear the story read by Peake’s son Sebastian (or it may be Fabian) on the recently released British Library audio CD of selections from Peake’s Progress.

James Tiptree Jr’s (aka Alice Sheldon’s) stories were published as science fiction, but they were haunted by death and despair and had a raging intensity and need which tended to drive them towards a breakdown in the rational surface of the world. The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976) is a typically incendiary tale which traces the development of the psychological mindset which accepts and enacts atrocities. It is also aware of its deep Weird roots, playing out an inverted enactment of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Harlan Ellison’s stories share the intensity and heightened emotions of Tiptree’s work, as well as the poetic prolixity of their titles, and his The Function of Dream Sleep (1988) brackets his deeply felt 1989 collection Angry Candy along with its opening story Paladin of the Lost Hour (one of my favourite of Ellison’s). Both show Ellison at his most affecting and powerful – the Weird with a passionate heart. M.John Harrison was a primary influence on modern writers of weird fiction, with his Decadent city of Viriconium providing the foundation upon which Ambergris, China Mieville’s New Crobuzon and KJ Bishop’s Ashamoil were built. Egnaro (1981) and The New Rays (1982) both appear in this anthology and in his collection The Ice Monkey (I still treasure my signed copy of the 1988 paperback). Egnaro, with its seedy bookshop described in uncomfortably familiar terms (I know these places perhaps too well) is one of his stories which warns of the dangers of losing oneself in fantasy, drifting apart from the real, whilst also being alert to its allure. Its narrative of a hopelessly questing protagonist searching for half-glimpsed elsewheres to escape from the disappointing present is recast in the context of Harrison’s Viriconium mythos in A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, a story which is itself radically re-aligned by the replacement in the title and throughout of one word in A Young Man’s Journey to London, included in the Things That Never Happen collection. The New Rays is a painful but compassionate story which confronts the incomprehensible weirdness of science and technology as it suddenly manifests itself in the lives of ordinary people, offering solutions and cures which to all intents and purposes may as well be magic. It has a strong affinity with Robert Aickman’s 1975 story The Hospice (published in the collection Cold Hand In Mine), in which the strange country of death banally interposes itself amongst the shabby reality of the world. Aickman excels in conveying an immanent sense of other places and presences in the back streets, scrubby commons and rubble strewn development sites of cities and suburban residential borderlands. His stories are not necessarily frightening, but combine the ordinary with the intangibly strange to subtly disconcerting effect. Both he and fellow writer of weird tales LTC Rolt were founders of the Inland Waterways Association, set up to save England’s canal system from falling into ruination. My father in law, a transport enthusiast, has knowledgeable tomes on the canals by both. There must have been something about spending so much time around the stagnant, algae-tinted water of disused locks and the dark mouths of long, claustrophobic barge tunnels that triggered the morbid imagination.

Elizabeth Hand is another writer who is well aware of her literary antecendents, and draws both on the art of the Decadents and Aesthetics and on the ancient rites, myths and beliefs of the Classical and Pagan past in order to replenish the world with dangerous enchantments. The Boy In The Tree from 1989 draws mythic archetypes from the human mind in a manner akin to Robert Holdstock in his Mythago novels. In her afterword to the story as printed in her 1998 collection Last Summer At Mars Hill, Hand acknowledges the influence of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, noting the synchronicity with which M.John Harrison’s similarly inspired story The Great God Pan came out at the same time. Hand’s story was adapted to form part of her first novel Winterlong which, with its otherplanetary setting, is an example of science fiction and The Weird combining to mutually beneficial effect. Angela Carter and Tanith Lee both provide variations on their latterday fairy tales in The Snow Pavilion (which only saw the light of day in the 1995 collected edition of Carter’s short stories Burning Your Bridges) and Yellow and Red (1998). Tanith Lee, in her short stories, seems to be one of the writers who most closely approaches Carter’s style, the lush, poetic prose which traces its descent from Decadent literature – heirs to The Savoy and the Yellow Book, Baudelaire and JK Huysmans. Michael Chabon’s The God of Dark Laughter (2001) elevates Coulrophobia (the morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns) to the level of a dualistic conflict of cosmic proportions. The anthology could equally have included his Lovecraftian pastiche In The Black Mill, included in the collection Werewolves in their Youth and written as if by his authorial creation August Van Zorn. Chabon cunningly fooled the literary world into feting him as the next great American writer with his first two novels, which followed the accepted patterns of the coming of age story (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and the tribulations of the conflicted artist narrative (Wonder Boys), before revealing his generic proclivities with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Gentlemen of the Road, Summerland and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. His book of essays Maps and Legends their fogbound atmospheres and gaslit urban mysteries which often serve to turn phlegmatic Watson's assumptions about the normal order of the world topsy turvy. KJ Bishop closes proceedings with her 2010 short story Saving The Gleeful Horse. It’s good to see that she’s still writing (unlike Steph Swainston, sadly, who has announced that she’s packed it in and is returning to teaching). I’ve been eagerly awaiting a follow up to her marvellous 2003 novel The Etched City for some time, hoping that it wasn’t a dazzling one off. And Bishop is another author of The Weird who is also an artist, as you can see here.

The site has also launched with a couple of interviews; one with Kelly Link, of whom I was not previously aware, so I’ve already been introduced to an interesting new writer; the other with Neil Gaiman, who needs no introduction but is happy to introduce others in a generous and genial fashion. He’s always a good source for literary recommendations, and here he cites his own early Weird influences and inspirations: Lord Dunsany above all, and Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and RA Lafferty. Asked to describe his own notion of what constitutes weird fiction, he suggests it’s ‘like a visit to a strange place – a holiday in unearthly beauty and oddness, from which you may not always safely return’. A wonderful evocation of its power to transport you from you immediate surrounds and concerns and perhaps to change your perspective on them forever. And is there such a thing as being too weird, Mr Gaiman is asked. His answer comes back immediately and unequivocally – No! Perhaps this offers a good subheading for this exciting new site: Nothing is too weird.

Folk Dances, Footplate Rides, French Films and Flute Fusions

2011-10-27T15:42:00.012+01:00

Some interesting records have made their way into the Oxfam music shop in Exeter of late, prime amongst them being the old 1975 LP of BBC Children's Themes. Full of timeless music from 70s children's TV, this features Lionel Morton and the witchy Toni Arthur singing Superstition (not a Stevie Wonder cover, alas) in Play Away, the beautiful pastoral guitar themes which Freddie Phillips provided for Camberwick Green, its more urban cousin Chigley and the courtly Rubovia, the immortal Derek Griffiths doing his thing in Ring a Ding, Roy Castle telling you what to do if you want to be a Record Breaker, and Maggie Henderson and Fred Harris bringing on the good times in Ragtime. There's also the snappy end theme to Vision On and the whirling fairground organ tune inviting us into the world of The Magic Roundabout. But perhaps most excitingly, there are several Radiophonic Workshop pieces, with Delia Derbyshire's famous Dr Who theme followed by some of Dudley Simpson's incidental music (realised by 'Derek Mill', presumably Dick Mills). Mills also 'realises' Simson's music for Moonbase 3. Another Workshop composer, Paddy Kingsland, provides the theme for Fourth Dimension, and there are almost five minutes of his magnificent music from The Changes, the adaptation of Peter Dickinson’s three novels depicting a world which turns suddenly and violently against all modern technology (when will the BBC get around to releasing this memorably imaginative series). All this, and the Girl Guides singing Kum Ba Yah on Blue Peter too. More 70s children’s TV magic is available on Hey You!, an album of songs from Play Away, with a nautical Brian Cant in rainbow shirt on the cover shouting out the rather rude greeting, thereby losing control of his oars. Brian is joined by pianist and musical arranger Jonathan Cohen, Toni Arthur and Lionel Morton (former chart topper with the Four Pennies) again, and future Evita Julie Covington. Brian sings Hey You! with Toni, and that exclamation mark led me to imagine them doing it in a Fall style – needless to say, it’s not like that at all. Toni's pagan roots show through on the Full Circle Medley, featuring Roll, Turn, Spin, Twelve-Month Turnaround and The Green Man, and on Spells, taken from a poem by James Reeves.

Old fashioned folkie delights are on offer in a couple of 1970 EPs emerging out of Cecil Sharp House under the aegis of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This venerable institution was founded in 1932, although it was actually formed from a merger between the Folk Song Society, founded in 1898, and the English Folk Dance Society, set up by Cecil Sharp in 1911. Sharp, a key figure in the preservation and recording of English folk songs and traditions, died in 1924, and the new headquarters which was built for the EFDSS in 1930 was named in his honour. In the post war world, the institution gained a rather reputation for being rather old fashioned and fusty, ignoring the more radical and politically engaged interpretations of the tradition presented by Ewan MacColl and AL Lloyd. Rob Young, in his book Electric Eden, which traces English folk traditions and their mutations from the twentieth century and into the present, quotes Lloyd’s amusing dismissal of the EFDSS’ favouring of ‘clodhopping bumpkin folderol’ – which actually sounds like a lot of fun. There was something of a split between the outlook of Sharp and his followers, who saw folk as the music of England, of some collective culture, and the MacColl and Lloyd axis, who saw it as being the music of the people, used to express the reality of their lives. This split persists to this day, with extreme right wing groups occasionally attempting to appropriate it for its own nationalist purposes, only to be repudiated by the musicians themselves. These two EPs feature a number of dances played by The Greensleeves Country Dance Band, led by the wonderfully named Dennis Darke (a Christopher Lee figure, I like to think), which has apparently ‘been playing for dancing in this lively and rhythmical way for some twenty years and is well known in the West Country’. There’s a rather forbiddingly pedagogical air about the sleeve notes, with the tune Princess Royal described as ‘an easy three part dance for initiating beginners into the contra dance progression’. It suggests that this is all meant to be taken with deadly seriousness and places the records outside of the more progressive syntheses of the traditional and the modern (ie rock) presented by the likes of Ashley Hutchings in his Morris On LPs. The EP covers have lovely monochrome graphic designs by Pat Clarke, though, which have been expertly and artfully photographed by my fellow worker (and Doctor Who fan) Kevin.

More Englishness is to be found on the 1965 LP Treasures of English Poetry, which finds theatrical worthies such as Michael Redgrave and Flora Robson lending their authoritative tones to masterpieces spanning four centuries (we don’t quite make it into the twentieth century here). Of particular interest to me is Marius Goring, who played major roles in two Powell and Pressburger classics, as the dandyish conductor of souls between earth and heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, and as the romantic composer Julian Craster in The Red Shoes, who vies with the svengali Lermontov for the affections of the young ballerina Vicky. I also recently heard him reading Mervyn Peake’s The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb in a recording included in the recent Peake exhibition at the British Library. Here, he reads Elizabethan poet Thomas Wyatt, 17th century verse by Robert Herrick, and Blake’s Tiger, Tiger. More poetry of a distinctively Welsh flavour is also to be found on the World of Dylan Thomas LP, which includes extracts from the first BBC broadcast of Under Milk Wood as well as readings from the 1954 memorial concert recorded at the Globe Theatre in London. These include several by Richard Burton, second to none in giving Thomas’ poetry life, who delivers And Death Shall Have No Dominion with mesmeric force, sufficient to make Death itself shrink: ‘When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot’. A real oddity comes in the form of a 10” LP from the French publisher Gallimard called Albert Camus Vous Parle. Even my paltry French can figure out this means Albert Camus Talks To You, which sounds surprisingly intimate given the unforgiving existentialism of much of his work. Camus’ vocal contribution comes in the form of a reading from that old Cure favourite L’Etranger. There is also a reading of the early essay Les Amandiers by Serge Reggiani, and a scene from the play Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) with Alain Cuny and Maria Casares, who played the Princess Death in Jean Cocteau's films Orphee and Le Testament D’Orphee.

More French film magic can be found in the LP soundtrack of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s affecting musical starring a young Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. This is a lovely artefact with luxury gatefold sleeve, in blue and pink cardboard, with three full colour plates attached, as well as an attached pink booklet with all the lyrics in French with a parallel English translation, which is handy. The whole thing has the feel of a souvenir from a gala premiere. There’s about 50 minutes of unbroken speech and music taken from Michel Legrand’s score, which syncopates everyday dialogue to a jazzy rhythm, occasionally bursting into joyous or sorrowful melody. Film music of an entirely different sort can be heard in Kenji Kawaii’s amazing score to Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The opening has a booming bass drum and low thrumming drone overlaid with chanting close-harmony voices which resemble the Bulgarian singers of Trio Bulgarka or the Mystere des Voix Bulgares. There is a dipping waver of wow and flutter in the midst of tones held by the singers, suggestive of a glitch. This cleverly incorporates the theme of the definitions of human and machine becoming blurred into the form of the music itself. It’s as if the voices are revealing their mechanical or recorded nature. Elsewhere, the haunted music box tunes (music boxes being a recurring image in Oshii’s films) again introduce this mechanical element. Ringing gong and Tibetan bowl sounds underlie much of the music giving it a ceremonial aspect. This becomes a literal soundtrack to the extraordinary scene in which we see a slow and dreamlike carnival procession in the vast information city in which the protagonists have just arrived, with the high wavering vocals providing indecipherable accompanying mantras. The whole thing ends with a song (in English) called Follow Me, which follows the melody of the adagio section of Rodrigo’s famous guitar Concierto de Aranjuez. This is either schmaltzy or affecting, according to taste. I quite like it. We’ve two John Barry LPs: The Great Movie Sounds of John Barry from 1966, which a side of his arrangements of James Bond music (no vocals here), and another featuring his playfully cool scores for The Ipcress File and The Knack (all moody cimbaloms, airy flutes and funky organs), alongside his more traditionally romantic orchestral themes for the likes of Born Free. The Concert John Barry from 1972 sees him take control of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play his arrangements of some of his classic and lesser known film scores, with another Bond suite as well as his music for the star-stuffed 1972 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the 1971 costume drama and luvvie face-off Mary Queen of Scots (with Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth and Vanessa Redgrave as Mary) and the 70s TV spy series The Adventurer.

An interesting obscurity from the 60s British jazz scene comes in the form of the rather clunkily titled Curried Jazz, which shows that John Mayer wasn't the only one producing Indo-jazz fusions at the time. A cue seems to have been taken from Mayer, with the band calling themselves the Indo-British Ensemble. The first side features the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler (actually on flugelhorn here), with Leon Calvert taking over the horn on the B Side. Johnny Dankworth sideman Ray Swinfield plays flute, with Dev Kumar on sitar, Chris Karan swapping his drum kit for tablas, Jeff Clyne on bass and Bill Eyden and Art Morgan sharing drum duties. Track titles like Meeting of the Twain and Looking Eastward to the Blues give a pretty good idea as to what’s going on here. Finally, there’s a couple of railway recordings, with the neatly titled Gresley Beat offering not a hitherto undiscovered skiffle band but the equally exciting sounds of Nigel Gresley’s engines, including the speed record-setting Mallard and the Sir Nigel Gresley itself. The World of Steam, meanwhile, offers you the chance to eavesdrop on express trains on the Paddington-Birmingham line at Templecombe Station, a goods train on the Waverley route, climbing towards Whitrope Summit, and rather more exotically DB locomotives in Southern Germany, at Muhlen bei Horb, in the Black Forest and TCDD locomotives on the Bagdhad-Istanbul line, in the Taurus Mountains and at Yenice in Southern Turkey. It’s like you were on the footplate itself, breathing in the heady aroma of steam and being temporarily blinded by a stray smut.

Utopia London

2011-10-26T23:30:00.013+01:00

Utopia London documentary trailer from utopialondon on Vimeo.

Utopia London is a film by Tom Cordell, shown at the bfi Southbank last month, which laments the demise of post-war modernism in the capital and more particularly the social ideals which drove it to create new, large scale public housing projects. It’s an unashamedly partisan work, a heart on sleeve polemic which never attempts to disguise its partiality. As such, it falls into line with the whole genre of cinematic agit-prop documentaries which have found their way onto arthouse screens in recent years, to often mixed effect. There is always a certain sense that these pictures are preaching to the converted, affirming them in their beliefs, and there’s certainly an element of that sermonising here. It’s perhaps significant that in the list of buildings referred to in the film on the Utopia London website, Cordell still refers to Berthold Lubetkin’s Bevin Court under its original name, Lenin Court. Scenes use found footage to amusing but often rather crudely crowd-pleasing (assuming that the crowd is of a left-leaning tendency) effect. An old piece of comic cartoon propaganda depicting the progress of evolution, with a lumbering dinosaur trampling through the landscape, plays as the narrative describes the return of the Conservatives to power in 1951; A silent film clip depicting a corpulent banker puffing on an oversized cigar offers an absurdly obvious caricature; and footage of lab rats attacking one another in confined cages whilst Conservative experiments and studies into the psychological and social effect of high density living is emotionally manipulative, and seems to draw on the use of such associative imagery for darker purposes in the past. A film with a different agenda could easily have used these shots to illustrate the social engineering designed by some of the post-war modernist planners and architects, for whom the inhabitants of their new worlds were expected to conform to a particular notion of community. Cordell’s comments after the screening, in which he noted that his film was a way of saying ‘fuck you’ to those who rejected the egalitarian ideals which he unequivocally identifies with the large scale post war developments hardly suggests that cool objectivity was ever a major priority for him. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of passion though, and part of his motivation for making the film was to put the case for the preservation of the remaining public buildings of the post-war modernist period, before they are razed like the Pimlico school in Westminster. We see the bulldozers move in to level this building, as does its architect John Bancroft. Travelling past on the top of a double decker bus a few days after seeing the film, I can confirm that the site is now a flattened and cleared blank, the school itself replaced by a purpose built academy run by a trust headed by a venture capitalist and leading Tory donor, with new ideals fit to match.

Alexandra Road

If you accept that this is a personal film expressing a strongly felt viewpoint (and, indeed, if you share that viewpoint), then there is a great deal to enjoy here. In a way, this is the official version of post-war modernism in London as its architects would have us hear it. Several of them are on hand to revisit the buildings they designed and talk about the ideas behind them, and the extent to which they feel they were realised (and, crucially, maintained) in the real world. The film is valuable in giving a voice (and face) to architects whose identity was subsumed within the anonymous government structure of the LCC; people such as Oliver Cox, John Partridge and Peter Aldington. They all remain proud of their achievements, although in the case of Neave Brown, the architect behind the Alexander Road Estate, often seen as the terminal bookend of the monumental public housing schemes, his walkabout proves inadvertently hilarious. Noting a couple of surly and suspicious kids (probably wondering why a camera is being pointed at them) jumping up onto a concrete wall, he declares in a loud, plummy voice ‘oh look, they’re having fun’. His description of the hard, concrete slopes tilting down towards the pedestrian centre of the estate’s long avenue as making it like a large playground is a little far-fetched, It’s the kind of surface against which heads are cracked in old public information films. Brown does show a wryly humorous side, which is not often associated with the doctrinaire sternness of brutalist architects. Coming to the end of one of the elevated walkways, which projects slightly beyond the wall of the final stack of flats, he remembers one of the builders telling him ‘I know why you made it like that – so you can jump off it when you reach the end’. He does have the grace to conclude that he probably made the whole estate too long. It certainly has the feel of being a world unto itself, with the stepped terraces overlooking each other and allowing little sense of privacy, and it can appear like a labyrinth from which escape is difficult. It was used to ironic effect on the cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s Sunnyvista LP, and its rapid fall from favour and fashion meant that it was regularly used as a backdrop betokening ‘gritty’ urban deprivation on 70s and 80s TV. The building has won praise from architectural critics, but few plaudits from social commentators. Jonathan Glancey (who’s a bit of both) remarks in his book on 20th century architecture that it is ‘an extraordinarily powerful, if utterly terrifying, experience. The ideas behind the project seem rational, yet it all seems so inhumane’. With Brown as your affable guide and a bright sun in the sky, you could almost be convinced. But a change of the light and a solitary digression and the atmosphere could rapidly darken.

The Alton West estate

Residents of the buildings are also given a voice. One particularly resilient old lady in the Alton East flats shows around and, when she reaches the lobby by the lifts, talks with offhand matter of factness about how this was where you used to find the drug users, and how it used to reek of urine. Another couple of elderly residents in Alton East are interviewed sitting on their couch, with its doily head rests, in their neat and immaculately orderly flat. They provide a rather conveniently conservative perspective with which to contrast the Alton East and West estates, suggesting a class division between the brick built buildings of the early phase of post war modernism, inspired by Swedish examples, and the uncompromising concrete buildings of the second phase, who looked to le Corbusier as their guiding figure. Kate Macintosh, the architect of Dawson’s Heights in East Dulwich, meets some of the people living there as she wanders around. They’re friendly and open and seem happy and cheerful and in their home environment. The outline of Macintosh’s buildings rising in irregular ziggurat masses above the tree-lined slopes of Dulwich and Forest Hill is a thrilling and strangely ennobling sight, redolent of an age when the future was still a place to anticipate with excitement and an expectation of wonderful new worlds to come.

Kate Macintosh's Dawson's Heights

Cordell’s filming is very accomplished, making the picture an enjoyable visual experience. He captures both the detail and the wider aspect of the buildings featured with judiciously composed shots. There are also a series of speeded up, Koyaanisqaatsi style interludes which evoke the kinetic buzz of city life. These are accompanied by gentle ripples of ruminative marimba music, a refreshing alternative to the sort of Kraftwerk electronica with which modernist architectural images are generally paired, and an invitation to revise our preconceived notions about what we see. He clearly has a wide knowledge of film history, too, making good use of clips from a number of movies. These include Soviet films from the experimental silent period, including Dovzhenko, Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, and the pupils’ declaration of revolt from Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite. Milling zombies from George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead are used to more ironic effect in relation to the Pimlico School and its attempt to provide a less conventional educational environment. The use of the Alton West estate by Francois Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451 is also shown (and I’ve about the use of brutalist architecture in 60s and 70s SF in a previous post), as is the film’s association of uniform new town housing with passive conformity and more traditional brick-built garden city housing with individualism and free thought. There are also quotes from the likes of Victorian socialist William Morris, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, German communist martyr Rosa Luxembourg, Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh – and Margaret Thatcher! These give the film a more essayistic, literary feel, providing prefatory headings for the different ‘chapters’.

The Bevin Court staircase

The film finds its founding figure in Berthold Lubetkin, the pioneering architect of a new and fairer world. The Finsbury Health Centre is the starting point of the architectural story, with the Hampstead modernism of Lubetkin and Tecton’s le Corbusier influenced Highpoint flats airily dismissed as having being built for the wealthy. We get to gaze up at the floating seashell spiral of the stairwell suspended in the lobby of Bevin Court, with the striking 50s graphics of its mural by Peter Yates to the side. John Allan, who got to know Lubetkin having studied his work as an undergraduate, talks about his architecture as art, whilst still remaining practical. The tale is told of the renaming of the building from Lenin to Bevin Court in the wake of the revelations of Stalinist atrocities. The bust of Lenin which was to have adorned the entrance sign was buried by Lubetkin beneath the hall, a ritualistic offering which made it a symbolic part of the foundations. It’s reminiscent of the myth in which the Bran, the pagan king of Britain, instructs that his head be buried beneath the White Mount in London in order to ward off evil from across the sea. Lubetkin is positioned as the defiant socialist hero, with a convenient omission of his later building of the luxuriously appointed Highpoint 2 extension (complete with separate entrances to the flats for tradesmen), with his own self-designed penthouse perched on top. Heroic portrayals are intended to provide inspiration, but are inherently two dimensional, and must needs ignore the more contradictory (and therefore more interesting) complexities of human nature.

Patrick Abercrombie's 1943 County of London plan

The story takes us from the plans drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie in 1943 and 1944 for the rational reconstruction of post war London around zones of mixed, low density population and varied housing and amenities, to the popularising modernist showcase of the Festival of Britain in 1951, and shows how the ideas were realised and developed. The Alton East estate follows the Abercrombie ideal of the dispersal and decentralisation of the population, with a mixture of high rise buildings, and terraced house and maisonettes, all on the edge of leafy parkland. Its Alton West counterpoint, built a year later in 1959, is more monolithic and domineering, the separate blocks of parallel flats like great vessels moored at the edge of the park. There’s no denying that this kind of monumentalism became very unpopular, amongst inhabitants as well as conservative opponents of public housing. The degree to which this was the fault of the buildings themselves, or to the poor maintenance and inappropriate housing policies of local councils is still a matter of impassioned debate. The film doesn’t include Robin Hood Gardens or the Thamesmead Estate, neither of which has attracted a great deal of support in the face of the general consensus that they are social disaster zones (although Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and other prominent architects favour its preservation), perhaps conceding that neither will do much for its case. As high rise buildings fell out of favour, due to the hasty and cheap construction methods exposed by the Ronan Point disaster as much as any inherent dislike, low rise high density estates came to be seen as an alternative solution. Which is where Alexander Road came in.

George Finch's future on a human scale

Perhaps the film’s greatest success comes not in winning any new converts to the cause, but in its portrayal of the architects themselves. This refutes the oft-held view of them as aloof and disdainful social engineers, dictating the way in which they believed the poor should live and shaping those lives through rigid and authoritarian structures. Such arrogance was reportedly a characteristic of the arch-brutalist husband and wife team of Peter and Alison Smithson, but it’s emphatically not a quality found in any of the architects we meet here. Particularly engaging is George Finch, a raffishly elegant figure in his pink shirt, white scarf and peaked cap. He guides us round his point positioned blocks of flats in Cotton Gardens and introduces himself to the receptionist at the Brixton Recreation Centre (recreation is a feature incorporated into all of his buildings, in line with the 60s anticipation of a leisure society) as the person who designed the building. His line drawings of his buildings, complete with charming figures of all ages mixing together and having fun, and with the odd aeroplane which looks like it’s been folded out of paper soaring overhead, sums up the bright and human future he envisaged better than any more precisely delineated architectural design ever could (and I'm sure Finch has included a hidden door which leads to adventure somewhere). It's like the bustling and happy world of Mr Benn's Festive Road transposed to the age of the high rise estate. All of these architects still cherish the ideals which they held, and mourn their loss from the world. Kate Macintosh was on hand for the Q&A session after the screening to affirm her own beliefs in the social value of architecture, and was joined by Cordell and Owen Hatherley. I would have liked to hear more of what Hatherley had to say; his blog Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy is always witty and engaged on the subject of modern architecture (and on other matters which occupy him, too). Unfortunately, as tends to be the case when lefties gather in any number, the session was taken over by a series of people in the audience who were more interested in delivering lengthy testimonies as to their own beliefs and the way in which they had put them into practice than with asking the panel any questions. I soon tired of this righteous exchange of mutual self-affirmation and quietly exited into the South Bank night.

The word utopia is a hard one to pin down. Deriving from the ancient Greek, it can, according to interpretation, mean the good place or no-place (or perhaps both). It’s an ideal plan or social thought experiment which tends to harden into oppressive forms as soon as it’s actually constructed or imposed. No matter how hard you try to wish it into being, Utopia can ultimately be found nowhere, least of all in London town. But the buildings which manifest the particular post-war moment of utopian dreaming in the capital deserve reassessment, whatever their flaws. Utopia London puts their case with conviction and a great deal of heart.