The Pope came to Britain last week, which must have been nice for him, as he always gets to pass through Italy on the way from his country to anywhere else in the world. Gosh, he must think, as he rides through Rome - I've picked such a good neighbourhood, in such a good city, for my country to be in!
While in Britain, the Pope's lamentation that Britain has become a sadly atheist country full of militant secularists, attracted a lot of attention - and not just for being the obviously bitter comments of a very old man who never comes to Britain and whose sources of information are Catholic priests. The coverage suggested that he had committed a gaffe, and that it had been impolitic of him to speak in that manner - but it wasn't the manner that was wrong, in my view, so much as the substance: the atheists and secularists of Britain are, by and large, not at all militant. Of all Britain's secularists and atheists, how many marched against the Pope on Sunday - against the noxious role that religion has come to play in public life, and against its ongoing offenses against human rights and free speech, and against its opposition of science and against its positing of blind faith as some sort of valid rejoinder to argument and reason? A middling percentage. There are some vocal atheists, yes - but they are a very small minority; the rest are busy cowering and accepting, being trod on and letting people get on with things very nicely.
Over the last few weeks, in the run-up to the Pope's visit, I've had occasion to discuss atheism and secularism a little with people, and a line I've heard again and again, from atheist, reasonable friends, is 'Oh, I can't stand that Richard Dawkins'. And this from people who, often as not, haven't read The God Delusion, and therefore have little idea of Dawkins' engaging powers of argument, his humour, his passion for his subject and his generosity of spirit. I can hardly begin to fathom the perverseness of rationalists attacking a scientist when there are targets like liars and criminals to have a go at instead. The point of view seems to be that he is too strident in attacking religion and that he should let religious people have their say. Who are these religious people who cannot take debate, who cannot take scorn? Is it somehow defiling their beliefs to question them? Just how far exactly ought an atheist or secularist go, according to the people who think Dawkins goes too far? Do these people - friends of mine - ever question anyone's beliefs, or do they just let everything pass? I let the lies and wilful misunderstanding of our world pass, too - I cannot pretend to be the bravest and most argumentative of atheists, standing up for the truth at every opportunity; but at least I respect the nobility and courage of Dawkins in opposing falsehoods and demagogy.
Philip Pullman wrote a very interesting article in the Guardian - of which more later - a while back, which I can now not find, but which essentially argued very convincingly that ideas themselves are not worthy of respect. People, he said, must have our respect, but their ideas must not, and in fact the most respect one can pay an idea or an argument is to probe it and question it. It isn't disrespecting a person to call their thoughts into question: the problem comes when someone's idea is presented not as an idea or thought or argument but as a 'belief'. The word 'belief' uninvites argument, and tells you that you should not counter it. But this is patently absurd: everything must be questioned. Dawkins' method infuriates some because he applies strictly scientific systems to his arguing: what is your proof for saying something, what is the truth in it, what makes you say it? At times when he has become irritatedwith his interlocutors it isn't because he disrespects the people, but disrespects their reasoning: if you posit a God, then don't be offended if someone asks you what that God is made of. If you cannot answer that, and no-one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer, your argument is ipso facto invalid.
The Guardian - trying to shed its image as the atheist vanguard - chose to comment after the anti-Pope marches on Saturday that the marchers should have shown sincere faith the respect it deserves. Faith does not deserve respect, no more than true love deserves respect or grouchiness deserves respect or a penchant for chocolate deserves respect. I have plenty of respect for people who believe in a God, despite having no respect for the idea of believing in a God, and on Saturday I was marching against the undue influence of religion in our world, as represented by the Pope, whose ignorant and hateful pronouncements on contraception, abortion, women's rights and gay rights are constantly reported as if they had some sort of validity by our press. I live in a world where faith schools get to choose which children they want to educate, despite practising religious people being a minority in Britain. I was there protesting against these things. In what way is protesting against the covering up of known acts of paedophilia a sign of disrespect to people of faith? It is a disrespect to people of faith, on the contrary, to assume they might not be as outraged by these things as non-believers.
A line that is always parrotted about Dawkins is that he is 'as bad as the people he attacks' because he preaches and tries to convert people to his cause. Let it be said once more that stating facts in a bid for people to understand the way things actually are (and again I urge everyone to read at least the chapter on bats in The God Delusion, to see with what elegance and clarity Dawkins presents the facts of the bat's evolution and of the evolution of the eye as an organ) is not preaching, but educating: it would be a completely different matter if the things that Dawkins was 'preaching' were patently untrue and had been proven as such. His means, at least, justify his method. Dawkins speaks with bravery, knowing that he has made himself the person who people criticise when they want an easy atheist target. He is unflinching in his intellectuality and morality, and has made enemies because of his unwillingness to accept the parity of fiction with facts. In his brilliant speech on Saturday, you could sense the candour and fury in him when he decried the immorality of planting the lie of hell in children's minds. What is ignoble or wrong about taking religious people to task for creating falsehoods with which to frighten and silence children? Attack him if you will, atheists, but we should all follow his example more.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Holiday reading
Hail, readers! Yup, this is the second post in one single day. I've got a lot to say to the world, and I'm not afraid to put it all down in this blog. So for part two of my holiday re-cap, we'll be looking at what I read this holiday, why I read it, and how you should read it too if you haven't already.
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
I love it when you take a book out with you somewhere, and your memories of reading it are fused with the sights and smells around you. For me, the last few chapters of Cat's Cradle - which I tore through in a fit of delight - will always be indelibly connected with Chinese villagers working by the roadside as my bus sped into the curvy hills around Yangshuo and down a rocky path, past dusty villages towards the Yulong river. It's not an entirely wrong sort of landscape to associate with Vonnegut's godless world, in which disenchanted islanders live in a hopeless sort of state, governed by power-crazed idiots. Reading Vonnegut's furious conclusion, in which the self-styled prophet Bokonon thumbs his nose at God as all around him the world lies in tatters, I thought of the pointlessness and misery of some of our existence, and the crazy rules and lives that are meted out to us by governments and religious leaders. It sort of made sense in this context - although the lush beauty of the surrounding mountains gave my heart some relief from Vonnegut's dystopian vision.
To say that Vonnegut's book is angry, biting and contemptuous of the modern world and its violence and superstition, is to give an impression of a dour book without heart. Yet Cat's Cradle bristles with life and hilarity - a sort of raging comedy - and is sometimes truly moving, even as Vonnegut strives to disconnect us from his narrative and his characters by cutting the book up into short chapters and routinely plunging his story into the realm of the farcical. To begin with, I wasn't sure what he was up to, and his world didn't make sense to me entirely - but as the book gathered speed and Vonnegut began to show that he had entire control over these characters and this invented world, I started to marvel at his vision and his cleverness. Briefly: Cat's Cradle deals with one man's attempt to piece together the life story of Dr Hoenekker, the inventor of the H Bomb. In the process, he stumbles across the lives of his children, and ends up with them on a pointless island with its own stupid religion, where the end of the world is about to take place. Vonnegut creates his religion (Bokononism) gleefully, writing hilariously daft prayers and chants that pepper the book, and also invests this hopeless island of his own creation with a sort of manic, believable life. Along the way, he very sharply skewers war, patriotism and religion, and it's a joy to behold. The greatest moment of the book is when he lets his guard down for one chapter, dropping his virulent, cynical tone to give voice to one lone reasonable character, who pleads for an understanding of our human barbary. In this chapter, where he memorably says that instead of honouring the war dead with marches and parades, we should paint our bellies blue and roll in the mud, we see a great despair and humanity in Vonnegut's prose. It's a startling book, and it made me feel quite tingly with excitement at its originality of tone and purpose.
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, by Sheila Rowbotham
From one opponent of war to another: one of the causes that the mighty Edward Carpenter adopted throughout his astonishing life was pacifism, which he took up in his seventies during the First World War. It made sense, given his opposition to the British Empire and his sense of interconnectedness in world cultures, and given, too, his interest in the human individual and a return to simplicity in life. In this context, war, pollution, and the ravages of modern British life registered for Carpenter as a blot on human existence, which he fundamentally believed to be spiritual.
If this makes him sound like a Victorian hippie, he wasn't. He was first and foremost a socialist, committed to social reform, who lobbied the government from a variety of associations that he fronted or participated in, such as the Fabians. His belief in spirituality and a simplicity of life ran somewhat counter to his carnal appetites, for he was a gay man advocating free love - and he was aware of this contradiction in a life both spiritual and fundamentally material. What is so tremendous about him is his energy in fighting for these causes, and his intellectual interest in taking up new fights and embracing new ideas. His reading, from Heidegger to Marx via Freud, Plotinus, Plato, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore and countless other writers, made me feel at once defeated (I will never have that understanding and intellectual ability) and inspired - inspired to understand the world through the philosophy and fiction of these great people.
Sheila Rowbotham's somewhat hefty biography makes for a thrilling read as you count all the causes that Carpenter had a hand in getting off the ground: recycling, women's rights, gay rights, nudism, free love, socialism, back-to-basics living, pacifism. He championed his beliefs with real conviction, and was always interested in his time, and in people. Rowbotham's book is also very clever in highlighting his real quality, which was a capacity for friendship - although I think it could have made a more pointed connection between this talent and his sexuality, especially since he was himself so interested in Platonic love. Where Rowbotham does hit the mark, though, is in observing how Carpenter's queerness made him able to fight for other causes, because of a feeling of otherness which would have opened his eyes to other suffering. I loved this study in marginalisation, where a man makes the most of his public position, while using his insight into difference and intolerance, to struggle for others.
A few complaints about the book, which is very poorly edited. There were so many mistakes in syntax and vocabulary, it sometimes came close to ruining the experience. I read about Alf Mattison's "fiancé Florence Foulds", about Carpenter being "empathic", "clambouring along the stony beach", having "self-depreciating charm", and "pouring over" photographs (all italics mine). I kept reading the word 'dubiously' used for 'doubtfully', and also read about people being "signalled out for comment" instead of being singled out. The Adamses are referred to on separate occasions as "the Adames" and "the Adams", and I lost track of all the hanging clauses after a while - but here's one f'rinstance: "Like Carpenter, always ready to help young talent, he [George Bernard Shaw] fell for Lena Connell". Here, Rowbotham means that Shaw was like Carpenter in that he was always ready to help young talent, not in that he fell for Lena Connell. Carpenter was decidedly homosexual, which is one of the main points of the whole biography.
Still, it's a fantastic book, brilliantly researched, and one with a cast of characters who made me feel very happy. I fell in love with George Hukin, the tender northern knife-grinder who Carpenter was besotted with and who was very fond of Carpenter in return. Hukin nevertheless married a woman and wrote a heartbreaking letter to Carpenter expressing a wish that they could all sleep together in one bed. He and Carpenter stayed on good terms for the rest of Hukin's life, and he pops up throughout the book as an ever noble soul. I also loved George Merrill, Carpenter's later lover, who placed lavender under guests' pillows and pinched E. M. Forster's arse when he visited Millthorpe. I loved Edith Ellis and her ballsy letters and opinions, and Olive Schreiner with her modern haircut, and the Fords, and the Salts, and the Mattisons. These people are drawn with great affection, and Carpenter's world seems to come alive. It's chiefly worth reading, though, for its humane and intellectual understanding of all the movements and writing that Carpenter embraced, and for its appreciation of this incredible life.
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Which makes it three excellent books that I read this holiday. I'm still making my mind up a little bit about whether it's a consummate masterpiece or merely a very excellent book, but it was certainly a real tonic, and I haven't read anything so original since - oh balls, since Cat's Cradle - but you get the picture. The Blue Flower is marginally the better book, I think, since it is so truly different, and always so faithful to its subject and tone. It has such an oddness to it, which means that you can never really know the characters, and yet you somehow feel their inner lives, from displaced comments that they make, or some slight observation in the narration. The tone is always one of slightly absurd, always wry detachment - but the book is also suffused with a true beauty in its prose; a beauty which is nevertheless exceedingly tamped down, and which plays second fiddle to dialogue and a kind of personal philosophy.
Oddly, The Blue Flower is the book out of these three that I have the least to say about, even though I am sure that it is the best of all three - I think because it is so extraordinarily self-contained, and answers so many of its own questions. It is about the nature of art, and the nature of desire and selfhood, and it elegantly shows that we can never really know other people - but that the act of creation, and particularly the telling of stories, allow us to bridge some of that psychological divide. I loved Fitzgerald's insights into the mind of her characters, especially Fritz's friend Karoline. Elsewhere, the strange main family are drawn with great affection, and the central character makes for quite an original composition - all the more incredible given that Fitzgeral is conspicuously embroidering onto the early life of the man who would later become the poet Novalis. It's an astonishing act of creation.
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
I love it when you take a book out with you somewhere, and your memories of reading it are fused with the sights and smells around you. For me, the last few chapters of Cat's Cradle - which I tore through in a fit of delight - will always be indelibly connected with Chinese villagers working by the roadside as my bus sped into the curvy hills around Yangshuo and down a rocky path, past dusty villages towards the Yulong river. It's not an entirely wrong sort of landscape to associate with Vonnegut's godless world, in which disenchanted islanders live in a hopeless sort of state, governed by power-crazed idiots. Reading Vonnegut's furious conclusion, in which the self-styled prophet Bokonon thumbs his nose at God as all around him the world lies in tatters, I thought of the pointlessness and misery of some of our existence, and the crazy rules and lives that are meted out to us by governments and religious leaders. It sort of made sense in this context - although the lush beauty of the surrounding mountains gave my heart some relief from Vonnegut's dystopian vision.
To say that Vonnegut's book is angry, biting and contemptuous of the modern world and its violence and superstition, is to give an impression of a dour book without heart. Yet Cat's Cradle bristles with life and hilarity - a sort of raging comedy - and is sometimes truly moving, even as Vonnegut strives to disconnect us from his narrative and his characters by cutting the book up into short chapters and routinely plunging his story into the realm of the farcical. To begin with, I wasn't sure what he was up to, and his world didn't make sense to me entirely - but as the book gathered speed and Vonnegut began to show that he had entire control over these characters and this invented world, I started to marvel at his vision and his cleverness. Briefly: Cat's Cradle deals with one man's attempt to piece together the life story of Dr Hoenekker, the inventor of the H Bomb. In the process, he stumbles across the lives of his children, and ends up with them on a pointless island with its own stupid religion, where the end of the world is about to take place. Vonnegut creates his religion (Bokononism) gleefully, writing hilariously daft prayers and chants that pepper the book, and also invests this hopeless island of his own creation with a sort of manic, believable life. Along the way, he very sharply skewers war, patriotism and religion, and it's a joy to behold. The greatest moment of the book is when he lets his guard down for one chapter, dropping his virulent, cynical tone to give voice to one lone reasonable character, who pleads for an understanding of our human barbary. In this chapter, where he memorably says that instead of honouring the war dead with marches and parades, we should paint our bellies blue and roll in the mud, we see a great despair and humanity in Vonnegut's prose. It's a startling book, and it made me feel quite tingly with excitement at its originality of tone and purpose.
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, by Sheila Rowbotham
From one opponent of war to another: one of the causes that the mighty Edward Carpenter adopted throughout his astonishing life was pacifism, which he took up in his seventies during the First World War. It made sense, given his opposition to the British Empire and his sense of interconnectedness in world cultures, and given, too, his interest in the human individual and a return to simplicity in life. In this context, war, pollution, and the ravages of modern British life registered for Carpenter as a blot on human existence, which he fundamentally believed to be spiritual.
If this makes him sound like a Victorian hippie, he wasn't. He was first and foremost a socialist, committed to social reform, who lobbied the government from a variety of associations that he fronted or participated in, such as the Fabians. His belief in spirituality and a simplicity of life ran somewhat counter to his carnal appetites, for he was a gay man advocating free love - and he was aware of this contradiction in a life both spiritual and fundamentally material. What is so tremendous about him is his energy in fighting for these causes, and his intellectual interest in taking up new fights and embracing new ideas. His reading, from Heidegger to Marx via Freud, Plotinus, Plato, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore and countless other writers, made me feel at once defeated (I will never have that understanding and intellectual ability) and inspired - inspired to understand the world through the philosophy and fiction of these great people.
Sheila Rowbotham's somewhat hefty biography makes for a thrilling read as you count all the causes that Carpenter had a hand in getting off the ground: recycling, women's rights, gay rights, nudism, free love, socialism, back-to-basics living, pacifism. He championed his beliefs with real conviction, and was always interested in his time, and in people. Rowbotham's book is also very clever in highlighting his real quality, which was a capacity for friendship - although I think it could have made a more pointed connection between this talent and his sexuality, especially since he was himself so interested in Platonic love. Where Rowbotham does hit the mark, though, is in observing how Carpenter's queerness made him able to fight for other causes, because of a feeling of otherness which would have opened his eyes to other suffering. I loved this study in marginalisation, where a man makes the most of his public position, while using his insight into difference and intolerance, to struggle for others.
A few complaints about the book, which is very poorly edited. There were so many mistakes in syntax and vocabulary, it sometimes came close to ruining the experience. I read about Alf Mattison's "fiancé Florence Foulds", about Carpenter being "empathic", "clambouring along the stony beach", having "self-depreciating charm", and "pouring over" photographs (all italics mine). I kept reading the word 'dubiously' used for 'doubtfully', and also read about people being "signalled out for comment" instead of being singled out. The Adamses are referred to on separate occasions as "the Adames" and "the Adams", and I lost track of all the hanging clauses after a while - but here's one f'rinstance: "Like Carpenter, always ready to help young talent, he [George Bernard Shaw] fell for Lena Connell". Here, Rowbotham means that Shaw was like Carpenter in that he was always ready to help young talent, not in that he fell for Lena Connell. Carpenter was decidedly homosexual, which is one of the main points of the whole biography.
Still, it's a fantastic book, brilliantly researched, and one with a cast of characters who made me feel very happy. I fell in love with George Hukin, the tender northern knife-grinder who Carpenter was besotted with and who was very fond of Carpenter in return. Hukin nevertheless married a woman and wrote a heartbreaking letter to Carpenter expressing a wish that they could all sleep together in one bed. He and Carpenter stayed on good terms for the rest of Hukin's life, and he pops up throughout the book as an ever noble soul. I also loved George Merrill, Carpenter's later lover, who placed lavender under guests' pillows and pinched E. M. Forster's arse when he visited Millthorpe. I loved Edith Ellis and her ballsy letters and opinions, and Olive Schreiner with her modern haircut, and the Fords, and the Salts, and the Mattisons. These people are drawn with great affection, and Carpenter's world seems to come alive. It's chiefly worth reading, though, for its humane and intellectual understanding of all the movements and writing that Carpenter embraced, and for its appreciation of this incredible life.
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Which makes it three excellent books that I read this holiday. I'm still making my mind up a little bit about whether it's a consummate masterpiece or merely a very excellent book, but it was certainly a real tonic, and I haven't read anything so original since - oh balls, since Cat's Cradle - but you get the picture. The Blue Flower is marginally the better book, I think, since it is so truly different, and always so faithful to its subject and tone. It has such an oddness to it, which means that you can never really know the characters, and yet you somehow feel their inner lives, from displaced comments that they make, or some slight observation in the narration. The tone is always one of slightly absurd, always wry detachment - but the book is also suffused with a true beauty in its prose; a beauty which is nevertheless exceedingly tamped down, and which plays second fiddle to dialogue and a kind of personal philosophy.
Oddly, The Blue Flower is the book out of these three that I have the least to say about, even though I am sure that it is the best of all three - I think because it is so extraordinarily self-contained, and answers so many of its own questions. It is about the nature of art, and the nature of desire and selfhood, and it elegantly shows that we can never really know other people - but that the act of creation, and particularly the telling of stories, allow us to bridge some of that psychological divide. I loved Fitzgerald's insights into the mind of her characters, especially Fritz's friend Karoline. Elsewhere, the strange main family are drawn with great affection, and the central character makes for quite an original composition - all the more incredible given that Fitzgeral is conspicuously embroidering onto the early life of the man who would later become the poet Novalis. It's an astonishing act of creation.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Aeroplane Films!
I might post a bit more about my trip to la Chine (cultural observations and what have you (but then again I might not)) but seeing as this is predominantly a blog about films and books and music etc, here are my two cents on the aeroplane films I saw this holiday.
ON THE WAY OUT
For her: Julie & Julia
For him: G.I. Joe
Julie & Julia is the better film, inasmuch as there are at least ten shots in it that don't make you puke with their business, loudness and ugliness. Julie & Julia is the better film because when the actors say their dialogue, it feels reasonably as if an actual person might ever have said those words or might say them some time in the future. Julie & Julia is better because - well, because G.I. Joe makes Jackass 2 look like Solzhenitzyn. Just who, exactly, gets off on this ceaseless parade of idiocy and explosions, in which morons make a point of running really fast and kicking each other hard? I understand that there are men in the world, and many of these men like to watch films with other men in them, doing manly things with cocks - I mean, guns. Fine. So be it. But is there anyone in the world who doesn't think he was hoodwinked into seeing G.I Joe, and that two seconds of the Bourne Adinfinitum is worth a thousand minutes of this shit?
G.I. Joe is bottomlessly stupid and banal, featuring the sort of bad directing that should be shown to people in film school. There are the most hilarious flashbacks, lasting about ten minutes, at the most inopportune moments, such as when someone's about to be kicked in the head; there are shit costumes, bad names, terribly edited chases, awful special effects, and Sienna Miller. It's an awful, awful film, made by morons for morons, with extra moronic touches added by non-morons, just for the hell of it.
Julie & Julia: better. That's not to say that it's an especially good film; it isn't, and in fact it's ultra forgettable. It would have been 118% better if the producers had just called it Julia, and got rid of Amy Adams and her depressing haircut entirely, to concentrate solely on the glorious Meryl. Ah, Meryl. It sounds silly to say it, because everyone does, but she really is the utter gonads. Every look she does, every creak of her voice, every hand gesture - everything is done in the most wonderful synthesis of character, with such joy in reproducing this great person and breathing life and invention into her. It's a treat through and through. Best of all is her relationship with Stanley Tucci, and there are terrific scenes when her sister (PLAYED BY JANE LYNCH! BY JANE LYNCH! JANE LYNCH!) comes to visit: the chemistry makes your hair stand on end. Anyway: long story short, Julie & Julia is a rather silly film that gets it almost half right.
ON THE WAY BACK
For her: The Time Traveler's Wife
For him: Transformers 2
Again, the film for the ladies is the better film - but only by the merest of distances, which is saying something since Transformers 2 is one of the very worst films I've ever seen. Transformers 2 is incomprehensibly, absurdly bad: dreamed up by a teen-brained action adventure wank fantasist with barely two neurones to rub together, it is an endlessly bewildering set of chases and explosions and laboured gags for the attention-deficient or the seriously retarded. It's the sort of mish-mash of bullshit comedy and crap action that makes Men In Black look like 2001: A Space Odyssey - there's a 'funny' robot, a 'sexy' robot, two appalling lead actors, and John Turturro irrevocably blackening his heretofore good name. It made me want to cry.
When I say that The Time Traveler's Wife is scarcely better, you'll get some sense of what a sorry, wet, stupid bundle of clumsiness and poppycock this truly is. Let's start with the obvious. Eric Bana(l). Oh, Eric. Eric Bana and his charisma-free potato face, with its range of expressions varying from 'bemused' to 'uncomprehending' via 'dormant'. Eric Bana and his collection of body muscles, which he likes to exhibit. Eric Bana and his own peculiar way of delivering lines, so that you forget them immediately afterwards; he could play Hamlet and you'd still only remember the word 'to' from his most famous monologue. Eric Bana is your favourite actor if you're the sort of person who enjoys a long walk down an under-lit university corridor when no-one else is around, or if yoghurt is your favourite food in the world, or if you watch GMTV for its news coverage, or if you go to Stoke-on-Trent for your summer holidays.
While I'm giving The Time Traveler's Wife a (thoroughly deserved) kicking, I'd like to vent some rage at this particular type of film, in which a silly, sappy, senseless and weepy woman moons over some unbelievably inaccessible guy. This film (like Twilight, like A Beautiful Mind) should be renamed 'Oh, That Tortuous Boyfriend!' The device by which the woman can never live a happy life with her man is so painfully laboured or irritating (he's a time traveller! he's a fucking vampire, yeah?! he's a spazzy scientist!), that I wonder what it is about women that they're willing to accept these dumb roles, these stand-by-your-man fuckheads; that they fantasise about fleetingly capturing that dark, troubled man who got away, the one who they can never quite understand. Women! Wake up! I was reading a biography of Edward Carpenter just before subjecting myself to this appalling slush, and I read about women who 120 years ago were fighting with Carpenter for their independance from men, for their sexual rights; I read about women who pioneered lesbian politics and wrote daring poetry and who lived on their own and cut their hair - and now, 120 years later, what have we got? These maundering, doe-eyed, will-he-be-my-boyfriend flibbertigibbets, fetishising their waiting for a man. It's so grating, so pathetic, I want to bang their heads together.
The Time Traveler's Wife, then: it's about a man who has to go away a lot, and he has a relationship with a woman who has to stay a lot, and they get together and are happy and then aren't, but really are, because she loves him because he's so mysterious.
So there we are. For the boys: mindless action films, because you don't ever really have to grow up, and after all, the world's your playground, so go ahead and explode things and onanise! You're a man! Well done! For the women: Meryl Streep has dignity and talent, and you'll have to cling to that for dear life. For the girls: another boring, ugly, badly scripted mess of a film in which the man flits around and she sits back and sighs lovingly. Pick a gender - they're both shit.
ON THE WAY OUT
For her: Julie & Julia
For him: G.I. Joe
Julie & Julia is the better film, inasmuch as there are at least ten shots in it that don't make you puke with their business, loudness and ugliness. Julie & Julia is the better film because when the actors say their dialogue, it feels reasonably as if an actual person might ever have said those words or might say them some time in the future. Julie & Julia is better because - well, because G.I. Joe makes Jackass 2 look like Solzhenitzyn. Just who, exactly, gets off on this ceaseless parade of idiocy and explosions, in which morons make a point of running really fast and kicking each other hard? I understand that there are men in the world, and many of these men like to watch films with other men in them, doing manly things with cocks - I mean, guns. Fine. So be it. But is there anyone in the world who doesn't think he was hoodwinked into seeing G.I Joe, and that two seconds of the Bourne Adinfinitum is worth a thousand minutes of this shit?
G.I. Joe is bottomlessly stupid and banal, featuring the sort of bad directing that should be shown to people in film school. There are the most hilarious flashbacks, lasting about ten minutes, at the most inopportune moments, such as when someone's about to be kicked in the head; there are shit costumes, bad names, terribly edited chases, awful special effects, and Sienna Miller. It's an awful, awful film, made by morons for morons, with extra moronic touches added by non-morons, just for the hell of it.
Julie & Julia: better. That's not to say that it's an especially good film; it isn't, and in fact it's ultra forgettable. It would have been 118% better if the producers had just called it Julia, and got rid of Amy Adams and her depressing haircut entirely, to concentrate solely on the glorious Meryl. Ah, Meryl. It sounds silly to say it, because everyone does, but she really is the utter gonads. Every look she does, every creak of her voice, every hand gesture - everything is done in the most wonderful synthesis of character, with such joy in reproducing this great person and breathing life and invention into her. It's a treat through and through. Best of all is her relationship with Stanley Tucci, and there are terrific scenes when her sister (PLAYED BY JANE LYNCH! BY JANE LYNCH! JANE LYNCH!) comes to visit: the chemistry makes your hair stand on end. Anyway: long story short, Julie & Julia is a rather silly film that gets it almost half right.
ON THE WAY BACK
For her: The Time Traveler's Wife
For him: Transformers 2
Again, the film for the ladies is the better film - but only by the merest of distances, which is saying something since Transformers 2 is one of the very worst films I've ever seen. Transformers 2 is incomprehensibly, absurdly bad: dreamed up by a teen-brained action adventure wank fantasist with barely two neurones to rub together, it is an endlessly bewildering set of chases and explosions and laboured gags for the attention-deficient or the seriously retarded. It's the sort of mish-mash of bullshit comedy and crap action that makes Men In Black look like 2001: A Space Odyssey - there's a 'funny' robot, a 'sexy' robot, two appalling lead actors, and John Turturro irrevocably blackening his heretofore good name. It made me want to cry.
When I say that The Time Traveler's Wife is scarcely better, you'll get some sense of what a sorry, wet, stupid bundle of clumsiness and poppycock this truly is. Let's start with the obvious. Eric Bana(l). Oh, Eric. Eric Bana and his charisma-free potato face, with its range of expressions varying from 'bemused' to 'uncomprehending' via 'dormant'. Eric Bana and his collection of body muscles, which he likes to exhibit. Eric Bana and his own peculiar way of delivering lines, so that you forget them immediately afterwards; he could play Hamlet and you'd still only remember the word 'to' from his most famous monologue. Eric Bana is your favourite actor if you're the sort of person who enjoys a long walk down an under-lit university corridor when no-one else is around, or if yoghurt is your favourite food in the world, or if you watch GMTV for its news coverage, or if you go to Stoke-on-Trent for your summer holidays.
While I'm giving The Time Traveler's Wife a (thoroughly deserved) kicking, I'd like to vent some rage at this particular type of film, in which a silly, sappy, senseless and weepy woman moons over some unbelievably inaccessible guy. This film (like Twilight, like A Beautiful Mind) should be renamed 'Oh, That Tortuous Boyfriend!' The device by which the woman can never live a happy life with her man is so painfully laboured or irritating (he's a time traveller! he's a fucking vampire, yeah?! he's a spazzy scientist!), that I wonder what it is about women that they're willing to accept these dumb roles, these stand-by-your-man fuckheads; that they fantasise about fleetingly capturing that dark, troubled man who got away, the one who they can never quite understand. Women! Wake up! I was reading a biography of Edward Carpenter just before subjecting myself to this appalling slush, and I read about women who 120 years ago were fighting with Carpenter for their independance from men, for their sexual rights; I read about women who pioneered lesbian politics and wrote daring poetry and who lived on their own and cut their hair - and now, 120 years later, what have we got? These maundering, doe-eyed, will-he-be-my-boyfriend flibbertigibbets, fetishising their waiting for a man. It's so grating, so pathetic, I want to bang their heads together.
The Time Traveler's Wife, then: it's about a man who has to go away a lot, and he has a relationship with a woman who has to stay a lot, and they get together and are happy and then aren't, but really are, because she loves him because he's so mysterious.
So there we are. For the boys: mindless action films, because you don't ever really have to grow up, and after all, the world's your playground, so go ahead and explode things and onanise! You're a man! Well done! For the women: Meryl Streep has dignity and talent, and you'll have to cling to that for dear life. For the girls: another boring, ugly, badly scripted mess of a film in which the man flits around and she sits back and sighs lovingly. Pick a gender - they're both shit.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Out Of Control
I'm too lazy to do some sort of retrospective of cinema this decade (although I will say briefly that this decade gave us, amongst other films, In The Mood For Love, There Will Be Blood, Talk To Her, Hidden and The Son's Room; not bad, right?), so I want to round out the decade - and this much-neglected blog - with a post about three wonderful films I've seen fairly recently, that have given me many great moments to mull over and delight in. I keep coming back to these films, in my mind - with visions of their worlds, snatches of dialogue, some fragments of colour or some sort of mannerism, coming back to me again and again. These are the best films - the ones whose reel continues to unspool in your head, long after the first projection. Those films are: The White Ribbon, by Michael Haneke; A Serious Man, by Joel & Ethan Coen; and Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze.
Thinking about these films, it strikes me that some of the best cinema is concerned with central characters struggling to create order out of chaos, to pin down the rules of the world, in order to create something controlled, that is understandable. That's - for instance - what Synecdoche, New York (by Jonze's former collaborator Charlie Kaufman, and another serious highlight of the year for me) is about: the director's inability to make his life fit into any recognisable pattern, and the impossibility of representing our human existence, in all its complexity, futility and grandeur. Synecdoche - and indeed all of Kaufman's work - takes a sort of perverse delight in noting how we cannot arrange our world according to our own vision (think of Jim Carrey trying to re-write his and Kate Winslet's existence, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and in that sense the cinematographer's attempt to nail down our world into a pretty narrative is a quixotic one (and here you might think of Charlie's inability to adapt Susan Orlean's book, in Jonze's film Adaptation.; life overtakes him, and his efforts are overpowered by external circumstances).
The Coens, likewise, have often depicted this sort of scenario. Jeffrey Lebowski - the Dude of the Brothers' brilliant The Big Lebowski - finds his slacker existence thrown into pandemonium after a heist goes ridiculously awry; Marge Gunderson spends the entirety of the film Fargo trying to find the criminals, but still cannot answer, by the end of the film, why people would wreak such havoc in the lives of perfectly ordinary people, while in the same film, William H. Macy's character wrestles with the way his life has spiralled totally out of control. This theme makes it all the more surprising to me that people have seen A Serious Man as such an anomaly in the Brothers' filmography. It shares with many of their other films this sense of life being unknowable, and humanity being a mere pawn of fate. Larry Gopnik - the serious man of the title, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg - finds his whole life taking a turn for the decidedly hellish, as his wife leaves him for a smarmy arse, his backward brother is arrested for various offences, his bid for tenure at University is under threat, he's blackmailed by a student, and he appears to be suffering from some unknown illness. It's actually classic Coen territory - especially considering the generally absurd treatment of Gopnik's woes - which recalls their film The Hudsucker Proxy, with its treatment of fate and time. In that picture, Tim Robbins is rescued from tragedy by a ukulele-playing angel; Gopnik, in A Serious Man, goes to ask three rabbis for assistance, hoping they'll be more clued up about matters of fate and man's place in the world. What sets this film apart is not so much the theme - life, with its various comedies and tragedies, is an absurd or cruel joke - but the way they've anchored their film in Jewishness. It gives the film a certain weight - something to anchor the whimsy - and makes it one of their best yet. Everything is perfect, from the lightly stereotyped characters, filmed in vivid cartoon colour, to the Coens' depiction of this world, which makes absolute sense and yet no sense at all. It is a very funny film - another thing reviewers have strangely not noted - while retaining great humanity and pathos. The Coens can appear snide (think of O Brother Where Art Thou?, with its disgusting depiction of the KKK as inept buffoons), but in this film we've invested so much emotionally with this family, it almost makes the whole joke of the film (the joke being that life itself is a joke - to look for meaning or order in it is self-defeating) somehow charming. All of it is so cleverly and intricately woven together, it makes the mind reel to think about it. I cannot wait to see it again.
Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze, has a shot at this question. The key line in the film, which does not appear in the book, comes from Max's mother, who - when he bites her - says, "What's wrong with you? You're out of control!" Or perhaps she says it the other way round. At any rate, in Sendak's book, the line is simply, "Wild thing!" - making Max one with the monsters whom he sails off to meet in the foreign land of his imagination. In the film, Max is not one with the monsters, and the tone is very different - less roustabout, more melancoly. Mas is decidedly at odds with the monsters, who do not see him as one of them, but as someone significantly different. This is a world where owls can be friends, and where humans do not exist. The idea of being out of control is key to the film, which sees Max attempt to exert some sort of control of his own over the wild things in his mind. Where the film builds on the book most significantly, it sees Max plan for the monsters a proper living space - a clear act of civilisation, aiming to turn this tribe into a society. The monsters are at once facets of Max's mind, and the aspects of other people that he does not, cannot understand. It is a classic trope of innocence and experience - except that Max undergoes his coming of age in the company of himself, pretty much. Only when Max has managed to control himself, as it were, can he return to the real world of civilisation. The film's fantastic conclusion, though, is that a lot of this is unknowable; the monsters of Max's id cannot truly be helped, and it is not his role to help them or order them. The child must not try to know; the fun of things and the feeling of things, are a good enough substitute for understanding. This is where the film really does succeed most brilliantly: its grasp of the importance of feeling - and by this I mean the literal sense, of grasping textures and sights and sounds; the film has a very wonderful raggedness to it, where twigs are knobbly and snap with a crack; where rocks slip and crash and crumble. You can practically feel all these sensations through Max. Again, another triumph of the film is its proximity with its subject - Jonze trains his camera on the hypnotic Max Records, capturing rays of sun in his hair, the dirt n his face - but everything is filmed at his height, from his perspective, so that we approach the monsters with the same apprehensions and wonder as he does. It makes it a terrifying film in those moments where it has to be - when Max must confront the aggression of the world, and try to fit into his own perception - justly because the fears are very real, and we are psychologically invested in the characters. It's a beautiful film - and I mean beautiful in the sense of visually beautiful, with a wonderful palette of colours and gorgeous shots in counter-light - that captures quite astonishingly the awkwardness of childhood; its boredom and its sense of alienation, but also the wonders and delights of it, even in trying and failing to make things fit a very narrow framework of understanding.
From the out-of-control Max to the almost demonically wayward children of The White Ribbon feels like a big step. Haneke's film is the stylistic antithesis of Jonze's broad, colourful, quirky film, instead shot in rigorous black and white, with great formal mastery. It is a quite lugubrious film, but incredibly involving right from the start, with that very strange tone typical of Haneke's best films, where you are involved despite the characters being only briskly sketched, and despite being plunged immediately into some horrible sort of situation. In this instance, strange and horrible goings-on in a German village at the turn of the century, seem to be connected to odd behaviour in the town's children. A horse is maimed and a Doctor severely injured; a woman likewise; a barn is burnt; a field's entire crops destroyed; a family bird is tortured to death. In the midst of all this confusion, the town's teacher is trying to work out what is going on, and the parents of some of the children attempt to control their children by making their two eldest wear symbolic white ribbons on their arms to symbolise their wickedness, and tying up their elder son at night to prevent him from masturbating. It is an almost relentless circle of retribution, with harm begetting harm. Through this nastiness, Haneke weaves an astonishingly delicate narrative, that of the teacher's courtship of a young governess.The scenes between them are beautifully acted, and shot with such respect and attentiveness - I'm thinking here of a one-take scene in which the two are out riding in a carriage, and take a turn off the path; he seeks to kiss her, and she asks that he does not, and they ride on. To see the dynamic between them work in this particular way, as the camera follows them off the road and they are presented in a seemingly stiff frame shot, is to note Haneke's genius: he crafts a sense of wonder - the obverse of dread - in very small goings-on. His eye for detail is peerless, and his sense of greater rules at large in the world (specifically, how all human actions are political, and therefore impact on the world in ways which are unpredictable) gives his films wonderful depth. The White Ribbon is a glorious masterpiece, in which every scene, every shot, is beautifully thought out and composed, and every line finds something to delight in or be unsettled by. The film's implied conclusion - and again, Haneke spells nothing out, but allows his ideas to emanate from his film - is that this generation of children added controlling behaviours to their cruelty and wrought havoc on the world. There is no tyranny in this film's creation though - the control that Haneke exerts on his subject is humble and natural, of a piece with its subject matter.
Thinking about these films, it strikes me that some of the best cinema is concerned with central characters struggling to create order out of chaos, to pin down the rules of the world, in order to create something controlled, that is understandable. That's - for instance - what Synecdoche, New York (by Jonze's former collaborator Charlie Kaufman, and another serious highlight of the year for me) is about: the director's inability to make his life fit into any recognisable pattern, and the impossibility of representing our human existence, in all its complexity, futility and grandeur. Synecdoche - and indeed all of Kaufman's work - takes a sort of perverse delight in noting how we cannot arrange our world according to our own vision (think of Jim Carrey trying to re-write his and Kate Winslet's existence, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and in that sense the cinematographer's attempt to nail down our world into a pretty narrative is a quixotic one (and here you might think of Charlie's inability to adapt Susan Orlean's book, in Jonze's film Adaptation.; life overtakes him, and his efforts are overpowered by external circumstances).
The Coens, likewise, have often depicted this sort of scenario. Jeffrey Lebowski - the Dude of the Brothers' brilliant The Big Lebowski - finds his slacker existence thrown into pandemonium after a heist goes ridiculously awry; Marge Gunderson spends the entirety of the film Fargo trying to find the criminals, but still cannot answer, by the end of the film, why people would wreak such havoc in the lives of perfectly ordinary people, while in the same film, William H. Macy's character wrestles with the way his life has spiralled totally out of control. This theme makes it all the more surprising to me that people have seen A Serious Man as such an anomaly in the Brothers' filmography. It shares with many of their other films this sense of life being unknowable, and humanity being a mere pawn of fate. Larry Gopnik - the serious man of the title, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg - finds his whole life taking a turn for the decidedly hellish, as his wife leaves him for a smarmy arse, his backward brother is arrested for various offences, his bid for tenure at University is under threat, he's blackmailed by a student, and he appears to be suffering from some unknown illness. It's actually classic Coen territory - especially considering the generally absurd treatment of Gopnik's woes - which recalls their film The Hudsucker Proxy, with its treatment of fate and time. In that picture, Tim Robbins is rescued from tragedy by a ukulele-playing angel; Gopnik, in A Serious Man, goes to ask three rabbis for assistance, hoping they'll be more clued up about matters of fate and man's place in the world. What sets this film apart is not so much the theme - life, with its various comedies and tragedies, is an absurd or cruel joke - but the way they've anchored their film in Jewishness. It gives the film a certain weight - something to anchor the whimsy - and makes it one of their best yet. Everything is perfect, from the lightly stereotyped characters, filmed in vivid cartoon colour, to the Coens' depiction of this world, which makes absolute sense and yet no sense at all. It is a very funny film - another thing reviewers have strangely not noted - while retaining great humanity and pathos. The Coens can appear snide (think of O Brother Where Art Thou?, with its disgusting depiction of the KKK as inept buffoons), but in this film we've invested so much emotionally with this family, it almost makes the whole joke of the film (the joke being that life itself is a joke - to look for meaning or order in it is self-defeating) somehow charming. All of it is so cleverly and intricately woven together, it makes the mind reel to think about it. I cannot wait to see it again.
Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze, has a shot at this question. The key line in the film, which does not appear in the book, comes from Max's mother, who - when he bites her - says, "What's wrong with you? You're out of control!" Or perhaps she says it the other way round. At any rate, in Sendak's book, the line is simply, "Wild thing!" - making Max one with the monsters whom he sails off to meet in the foreign land of his imagination. In the film, Max is not one with the monsters, and the tone is very different - less roustabout, more melancoly. Mas is decidedly at odds with the monsters, who do not see him as one of them, but as someone significantly different. This is a world where owls can be friends, and where humans do not exist. The idea of being out of control is key to the film, which sees Max attempt to exert some sort of control of his own over the wild things in his mind. Where the film builds on the book most significantly, it sees Max plan for the monsters a proper living space - a clear act of civilisation, aiming to turn this tribe into a society. The monsters are at once facets of Max's mind, and the aspects of other people that he does not, cannot understand. It is a classic trope of innocence and experience - except that Max undergoes his coming of age in the company of himself, pretty much. Only when Max has managed to control himself, as it were, can he return to the real world of civilisation. The film's fantastic conclusion, though, is that a lot of this is unknowable; the monsters of Max's id cannot truly be helped, and it is not his role to help them or order them. The child must not try to know; the fun of things and the feeling of things, are a good enough substitute for understanding. This is where the film really does succeed most brilliantly: its grasp of the importance of feeling - and by this I mean the literal sense, of grasping textures and sights and sounds; the film has a very wonderful raggedness to it, where twigs are knobbly and snap with a crack; where rocks slip and crash and crumble. You can practically feel all these sensations through Max. Again, another triumph of the film is its proximity with its subject - Jonze trains his camera on the hypnotic Max Records, capturing rays of sun in his hair, the dirt n his face - but everything is filmed at his height, from his perspective, so that we approach the monsters with the same apprehensions and wonder as he does. It makes it a terrifying film in those moments where it has to be - when Max must confront the aggression of the world, and try to fit into his own perception - justly because the fears are very real, and we are psychologically invested in the characters. It's a beautiful film - and I mean beautiful in the sense of visually beautiful, with a wonderful palette of colours and gorgeous shots in counter-light - that captures quite astonishingly the awkwardness of childhood; its boredom and its sense of alienation, but also the wonders and delights of it, even in trying and failing to make things fit a very narrow framework of understanding.
From the out-of-control Max to the almost demonically wayward children of The White Ribbon feels like a big step. Haneke's film is the stylistic antithesis of Jonze's broad, colourful, quirky film, instead shot in rigorous black and white, with great formal mastery. It is a quite lugubrious film, but incredibly involving right from the start, with that very strange tone typical of Haneke's best films, where you are involved despite the characters being only briskly sketched, and despite being plunged immediately into some horrible sort of situation. In this instance, strange and horrible goings-on in a German village at the turn of the century, seem to be connected to odd behaviour in the town's children. A horse is maimed and a Doctor severely injured; a woman likewise; a barn is burnt; a field's entire crops destroyed; a family bird is tortured to death. In the midst of all this confusion, the town's teacher is trying to work out what is going on, and the parents of some of the children attempt to control their children by making their two eldest wear symbolic white ribbons on their arms to symbolise their wickedness, and tying up their elder son at night to prevent him from masturbating. It is an almost relentless circle of retribution, with harm begetting harm. Through this nastiness, Haneke weaves an astonishingly delicate narrative, that of the teacher's courtship of a young governess.The scenes between them are beautifully acted, and shot with such respect and attentiveness - I'm thinking here of a one-take scene in which the two are out riding in a carriage, and take a turn off the path; he seeks to kiss her, and she asks that he does not, and they ride on. To see the dynamic between them work in this particular way, as the camera follows them off the road and they are presented in a seemingly stiff frame shot, is to note Haneke's genius: he crafts a sense of wonder - the obverse of dread - in very small goings-on. His eye for detail is peerless, and his sense of greater rules at large in the world (specifically, how all human actions are political, and therefore impact on the world in ways which are unpredictable) gives his films wonderful depth. The White Ribbon is a glorious masterpiece, in which every scene, every shot, is beautifully thought out and composed, and every line finds something to delight in or be unsettled by. The film's implied conclusion - and again, Haneke spells nothing out, but allows his ideas to emanate from his film - is that this generation of children added controlling behaviours to their cruelty and wrought havoc on the world. There is no tyranny in this film's creation though - the control that Haneke exerts on his subject is humble and natural, of a piece with its subject matter.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
A Decade In Music
When I think back to music this decade, I get such an almighty headrush recalling all the joy - and some of the sadness - that accompanied my listening. My most important musical memory of the decade is this: driving to Coventry with Ben and Laura, singing 'Wagon Wheel' by Old Crow Medicine Show. I've never sung so loud in my entire life, and they too were braying at an inordinate volume, and I have an exact visual memory of whizzing past a roundabout as we sang, "But he's a-heading west to the Cumberland Gap - Johnson City, TENNESSEE!" I could feel the happiness warming my body and hurting my cheeks.
This is to say that context is so important to understand music - where you were when you heard it, what memories it brings back, what significance it had, who you associate it with; perhaps just as importantly these days, how you heard it. You need to have some sense of fluidity in music: what music led you to what, what your path was. I'm pleased to say that all my discovering of music, practically, happened this decade. When other people think of their formative years, and the music that most influenced them, they often go back to their teens - but I was such a boring little prick when I was a teenager, and all of my sense of discovery, of awakening and hunger, my sense of myself: I attribute really most of it to this decade. In the first half of the decade, I lost two friends and a grandmother, at least two sorts of virginity, and so many illusions and preconceptions about the world. So this is my self-built soundtrack - what shaped me, and what I chose to shape me.
This decade, I didn't just hear the Strokes, Kanye West, Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom and Dizzee Rascal for the first time - I also discovered Joni Mitchell, Orange Juice, Robert Johnson, Jonathan Richman, Bessie Smith, Public Enemy, Kate Bush and Hank Williams. So I feel a bit funny picking music from this decade, because all of this was happened upon at the same time - and I'm grateful to my age that it made all of this available to me at a time when I was anxious to strip myself down and start over. Pitchfork, Myspace, Last.fm, Salon, Spotify, various downloading sites and blogs: I read up on everything, and tried to be in touch. It was also a way of trying to work out my thing, like Tigger eating thistles and honey and all sorts before settling on cough medicine. The old came in with the new: Rufus Wainwright got me onto the McGarrigles and Loudon, and Leonard Cohen; I heard about Elizabeth Cotten on Pitchfork; Fiona Apple covered Bessie Smith, Blossom Dearie and the Boswell Sisters, so I hunted down the originals; likewise Fleet Foxes with Judee Sill, Final Fantasy with John Cale. Not counting friends and their influence: all the country music, gospel and Devon Sproule from Laura; Dave and Bonnie Prince Billy; Sophie and her Joni; Stef and Bright Eyes; Ben and - jesus - all that indie stuff I had a go at, and some of which stuck. I first heard Rufus on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, for crying out loud. It just feels like such a whirl, this decade, that picking out albums seems not quite right. But I'll give it a go.
My best music this decade is probably not the actual best music of the decade. In fact, it's definitely not. But I suddenly got that thing, in or around 2005 - that tingly feeling of music speaking to me, and just to me. What I was going through that year, Rufus Wainwright voiced exactly in 'Foolish Love' and '14th Street': not just in words - although they were also spot-on - but with the tone of the music, with its cadences and instruments. I suppose that's the teenage rush.
Go on then - let's attempt a list. Of music merely from this decade. Which is wrong:
Albums:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
2. Rufus Wainwright - Poses
3. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender
4. Kanye West - Late Registration
5. Bjork - Vespertine
6. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
7. Gillian Welch - The Revelator
8. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
9. Antony & the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
10. Denison Witmer - Are You A Dreamer?
Some songs:
Rihanna - Umbrella
Jens Lekman - You Are The Light
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Cat Power - Salty Dog
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Beirut - Postcards From Italy
Fiona Apple - Not About Love (Jon Brion version)
Lupe Fiasco - Go Go Gadget Flow
Britney Spears - Toxic
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
Dizzee Rascal - Dream
Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - Knotty Pine
Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game (acoustic)
Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel
Ol' Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis - Got Your Money
Devon Sproule - Plea For A Good Night's Rest
The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?
Shivaree - Goodnight Moon
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
The Strokes - Hard To Explain
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Raining In Darling
Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog
Ryan Adams & Emmylou Harris - Oh My Sweet Carolina
Micah P. Hinson - She Don't Own Me
Rufus Wainwright - Dinner At Eight
This is to say that context is so important to understand music - where you were when you heard it, what memories it brings back, what significance it had, who you associate it with; perhaps just as importantly these days, how you heard it. You need to have some sense of fluidity in music: what music led you to what, what your path was. I'm pleased to say that all my discovering of music, practically, happened this decade. When other people think of their formative years, and the music that most influenced them, they often go back to their teens - but I was such a boring little prick when I was a teenager, and all of my sense of discovery, of awakening and hunger, my sense of myself: I attribute really most of it to this decade. In the first half of the decade, I lost two friends and a grandmother, at least two sorts of virginity, and so many illusions and preconceptions about the world. So this is my self-built soundtrack - what shaped me, and what I chose to shape me.
This decade, I didn't just hear the Strokes, Kanye West, Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom and Dizzee Rascal for the first time - I also discovered Joni Mitchell, Orange Juice, Robert Johnson, Jonathan Richman, Bessie Smith, Public Enemy, Kate Bush and Hank Williams. So I feel a bit funny picking music from this decade, because all of this was happened upon at the same time - and I'm grateful to my age that it made all of this available to me at a time when I was anxious to strip myself down and start over. Pitchfork, Myspace, Last.fm, Salon, Spotify, various downloading sites and blogs: I read up on everything, and tried to be in touch. It was also a way of trying to work out my thing, like Tigger eating thistles and honey and all sorts before settling on cough medicine. The old came in with the new: Rufus Wainwright got me onto the McGarrigles and Loudon, and Leonard Cohen; I heard about Elizabeth Cotten on Pitchfork; Fiona Apple covered Bessie Smith, Blossom Dearie and the Boswell Sisters, so I hunted down the originals; likewise Fleet Foxes with Judee Sill, Final Fantasy with John Cale. Not counting friends and their influence: all the country music, gospel and Devon Sproule from Laura; Dave and Bonnie Prince Billy; Sophie and her Joni; Stef and Bright Eyes; Ben and - jesus - all that indie stuff I had a go at, and some of which stuck. I first heard Rufus on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, for crying out loud. It just feels like such a whirl, this decade, that picking out albums seems not quite right. But I'll give it a go.
My best music this decade is probably not the actual best music of the decade. In fact, it's definitely not. But I suddenly got that thing, in or around 2005 - that tingly feeling of music speaking to me, and just to me. What I was going through that year, Rufus Wainwright voiced exactly in 'Foolish Love' and '14th Street': not just in words - although they were also spot-on - but with the tone of the music, with its cadences and instruments. I suppose that's the teenage rush.
Go on then - let's attempt a list. Of music merely from this decade. Which is wrong:
Albums:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
2. Rufus Wainwright - Poses
3. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender
4. Kanye West - Late Registration
5. Bjork - Vespertine
6. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
7. Gillian Welch - The Revelator
8. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
9. Antony & the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
10. Denison Witmer - Are You A Dreamer?
Some songs:
Rihanna - Umbrella
Jens Lekman - You Are The Light
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Cat Power - Salty Dog
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Beirut - Postcards From Italy
Fiona Apple - Not About Love (Jon Brion version)
Lupe Fiasco - Go Go Gadget Flow
Britney Spears - Toxic
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
Dizzee Rascal - Dream
Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - Knotty Pine
Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game (acoustic)
Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel
Ol' Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis - Got Your Money
Devon Sproule - Plea For A Good Night's Rest
The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?
Shivaree - Goodnight Moon
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
The Strokes - Hard To Explain
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Raining In Darling
Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog
Ryan Adams & Emmylou Harris - Oh My Sweet Carolina
Micah P. Hinson - She Don't Own Me
Rufus Wainwright - Dinner At Eight
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Devon Sproule - Don't Hurry For Heaven
I know I go on about Devon Sproule too much. I also know that there are perfectly intelligent, tasteful, sensible people who will never, and not for want of trying, understand what on earth I see in her. But I do honestly think of her as one of the very loveliest things I've ever heard - a woman whose freshness and sincerity are matched so obviously by the clarity of her beautiful singing voice, and whose folksy, loopy guitar-playing in turn echoes that voice so well. I love her strange phrasing, and the deep chords she plays; I love the way her voice alternately swoops and hushes or closes a line with a squeal; I love her lyrics, which are full of love and wonder for the world she lives in: its sights, smells and sounds, all conjured in slight strokes. Nowhere is this more evident than on her best album, Keep Your Silver Shined, in which she paints an assured picture of her conjugal bliss: 'Old Virginia Block' is an ode to her home state set to a rollicking country stomp complete with racy fiddle, while 'Let's Go Out' is a jazz-inflected ballad telling the tale of her and Paul Curreri's homely courtship, with clarinet fizzing in the background. 'Stop By Anytime' is the very essence of a lazy afternoon in the country - "if you could come around, I'd take you out to see the bugs in the big woods shine", she says, betraying the eye of someone whose awe for the world is immense: "cat bells' jingle in the middle of the night,/fruit flies drown in the undrunk wine/cracked blue china in the rack going dry". I think that perhaps I'm especially drawn to this trait in her because when I return to my house in Normandy, I feel a similar sense of wonder and delight in all its particularities - the creak of the stairs, the smell of the cupboards, the feel of the lawn under my feet, the sight of the well through the curtained window, the shine of the brass pans against the dusty red-bricks where they hang above the blue wood-stove in the kitchen fire-place. You never really hear about this sort of thing in song.
Anyway. The reason I'm going on like this is that I'm finding it so very, very hard to convey just how disappointed I am in her new album, Don't Hurry For Heaven. I hear in it none of the energy and fizz and delight that are so obvious in her two previous records - she is so lacking in zip and sass, and for the arrangements of these songs (which, though not a patch on some of her more beautiful stuff, still contain some moments of loveliness) she has chosen to go down a curiously bog-standard route. I can see that to her this may have felt like a new direction: making her sound more accessible, with more guitars and some call-and-response-ish stuff. But it just descends into dull mid-tempo jamming so often, and you lose trace of her lovely guitar-playing, which really is the best accompaniment to her voice. Her voice in this is too polite, too unlikely to go off in a funny direction. And she was obviously uninspired with the writing: where once she gloried in the everyday, some of these songs are merely commonplace.
There's still some good stuff, but it could have been so much better: 'The Easier Way', for instance, would have benefited from a very simple treatment to offset its delicate love message. Lumbered as it is with pedal-steel and added voices, it loses the freshness of its melody. It could have been one of my favourite songs, but it's so timid, so staid. As it is, I merely like it, and I do still think the pure tune is Joni Mitchell-worthy. 'Don't Hurry For Heaven' has been ruined, and from being a charming, sprightly country ditty it has now been given more vocals and guitars and that omni-present pedal steel. 'Julie' has its moments but is maudlin, and 'A Picture Of Us In The Garden', contrarily to so many songs here, should have been beefed up. Throughout, the production is completely wrong, giving a grainy texture to these songs and to her voice - when her main asset is the wonderful clarity of her voice and playing. And I'm dismayed that the jazz-folk-pop direction of her last album has been jettisoned, when it was actually so original and clearly suited her style so well.
So now I don't know what to do. Sproule was beginning to make a little bit of a name for herself with her last record, with a television appearance and some radio play here in England - and I don't think this record is going to keep up that upward curve in her career. I'm desperate for her to return to her roots and realise what made her such a breath of fresh air.
Reading: Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Anyway. The reason I'm going on like this is that I'm finding it so very, very hard to convey just how disappointed I am in her new album, Don't Hurry For Heaven. I hear in it none of the energy and fizz and delight that are so obvious in her two previous records - she is so lacking in zip and sass, and for the arrangements of these songs (which, though not a patch on some of her more beautiful stuff, still contain some moments of loveliness) she has chosen to go down a curiously bog-standard route. I can see that to her this may have felt like a new direction: making her sound more accessible, with more guitars and some call-and-response-ish stuff. But it just descends into dull mid-tempo jamming so often, and you lose trace of her lovely guitar-playing, which really is the best accompaniment to her voice. Her voice in this is too polite, too unlikely to go off in a funny direction. And she was obviously uninspired with the writing: where once she gloried in the everyday, some of these songs are merely commonplace.
There's still some good stuff, but it could have been so much better: 'The Easier Way', for instance, would have benefited from a very simple treatment to offset its delicate love message. Lumbered as it is with pedal-steel and added voices, it loses the freshness of its melody. It could have been one of my favourite songs, but it's so timid, so staid. As it is, I merely like it, and I do still think the pure tune is Joni Mitchell-worthy. 'Don't Hurry For Heaven' has been ruined, and from being a charming, sprightly country ditty it has now been given more vocals and guitars and that omni-present pedal steel. 'Julie' has its moments but is maudlin, and 'A Picture Of Us In The Garden', contrarily to so many songs here, should have been beefed up. Throughout, the production is completely wrong, giving a grainy texture to these songs and to her voice - when her main asset is the wonderful clarity of her voice and playing. And I'm dismayed that the jazz-folk-pop direction of her last album has been jettisoned, when it was actually so original and clearly suited her style so well.
So now I don't know what to do. Sproule was beginning to make a little bit of a name for herself with her last record, with a television appearance and some radio play here in England - and I don't think this record is going to keep up that upward curve in her career. I'm desperate for her to return to her roots and realise what made her such a breath of fresh air.
Reading: Lorrie Moore, Like Life
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