streams of expression

Some Short Foule Field Notes: John DeWitt, Lisa Jeschke, Andrea Brady, Cambridge, 14th January 2012

2012-01-16T18:29:00.015Z

[Above] The Nihon Room is a formal function room, which takes its name from Nihon University in Japan. The University made a large contribution towards the cost of building Foundress Court.

John DeWitt, on a visit from Uruguay, moved through generally short poems, often in translation and dialogue with South American poetry for which my linguistic capabilities and general knowledge are woefully inadequate; sharper and shorter contours (in terms of lines) were traced in an on-going collaboration with Rosa van Hensbergen, of which he read part; out of it all, a line about the sky being our most truly communal possession, rising above a land-fill site – the idealist cynicism, was it, of that, being quite striking and beautiful, though, this being only my fragmentary memory of it, I'm probably betraying it out of the context of the poem from which it sprang out at me.

Lisa Jeschke's work would generally be described as 'theatre', which it is, though of a kind which merges and emerges from – list – performance art, fluxus, instruction pieces, textual fragments, rigid part-parody formalism, stringent abyss-peering, uncomfortable laughs. Over the past few years, seeing her work with Lucy Beynon, in that scene of artists loosely or not loosely associated with Judith E Wilson drama studio facilitator and maker Jeremy Hardingham and with artists currently or previously based in Berlin, has had a real, if sometimes undetected influence on my own thought and way of seeing things, as I’m sure it has for others also. I mean, you can't really forget something like the duo piece 'John Hurts (from Idiot)', which I saw twice in two days, in the dark, able to trace out its formal moves the second time, tho' still shocked and stunned and drained by the wailing harmonising canto of a sung voice holding out alongside Konrad Bayer's shit-list: "theatre is a pile of shit. art is a pile of shit. science is a pile of shit[...]life is a pile of shit. death is a pile of shit. the day is a pile of shit. the night is a pile of shit". The poetry that Jeschke read tonight, some bits of which, but only some, I'd seen before, was a whole of new and reconfigured fragments, placed into a seemingly rigid formal architecture, rather Cage-like in that kind of aphoristic structure, 24 viewpoints or variations on things like nothing (nothing? nothing) and speaking and not speaking and agency and non-agency. It was, oh, I guess, 'performative' in a way that DeWitt or Brady were not, and that was refreshing - tho' I expected nothing less - and its mock-rigour and real rigour dealt with humour and with the joke in ways that the boys' club tittering of some readings can't reach, in that the communal sense of release and relief might and can and does comfort (wrong word, they're not exactly soft punch-lines) more than Jeshke's deliberate de-stablilisation, catching us off balance, rigorous in its argument, in its skewering of any over-idealistic claims for agency while never retreating into scornful cynicism of an empty or unnecessary sort. (I've just picked off my shelf a pamphlet "Live from Occupied Lady Mitchell Hall" (November 2011) in which a two line poem by Jeschke is placed underneath poems by Marx, Alexander Blok and Mayakovsky, and whose dig at Debord acts as a necessary undercut or check to any claims elsewhere, as 'political poets', we might make, like "occupy everything, be everywhere at the same time" or some such shit. Saying, what is poetry, or theatre, *really*, and publically? Or not publically? "It is strange that everyone always speaks of the theatre as the paradigmatically public form of art." “Stand up, then.” Which is pertinent to what was happening in that room, what social group is in those four walls, what elsewhere outside.) There were less laughs than there might have been, though it was not Jeschke's intention, to not provoke laughter – that, in fact, being the intention, or the half-wished for side effect, often – laughs that catch and die or that carry on. Something to do with the room that night, the feeling of the place, the hideous dog's-mange carpet, the conference-location ambience – tho' that tension was in itself something that the work seized on and fed off, in situ. (A passage of rapid-fire mellifluous variations, in German, on a line from W.S. Graham ordering us to imagine, got the most laughs.) Poetry as clear-eyed as this, and as subtly complex in its generic manoeuvres, without archness of affect, throws some cold water just when and where it's needed, "rest[ing] on restraint," asking itself and us what it can do, not answering that question, doing it, trying to, singing silent night, twice, who else would dare.

Andrea Brady's reading covered work from the early 2000s up to the present; as such it seemed intended as a kind of mini-career summary, perhaps influenced by the fact that Cambridge is the place with which her work is associated in most people’s minds, even if now, as an American in London, that geographic pinning down does not any longer hold. So the reading could help both Brady, and us, see where we, and she, were. Or something of the sort. One could say that the trajectory marked was from intense and intensive political engagement - intertwinings of sexuality, consumer desire, imperialism - to something more classically 'domestic'. Indeed, in an interview from 2010, she says: “I am sad to recognise that as I get older these momentary eruptions, urges and desires come less frequently. My time and my thinking is so fragmented. I don’t write at work anymore; I work at work. I am happily settled in love so I don’t write those driven, manic, disguised love poems which are first of all acts of persuasion anymore either.” The dilemma of poetry as work or as vocation, or as both. How to write professionalised poetry that doesn’t betray itself. Nonetheless, to see that trajectory as too rigidly evident would be crass – the poem 'geld', from a sequence on the photomontages of Hannah Höch, was nothing if not political – the pun on ‘coppers’ feeling curiously apposite in the light of last year’s sudden upsurge of politically-inflected protest language – though it is true that the later work fascinates for its meditation on the social structures fostered and created in what is too often seen as the apolitical, even reprehensibly so, world of infancy and parenthood - love not as a defiant sexuality, bristling against institutional sadism and, say, hoping to defeat it while still unbearably reflecting it – but as mediated through (more traditional?) social relation and through individual relation, as the passing on of law consciously or unconsciously, of finding oneself as the first figure of authority for a child, of the pain and, glib word, responsibility of that. This is necessarily a post-feminist motherhood meditation - (I mean, it is from the legacy of feminism, not that we've got beyond feminism) - if we could call it that, which it partially is, and in toto isn't, so it's not about some relegation to a domestic sphere, Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt of the Cambridge poetry scene. Something, though, lacking in the more macho world of biting caustic bile and tirade, even the softness or ardent desire in that not always tempered by Brady’s sense of having to negotiate within the terms of long-term love. (Notion: read ‘Mutability’ alongside Douglas Oliver’s invocation of his dead Downs syndrome son, Tom, the “real mongol baby,” the “sweetness, ‘stupidity’ and near-harmlessness of a baby.”) But, look, no one here gets off easy. Putting her daughter to bed: “We put you down / in a cage, that comes with these instructions: / fearful loneliness is the condition / of your liberation, and will yield to pleasure / if not to horror and a dry mouth.” The first punishment: “Our group solidarity is dependent first on the discipline whose profit is happiness as conformity.” The urgent enquiry of these lines, of these poems, is a fearsome and tender thing.

Caché (2005)

2011-12-22T23:16:00.012Z

Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou
Music: None
Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Director of Photography: Christian Berger

OK, so a quick run-down of What Happens In Caché. Auteuil and Binoche (he a TV intellectual; she a book publisher) start receiving surveillance footage of their own home, and creepy drawings, in childish hand, seemingly depicting some sort of nightmare incident from the past. The police refuse to help, as the video and drawings don’t constitute a direct threat, and Auteuil clams up, though it’s clear the un-wanted materials have something to do with some past incident in which he was involved. Turns out, then, that he can track down the source of the stalker material – said source, Majid, a now forty-something Algerian man, living in subsidized housing, was adopted by Auteuil’s family as a kid, after his parents were killed in the 1961 Paris Massacre, but kicked out and sent to an orphanage when a jealous Auteuil fabricated an incident involving the beheading of a chicken. Majid proceeds to commit suicide in front of Auteuil, who is subsequently confronted by M’s (un-named) son at work. After brushing him off, and returning home, our man tries to pretend that all’s back to normal, takes two sleeping pills and falls asleep in a darkened room. Oh, and it all ends with an ambiguous and contentious final shot, but we’ll get to that in due course.

The menacing stalker tactics employed by Majid are of course meant to seem creepy; the set-up being that we’re watching a thriller, the first shot maybe signalling an ‘enemy of the state’-style surveillance-paranoia movie: you're not safe even in your own home. But this, of course, is only a tactic to draw one in, so that one takes on the middle-class intellectual family's detachment (where everything is filtered through television, through radio, through newspapers, through books – nothing at first hand, nothing material), before the rug is well and truly pulled from under the feet of both characters and audience. Let’s take that moment when a news clip covering the Iraq war is seen in un-framed full-screen, before we pull out and see it safely boxed inside the television on which the characters watch (or don’t watch) it. (Haneke: "We fixed a neutral date and chose news items on television on that date. It had nothing to do with the content. But of course, you always see images of war, and that fit with the subject of the film.") Such a removal of the framing device prevents escape, prevents us from saying ‘it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’ – I mean, for that moment, we are watching a news report, we aren’t watching a movie, we can’t just switch the tv off and go to bed. So now we see and hear the (socio-economic) realities that really underline a comfortable middle-class existence, with books and wine and dinner parties and Rimbaud. (The latter is here understood (in the brief snippet of Auteuil's TV show that we’re shown) not as the revolutionary poet that Kristin Ross shows him to have been, but as a flamboyant individualist, a gay colonial adventurer, his work discussed, not via the Paris Commune, say, or modernism, but family problems with his censoring sister (who, appropriate to the film’s overall theme and title, ‘hid’ (Cachéd away) the poems of his that shocked her). All very much ‘épater le bourgeois’ – and now Rimbaud’s work has been recuperated by precisely those bourgeois, subsumed into the ‘sophisticated’ wing of the culture industry.) The first time we see that Iraq news clip, our immediate reaction is no doubt: 'this isn't relevant to the plot; why is this still showing while the narrative conversation between Auteuil and Binoche carries on regardless?' Of course, though, the idea is that the clip is relevant, that the sort of activity it captures (imperialist, military exploitation under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’) does underlie everything we do, everything we allow our governments to do, by proxy, for us.

Take, too, the scene where Binoche takes a call from Auteuil at a book launch party and her conversation is heard simultaneously, and with equal prominence to that of the drunk intellectual next to her talking about Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, &c. These figures become just names, standing in for intellectual 'engagement' (Baudrillard as the classic example of someone who went from post-68 leftist engagement to post-modernist 1990s fatalism (for more on this, see Sadie Pant’s first book, ‘The Most Radical Gesture’)). Such names can be checked merrily, and harmlessly, while the plot, the repressed past, unfolds at the same time, via Binoche's phone-call. These people aren't necessarily right-wing – indeed, they’d probably consider themselves liberal or even leftist (the book Binoche is helping to publish is about globalisation, as we learn in the conversation between Auteil and his producer) – but underneath it all lie assumptions and reliances shared with the most bigoted and comfortable of the right.

And take the encounter with the black guy going the wrong way down a one way street on his bike – in the context of the narrative 'mystery' we're still trying to piece together, we suspect him as being part of a network of malignant kidnappers or schemers, an accomplice in a conspiracy of the ethnic 'other', the revenge of this repressed other against the white middle-classes (against the failed revolutionaries of 68 perhaps, that compromised generation who have become the new neo-liberal elite, standing for the very things they fought against - racism, imperialism, interventionism, sexism (take a look at Dominique Strauss-Khan….and take a look at Richard Seymour’s ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’ while you’re at it.)). So, like Auteuil’s character, we’re drawn into that spooked mindset which doesn’t even realize its own (hidden) racism, where every black guy on the street is a potential mugger or rapist, every Muslim a potential terrorist. It’s an encounter with obvious symbolic levels which also fits in with the notion I started with: that the film draws us into a racist/paranoid mindset to reveal our own racism and denial of the guilty secrets that underline our system, our comfortable middle-class existence – not only the secrets of the past (the 1961 massacre), but, continuing into the present, Sarkozian racism, the banning of the hijab, fears of Islamic terrorism, demonisation of Arabs and blacks, &c. (All this can, of course, be seen in the reaction to the 2005 French riots and their 2011 British equivalent (in its most extreme form, with the hideous spectacle of David Starkey’s unconcealed racism on Newsnight, his invocation of all those hoary old clichés about the damaging effect of brutal, barbaric, ‘uncivilised’ black music (he’s talking about rap, they said it about jazz in the 1920s – “Playing that bloody jungle music all night” – yo, Adolf!).

Even in broad daylight – the shoulder check, the near-collision in the street – things are still not quite out in the open. Auteuil doesn’t call the guy a ‘nigger’. Doesn’t even think that word, perhaps. Caché. Everything is hidden – no more so than in the (in)famous final shot, in which an apparently crucial plot detail (the friendly meeting between Majid’s son and Auteuil’s kid, Pierrot) is smothered behind the credits and a seemingly innocuous diurnal scene – the school, which of course is already more than innocuous, contrasting as it does with the previous scene in which the Algerian kid is taken away. This school, then, is the kind of opportunity he was denied by Auteuil’s lie; it’s also a reversal of the first, extended shot of the film (the held frame with Auteuil’s house in the middle-distance), in which we look for narrative information, perhaps suspecting that this shot will contain the seeds for the mystery to come, that we may pick up clues which will come in handy later in solving it, only to realise as the film goes on that we won't find these; so, by the time of this final shot, we assume that this will be just another example of willful alienation and expectation-frustration, and switch off (oh, credits rolling, let's leave the cinema, maybe wait for the gag roll at the end), only to miss this potentially crucial detail. Pierrot hides from his parents (and from the audience) his reason for going AWOL, the night they (erroneously) thought that he’d been kidnapped by Majid; Auteuil, at the end, literally hides in the dark, under the bed-covers, narcotized by sleeping pills. In this film, things are hidden in plain sight. There is no ‘mystery’ in the detective-drama sense – indeed, viewed from that perspective, many things may seem too obvious, too immediately apparent – oh, yeah, Majid’s the stalker, of course – but then we're not so sure, and then it doesn't matter anywhere, because that plot was itself a MacGuffin, was itself hiding the metaphorical/ allegorical notions of colonial guilt. We miss the one-sentence discussion of the FLN massacre in our desire to catch what’s happening in the ‘main plot’. As Haneke says, how could you just forget a massacre like that? There’s how.

Such forgetting is, of course, a key part of the relation between generations, which is itself a key part of the film. Take the conversation between Auteuil and his mother, in which she tells him that she doesn't think about Majid any more. Auteuil's parents were non-racist enough to travel all the way to Paris in order to collect the boy and adopt him after his parents' death in the demonstration. (OK, maybe they thought of them perhaps in a slightly patronising way (“good people, good workers”), but still, they had enough of a sense of humanism to see that these others were not fundamentally evil or barbaric, that their progeny could even become one of their own.) Yet Auteuil himself is of the next generation who, perhaps as a sense of loss at the colonial empire gone, perhaps as a result of aggression and/ at failure channelled into immigration-related paranoia after the failure of ’68 and the institutionalisation (and recuperation) of socialist politics via Matterand, have become more racist than their parents, even as they flirt with post-modernism and liberalism/leftism, adopt that vocabulary.

Given this, I think we should take Majid's death as a moment of necessary abjection, in Kristeva’s sense of the word: that moment that brings us starkly up close to the real – a corpse, a woman's body (so often stigmatised as disgusting or ‘unnatural’, even as it is fetishised or adored), the repressed memory of the (literal) shit on which our entire culture is built, our foundational anal fixation (see Adorno’s ‘Negative Dialectics’) – and in this case, the real of colonial oppression, the dead Algerian before you on the floor, his blood and his body there on the floor before you. The Algerian man literally has to die in front of the French man, not in a 1960s film, now ‘historical’, portraying events that occurred at some temporal remove in a distant country (‘The Battle of Algiers’), but in a modern flat, in front of a pair of modern eyes. So when, before the deed, Majid says, “I wanted you to be here,” he’s not offering an explanation along the lines of “this is why I’m doing this” – that wouldn’t suffice – but forcing that internal shock of recognition, that internal jolt which forces one to look, to see: look up, face it, this is it, this is reality.

Coming back, then, to that closing shot, that possible 'revelation' (or MacGuffin): Robin Wood argues in his review that the film’s pessimism is “surely…qualified by that last shot, echoing the end of Benny's Video (in which the boy betrays his own father, an act that Haneke courageously sees as justified) and suggesting the possibility of collaboration, revolution, and renewal within the younger generation." This doesn't have to mean that Pierrot, the son (the clown-related name has to be significant here, but I’m not sure in what way, exactly) was in on the deal, for some reason deciding to torment his own parents; but rather, that he can establish friendly relations with the (un-named) Algerian son, instead of treating him with contempt or fear or threats or lies, as his father does, or with convenient forgetfulness, as his grandmother does. If a crucial strain of the film has to do with generational changes in race relations – from the patronising but well-meaning attitudes of the ‘50s to a contemporary paranoia masked with an apathy that cloaks the issues at stake with a veil (uh, not a hijab) of liberalism – then perhaps this ending suggests (as does ‘La Haine’s’ central grouping, its three musketeers of the banlieues – Arab, Black and Jew) the possibility of healthier interracial relations being established by the young. (This was, after all, the betrayed dream of ’68 – the young atoning for the sins of the old, making a new world free of stagnant prejudices, of repressed and repressive institutions and the damaged social relations these generated). It's a fragile moment, if that's so, and one which most will not even notice – but perhaps that's the point: Haneke's saying, look, look - the solutions, the possibilities, the glimpses are there, if you'd only get out of your paranoia and your fear and your racist shell & see them, 'hidden' right in front of your own face. That makes him sound far too manifesto-like, of course – I’ve followed Wood's conclusion too far, perhaps, expanded that point too much.

And yet...in an interview with Bright Lights Film Journal, Haneke has this to say:

"We all take sleeping pills as does Daniel Auteuil, although it may take many different forms: it may be alcohol, a drink before we go to bed, it may be sleeping pills, or we may donate money to children in the third world. But each of us pulls the blanket over our heads and hopes that the nightmares won't be too bad. For example, I am sure you oppose strict immigration laws that have been introduced in almost every European country. And yet what would you say if I were to suggest that you take into your home an African family? I think this is the case with all of us. All of us have knowledge that tends to lead to tolerance; at the same time we have selfish interests that are contradictory to this tolerant ideal."

If that’s nowhere near as hopeful as my suggestion of comradeship or, at least, of tentative inter-racial interaction not based on mutual hostility or suspicion, then it does at least act as a problematization, a jerking out of complacency, a foregrounding of the issues at hand, putting the political back into the idea of the domestic, making a political film not as explicit Pontecorvo-style engagement ('The Battle of Algiers' is, I believe, the only French film made about the whole Algerian crisis), but by showing complicity in every area of life, stripping away the layers of insulation into a single act of insistently present violence (tho' even this is viewed thru the video camera), and creating a nagging aura, an atmosphere of unease and uncertainty throughout which is far more than just cheap effect, far more than just some cheap scary thrill or frisson, a stimulus for its own sake. Chew on this:

"How do you behave when confronted with something that you should actually admit responsibility for? These are the sort of strategies that interest me, talking yourself out of guilt. It's like this: we all believe we're so fantastically liberal. None of us want to see immigration laws tightened. Yet when someone comes to me and asks if I could take in a foreign family, then I say, well, not really. Charity begins at home with the door firmly shut. Most people are as cowardly and comfortable as I am."

(And, yeah, check this cache also.)

John Coltrane: Selflessness / Live in Seattle

2011-12-20T16:01:00.010Z

Coltrane in 1965 is what I keep coming back to. Now that all this stuff is on the you tube (see above), I've been listening to it again, taking advantage of the potential to skip back and forward in a track, to listen and re-listen to particular second-long clips without having to juggle the fast-forward function on cassette or cd player – just with mouse clicks, to listen to a ten-minute or a ten-second section three times in a row...and all that jazz. McCoy Tyner's playing was so *thick* at this time, his chordal voicings approaching clusters in their density, and his rhythmic monotony a crucial part of the dialectic between stasis and continuance/momentum that gives his playing its peculiar quality. (This is similar, I suppose, to the trance states induced by particular kinds of tribal drumming, but you're not going to go into a trance here: the rhythm is too insistent and also too broken-up (thanks to elvin jones, “gretsch freak”) – it doesn't have that swirling endlessness that makes alice coltrane's playing on, say, ‘live in japan’, ultimately boring (much as I love her harp-like-swirl and the use of the entire range of the keyboard, from lowest thud to highest tinkle - and tho' of course the boring and monotony as such are in some sense a crucial part of both pianist’s playing styles, in a way i'm not sure i've yet quite grasped or come to terms with. (Tho’ this might provide a clue:

The venerable Curt Sachs may have put his finger on what is at issue here in Rhythm and Tempo (1953), when he discovered that "rhythm" itself, to misquote Freud, is a primeval word with antithetical senses. On the one hand, rhuthmos (Greek) denoted river or flow. On the other rhythmus (Latin) denoted blockage or dam. Sachs's point is not that Greeks and Romans had different cultural coordinates (to a large extent they did) but that coiled within rhythm itself was a certain undecidability - perhaps the very same undecidability that Derrida traced in the connotative oscillations of "tympan."

John Mowitt, 'Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking' (Duke University Press, 2002), p.24))))

So there's this thing called 'selflessness' that coltrane recorded in ’65 - it's from those studio sessions that were included on 'the major works of john coltrane', a 2cd box set impulse released in the 90s sometime, and which i remember listening to after borrowing it from my local library (who for some reason owned this (now probably out-of-print) thing alongside art blakey and stan getz and MJQ and courtney pine (they subsequently sold off all this stuff, no idea where it went: perhaps some old-people's home now possesses 'ascension', 'om', 'selflessness' and 'kulu se mama' on two shining discs and plays it as dinner music)). that was the first time i heard 'ascension', and 'selflessness' is a side-note compared to that…but ‘side-note’ is the wrong turn of phrase entirely, this is *vital* shit. i hate it when, say, allmusicguide does one of their fucking capsule reviews where they go, 'o, this is fine, but not the best place to start if this is your first time with player x', relegating most everything to some deferred future where you're an ‘expert’ and can therefore ‘take it.’ to that I’d say, *launch yourself in*, yeah? - of course you won't fucking understand it, I still don't, coltrane himself didn't, this is at the limits, it's hard to understand when you're up in that air... - but, ok, I heard 'expression' and 'ascension' early on, and i loved the passionate melodics of the opening heads (‘ogunde’ is based on a folk song, after all), and i didn't really *understand* pharoah sanders at all, and in fact i actively disliked him, but these things take time, go on with it, get on.

('selflessness' and 'live in seattle', which are the things i'm going to write about here, both feature donald rafael garrett on bass and clarinet, which is ostensibly the reason i'm considering them both together. garrett's not someone who was much heard from, or about, but val wilmer's 'as serious as your life' posits him as one of those crucial mentor figures during the mid-60s (giuseppi logan as another), whose contributions to the music and to the scene were certainly not proportional to their scant and inadequate documentation on record. (http://www.bardoworks.it/rafael.html has some further info.)

Donald Rafael Garrett in concert in Pisa, San Zeno abbey, 1983

// now let's get on, 'selflessness' opening with one of those melodies coltrane was writing around this time, ostensibly as serene or joyous up-cry, but which turn into a kind of desperate keening -as if one wished *too much* for that transcendent, solving/dissolving joy, for that synthesis, for the one final note that would provide the answer to the thousand fractured, cycling notes played through before: coltrane himself blowing the melody strong, sanders dipping and diving around him, with some wonderful watery, rattley flutter-tonguing.

& rafael garrett's arco bass insists on being taken as a third lead melody voice, blending with the horns, rather than partaking in the strummed and thrummed deep-end accompaniment that jimmy garrison, the coltrane quartet regular, would have provided. – to illustrate this, let’s take the first ten minutes or so of 'evolution', from the 'live in seattle' recording, where Coltrane, Sanders, and Garrett (this time on bass clarinet) soar in imitative, roaring and meshing blasts and honks, while Garrison provides a solid rhythmic underpinning which seems to be going on its own separate box or booth, tethering down the 'out of this world' massed vocalised ecstasies of breath and air and metal, and essentially playing the flamenco-inflected bass solo which he then proceeds to deliver once the horns have stopped playing (this solo being a regular occurrence on Coltrane's live recordings). the absence of a drummer highlights just how 'free' the horns were capable of be(com)ing, of moving outside established licks in a flowing and melting and melding way: formally, one could describe this as ‘rhapsodic’ (in the sense that the term 'rhapsody’ comes from the Greek 'rhapsōidos', which itself comes from the combination of 'rhaptein', to sew, stitch together, and 'aidein,' to sing). & jazz itself is, perhaps, ultimately a rhapsodic form, based on fragments, breaks, discontinuities, allusions and quotations – at the same time that, as in hip-hop, *‘flow’* is central: propulsion, momentum, ‘looking ahead’. nonetheless, garrison’s desire to provide an established 'jazz' element does contrast with what the horns are doing (tho' to start off with his picked harmonics sound suitably 'exotic'); their flow reaches an extent to which it becomes *overwhelming*, dispensing with clock-checking time, with finishing a tune in ten minutes so that people can go and buy drinks, so that time itself becomes a felt, controllable thing, slowed down and speeded up at the musicians’ will – for the ultimate example of that, you’d have to look at those mammoth extended pieces by the Cecil Taylor Unit, where time itself stretches so much it almost seems to break, to fracture, to become meaningless.

well, now we’re here, hell, let’s just *listen* to the *whole* of 'evolution' – garrett's thin-reed wail on clarinet, notes bent, metallic melted to malleable shape-shift, transitioning into sanders' shronking and then that unbearably beautiful way he ends his solos with a kind of desperate lyricism, keening up-slide to notes. again, that *thin-ness,* not the full-bodied-ness we think of when we think of free jazz – say, Brotzmann or Coltrane himself – not that *filling out* of the sound-space: yeah, Sanders can do that, does do that, but what I'm talking about here is his use of *fragility*, a sense of self un-stable and breaking under the pressure and force of riots and revolutions and that late 60s belief in cosmic transformation; yeah, fucking *eschatology*, if you like, material transformation – sound is material, isn't it, it could speak another reality into being and not simply be contained within the glass-cash-register chinking register of the night-club / the record-label / the hit-parade / the culture industry. Uh, yeah, if Sanders' multiphonic explosions of simultaneous multiple notes, overtones, difference tones intend to vibrate the space into the fullest potential possible, the most filled wholeness - "every kinda chord you can hear under the fucking sun” - his solos at this time end with, say, two successive notes, the stalled beginnings of a melody, as his saxophone moves into being a voice, trying to sing a song to itself but now having to flutter-tongue burble and cry in woundedness – and it's the *transition* here that gets me, in this say, thirty seconds of music which expands out beyond itself as a non-melodic ear-worm which encapsulates for me what Coltrane could have and was constantly trying and failing to do - that failure as *built into the condition of the music*, the condition of music itself, the condition of the world itself that would not change as was wished – a desire that cannot express itself in logic, barely even in illogic, gesturing towards the "possible world," yeah, a "community of risk," someone in some other context said that.

that transition i mean is when sanders' solo is ending and suddenly, without warning on the audio version at least, coltrane, i think it is, comes out to the microphone and starts shouting, comes in roaring, 'OOOMMM' 'OORRRRHM' / 'OOOOOM' – 'OM', the primal word, the primal vocalised sound that sets the universe into being ("and god *said*, let there be light" - light and sound as one simultaneous flash, an explosion into being as the origin of the universe, some collective pre-evolutionary memory of the big bang) (see simon weil's fine article 'circling om') - that roaring is *almost* a parody of some horror-movie ‘black-magic’ voodoo roar, but it transcends that, it's not transcendent, it's a bellow of roaring animal pain outside language, outside the formal language of music, outside song - is not speech, is not song – is both – those moments when coltrane would take the horn out of his mouth; as miles davis had advised, but not to stop playing, instead to give vent to that roar of exhilaration mixed anguish…

more transitions (‘transition’ the title of a record from this year, coltrane’s music itself in transition, in creative mentor-exchange with the new thing saxophonists – sanders, shepp, carlos ward, ayler, john Gilmore – for whom he was a talismanic figure, the leader and legitimiser of the movement – tho’ he was equally influenced by their own side-slant attack; the ‘classic quartet’ splintering apart, that tension, between tyner’s static rhythmix and the way his playing cannot *help* but ratchet up in intensity and depth and drive when placed in the same physical space as coltrane’s boiling over; jones perhaps the prime force driving coltrane out into polyrhythmic ambiguity (that means, simultaneity), (*energy music*), himself frustrated (exhilarated?) by the wall of sound above and beyond him (reportedly throwing his drum-sticks at the wall at the end of ‘ascension’); garrison the one hold-over, once the transition to that final quintet was accomplished – and yet, it’s precisely that tension, that push-pull, that gives this music its power, and its *objective social content* – this the year of the watts riots – rip it up, split it up, all felt as personal upheaval, split and shatter into collectivity, that transition into new forms is *of course* painful, as any transition is, who knows where and what horror or beauty it could turn into, treading on thin ice, on air, tight rope tightened or loosening.)
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so, transition, when coltrane stops shouting and the horns go triple over garrison's jazz moves, when they're wailing da-naaaaaaahhhhh-nuh, da-naaaaaaaaaaah-nuh (I can't fucking 'transcribe this', as onomatopoeia or notation or whatever - it is un-fixable in that sense, less we develop the technology to contain it - and if we did that, then we'd be in some society where our understanding of what went beyond our current grain made life liveable, where wounded cry was not just some impoliteness to be ignored, ill-advised feeling-show)); when Tyner comes in under and it's like some floor locks into place beneath the horns, and then he solos, the relief of that, there's only so much reality or surreality or irreality you can endure... 7:08 into Tyner's solo, Garrison pluck-repeating single note, the music freezing into repeated locked-record-groove stasis, like stammer-stuckness, like Coltrane repeating the head to 'confirmation' twenty times in a row, seeing it from its different angles, its different permutations, trying to reach every possible harmonic implication, to see the whole thing from all fucking angles - but different to that, I suppose, in that repetition is used in Tyner as a particular dramatic effect, whether gravity pillar-thick chord or as harp-like arpeggiated swirl with thick deep-end muscle - a space he moved into at this time, 1965, which never before or since was quite the same, had a lightness to it that this gravity-insistence - well, it's that, but at the same time it suggests that moment when everything's gonna split open - it never quite does - well, the horns come back in and thick cluster bash, is pentecost tongues to "set fire and death on whitey's ass" (if you believe amiri baraka...ok, this is not hate music – or maybe it *is* - “what we need is hatred. from it our ideas are born” (genet) – maybe it is, and maybe the critics were right (the london evening standard’s jack massarik, & his infamous off-mic “torrents of hate” jibe when some coltrane was played on one of bbc radio 3’s afternoon jazz snoozefests) – but if they were right, they were right in a strictly narrow sense that made them see that hatred as mere perversity, misanthropy, nihilism;

any hatred that there is in the music would have to be inextricably linked to love, love and hate mingled, hate motivated by love - by which i mean that there has to be a sense of what *has to be done* (perhaps *hateful* things) if change is going to be more than just a willed-for moment of religious transcendence, reliant on the intervention of an on-high god we ceaselessly invoke with or without the hope that he will finally choose *now* to intervene - it is still an in invocation then, but an invocation to action, however direct or indirect, to change systems of oppression and exploitation, bigotry and misery. of course, coltrane has an odd relation to direct action, we see this in that awkward interview where frank kofsky tries desperately to make him into a post-malcolm marxist but only succeeds in getting him to talk about the need for universal peace...archie shepp, the disciple, no doubt encouraged him to raise the political ante, there were young black men in the clubs at which he played shouting 'black power! black power!', and maybe coltrane would have become more politicised if he'd lived until the 60s - but this is the same as the 'what would malcolm have done if he'd lived' argument that those on the left still engage in from time to time. (counter-facts, counter-histories are all very well, but they never happened, did they?)

oh, ok, back to 'selflessness' again, and finally: things move on out. i'm so used to thinking of sanders' playing as undergoing a trajectory, from wild yawping, coruscating, disturbing beauties with coltrane (and those couple of blue note dates, ‘symphony for improvisers’ and ‘where is brooklyn’ w/don cherry), and then, once coltrane dies and he becomes a leader in his own right, a more controlled use of the free playing as occasional effect, climax, or 'interlude', between burbling, mellow, melodic rambles over ethnicky grooves and repeating chords...but here sanders' playing is not just the squall or blast of sound i'd remembered it as; rather, he develops rather jauntily carnivalesque rhythms (in a very distant pre-echo of Sonny Rollins, circa 'Don't Stop the Carnival'), tho' this is done, it shd be noted, thru unusual and forceful tonguings or fingerings (or however it is he gets those effects).

dig too, on these recordings (on this and 'live in seattle'), how the two main horns, sanders and coltrane, sometimes seem to swap over, coltrane adopting sanders-esque howls, sanders sliding his own melodicisms alongside coltrane's prophet-like, authoritative pronouncements. i'm not using 'prophet' here as some un-thought-through metaphor: prophets (i'm thinking in the biblical sense here) use poeticised, metaphorical, fanciful language (i mean, 'revelations' is sci-fi before the category of sci-fi, right?) to call down the abuses and corruptions and degradations of current society; to predict the calamities that will befall the society if it does not change it ways (or have those ways *changed for it*); and to posit an alternative future in which that society is healed and mended and transformed. is coltrane not doing all three of those here, as far as the limits of his instrument and his epoch and his imagination will let him?

of this kind of *total engagement* there is still need.

Timothy Thornton / Tomas Weber / Simon Jarvis / November 2011 / Cambridge

2011-11-05T22:39:00.005Z

Last night’s reading at the Judith E. Wilson drama studio – one of what seems right now to be a weekly embarrassment of riches down Cambridge-way – promised fine poets reading serious work, but what transpired was more than that, I think, in its totality: three very different writers, with different projects, each giving a reading with totally believable but different modes of delivery and intensity, each sustaining thought in critical fashion as felt engagement and as poetic investment. Simon Jarvis, first of the three, began with a twenty-minute poem on church history, part of the enormous ur-text of which such poems as ‘Dinner’ (read a couple of years ago at Queens' College, and published in CLR 4) are also part: the form here that of dialogue, with speech-song and prosody in rhapsodic digression from a single point or moment - a piling-up and extension of a thought and thread until it returns almost beyond the limits of memory. As Jarvis would muse, when does a rhyme cease to be a rhyme? Could one rhyme across stanzas, across pages, even across poems, as well as across just lines? So, here: how long can a thought be sustained, deferred by the nested parenthetical sub-thoughts/songs to which it gives rises, until one loses that original thread? It’s undoubtedly harder to keep up when hearing the poem read aloud than when engaging with it on the page – your mind slips for a moment and you lose the sense of the accumulating list that follows what you missed – and your own connections, your own word-associations, can add to that distraction too easily. Even on the page, of course, a poem such as ‘The Unconditional’, with its (nested (nested (nested parentheses, demands to be read, really, in one go, in one flow, teaching one-self to read it in a way that stretches at one’s capacity for comprehension and information in a kind of critical testing that is central to Jarvis’ mode of poetic thought and life.

In this particular instance, though, that song and that prodigious prosodic excess were perhaps held in check – or was it my lack of knowledge (and, let’s say too, time for) the intricacies of church history? It did feel as if there was some kind of measure here – in other words, excess wasn’t what was being fore-grounded, Jarvis instead voicing both sides of the dialogue, not by altering his voice, but by shifting his position to face different sides of the room, left and right, and looking straight ahead for the brief sections of narration. Perhaps the fact that, in contrast to the occasions on which I’ve seen him previously read, he had not memorised the poems (a quite staggering feat, really, in the case of ‘The Unconditional’), but recited from printed pages, contributed something to that sense of ‘measure’. Still, it's pretty clear that what was being attempted here was different to the, yeah, Dionysiac eccentricities of ‘Dionysus Crucified’ (the enormous pamphlet recently published by Grasp Press), of F0, and of ‘The Unconditional’. To be sure, Jarvis has always worked in several modes – often in the same poem: a kind of deferred and digressed narrative, often involving cars or travel around Cambridgeshire; a jumble of computer glitch and concrete/sound poetry style break-down(or up); and a kind of poeticised conversation, dialogue, also set within a narrative framework. I get the sense that the best of his work is that which encompasses all of these – ‘Dionysus’, for instance, moves from descriptions of the Dionysus legend to what appears to be a story about an awkward encounter in a café playing fusion jazz to passionate denunciations of the role of cash and of the current capitalist crisis (yeah, and mentions Cheryl Cole, for which “50 vertical miles above Schloss Burrell” in F0 is of course the delicious precedent). The church history poem read today didn’t, really, have so much of that variety or wildness - I don't mean wildness, maybe, but skewed-ness, a mixture of extreme control and poetic skill and what appear to be perverse or even whimsical choices (but which are all the more powerful for coming within that context of great prosodic skill). Nor did the shorter poem that followed (the genesis of which apparently lay in a bizarre incident a couple of years back in which Radio 3 commissioned a piece of seasonal verse, but decided that the result would have to be butchered to about a quarter of its length and read by Stephen Fry – from poem to sound-byte, neutralized out of existence). Yet that relative non-skewedness didn't feel like lack in this case: the poem's reflections on Christmas and the notion of gifts were often quite moving, filtered through a register personal in a way unusual for Jarvis (that reference to “hugs”). I'm not meaning to endorse this as some kind of too-easy Christmas sentimentality, but I do feel it as really felt there and in that context working: and then the amazing section in which all objects – the door handle of a car, everything one touches or sits on or looks at – are emptied of agency, Christmas presents, a toy car standing in for some love it cannot in the end encompass. And what was that line about a “Soviet of love”? Our hearts did a little jump. OK, so the combination of those two poems, wasn’t, I think, the best Jarvis reading I’ve ever seen, ever, OK, but that’s because he is one of the very finest readers of his own work around – and yeah, one of the very finest poets around, I do really think so.

Tom Weber’s mode of delivery is trembling hand on paper and head aslant as if looking at the poem out of the corner of his eye was the only way he could read it: essential that he not look at it straight. But these poems have a directness too, shorter poems, not that extended narrative or extension of thought that Jarvis is so uniquely, perhaps, capable of putting into practice, but with extended or connected thought running across them, yes – read as a piece the words recurring, like ‘heart’ again and again, celeb names or sports dates perhaps invested with something or otherwise in there as shadow puppets, ghost targets (now I think about this, that’s something that Jarvis and Weber and Tim Thornton all do share, though in very different ways, as I’ll get onto in a minute). I don’t know how much more I can say, to do justice to these – I would like to hear them again, to read them on the page (they’re forthcoming for publication).

Interval period. And now Timothy Thornton launching ‘Jocund Day’, the inaugural publication of Mountain Press (whose difference to Grasp, from what I can gather, is its determination to print extended or book-length collections rather than just two-a-penny pamphlets: JD collects work published over the past few years in a variety of little magazines, etc, and, as Thornton explained in his introduction, has some gestation in work written as far back as 2005, when he was briefly at Cambridge). Neil Pattison’s spoken introduction had it that there are two types of poems: those you believe and those you don’t – which as a framework could have some value, I think, and Thornton’s poetry, his delivery of it, had that belief written all over it. As a musician, his poetry is concerned very much with intricacies of sound resonance and echo – but this was sound pattern not as decoration, as be-jewelled cover for lack of substance (masquerading as glittering substance in itself), but as a means of poetic thinking (to borrow Jarvis' phrase). This thinking doesn't exist for Thornton in the same way that it does for Jarvis – here, sound is cut or choked, rhyme (more often half-rhyme) is a texture suggesting further layers of meaning, or a kind of concealed meaning between the spaces on the page, between the words (as when, in reading, Thornton made the Freudian slip of ‘whipped’ for ‘wind’ in one of the book’s ‘Tattoos’). (Or see Mike Wallace-Hadrill’s notion that Thornton’s punctuation “bullies” the language it works with and against and alongside.)

Maybe that was a quality of the reading itself – Thornton was clearly nervous before he read, an energy which translated perfectly into the spasmodic, manically and desperately humorous modular poem/ dossier ‘TRAILS’ (as published at Deterritorial Support Group), a work-in-progress which, in this version (previously presented at this year’s Sussex Poetry Festival), combines responses to the news coverage of the April riots protesting the installation of a Tesco supermarket in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol, with visceral-political responses to the education protests of late 2010 and early 2011, and with a tactic also deployed by Keston Sutherland, in which an object unworthy of the attention given to it becomes a kind of manic focus, a phantom figure onto which all sorts of obsessions and connections are projected, under which it can not stand. (In this case, that object, or subject, is ‘Nigel Pargetter’ from the Archers, a character killed off after being on the show for a couple of decades.) I wouldn’t say that this is a smoke-screen effect, though I wouldn’t say either that I knew precisely what it was it is doing (Sutherland says (in the ‘Naked Punch’ panel discussion published earlier this year) “I like testing the capacities of poetry and my own interpretation by seizing on a very improbably specific detail of consumer society and trying to make from that some image of the whole”) – also, perhaps, the displacement of unbearable or limit-battering love mingled violence into the humorous bearability of Lenny Henry or TL61P, or Nigel Pargetter. That latter’s not quite right – these figures are not just ways of sugaring the pill, lightening the load, joke as distraction rather than as central to argumentation; yeah, I don’t think, in any case, or in Sutherland or in Thornton’s cases, that this humorous perversity betrays the urgent spirit of the rest of the poem – in fact, it heightens it –

as when activist Jody McIntyre, dragged from his wheelchair by police during the March protests in London, then savaged by a BBC journalist for ‘intimidating’ the cop into having to drag him from his dangerous, from his menacingly-wheeled wheelchair, here is conflated with housewives’ favourite darling comedian, Michael McIntyre – to whit, “I’m proud of the BBC (quote)“Hello is that Michael MacIntyre hello? Mister MacIntyre how/ did you feel about being pulled from your wheelchair” (unquote)(quote) “I thought you were a quote(uncunt)(quote)(unquote)CUNT” –

as when “PROFESSOR BRIAN COX” collapses into “Alain / de Botton or Alain ‘de’/de Botton”, twitter feeds and rolling news as the hateful levelling-out of all discourse into flat celeb-g(l)oss tv-professor banal-piety, sound-bytes biting off the heads of those running headless chicken down Stokes Croft (so the clucking news would have it), de(-ar)rangement of bodies on streets, a sex-violence fantasy-fear (those dark, sexy rioters) simultaneously enhanced by being denied and derided (hence the “cop pissing into my happiest mouth”). That kind of visceral, personal, sexualised – and satiric – reaction to riots (of which the Stokes Croft instance was an early prefiguring of August’s more widespread urban action) strikes me as a very honest and usefully aslant way of examining the current political situation without losing a sense of one’s individual body and its slotting into the cogs of the machine, or throwing itself onto that machine’s gears. This is neither knee-jerk liberal condemnation resulting from a kind of accomodationist pacifism (viz. the response of the 'official' left to destruction of private property), nor cautiously-stated liberal solidarity for some concrete action, which yet stands individually on the fringes of the crowd and its smash-heart-of-glass, nor the even more passively brutal tactic of simply ignoring what happens outside your own territory (“placidly claimed to be / a few hundred miles from other things”) - this is the night terror or the manic hysteria high of riots and smashing at limits inscribed within and without our deepest person – this is simultaneously a mind made and shaped by media and a mind that seeks to think outside that poetry of capital with its own desiring poetry, turning barbs and love and self-harm in equal measure against the flat-screening process of Auntie's news mediation. ‘TRAILS’ is a virtuoso piece in the sense that virtuosity allows you to do something, with all your resources of technique and personhood and poetic history and their intersections, that a calmer voice would not – at once going out of yourself, being swallowed in a spasming language (Thornton emphasising this in his notated stuck-judders, jack-hammer stammers (“Alain de Alain de”) and his delicious thrusting up to the limits of what he could say, as if willing himself to the border of inarticulacy), and coming from the very deepest inside-out of our hurts and wants and needs, something, some things, “that actually happened.”

Yeah, something happened in that reading too - "an actual thing: I have seen it." You better believe it.

“And that is the nature of the historical moment...": On the London Riots, August 2011

2011-08-10T14:08:00.009+01:00

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Saturday 6th August, 2011: family members, community activists and local residents marched from Broadwater Farm to Tottenham Police Station, to protest the police shooting of local man Mark Duggan. Demanding to speak to a senior officer, they were refused dialogue, and stayed outside the station for hours, waiting to be spoken to, waiting to be heard. The arrival of a younger crowd and what seem to have been the usual heavy-handed police tactics (there were rumours that cops had attacked a 16-year old girl) then sparked off what turned into a full-scale riot, a riot which has since spread, in the past few days, to Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham. Prime Minister David Cameron has returned from his holiday and is talking about authorising the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on protestors. Memories of Brixton and St Pauls in the 1980s come flooding back. Of course, seeing all this on the television and thru the prism of the internet is a totally different thing to seeing it on the ground – mis-information, wilful or not, confusion, rumours, outright lies, knee-jerk opinions and reactions abound, and one has to pick one’s way thru the mess. Seeing the disparity between what was being reported on ‘reputable’, ‘balanced’ news outlets, and what was actually happening in-situ, during the November 2010 education protests, is proof of that, if proof were needed. So what to make of it all?

The quotation that I’ve appropriated as a title for this post comes from Darcus Howe, being interviewed by a typically hostile and aggressive BBC journalist who, rather in the style of ‘Hard Talk’ frontman Stephen Sackur, attempts to force him into a ‘gotcha!’ endorsement of the riots. She doesn’t get that (instead, she’s deflected with the rather wonderful “I have never taken part in a single riot. I've been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. And have some respect for an old West Indian negro, and stop accusing me of being a rioter. You won't tickle me to get abusive, you just sound idiotic. Have some respect.”), but Howe does say: “I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment...” Howe is not, as I take it, arguing that the riots are genuine revolutionary action (he make it clear that he has never been a pure rioter, but a politically-motivated protestor), but he is saying that they are more than just mindless thuggery; that the political, economic, social and racial causes behind them deserve closer examination; and that the fact of these riots cannot simply be tut-tutted away by ‘non-violent’ liberals or rabid, racist conservatives.

Of course, the spark for the London riots *was* political – the shooting of Mark Duggan, which is just a single point on the edifice of racial profiling, unexplained deaths, and general brutality for which the police never do, and never are expected to answer (as if, perhaps, ‘it couldn’t happen here’ – yes, America, images of Miles Davis covered in blood outside Birdland, perhaps, or Thelonious Monk gifted years of mental trauma after an unjustified beating, or Oscar Grant, yes, how could we forget him? (ok, we'll grant you Smiley Culture, yeah, he died here, didn't he?)). But, in the transition to a full-blown riot, the original motivation becomes lost in a sea of other, individual and collective motivations – resentment at the poverty in which one finds oneself and the contempt with which one is daily treated; resentment at the lack of horizons, at the insistence that this is how it is and will always be, that *you* are the unavoidable by-product of economic policy and are regrettable but disposable, human cannon fodder/ 'collateral damage' in the worldwide war of free-market economics – anger even more personal than that, at a failed relationship or the way that is entwined with the social – losing one’s job and its personal consequences, failing to get a job, going back to the job centre to be treated with snooty derision, seeing oneself lambasted and parodied or just ignored in the news media, on the shiny televisual box that shapes how everyone thinks – maybe even a desire somehow to ape those action heroes one sees on that same box, to be a warrior, an action man, to engage in physical acts of violence as an assertion that yes, you are making a mark on the world, yes, *you are there.* It’s this super-abundance of motivations, and, at the same time, the negation this produces – the sense that one doesn’t quite know why one is doing this, why one is smashing this particular window or taking this particular object (beyond the fact that one is told all the time by big papa advertisement that it is desirable, you’ve gotta have it (the blackberry, the trainer), even if you can’t, can’t afford it, could never afford it) – that spreads, almost organically, in the riot: no programme, no specific relation between ends and means, no end(s) in sight, just this pure act, this open moment of negative possibility. The only alternative to poverty one is allowed is the spurious notion that one can somehow pull oneself out of poverty, be Alan Sugar’s apprentice, bawl out a tried-and-tested number on The X Factor, be mocked or paraded or degraded in the freak-show spectacle of Big Brother, exist in that other unreal-world of Z-list celebrity, Botox, bling, false smiles and breasts and lives – the only alternative is to be rich, to be born somewhere else, to get lucky; and the only *real* alternative, now, is to riot, to still be in the place and the situation in which one was the day before, but to transform it, yes, negatively, but still to transform it, for a few days at least, before ‘normality’ is restored by the big guns (plastic bullets, anyone?), before police sentences are slapped down (and Mark Duggan’s murderers are never touched, of course, of course), before Liberal/Tory condemnation dies down and we all forget about the temporary inconvenience of the England-Netherlands football match at Wembley being called off, or that we were worried the Olympics might be affected (O God forbid).

Hey, I’m not *celebrating* the riot: let’s face it, most of the internet commentators who seem to some extent to be sympathetic to the rioters, who, at least, don’t call them animals and scum and say ‘bring back thatcher’ and ‘this is like planet of the apes’, would be fucking terrified if it was *their* street that was on fire, *their* corner-shop window being smashed, because they don’t know what it’s like to live without horizons, without a university degree that enables you to talk about Marx and sociology and the real political causes of the violence etc etc, without the privileges they daily enjoy even as they condemn the system that extends them these. I’m not excluding myself, I’m talking about myself, in fact, what courage of convictions I possess I don’t know, it’s easy to type a few hundred words while the news unfolds on screens before you – but, yeah, let me carry on for just a moment. I’m not celebrating the riot, but neither am I going to fall into the other camp, of weak pseudo-pacifist condemnation of what those nasty urban youths are getting up to. As Chris Goode puts it in an invaluable blog-post working thru his own thoughts on the riots, the binary choice we are presented with – that Darcus Howe is presented with by that idiotic BBC journalist (does she call him ‘*Marcus* Howe’ at the beginning of the clip or am I just imagining things?) – between ‘condemning’ and ‘condoning’ what is taking place, absolutely fails to grasp the complexity of the actual situation. If the violence was motivated by an actual political programme, with specific goals in mind, then it would be truly scary for those in power, then it would be, perhaps, true *revolutionary* violence – the fact that it isn’t renders it brief, impotent, disruptive, but it still exists as an objective fact, in some sense mimetic of the latent, implicit, hidden and not-hidden violence that allows capitalism as we know it, as it infiltrates nearly every portion of our daily lives, to exist, to continue, to suppress, to exploit. One could see it, in some sense, as capitalism turned on itself – every day you are tell you can and should and must have the latest gadget or item of clothing, the latest craze invented as a distraction in a self-sustaining, never-ending circle of acquisition and consumerism – and so when you smash a window and you take that pair of trainers for yourself, without paying for it, you are at once negating the system by eliminating that all-important factor of money, and you are embodying its values, those advocated attitudes of dog-eat-dog, take-what-you-can-at-others’-expense; embodying those values and turning them against the system that spawns them. This doesn’t make ‘looting’ a revolutionary activity – not in the semi-motivated, indiscriminate sense of vague boiling rage that would seem (to this outsider) to characterise the riots currently taking place – but it does make it more than simple stupidity, more than the thuggery and hooliganism of the Bullingdon Club (we smash stuff because our privileged position in society allows us to) or the Reading Festival-goers, middle-class kids who go on a rampage at the end of three days of drink and drugs and pop music. In other words, we can *understand* the riots, understand and even be excited by the potential that is there, for genuine revolutionary ‘movement of the people’ (in Fela Kuti’s words), even as its direction into blind shop-window-smashing and building-burning remains un-channelled, its energies un-directed, un-fulfilled.

In ‘V for Vendetta’, Alan Moore’s anonymous anarchist instigator (following Robert Anton Wilson) pontificates on the difference between ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’.

Evey: "Is this the land of do-as-you-please?"
V: "No, this is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means ‘without leaders’, not ‘without order.’ With anarchy comes an age of true ordung, of true order, which is to say, *voluntary* order. This age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung has run its course. This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos. Involuntary order breeds dissatisfaction, mother of disorder, parent of the guillotine. Authoritarian societies are like formation skating. Intricate, mechanically precise and above all, *precarious.* Beneath civilisation’s fragile crust, cold chaos churns. And there are places where the ice is treacherously thin."

Let’s say now that we’re witnessing chaos. But let’s say too that there is the potential for anarchy – or, if you don’t hold to that political persuasion, for that afore-mentioned revolutionary movement of the people. (The rioters are Black, Jewish, White, Men, Women.) Yes, the crack-down will begin and things will return to the way they were – but not even that, the charred buildings and the smashed windows that will take months to repair will provide a constant physical reminder of what happened – and, more importantly, tremors such as this, added to the more politically coherent protests and marches of November 2010 or March 2011, added to the Arab spring, added to everything, suggest that the earth-quake to come may be more than just a simple riot.

The Tree Of Life (2011)

2011-07-29T16:15:00.018+01:00

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
Music: Alexandre Desplat (plus Smetana, Preisner, etc)
Director: Terrence Malick
Screenplay: Terrence Malick
Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki

Given the cosmic scope of this film, some people may be surprised at how much of its power comes from its evocation of childhood and a sense of place. But this is not to reduce it to a simple ‘coming-of-age’ story; like the best of the American avant-garde – Olson’s ‘Maximus’ sequence, Stan Brakhage’s ‘Dog Star Man’ – the connection is made between locality and a wider historical and geographical scope, shading into myth the diurnal activites which many take for granted, risking overbearing over-statement, sometimes macho romanticism, but ultimately winning, through risk, through running the gauntlet between absurdity and genuine insight, a genuine respect, testing the margins of one’s art. This is not, though at times it comes close, a nostalgic romanticisation of 1950s suburban American childhood – for childhood is shown with all its little dramas and crises, its pulls and tugs in different directions, its simultaneous aimlessness and boredom and sense of unlimited wonder and unbounded excitement – a treatment of childhood that doesn’t reduce children to mini-adults, but entwines their experiences with those of the adults who raise them, which takes their experiences seriously, which recognises the universal resonances in their barely-articulated or conceived notions, musings, wonderings. There is a sense of awe at life here, a sense of palpable joy, but childhood is not an Eden, and this is not a regressive vision. Well, let’s revise that, Malick’s worst tendencies are simplistic, regressive, naïve in the worst way – it’s these that allow him his grandest moments, which could not possibly come off if they possessed even a hint of irony or lack of belief – and it’s also these that allow such mis-steps as the rather trite finale, in which Sean Penn’s architect has a vision of the after-life, wandering a beach with his family, still in their 1950s guise, thus effecting a reconciliation with the sense of loss that now plagues him in his adult life, at the peak of material success (shiny house, shiny office, the money his father always strived for but never quite made). Now he (and his mother, who had earlier mourned the death of her son and asked that age-old question of God, or the life-force, whatever you call him/her/it) can come to terms with the death of his brother and his sense of childhood as a magical time of harmony with, and exploration within, nature, which he now betrays and grows distant from in an artificial environment of glass and steel. The problem here is really the banality of the images – for a film-maker whose logic is so often visual (dialogue being reduced to whispered voice-over and half-caught mumblings, the tail-ends of conversations – one might say that dialogue takes place through glances, through the raising and lowering and moving away of eyes, the shifting dynamics of facial expressions and bodily gesture – a kind of dance, a choreography created from the way we relate to each other through movement every single day), to revert to wispy female-angel fingers and hands up-raised to the sky, to a Georgio Armani’d Penn looking constipated while circling a 1950s memory of his family, in a kind of cross between Jack Vettriano paintings and the kitschiest of Christian art, is a huge let-down. One can see exactly what he is trying to do, and it makes perfect sense in the logic of the film as a whole – the reconciliation demanded by the film’s wide questioning at the start, that questioning that led to the ultimate out-wards pan, from the grief of a specific suburban family to the creation of the universe, and back down, the intermeshing of everyday detail and wider religious/scientific considerations. We’d been prepared for this vision from the start of the film – shots of Penn wandering a desolate landscape and then preparing to make a leap (of faith) over the edge of a cliff, down a wooden pathway/bridge, set us up for it – and after the audacity of the out-Kubricking Kubrick Big Bang sequence, presenting us with a depiction of the after-life doesn’t seem too unreasonable – and yet, and yet, it just doesn’t come off. I suppose everyone has their breaking point, that point where they can say to Malick, ‘this much and no further’ – for some, in the showing I attended, this happened as early as the dinosaur sequence (able to tolerate 15-minutes of what was, essentially, avant-garde film-making, audience patience was tested by the sudden appearance of ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’-style CGI creatures). For me, then, I suppose it was the vision of the afterlife. Nonetheless, I was still able to leave the film with a sense of satisfaction, of, I suppose, wonder – the transition from grand orchestral swellings to credits unfolding over the ambient rainforest sounds, a technique also used in ‘The New World’ is one to which, if one has gone this far, one cannot help but respond to viscerally emotionally, even as, at the back of one’s mind, it seems absurd, manipulative, clunky, whichever adjective you choose to append.

I mentioned a sense of place, and, truth be told, this isn’t precise or specific in the way that Olson’s ‘Maximus’ was (or attempted to be): I don’t believe the town itself is mentioned by name, the film’s cast being pretty much limited to a single family (one of whom, the youngest son, is only sketchily defined at best); we only catch neighbours and relatives in glimpses, as figures who flit in and out, half-registered, and then disappear again (perhaps a result of Malick’s famous editing process, in which originally substantial roles are reduced to nearly-nothing). The same is true of a sense of time (hardly surprising, given the millennia covered in an early sequence): we are not presented with the familiar trope of news reports blaring out on the radio or television to give a sense of period (that sense of pleasurable semi-nostalgia present in shows like ‘Mad Men’ or the BBC’s ‘The Hour’ (which engages much more specifically with the making of the news, the way that our understanding of history is shaped by those who report it)). That said, costumes and period detail all seem to very precise, as is, apparently, the norm for Malick. Indeed, this very combination of vagueness and exactness may be what irritates a lot of the director’s harshest critics, and which certainly irked me about his previous work; ‘The New World’ betrayed any notions of historical fidelity in the way that it settled for a romanticised, colonialised Pocahontos narrative (in contrast to ‘Argall’, William T. Vollman’s revisionist re-telling), while ‘The Thin Red Line’ registered war as a kind of vague blight on nature in a way that felt like an evasion, given the way that the particular war it addressed still exists as part of our cultural consciousness and our political history. (Curiously enough, ‘TTRL’ has more ‘contextual’ detail than John Boorman’s similarly sparse ‘Hell In The Pacific’; but is precisely this opening up beyond Boorman’s claustrophobic, two-hander confines that accounts for its failure: generic back-stories and vague, meandering musings remove from the film any primal, stripped-back power, whilst remaining too vague, and too purely Americanised, in terms of historical engagement (compare Clint Eastwood’s ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’, in which Japanese soldiers are for once humanised and treated as more than faceless or silent opponents). ‘The Tree Of Life’, then, gives us a sense of place as felt and lived in, rather than apprehended from outside – and, because its central premise is to do with a more general theme (the loss of a child) than the historical settings of ‘The New World’ or ‘The Thin Red Line’, it can inhabit this space with a sensuous exactness, unworried about historical niceties or political concerns. The unpredictability of Bergsonian durée; ‘subjective’ time (though time spread across several subjects, and occasionally to non-human levels); the temporal fluidity allowed, but rarely exploited, by cinema – the way that particular objects recur again and again, with differing levels of significance, not as artistic ‘symbols’ or allegorical details but as shifting images onto which differing projections and perceptions are placed (for instance, the shots of the same trees down the road, made metaphorical or symbolic or merely atmospheric at different times; the recurrence of the yellow dump trucks in the yard, at first objects of close attention in the children’s out-door play, then left, forgotten, as they grow up: objects of memory and loss and the passing of time (their association with building – and particularly, with the architectural and housing hopes of the ‘50s, presumably no accident)).

Subtleties such as these emerge because of the way the film was shot – as Brad Pitt (acting as Malick’s mouth-piece for the publicity circuit) notes, this involved improvisation, shooting on the fly, getting actors to inhabit a space (in terms of actually renting an entire block, rather than shooting in a studio), to inhabit their costumes, wearing them all day, to be inside a certain mindset – so that the film can be stitched together from tail-ends, from glimpses, from the moments, beyond the big show-downs and speeches on which dramatists and film-makers normally focus, that actually constitute a large part of the way we interact and relate and judge others’ character.

Thus, without having to be restricted to narrative and the self-consciously dramatic, we actually get a much better insight into the way life develops as we live it, which mitigates against the heavily archetypal qualities which sometimes threaten to turn the characters into ciphers (particularly the idealised mother, who stays just the right side of the irritatingly angelic and opaque (Pocahontos fell the other side of the line in ‘The New World’)). Archetypal qualities are grounded in observable and universal detail – the mother dressing a child's wound, the father helping with first steps – to sometimes breath-taking effect: early on, we witness a scene in which a baby's face is placed right up against the screen, before focussing on a leaf blowing away across the pavement – more effective in experience than in description, perhaps, it imparts a sense of almost trance-like wonder, a pre-linguistic coming-to-consciousness, those first encounters with the world. This is what Malick is after in almost all his work (those paradisal scenes of swimming in the sea in ‘TTRL’ and lying in the grass in ‘TNW’), but here one feels that he has really succeeded in capturing it, in seeing with what Brakhage called ‘the innocent eye.’ Because all this is placed in the context of growing up, of the very early ways in which one places oneself, and is placed, in the world, it has a specificity to it that the forest or ocean idylls of those earlier films lack: and the visual puns/ correspondences within this wealth of observed detail connect to wider thematic concerns without over-burdening their freshness or reducing them to clunking metaphors. Thus, pointing to the sky is at once looking for/at God (and is explicitly described as such – “that’s where God lives”), but it is also the simple mechanics of throwing and catching a ball or climbing a tree (things that most boys do); throwing a stone through a window at once illuminates an element in the brothers’ relationship (the elder boy, taking after his more aggressive and macho father, throws the stone almost as a dare to his milder, younger sibling), part of a sequence conjuring up a sense of darkness and the possibility for violence (playing with guns, toying with war), and simply an observation of child-hood games – something that many kids will have done, at some stage. One thing can be, or suggest, many others: objects passing through consciousness, creatively perceived (in the sense that, for Merleau-Ponty, perception is creation), one thing triggering the thought of another, shifts and links and loops; the self as a part of the world, as something created from the world, rather than a self-contained observing entity, detached from it. For the most part this is done without resource to the magical realist tropes one might expect (which I’ve always found tend to rather domesticate the subversive potential of magic, irrationally arranging rather than rationally deranging the senses) – except for one particular incident, all the more powerful for being the only such occurrence: that sudden moment where, as a bed-time story the mother describes going up in a plane, we see illustrative footage of the ride, and then we see her (in her mind’s eye? in the children’s? in both?) levitating, floating, arms spread wide, next to the tree on the suburban lawn. If perception bases itself upon which is actually there – trees, lawns, roads, people – imagination allows for elaborations, variations, added to this: thus, the long loft, an attic room with a light-filled window, is seen through a child's perspective as extra-elongated, and the adult standing there with the child becomes extra tall, stretched, a giant in a vertically-confined space. Of course, that move towards ‘the light at end of tunnel’ has several connotative layers (the light one sees when one first bursts into the world as a new-born, or on opening one’s eyes in the morning – or, in this film, the occasionally-glimpsed cosmic light that might be equated with the life-force of the universe) – but it doesn't become a concrete symbol, staying instead as part of a network, a patchwork of shifting images, criss-crossing over and resonating with each other in a kind of non-linear, non-schematic dialogue. This allows the narrative structure to remain somewhat loose: we could view the entire main portion of the film as enclosed between Penn's going up and down the elevator, initially grieving for the death of his brother and the loss of his child-hood, and finally reconciling all this with a vision of his loved ones, united again in a heaven-like space. This would make the 1950s sequence the specific remembrance of a particular character, though, which is not how the film works, overall: and to try and trace particular ‘arcs’ or particular memories to particular characters will often prove a fruitless task, one that goes against Malick’s whole method in the film. As a reaction against the subjectivity of narrative or authorship, we come across this technique in ‘The Thin Red Line’, where various voices mesh and weave around each other (and in the suggestion that we are all part of a single human soul); and here, that extends to camera-work – the camera is not the (male or otherwise) gaze but the eye of a baby, a boy, an adult, a god. Though the film is very much the product of one man’s consciously grand vision – ‘this is how I see the world’, by Terrence Malick – the working methods used (improvisation, spontaneity, non-scripted interaction between actors) ensure that it remains collaborative, and the movements across consciousnesses and subjectivities and viewpoints almost bring to mind Stewart Home’s criticism of ‘bourgeois subjectivity.’ (I’ve just been reading Home, which is why he’s been slotted in here – of course, he would detest the religio-mystical quality of Malick's vision.)

This use of the camera to open up inter-subjective spaces and to move across vast spans of real and felt time is an at times dizzying affirmation of cinema’s potential – beyond genre and beyond (straight-forward, linear) narrative – and is coupled to an equally strong use of sound, the use of classical music at times suggesting something operatic, balletic. Cutting down on the now-expected Malickian voiceover (though it's still there, whispering away – “Brother. Mother. It was they that lead me to your door,” etc, etc) means that a lot of the film, though full of sound, is not dialogue-dominated. I don’t know how one would describe this: (once again) wordless opera, ballet? In fact, it’s a consciously cinematic use of sound, a real exploration of the medium’s sonic possibilities, of the conjunction of music and image – thus, scenes sweep by on bursts of musical rhythm, not as mere accompaniment or montage-style, but through a looser emotional sweep. And yet they often seem chosen for quite precise reasons: the various bits of piano music by Bach and Couperin that pop up now and again come from the father’s frustrated ambitions as a concert pianist rather than simply performing a decorative function – they exist half-way between the narrative and the ambient. Probably the most memorable musical ‘set-pieces’ involve the use of Smetana’s ‘Moldau’ from ‘Ma Vlast’ (the original piece a tone-painting of a river, and thus entirely appropriate to the film’s frequent recourse to images of water), playing alongside the exhilaration of young children running and jumping round their neighbourhood in what feels like one continuous sweep; and the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Preisner’s ‘Requiem For My Friend,’ soaring out during the Big Bang scenes. The latter, once more, fits for more than just its swelling emotions– remember that this whole sequence is framed by the mother’s cry of anguish at the death of her son, and the use of a setting of the Requiem Mass seems entirely appropriate. For some, this may seem presumptuous – the origin of the universe ‘framed’ by a single human death – and I’ve even seen it compared to the joke in Charlie Kaufmann’s ‘Adaptation’, where Kaufmann can’t decide how to open his story about orchid-hunting, and in a maniacal brain-storming session decides to go right back to the beginning of time. Yet it is that kind of framing that is crucial to Malick’s vision: in an original draft of the screenplay, the final afterlife scenes expand out to show the death and re-birth of the entire universe, only to come resting back to the apparently un-important grieving of one character.

‘The Tree of Life’ is, in part, a very loose adaptation of the Book of Job, in loose thematic content if not in overarching narrative: hence the film’s opening epigraph, God’s response to Job: "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" I’ve tended to see that argument as a dodging of the question – ‘how could you do this to me, a good man – how could you allow the death of my family, the destruction of my possessions, the disease of my body?’ countered with, ‘well I don’t have to explain myself to you, I can create worlds and galaxies’ (though if one was in that position perhaps one might feel the same way – power corrupts, and all that…). As a statement, it possesses (doesn't it?) a rather hectoring, bullying, braggart quality. In part the problem may be that faced by Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ – when theological arguments such as these are placed in the mouth of a personalized God, a God who functions as a quasi-human character in a story, they come to seem unfair, petty, vindictive. Malick solves this problem by refraining from presenting a personal God (he probably doesn’t believe in that kind of religion anyway), instead offering up some sense of a diffuse life force (which is why the ministering female angels in heaven, like spa attendants, is a bit of a misstep) that animates creation, a wider context which doesn't strip life of its value, but which allows us to accept things in the over-arching scheme of things, without becoming completely passive or fatalistic because of this (the obvious comparison here, for me, would be Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Starmaker’). The dinosaur scene, though it caused titters and a walk-out in the screening I attended, does succinctly illustrated Malick’s theme of ‘the state of nature’ vs. ‘the state of grace’ - here, the dinosaur chooses not to kill his prey but to love and leave to live (as, towards the end of the film, Pitt's sacking allows him to reconcile with his son and to realign his priorities). Perhaps it’s too crushingly obvious, too sentimental – Malick seems happy to attribute destructive impulses to humans, but rarely extends these out to the natural world, which remains paradisal and idyllic. And yet, as Jason Bellamy suggests, the implication that the dinosaur’s first impulse is to violence, and that the act of kindness, or curiosity, whatever motivates it, is something beautiful and unexpected – the birth of morality as a sudden, un-explained transcendence of the kill-and-be-killed struggle for survival – is more than just romantic naivety: "What I find interesting is that a filmmaker known for romanticizing nature would equate it with violence. It seems to me that Malick is implying that violence is our default setting, and that those who can rise above nature, rather than succumb to it, are extraordinary."

This choice between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ may be laid out too baldly for some, but its weave into the film’s main, 1950s Texas segment, is generally fairly subtle – yes, the mother (grace) may be a little (more than a little) idealised, but she isn’t perfect (for instance, the suggestion that she doesn’t really stand up to the father’s disciplinarian awkwardness, working instead by stealth to educate her children along a kinder path), while the father, for all his anger and his antagonism, is capable of feeling great love for his family, and of feeling great sorrow and loss and guilt at not being able always to express this love. In part, it’s the social expectations of the time that cause him to follow ‘the way of nature’ – given the way that a combination of social Darwinism, consumer lifestyle pressures, the American dream, and imperial/ Cold War ambition would push a moderately-successful 1950s businessman into macho poses and roles (though always wedded to good ol’ family values; hence the conflict, between the love one is supposed to feel for one’s family and the suggestion that one can do and be anything one wants, superior to the inanities of this domestic sphere). Violence (as in the scene where Pitt tries to get his children to hit him, teaching them to fight and be ‘real men’), a go-getter mentality, shading over into envy (Pitt’s complaints about never having quite enough money, whilst eyeing a neighbour’s larger house and grander lawn), pushing your way to the top at other’s expense, even hate; these compete with kindness, a sense of wonder and satisfaction (rather than “find[ing] reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around[…], and love is smiling through all things”), obligation to others, love. Music might be considered as on the side of love, culture, developed emotion and sensibility, etc; thus, Pitt’s abandonment of a possible musical career is a betrayal of his better impulses (though music still allows him to commune with his son, as they play a piano and guitar duet). And yet, some element in the music – the pursuit of technical perfection, of being ‘the greatest’ – shades into the ambition of Pitt’s other career; hence, telling his eldest son a story about Toscanini’s perfectionism, recording sixty-five takes of a piece and still not being satisfied – always, “it could have been better.” Music becomes the pursuit of an elusive technical goal, rather than a communal sharing or an expression of social life – ‘culture’ that can be tucked away into the side-boards of a pristine suburban home as if it were bone china or candle-holders – the stentorian sounds of Brahms blaring out overbearingly during a family dinner. It can be possessed, locked up, compartmentalized (the son’s invention of DJ-scratching, making a record of pristine piano music turn woozy, skip and swoon out of its temporal lock-step, is at once an expression of freedom and a frustrated realisation that this world of ‘culture’ and creativity is lost to him, as it is not lost to his musical brother); similarly, that scene early on, when a young son strays over the property boundary into the neighbour’s yard – never mind that they are both part of one long, un-broken stretch of grass, that the line the father frantically points out – ‘look, see that line, see that line’ –isn’t actually there, that there are no such lines in the natural world. Property, owning things, locking them up, is something that runs completely contrary to the children’s fluid world of play, running through the neighbourhood, through the woods, over the road and into the garden, the camera swooping and diving with them (or that scene where Pitt leaves on a business trip and the children and their mother run riot through the house, chasing each other round in a kind of joyous parody of his disciplinarian bouts of fury). ‘Perfect’ suburban houses become prisons, little tins of family argument, husband vs. wife: we witness one such dispute in the family home; and then, a few moments later, a similar tiff through the windows of the next-door house; but even the wide-open spaces that one might expect to provide a liberating contrast, filled as they are with modernist light, cathedrals of technology and ‘progress’, lack something – either they are packed with stultifying industry and noise (Pitt can hardly hear the news that his son’s died over the roar of aircraft engines), or they are empty, gleaming, vacant (as in the vertiginous sky-scrapers in which Penn works). This may be overly simplistic – there is, at times, a real sense of excitement at the possibilities of technology (Pitt’s an inventor, with a long list of patents, his job allowing him to travel to China by air, and to boast of this to his children); and it’s hard not to feel awed by the shots of sky-scrapers, their glass-and-metal interfaces between open sky and light-filled interior, those exhilarating tracking shots along enclosed walk-ways, those moments when the camera assumes the position of a human, craning their neck upward at these nearly-unbelievable structures. Even having Sean Penn mope and mumble in the foreground does little to diminish the power of such spectacle, and whether this is Malick becoming enticed by what he sees at the expense of intended thematic treatment, or whether another example of his contradictory attitude towards progress, nostalgia, nature and technology, one is struck by the fact that he could just as easily turn his eye to city-scapes (à la Francis Thompson’s ‘New York, New York’), as to leaves and trees and grass and curtains blown by the wind.

Moving on – the film’s treatment of violence, appearing as it does in a context much less explicitly concerned with historical conflict (in comparison to ‘The New World’ or ‘The Thin Red Line’), comes across as that much more convincing for being ‘domesticated’; I’m thinking of the scenes in which the gang of boys go around pretending to shoot guns and launching firecracker-strapped frogs into the air ('do you think he flew to the moon?'), as a kind of innocent and naïve, though perverse, experimentation ('it was an experiment', one of the boys actually says – the way killing a fly is a mixture of sadism, curiosity and play); an implicit mirroring of a more knowing adult impulse to destruction (the cold war, the space race, the development of biological and nuclear weapons, Dr Strangelove territory). It’s crucial to the film that this is rejected (whereas, in ‘TNW’ and ‘TTRL’, natural paradises were destroyed by fire and bullets and battle) – thus, after the elder brother betrays his younger sibling by making him put his finger over the end of a BB gun, then firing it, he offers him the chance of revenge – hit me with this piece of wood – which is eventually rejected, sulking and sorrow turning to smiles (just as he refuses to hit his father earlier in the film) – anger turns to softness, distrust and confusion to reconciliation and acceptance. This worms itself into the film’s very structure: the staging of small crises and reconciliations within a larger scale – layers within layers (the ‘framing devices’ of (1) the mother coping with her son’s death, (2) the grown son coping with the death of his brother, (3) the ‘nature’/ ‘grace’ conflict, and the way all these envelop and bracket the smaller incidents of a 1950s childhood). We have levels and parallels both within the smaller narrative and the cosmic one.

This sense of the small in the large, and the large in the small (‘everything is connected’ – hence the closing shot of a bridge) is present even in the way the big bang/birth of life sequence is put together – ‘large-scale’ footage of galaxies exploding, forming, expanding, and microscopic details of single-cell organisms reproducing, both possessing a similar awe-inspiring effect – the wonder of the very large and the very small – that Blakean notion (“a world in a grain of sand”). Significantly, Doug Trumbull, who worked with Malick on the visual effects for this sequence, was consciously working with the home-made legacy of avant-garde film (even going so far as to ‘sample’ an excerpt from Scott Nyerges’ short ‘Autumnal’) – the DIY feel, the physical quality of things, like the way Stan Brakhage constructed his great meditation ‘The Text of Light’ entirely from filming through ash-trays. Trumbull:

"We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be. It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”

Trumbull’s sequence is, perhaps a film-within-a-film, an avant-garde light-show which Malick has somehow managed to smuggle into an ostensibly Hollywood picture – though I would argue that it is still central to the whole picture’s philosophy and thematics. Certainly, its level of abstraction (though we do know vaguely that its images are supposed to ‘represent’ something – galaxies, nebulae, great explosions of gas and energy) is far greater than that of the 1950s sequences, which are sometimes quite rigorously put-together. Many of the details in the main part of the film cluster around particular elements – earth, air, fire and water, in fact. Thus, we have scenes of planting and burying in the soil; of gazing up to the sky, watching the wind billow out curtains and leaves; of lighting candles for the dead (as well as for a general sense of loss, of not having used life to its full potential); and, most frequently, scenes of water – spraying the lawn with a garden hose; baptism; bathing; children wading next to a local river; dinosaurs encountering one another millions of years before, perhaps on the same river; more generic shots of crashing waves; the origin of life in the oceans. If trees provide the film’s central metaphor, or image-cluster, then water is what enables trees to grow, enables life to begin and to expand and to flourish; this perhaps explains the decision to set the afterlife vision on a beach (half-way between land and sea, evocative in some sense of la creation du monde – and after all, remember: “Then he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”) Thus, the birth scene, where we witness a boy swim out of a water-filled bedroom (home/womb) – out into the world – might seem rather clunkily metaphorical and unnecessary if subjected to subsequent scrutiny, but in the flow of things it's audacious and resonant, given the film's preoccupation with home and with environment and with dwelling; given too the way it draws out of the child-hood home a sense of first engagement with profound issues, vaguely or incompletely articulated because this is how that first engagement tends to unfold – an intuition, an inkling, an uncertain thought, subsequently elaborated, fantasized upon, speculated about.

One could say that Malick has been building towards this film, if not for the entirety of his career, at least in his most recent pair of Hollywood films – ‘The Thin Red Line’ and ‘The New World’ both share the obsession with trees and water and light – and ‘The Tree of Life’ surpasses, and synthesizes, these films, giving their obsessions an evolutionary and scientific *and* religious basis, water as there at the origin of creation, as having a deep connection with the human physical organism that is not merely pretty or fanciful or vague or simplistic. The film’s approach to science is perhaps more imaginative than rigorously scientific, but that’s to fall for the too-easily re-inforced notion of ‘the two cultures’ that still hangs over much discourse today, to the detriment of both art and science. (Similarly, the way that ‘The New Atheists’ condemn religion out of hand, blanket-brushed out of ‘rational’ discourse, the extreme end of the Enlightenment project (which, as Adorno and Horkheimer noted, concealed within itself the very barbarism it sought to overcome) – and the alliance of this approach with the right-wing politics that increasingly dominate western discourse (for instance, the way that ‘Islam’ is considered a monolithic entity in a way that Christianity never would be, and thus reduced to a simple ‘other’ or enemy (or the way that this is done with religion in general, in some circles – hence, Richard Dawkins’ proposal to exploit religious civil war in Africa as a means of promoting secularism). ‘Observable facts’, figures, statistics, impartiality, objectivity – as if these could exist absolutely, outside the realm of human interpretation and the framework of particular social and political systems and processes – as masculine certainty, as the American Cold War mentality once again, trumpeted against ‘effeminate’ questioning or uncertainty or problematisation.) Consider the work of artists like Brakhage, Jim Davis, or Jordan Belson – the way that their films could be at once ‘fanciful’, mere plays of pretty light and shadow and son-et-lumiere effects, and at the same time could get the heart of cinema itself, to image-making, shadow-play, our relation to light, notions of space and time and the nature of consciousness and perception – at once handmade and possessing much in common with the most advanced scientific hypotheses – should prove an inspiration to both artists and scientists, and a chastisement to those too-simple binary positions which seem to be many people’s default settings in the ‘educated western world.’ While Malick works in more of a ‘mainstream’, narrative mould – his films (or ‘The Tree of Life’, at least) existing, perhaps, in a happy medium between the non-linear, the abstract, the purely visual, and plot, characterisation, etc – the spirit that infuses this latest project does recall that of Brakhage, Davis, and Belson – if not while watching the film, certainly in thinking about it after – and the fact that he has managed to, not so much smuggle, but trumpet this into Hollywood (this film doesn’t pretend to be something other than it is, something easily marketable or bankable) – should thus be some cause for celebration.

The titters and the walk-out that occurred during the screening I attended – and the fact that so many critics see fit to mention the dinosaur scene as if it made the whole film fail or seem ridiculous (though that absurd/ brilliant balancing act is perhaps what makes this such a great film) indicates something important: you have to be with Malick on this one – to go with him the whole hog, to walk with him where he choose to go. Afterwards you can analyse and criticise and decide whether you do or do not want his vision (and wanting it doesn't mean that you have to agree with it or buy into it or be converted or whatever it is people are afraid of – he's not a polemicist, not an evangelist, not a preacher, but an explorer, exploring some ideas and sensations that he no doubt holds very personally, his belief system, well not system, his core beliefs, up there for you to see) – but you need to go with him for the duration of the film, for two-and-bit hours, try to do that. It's not as if I'm a total devotee; I find ‘The Thin Red Line’ and ‘The New World’ rather lacking if I'm honest – perhaps it was seeing this in the cinema that made it into such a grand and provocative thing; something about the communal experience and the sense of someone really wanting to explore important issues, and not in an overly schematic or hectoring way – yes, saying ‘these are big things’ – life, death, the rest of it – but grounding them in the mundane or the brief observed detail, in observations of life as it is lived. After the walk-outs, fairly early in the film, everyone else sat through to the end, through the credits, until the projection had completely finished, not because of any particular point of interest or polite sense of obligation, but because it felt like part of the experience, it *was* part of the experience, like those long silences at the end of a piece of improvised music, the held collective hush that film could be, the mass communion rather than the bashing into submission with noise and gizmos and sex and violence mashed and then the nervous laugh or the loud guffaw and the trooping out quick-fixed, superficially elated. Last word goes to Roger Ebert:

"Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine."

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

2011-07-26T17:39:00.024+01:00

Starring: Aaron Stanford, Ted Levine, Kathleen Quinlan
Music: Tomandandy (Thomas Hadju/ Andy Milburn)
Director: Alexandre Aja
Screenplay: Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur
Director of Photography: Maxime Alexandre

As I’ve mentioned before, in a post on the far-superior ‘28 Weeks Later’, one cannot view horror-remake/pastiche projects such as ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ without an acute awareness of the fact that Aja and his ilk have grown up with '70s grime-horror in their blood. They want us to know it – they flaunt that influence as a badge of honour, in the same way that certain bands will name-check Captain Beefheart; the way that, goddam it, Bill Clinton will name-check Peter Brotzmann, with off-hand, aw-shucks wonder. What I’m trying to say (and this is why that Clinton reference fits – I’m well aware that he’s not claiming to play his sax like Brotzmann) is that you can name-check anyone you want (not even as the usual trick – the politician (Gordon Brown) pretending to like some popular band of the moment (the Arctic Monkeys) – you can genuinely like them, as I’m sure David Cameron genuinely likes those '80s bands whose music comes in part as a reaction against the very political philosophy that Cameron now rams down our bleeding mouths every single day); you can even turn it a very fine pastiche of their work, but if all that remains is a kind of recycled homage, we’re not really getting anywhere. Now influence consists at once of absorbing/ building upon the lessons of one’s predecessors, and reacting against them. One could thus see the original version of ‘Last House on the Left’, for example, as a more ‘realistic’ reaction to the stylized/ historicised settings of Hammer horrors, or the contemporary, but comic-strip-oriented sensibility of ‘it came from outer space’ monster and red-scare flicks, and George Romero’s ‘Martin’ as a commentary on vampire movies as delusion (“there’s no real magic…ever”), from within the ostensible trappings of a contemporary vampire movie. In the case of Aja and crew, though, the contemporary elements tend to feel rather more like surface trimmings added to the essential core of ’70s movies – a few cutesy political references/ ‘resonances’ to make the more liberally-inclined audience members grin with smug and quickly-forgotten self-satisfaction/righteousness - and then, more noise, more thunder, more blood, more gore for everyone else. Despite its reputation, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is not an especially violent film, in terms of what is actually shown – but psychologically, of course, it’s totally draining, its impact coming as much what you don’t see as what you do. Aja’s tendency to leave nothing to the imagination, meanwhile, is good for a few quick and immediate scares – but, as for lasting unease/disquiet, forget it. This is what you deserve, so this is what you’ll get: the instant rush as opposed to the slow burn, the product of a synapse-firing computer age. These films are the product of assimilation, of forgetting – even the return of the repressed as the mere recycling of tired old clichés, incorporated into the viscera of an instant-porn, instant-food sensibility: thrills on tap, connected always to money and exploitation, a digital sheen smoothed over old stains - the money shot, whether it be pure ejaculation or a severed heard or limb or torso, it doesn’t matter – that, and then the lapse into lethargy and sofa-fried-potato slump, or regimented sports-fanatic/ fantastically-busy-businessman shtick – too much to do or nothing doing, in either case papering over a void, like the crack in the wall into which Harriet Andersson stares and wishes to step, in ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’. Hell, let's leave Bergman's religious angst alone, 'The Hills' isn’t supernatural horror, in any case – ghosts, repression, the past, all of that, it’s there, but clothed in pseudo-scientific credit-sequence image-jumble (mutants as the result of nuclear experimentation, a curiously retro anxiety, complete with ’50s pop song-soundtrack and preserved American model town/ nuclear-testing site.) Maybe that’s what mainstream movies are about now, anyway – the digestion and regurgitation of a history of film that seems to have stalled into cheap digital s(t)imulations (watch Johnny Depp’s Keith Richards impersonation in 3D at yr local corporate multiplex, then get the blu-ray HD super-surround-sound tie-in home-system viewing-experience (and don’t forget the T-shirt…)), searches for significance hoisted onto ’50s pop-culture models (‘The Dark Knight’ as a combination of pop-kitsch with ‘artistic’ or even ‘philosophical’ intent), and easy-snack genre-staples: the action movie as an increasingly machine-dominated world of graphix and hyper-real super-violence (hello, Michael Bay; and hello, James ‘Avatar’ Cameron as well, you won’t get out of this, because your veneer of sub-new-age-liberal-Hollywood-faff and ethnicky-piped-soundtrack doesn’t pull any wool over eyes – we all know (do you know too?) that it conceals the very same techno-sadism), the romantic comedy as an increasingly facile assertion that everything’s gonna be alright (Kit Withnail: “To quote the psychologist Oliver James: “the Beatles’ hit ‘All you need is love’ really showed how warped our thinking had become by the end of the 60s”. This is a message we see throughout the media – if your life is bad, find love, and nothing else will matter. Consider for a moment how many falling-in-love films there are. Thousands? Now, how many seizing-the-means-of-production films are there? Alright, in a less Marxist idiom, how many films show a just society and eradication of poverty as the plot’s climax. Ten? Less? How often have the messages of the romantic films been, “lots of things are not going well but none of them matter now because I have the girl/guy”?”)).

OK, so there’s all that. Back to the torture-porners and the horror-specialists, and back to their heroes: Craven, Carpenter, et al, their work emerging (so says ‘The American Nightmare’) as a specific product of the 1970s, as a reaction to the defeat / 'rehabilitation' of hippie culture by the establishment. (And see here Adam Curtis on the alliance between the then-emerging computer technology and hippy, or post-hippy generation 'cool guys' who eventually became, in the nineties and noughties, the new elite, marketed as the young people's friends (producing their ipods, their mobile phones, their laptops, shaping their social world & way of thinking thru technology), perhaps socially 'liberal' (tolerant of homosexuality, multiculturalism, etc) while actually just as oppressive/exploitative of third-world labour/in league with global capitalism, as the more obviously 'enemy' authoritarians of the 1950s. (So, for Andreas Baader or for Wilhem Reich, sexual revolution was inseparable from, was perhaps even more important than previously-articulated versions of Marxist/social revolution – yet, once it's granted, the freedom to fuck simply means that fucking itself becomes a part of the system, not an act of rebellion against it – becomes yet another quick-fix drug and long-term dependency to mask un-freedom and helplessness.)) Perhaps it’s the beginnings of this process (assimilation) as well as the endings of another (the ’60s hope of revolution) that these ’70s horror films deal with, almost unconsciously, and it’s that not-even-conscious knowledge that makes them still so powerful today, endows them with something beyond the cheap thrills and seedy wrongness that gives them their immediate illicit and pleasurable edge. Fast-forward thirty years or so, and the cynicism/despair of that generation proves well-founded – the same imperialist wars and exploitation at home and abroad; the same inequalities (however well-disguised); the same right-wing extremism run rampant; the same gun-toting misogyny, sometimes even passing for feminist liberation (as in the discourses surrounding the veil, the smoothly-rolled-out justifications for the invasion of Afghanistan as the liberation of women from the grip of the Taliban (now women can be blonde and beautiful and dance near-naked in the foam and lather of a car wash!, and “music and song are returning to that devastated land”) – tinges of ’60s rhetoric wedded with the advanced capitalism of the 2000s and beyond, total assimilation/ indifference as the norm. Indifference – not revolt or joy or rage or despair, but indifference – push the envelope further, it still doesn’t do anything for us (the law of diminishing returns) – nothing is now unthinkable, in the world-wide anything-goes freak-show (cf. Mike and Kate Westbrook’s ‘The Waxeywork Show’); nothing, that is, except the overthrow of global capitalism) – hence, the increasing gore-count of the horror movie, post-the slasher craze, post-gut-ripping zombie apocalypse (the transition from ‘Night of the Living Dead’, with its sombre late 60s black-and-white images and its library-music score, to ‘Day of the Dead', with its blood-red ’80s colour and synthesizers); now, the latest thing, 'torture porn' (which is anyway only a slight amplification of the increased violence in non-horror genres – the casual blasting away of millions of assailants, the endless whiz-bang, gun-firing, exploding, ripping, shredding, titillating techno-violence of superhero movies and action films; or even the fact that characters' deaths are passed off as a joke, not once, but twice, in the supposedly 'family-friendly' gazillionth sequel to 'Pirates of the Carribean'). So if there is, apparently, nothing to react to, no envelope to push further (here’s an underground horror movie supposedly shot in one take, like a marriage between Hitchock’s ‘Rope’ and a snuff movie; here’s three hours of vaguely historically-justified torture; and so on), what to do? Go back to the past, it seems – to ‘Texas Chainsaw’ territory –grime, dirt, shacks, hillbillies/hicks, the deformed and ugly as villains (a too-easy equation of physical with moral ugliness, one might say), the young and pretty getting mutilated, a family unit fragmenting and re-constituting itself as, first scared and scarred, then remorselessly violent and vengeful.

Aja's 'The Hills Have Eyes’ tries to avoid the jaded sense of gore for its own sake through an hour-long build-up – not without gore (witness the opening scene), but mostly focused on establishing character, situation, location, etc. ('Wolf Creek', one of the better of the ‘torture porn’ movies, does this to a far greater extent, its opening half seeming to come from an entirely different film to the relentless second – an easygoing travelogue with pretty sunset backdrops that eventually turns into night-time torture claustrophobia.)) Yet this structure is in some ways rather second-hand – the plot is fairly faithful to Wes Craven's original – and in any case, is (over-)compensated for in the bloody second hour, to which we’ll come in a minute. As I’ve been re-iterating, Aja and the other horror-(re)makers/pasticheurs, have grown up with a particular kind of ’70s horror movie wedged deep under their skin, and, rather than attempting to forge something new from it, seem to wish merely to re-contextualise their predecessors for the Iraq War era (or, in the case of ‘Hostel’, in the light of Europe vs. America tensions and worries about sex-trafficking.) Of course, as horror specialists have always done, both Eli Roth and Aja have their cake and eat it – picture their work as an absurd, satirical amplification of deepest xenophobic fears (murderous gipsies, slavs, rednecks, inbreds, mutants, and disabled people), but one that also risks re-enforcing popular stereotypes, that risks the alarmist and intolerant absurdity of Daily Mail politics. Iraq, of course, provides a handy, and perhaps too easy parallel with Vietnam– another widely-unpopular, but lengthily-fought imperialist war, married to fear of the other (immigrants, mutants, 'ragheads', terrorists, what-have-you) and an emphasis on romantic love and 'family values' as a saving grace (as in the film ‘Dear John’) – all these provide plenty of material for horrific/satirically-tinged exploration, well within the bounds of genre cinema. The problem with simply re-doing and slightly tweaking what went before (more gory, more explicit in its political references) is that it no longer seems surprising, or even very reflective of society – in the age of the internet and endlessly-accessible information, everything becomes second-hand, nothing truly felt. We view the past thru a prism of movies – life is a genre cliché, politics is understood, or glimpsed, through horror films rather than, as in the 60s, through Marcuse or Marx and direct action. The result is a series of undoubtedly efficient genre pics – and sometimes, as with the afore-mentioned ‘Wolf Creek’, genuinely effective ones – but there's something rather too calculated about their endless ferocity, and, above all, their political 'commentary'.

OK, in Aja’s film, the transformation of a wimpily impractical mobile phone salesman into all-American instrument of revenge – he attacks his enemies with a baseball bat, and even a mini stars- and-stripes – is no doubt intended as parodic. And the film’s most interesting moment, a brief shot in which we see a bald, mutant mother figure watching television while combing a doll’s wig (unable to come to terms with her own ugliness, living vicariously through the image of perfect, half-infantilised, half-sexual Barbie beauty, for which all should strive), suggests that it’s not so much nuclear testing as the nuclear-family, or television, the drug of the nation, that’s turned her into a monster, that’s groomed her for this role (women as passive, home-bound dolts; men as ‘active’, out-door, murderers, their actions the literal manifestation of the cannibalistic tendencies (feeding off others) encouraged by the dog-eat-dog world of work). But, aside from 'Big Brain's' "you've made us what we've become" line, there’s no expansion of this – as Roger Ebert points out, the film’s killers are not “individuals with personalities, histories and motives”, but “simply engines of destruction.”

The stars 'n' stripes & a baseball bat : all-American weapons

Television, The Drug of the Nation

In attempting to adapt the aesthetics and subject-matter of '70s horror to a contemporary setting, and with the needs of a gore-saturated, thrill-seeking public in mind, what Aja has actually succeeded in doing is to create a brood of villains whose simple nastiness regresses to the cheapest monster-movie stereotype: not Frankenstein's monster, with his child-like emotionalism, not Dracula, with his caddish charm, not Romero's zombies, with their melancholic stumbles through the darkness of death, but infinitely disposable hick cannibals, cheap cannon fodder.

Consider Craven's hill-dwelling clan; consider the fact that the opening of his film includes more lines of dialogue for Ruby (the clan's little girl) than the entirety of the remake; consider the way that there's something rather exhilarating about the original brood, hippies with a macabre sense of humour who have taken to the hills, where their minds have become deranged, their clothes a mixture of raggedy left-overs from civilisation and primitivist, quasi-tribal chic - they are what straight America finds itself up against, or they are what straight America imagines itself to have fought, and defeated; paranoiac Manson family values (the clan, the tribe, the commune, breeding like rabbits) threatening the the strict confines of a more containable family unit, easier to fit into pre-ordained roles and to sell products to. Aja doesn't really give us much sense that the Hill clan are a 'family' at all; we briefly glimpse some small children, Big Mama sits watching TV, and Ruby skips waif-like through the desert landscape, but there's little sense of personal interaction or of particular relationships between individuals.

Consequently, despite the satirical touches, one doesn't feel the shock that was present in Craven’s original at the transformation of the ‘ordinary family’ (here, sexy/narcissistic teenage daughter, moody teenage son, hippy-turned-religious, let's-get-the-family-together-praying mom, and tough ex-cop dad, attempting to gain back some of his all-American manhood by going out into the desert (albeit as tourist rather than active participant in survival games)) into a ‘violent brood’. Nor do we have much sense of parallels with the mutant family, as mirror-image or horrible reversal of the norm. Our heroes’ embrace of bloodthirsty survival tactics, the revealing of the real violence at the heart of their comfortable ‘normality’ (the violence, in fact, that allows it to exist) is presented as more exhilarating than anything else: right, most of the women are out of the way, killed off in a trailer massacre – now the teenagers and the 'wimp' son-in-law can go and kick some ass! One might have thought that the scene where said wimp is mocked by the teenage boy, no less, for being a pacifist, gun-control democrat, might lead to some critique or even criticism of violence, but instead we just revel in revenge – though the ‘monsters’ are in some sense victims, their sheer physical ugliness, their cannibalistic excesses, and the whooshes every time they dart round the edges of the frame (Roger Ebert: “just as a knife in a slasher movie can make a sharpening sound just because it exists, so do mutants make swatches and swootches when they run in front of cameras”), make them simply into evil antagonists (aside from Ruby, the mournful-faced little red riding hood girl, her costume’s ‘Don’t’ Look Now’ echoes apparently unintentional), and we have no problem with them being dispatched bloodily and gruesomely. Nor do we have a problem with the ‘Straw Dogs’-style transformation of the son-in-law – the way power guitar swells on the soundtrack every time he dispatches a member of the 'family' while he takes off his glasses in semi-parodic, semi-‘heroic’ (‘cool’) fashion (said action repeated not once, but several times over, like the quips James Bond makes after he dispatches another larger-than-life villain.) I can’t help feeling that we’re actually, in some way, meant to feel liberated by this – the guy's saving his baby, after all, being a ‘real man’, so let’s sit back and enjoy the ride, alright, with no moral qualms. Craven, remember, ended his film with a freeze frame as the screen turned red on the murderous rampage of a previously benign, ‘ordinary’ man – we were meant to be shocked by this, perhaps ashamed at our own exhilarated complicity, but we were certainly not meant to revel in it. Thus, while Aja’s ‘Hills’ purports to be critical of all-American values, it ends up simply reinforcing them in the usual action/horror-movie style (see Michael Caine in ‘Harry Brown’, or Kevin Bacon (of all people) in ‘Death Sentence’) – sod it, let’s just blow the fuckers away. This is why its apparent anti-Americanism feels rather tokenistic; yes, maybe an American film-maker wouldn't have made the scene in which a wheelchair-bound cripple with a massively deformed neck sings 'The Star Spangled Banner', or another is killed by having the stars and stripes literally thrust thru his neck, but in a way such touches make matters worse – they are just a European reflex-instinct, a simulated edge of political 'credibility' to make critics stroke their beards or beads in happy appreciation. It's certainly not the fever dream that horror, or horror-tinged surrealism, is capable of unleashing – the anti-Americanism of Artaud, and, to a lesser extent, Céline', is delirious almost to the point of caricature (and such bitter attacks don’t have to come from the United States at all – we could easily include William Burroughs here). However much Aja wants us to feel it, what we have here is not delirium, not the giddy and horrific transformation of social values and situations, but genre clichés amped up to new levels of violence and noise (perhaps so that we won’t recognise them as clichés), and a facile resort to easy, glorified violence, the family unit triumphing through adversity – and of course, the expected ‘shock’ ending, as the camera pulls out from the victors’ group huddle to reveal that they are being watched through another pair of binoculars. There’s a sequel too, don’t you know.

Grachan Moncur III - New Africa

2011-07-24T13:26:00.007+01:00

Grachan Moncur III, Roscoe Mitchell, Dave Burrell, Alan Silva, Andrew Cyrille (plus Archie Shepp on one track). Recorded August 11, 1969 in Paris.

For whatever reason, trombonist Moncur's discography has remained sparse, and, though he played sporadically through the '80s (with Cassandra Wilson and others) and has recorded a couple of albums since the turn of the millennium, one feels a sense of loss at the fact that a unique compositional voice was never given the space to develop into further areas. As a sideman, he lent his talents to a number of late-60s free jazz albums (in particular, those of Archie Shepp), but, fine as his contributions are, his is not the dominant voice that it was on his own recordings, and those of Jackie McLean. And that's because Moncur as improviser is only part of the story - his writing is not a mere adjunct to the business of getting down and `blowing free', but a crucial part of his entire aesthetic (something one also senses about his sometime collaborator Alan Shorter). In terms of his own music, then, what we have are the eerie, superbly atmospheric Blue Note dates (the quartet of `Evolution' and `Some Other Stuff' under his own leadership, `One Step Beyond' and `Destination....Out!' under that of Jackie McLean), and the often attractive, but more formulaic modal/African-inspired dates (the two albums he cut for BYG in 1969, and `Echoes of a Prayer', a collaboration with the Jazz Composers' Orchestra recorded five years down the line).

`New Africa' is the first of the BYGs, and the seventeen-minute titular track gets things under way. It's listed as a suite in four movements (a bit like 'Echoes of a Prayer'); in that case, the first 'movement' is the opening, slowly pulsing ostinato figure sounded in unison by Dave Burrell's left hand and Alan Silva's bass, with Burrell plucking out grave, mid-register chords on top. The entrance of Moncur's trombone two minutes in signals the second movement, and the two main melodies of the piece (which serve as more traditional `heads' in Archie Shepp's rendition, with Moncur, released on 'Kwanza'). The tempo quickens, Cyrille laying out sparkling, regular time on his cymbals, as the trombonist takes his solo. Given the propensity for slow, moody compositions he'd displayed on his mid-60s collaborations with Jackie McLean, it's no surprise that he relishes the space afforded by the steady rhythm-section foundation; with Burrell's on-the-beat chords and Cyrille's cymbals, he's able to tease out and develop phrases in an almost leisurely fashion - often, simple melodies that might have come from folk-songs (and indeed, he went on to record traditional Brazilian tunes on 'One Morning I Waked Up Very Early', ten days after the sessions for this album.) The problem with such a regular and reliable back-drop is that it's easy for the attention to wander; and, whereas Mal Waldron's trio recordings from the same period (such as `Free at Last' and `Spanish Bitch') take the approach to its logical conclusion, everything put at the service of the riff, dark and drawn-out, deliberate and packed with tension, with soloing as such taking more of a back-seat, here, the ostinato approach threatens to overwhelm the solos - in particular, those of Moncur, but also those of Roscoe Mitchell (who plays here in a much more `inside' fashion that one might expect from his work elsewhere, with a smooth yet piquant tone). Even in Burrell's spot, where the repeated chords momentarily let up for more linear melodic playing, things are hampered by the deliberately limited harmonic framework, which spurs the development (or lack of) of some rather aimless and, frankly dull material, with the pianist seeming to simply plonk his way up and down the instrument according to pre-set formula, rather than expressive need. The locked-in nature of the repetitive material means that it's very easy for things to meander, to drift, a problem I also find with some of Shepp's work from this period (`Coral Rock' being a prime example, as Alan Shorter's harmonically-distinctive composition and solo is bludgeoned by relentlessly hammering piano work); one senses, most of all, that it restrains Burrell, one of the most diverse and capable of free jazz players, into an unrewarding supporting role. And, while in some ways it opens up space for the horn players, it also closes down any possibility of silences or pauses in the music as a whole.

That said, there are benefits to the approach, as demonstrated on the next track, which, at under half the length of `New Africa', doesn't risk becoming too loose or baggy. Hard, concise, lapidary, `Space Spy' conveys an impression of relentlessness, seriousness, a brooding and oppressive atmosphere in which repetition is the spur of tension and uncertainty rather than familiarity and comfort. Burrell stabs out a two-note motif, like rumbling morse code, freeing up Cyrille to play more colouristically, while Moncur explores gnomic, almost fragmentary dissonances that share harmonic territory with, of all people, the film composer Jerry Fielding, who scored a number of Sam Peckinpah films in the '70s. `Exploration', as its title implies, is the `freest' track on the record; another menacing low-end melody gives way to a period of collective soloing that finds Moncur and Mitchell initially, elusively, suggesting the clock-tower chimes best known to those from the UK as the `Play Up Pompey' chant sung by fans of Portsmouth City, FC. The horns and Burrell then proceed to riff off each other, picking up, varying, developing and discarding each other's melodic figures in a sometimes sprightly, sometimes deliberately lugubrious fashion.

Another unison melody opens `When', this time more simple, song-like and hopeful, the sort of material that could easily be turned into a collective chant, perhaps at a civil-rights rally. Archie Shepp joins the band on tenor sax, and one remembers just how much spark and fizz his playing had during the 60s: the extension of pauses to create tension and uncertainty; the sudden re-entrances in a blurring, blarting blast (what Ekkerhard Jost called `staccatoed legato'); the use of particular forms of tonguing, slurring, notes trailing away after that initial fortissimo impact; the combination of languor and passion, romanticism and fury, sometimes within the same phrase; the timbral reminiscences of Ben Webster or Jonny Hodges tied to the multiphonic innovations of Johns Gilmore and Coltrane, sliding between smoothness and acidic sharpness. Moncur, for his part, blows some delicious, voice-like high notes that seem to pre-echo Mitchell's bleats, trills, and smooth melodicism, and Shepp ends the piece with some beautiful supporting harmonics that make his tenor sound almost like a flute.

In sum, though the occasional longuers mean that `New Africa' lacks the cutting-edge possessed by Moncur's work on Blue Note, and if there's a sense of opportunity missed (imagine a record that explored the collective improvised territory of `Exploration' throughout), it nonetheless remains an attractive and worthwhile album overall: certainly, an important stop-off point for those who wish to understand the trajectory of Moncur's career, and the late 60s free/modal scene in general.

Keith Rowe At The LRB Bookshop

2011-06-25T17:31:00.005+01:00

Keith Rowe (Solo)
London Review Bookshop, 22/06/2011

During a brief introduction, Rowe explained that he would be playing two sets: interpretations of, first, a page from Cornelius Cardew’s ‘Treatise’, and second, Christian Wolff’s ‘Edges’. In certain anniversary years of Cardew’s birth, he plays Treatise throughout the year; this year (the 75th anniversary), he was up to page 68 (which is slow progress, apparently). However, as he made clear, the piece was being used as a point of departure, rather than being ‘played’ as such: thus, while he began the performance by keeping a fairly close eye on the score (looking at it continuously as he made one particular manoeuvre), things soon started to lead away from that in the flow, or succession, of improvised ideas. In any case, Treatise is a particularly open piece, designed to encourage thought, care and attention in interpretation, but also to allow the individual to make the music they might make anyway, in a more coherent, or at least, structured, manner: to group ideas that might, otherwise, flow somewhat diffusely or digressively, around a central series of specific points. One might also note that there’s a rather different set of parameters involved in solo, as opposed to ensemble interpretations: whereas (according to one way of playing the score) the ensemble may feed back on itself, certain people’s interpretations of certain symbols informing other individuals’ interpretations in dialogic fashion, the solo performer is interacting solely with the score itself. Rowe remarked, in deadpan fashion, that we wouldn’t notice much difference between the Cardew and the Wolff pieces – he was placed very much in the foreground, with the two composers somewhere in the background of his musical thinking, perhaps serving to focus the occasion (rather than taking an entirely free ‘let’s see what happens’ approach, an exploration of playing as a wholly sufficient and interesting category in itself, à la Derek Bailey), but by no means providing a ‘key’ to understanding the performance, which one could appreciate in and for itself with no knowledge of the scores that were being played (or departed from).

Before describing the music, it might be useful to mention the reduced size of Rowe’s set-up – a small mixing board, two radios (one tuned to BBC Radio 3 (perhaps pre-recorded, as three distinct, and quite different pieces of classical music were used), the other to BBC Radio 5 Live (mainly John McEnroe offering his pundit’s opinion on the second day of the Wimbledon tennis championships, which was happening at the same time across the city)), a fan, an electric toothbrush, brillo pads, stones, pedals, metal objects, and, of course, the ‘guitar’ itself – a modified fretboard, laid flat on the table. I’ll come back to the point later, but it struck me that this set-up offered, on the one hand, an element of risk – what if none of the sounds on offer really seemed to be working, and another option was desired that simply wasn’t there? – and conversely, of stability – the opportunity to really focus in on a specific set of materials and concerns, generating an immediate sense of focus, a certain usefully freeing limitation (if that makes sense).

Anyhow, 'Treatise' began abruptly, one might even say violently: abrasive, sharp, metallic sounds of fairly short durations, chosen deliberately for their jarring effect: at several points, as Rowe scraped a string or rubbed it with a brillo pad, a grimace of concentration, even anger, seemed to cross his face – albeit mixed with a certain glee in pushing things ‘out there’, in taking a particular action to its noisiest extreme. As the set progressed, a more familiar approach asserted itself, with drones coming in and out (often generated by holding an electric toothbrush over a particular string, e-bow style) – this leading at times to the sort of beating frequencies and timbres that have become common in the more drone-oriented areas of ‘eai’. Things were, however, still broken-up – one sensed that, despite having (presumably) decided to take this approach before he started, Rowe was still feeling his way in, which gave the music a palpable sense of discovery, invention. Things weren’t ramshackle, but they were unconcerned with propriety (despite the parallels he likes to draw between his own work and classical music, and his use of fairly substantial classical excerpts in the second set). It was above all about improvisation (in contrast to the more conceptual work on the recent duo with Radu Malfatti, during which, at certain times, one senses that Rowe was rather less than comfortable (for instance, the fact that the recording of Jurg Frey’s ‘Exact Dimension Without Insistence’ had to be pieced together from three separate takes, because Rowe found it too hard to limit himself to the score’s narrow confines). (I don’t mean to disparage the collaboration, or the Frey score, but to suggest that Rowe may be heard at his best in a situation more akin to the LRB gig.)) Actions here are directed, intended, precise – particularly given the use of the aforementioned small set-up, much reduced in size from those we have seen used in the past– but relations between sounds do not follow a straight narrative pattern. One might say that the second set did follow some sort of linear trajectory, beginning from sparseness – slow, scrubbing and scooping of metal on metal, as objects were moved up and down the strings, with ‘peripheral’ white hiss faded in and out – and moving into the loudest section of the evening, a particularly violent scraping action that made the blue lights on the PA flash and crackle. Nonetheless, this very loose movement towards crescendo (and I’m inevitably simplifying the actual process, the attempt to recall what happened flattening out the actual details of its unfolding) was hardly smooth progress, and certainly not indicative of the general feel the music took. Let’s consider, as more representative, the endings of the two sets: Treatise stopping when Rowe dropped a metal object onto the floor by mistake (he’d just about finished anyway, but the sudden accidental clang made a nice abrupt snap out of ‘the zone’.) A wry smile; “That’s it.” And that was it. Edges, meanwhile, finished with Rowe reaching over and switching off the small desk-lamp which had been lighting the score, as the sounds he’d been making simultaneously ceased. A brief silence (traffic whooshes and whispers leaking in from upstairs), but not luxuriating in it – and from the darkness, “that’s it,” again. There was something very unaffected about this, possessing more in common than one might think (contrary to my earlier suggestion) with Derek Bailey’s no-nonsense approach: the desire to use one’s materials (developed as they are through detailed and constant thought and philosophical investigation) in the situation that exists as one finds it, rather than imposing ‘high art’ into a world it won’t fit. One thinks of the story about Zen archers that Rowe likes to repeat, illustrating as it does the importance of knowing the room, judging the room, being a part of ‘a perfectly ordinary dimension of reality’. Or again, his insistence on not practicing, on not rehearsing, of being actually terrified of his instrument: this is not, as solo improvising can so easily become, the slotting together of a selected assortment of tricks, effects, techniques, patterns in a slightly different order to your last performance, but what he calls “searching for the sound in the performance.”

Some might argue that this shows a sort of contempt for that audience – as if, because Rowe doesn’t woodshed at home, his stage performances become that wood-shedding, rather than a considered, crafted musical piece – and the process is somewhat (ok, very much) antithetical to the notion that dominates some forms of popular music, of putting on a choreographed stage show in which each element fits. (Then again, perhaps that extreme choreography is more a characteristic of an increasingly commodified and ‘whitened’ strain of pop – Madonna, Lady Gaga – where spectacle, costume changes, and dance routines take the place of shifts and discoveries in the music itself. James Brown, by contrast, might have put on a tight –a very tight – show, but there was still space for the music to breathe, for discoveries to be made within those tight parameters that were the music’s raison d’etre.) What Rowe is doing, then, is not showing contempt for his audience (which, in any case, consists on this occasion of no more than thirty or forty people (the venue, in the LRB basement, wouldn’t allow for any more)), but respect for them: taking for granted their willingness to participate in the thought processes he manifests through the sound he creates, to follow the music where it goes, to embrace the possibility of abruptness or jarring transitions or seeming ‘failures’ (where a new technique is tried out and falls flat or seems out of place). It’s an attitude that, perhaps, emerges only from years of playing this music, of developing something of a thick skin, but also of knowing that one is performing in an intimate setting, for an audience who are sympathetic and willing listeners, willing to go (again) where the music demands: an attitude exemplified by the way he played through the sound of a mobile phone going off, that sound then becoming, briefly, a not-unwelcome part of the texture, rather like the found material heard on the radios – not to suggest that “anything goes”, or that any interruption is valid (as in Cage’s 0’00”) (and, indeed, the use of radios seemed rather more pre-ordained, in the manner of sampling, than random or aleatoric) – but that there is a high degree of flexibility to the aesthetic, a flexibility that doesn’t compromise serious dedication to a particular set of goals and methods. Accident and discipline here go hand-in-hand: as in the occasional sounding of the ‘guitar’s’ open strings as ‘accidental’ by-product of other actions, rather the main intention. Another example: at one point during ‘Edges’, a low wadge of feedback conjured up, for me at least, the ‘hard’ sound of the rock guitar – but it happened so quickly that it barely registered as such. While I’ve suggested that Rowe could be considered more and more as a player of ‘electronics’ in recent years, his use of a modified, table-top version of the guitar (like a small chunk sawn off from a ‘real’ instrument), and that aforementioned occasional striking of open strings, reminds one that he does still have some interest in the instrument as such, even if aspects of its heritage rankle with him. Perhaps it’s simply the uncontrollable resonance of history and tradition, asserting itself against or despite departures from it (in contrast to the parodic play with cliché and genre in Amalgam days, and in contrast to the very conscious use, in this performance, of radio’d classical music as something to dialogue with, a technique somewhat reminiscent of the way that Keston Sutherland’s ‘high modernist’ poetry consciously dialogues with poets of the past, even as it studs and stutters itself with mangled fragments of the hyper-modern, the global-technological-late capitalist sphere). In fact, though, it may be that very emergence of historical fragments from outside immediate intention which allows individual artistic development to take place: the shock of something unexpected – either unexpectedly new, or unexpectedly, and disturbingly, familiar – leading to that existential moment where one is forced into a decision – ‘where do I go from here? what do I do now?’ – and where one then makes that decision, where one then acts. From the Paris Transatlantic interview, once more:

“You can't escape history, you can't escape memory - but I can honestly say, even now I will discover things I've never done in my life, and I constantly search for that. To a casual observer it might sound like something I've done before, and I know it isn't. I'm the judge of that, and I'm pretty severe with myself. I do not like the idea of reproducing something I've done before. I will happen on it, I'll suddenly find myself doing something I've done before…

DW: And then do you say "Whoa, I've done that before.." and stop, or do you accept it?

KR: I'll accept it, and then quickly counterpose it with something…Stop it abruptly, so something unethical to it…”

Un-ethical? The fact that Rowe even talks in terms of ethics brings us back to Cardew – ‘Towards an Ethic of Free Improvisation’ – and brings home the fact that this is, in fact, profoundly ethical music-making; well-suited to the visual coincidence (or was it intention?) that found Rowe setting up his table between LRB bookshelves marked ‘Music’, ‘Religion,’ and ‘Cultural Studies.’ Not that the music inspires religious devotion (though Richard Pinnell’s review of the gig under consideration is indeed a fervent response), but that it argues, and earns for itself a certain weight, a certain importance that one might be hard-pressed to think music could now have (except as all-encompassing distraction, as identikit-background-noise to music-video theatricals.) And, really, thank fuck for that.

Koboku Senju Live in Oxford

2011-05-28T12:01:00.006+01:00

Koboku Senju
Tetuzi Akiyama (acoustic guitar) Eivind Lønning (trumpet) Toshimaru Nakamura (no input mixing board) Espen Reinertsen (tenor saxophone) Martin Taxt (tuba)

Stephen Cornford / Patrick Farmer / Sarah Hughes
Cornford (mixing-board (feedback)) Farmer (turntable, objects) Hughes (chorded zither)
Art Jericho, Oxford, 27/05/2011

As I walked through the door of Art Jericho (a neat little gallery space down a back-street of half-built and shadowed buildings), Patrick Farmer (on turntable and various objects), Sarah Hughes (on chorded zither (i.e. autoharp), played with various modifications and electronic treatments) and Stephen Cornford (on mixing board and objects) were creating an immediately absorbing kind of pindrop-music; indeed, the sound of a pin dropping could very well have formed part of their arsenal, perhaps connected up to some sort of feedback device or scratchily amplified on the turntable. The first ten minutes or so trod a pleasing line of simultaneous tension and stasis; there was a lot going on, in terms of events and changes (particularly from Farmer, who seemed to be playing the role of agitator, suddenly creating loud, harsh jolts of feedback and noise in unexpected places), but, at the same time, much of this took place over a fairly stable drone, provided by Hughes’ bowed zither. Then something happened, and the music moved away from this course (which it could easily have held for half an hour or more); things became more broken up, even theatrical, from delicate quiet sonorities which the half-sitting, half-standing crowd seemed to be craning forward to hear, to Farmer’s aforementioned jolts and outbursts. When Hughes bounced a small red balloon off the strings of the table-top zither, so gently that it seemed to make no perceptible sound, the performative aspect kicked home; though the three musicians were sitting fairly still at their three tables, or work stations, this didn’t feel like a solemn or reverential set-up – instead, they became garden shed scientists, fiddling around with arcane and quasi-magical devices fused from the cutting edge of electricity and the homely detritus of eccentrically-kept junk. Hughes’ strongly diatonic instrument also militated against the harshness of some of the other sounds; her employment of a simple melody (played with such delicacy that her thumb barely seemed to brush the strings) adding a folkish, even ambient touch that was all the more effective for being sparingly employed. Towards the end of the set, Farmer picked up a box and emptied its contents (compost? Chinese take-away? dried leaves?) onto the turntable, all in one motion, the gesture radically changing the sounds coming from his set-up, and providing a nicely serendipitous correlation between physical movement and sonic event. It was typical of the trio’s unforced and easy improvisational method; improvisation as the discovery of the genuinely new, the creation of surprising and pleasing relations and juxtapositions, a sound laboratory.

If Farmer could have been said, broadly speaking, to play the ‘agitator’ during the trio set, then Nakamura filled that role during the start of Koboku Senju’s performance at least, his sharp, fizzing high tones and sudden bursts of scrunching feedback giving the impression that the machine was controlling what sounds were about to come out as much as he himself – though his pose of calm concentration (which might perhaps be mistaken for sleepiness), barely moving anything more than his hands, suggested that such a situation would not have perturbed him in the slightest. It was if he was reading a book or scrutinising a sculpture, looking down at the no-input board and waiting for it to reveal its secrets to him, rather than manipulating it with obvious physical dexterity or virtuosity. Akiyama’s guitar playing was similarly untroubled and relaxed, though more conventional in terms of technique: he began with three capos clamped on the instrument’s neck, gradually removing these as the set went on, playing relatively brief melodic phrases at untroubled, though fairly regular intervals; neither settling into finger-picking nor Bailey-esque improv; later on, rubbing a metal slide over the strings to produce an arco effect. This combination of melody and the textural improv of Nakamura and the three Norwegians (Espen Reinertsen on saxophone, Eivind Lønning on trumpet and Martin Taxt on tuba respectively) was something that perhaps shouldn’t have worked in context. Indeed, what makes Senju stand out as a group is their seemingly rather clunky line-up of three brass/wind instruments, electronics, and acoustic guitar. In the end, though, it was the mesh rather than the abrasiveness of the instrumentation that compelled. Having listened to electro-acoustic improvisation for a number of years now, I thought that the days of not being able to tell which instrument was doing what might be over (that initial shock when one first hears the employment of extended techniques –, that disorienting, blurring effect), but, even seeing the music live (which should make who’s doing what clearer), it was sometimes hard to believe the evidence of one’s own eyes. How is it possible that a trumpet can produce sounds like that merely by tilting the mouthpiece to the side of the mouth? Is it possible that a saxophone can sound so un-jazz-like? Are those high sonorities really coming from the tuba? All this was compelling enough – meshing, merging, and those collective swells (not so much climaxes) out of which emerge a moment of piercing clarity, often provided by Akiyama’s melodies – but what really tipped things was the moment, about half-way through the set, when the three horns suddenly moved from extended techniques to a succession of three-voice jazz melodies. Presumably improvised and unplanned, it was, like Hughes’ zither melody in the first half, a moment of lovely and unforced surprise – and what was more admirable was that Senju didn’t just stop there, as they well could have, but moved back to textural playing (Taxt, at one point, removing part of the tuba’s tubing and clinking it against the body of his instrument; at another, turning the whole thing sideways so that the enormous, gramophone-like bell pointed directly at the audience; Lønning circular-breathing, smoothly but with an edge of roughness, a popping breath sound that came around every few seconds – simultaneously the result of physical necessity and a part of the music). Really, the hush at the end (I say hush, despite the sound of Friday-night parties passing down Walton Street) and the following applause, were more than well-deserved.

[Reviews also up from Lawrence Dunn and Richard Pinnell.]

Billy Bang is Dead / Memorial Playlist

2011-05-11T23:00:00.000+01:00

Billy Bang & Shoji Hano at Inage Candy, Chiba, Japan, 11th Oct 2008 (MP3 version included in the playlist link at the bottom of the post)

"I lived many deaths, being a soldier in Vietnam fighting. I learned to get past death in Vietnam as a soldier. I was afraid of death, and that's the truth – no one wants to die – but I could not be afraid of death to do my job. I pulled point, I was the first cat out, I did ambushes, I was in the actual war fighting, so I could not be afraid of death, because I might have to give my life up for my next compadre right next to me, so death had no significance for me – the job of survival did, the job of getting the job done did. So I was not afraid of death, and…nobody wants to die, but I was not afraid of it. And I'm still not, especially not now, because I think I left the world with enough documentation and testimony that if I leave tomorrow – not tomorrow, but I'm sure I will leave – then I feel good about leaving the planet earth with what I left behind me, and with me, so I have no problem with that. And then, I don't know what the next story is about, where I go, so I'm not worried about that. People who are preoccupied with that do not live, and the best thing is to live every day, each and every day until that time come. And let death take care of itself."

Violinist Billy Bang died of lung cancer on Monday, April 11th 2011, at the age of 63. Probably best known these days for two fairly recent albums reflecting on his experience as a solider in Vietnam, he’d established himself on the New York loft jazz scene back in the 70s, becoming a key figure, along with the likes of frequent collaborator William Parker, in the second-(third-? fourth-?)generation free jazz movement. His playing combined abrasive grit, rough-edged folksiness, surprisingly straightforward melodicism, and a certain swinging jazz touch (the latter was to become particularly prominent later on in his career, though that’s not to suggest he morphed into Didier Lockwood…).

The violin/drums format witnessed in the at the top of this post brings to mind, of course, the legendary collaboration between Leroy Jenkins and Rashied Ali, 'Swift are the Winds of Life'. Bang's folkish touch and Shoji Hano's ebullient rhythms ensure, however, that this duet has a very different feel, somewhere between a hoe-down, a call to the spirits, and a straightforward rock-out. Listen four minutes in as the violinist locks into repeated figures, playing them over and over with minimal variation – incantation, invocation, whatever you choose to call it, it has undeniable power.

Bang’s playing suggested any number of folk traditions - elegant plucked pentatonic figures reminiscent of Oriental music, big sawing motions and slides from American country and appalaichan traditions, percussive col legno from the avant-garde, and of course the free-jazz tinged post-bop language which he made his own. As he said in an interview, his aim was to get between the virtuoso technique of Leroy Jenkins (with whom he studied) and the much-maligned, but more intuitive approach of Ornette Coleman. It's that combination of melodic simplicity with a certain 'off' roughness around the edges (rather than the heightened sweetness we're accustomed to from Hollywood movies and the classical violin repertoire) that makes Bang really stand out. His compositions, which tended to be riff and groove based, demonstrated that same simplicity, but he was by no means a 'simplistic' musician, as should be obvious from just glancing at the number of different projects and musicians he worked with, often changing from record to record. (And as was made even more abundantly clear when listening to excerpts from WKCR’s 24-hour Bang memorial broadcast.)

Bang’s musical story proper begins upon his return from military service in Vietnam; finding the South Bronx its own kind of war zone, he half-wondered if going to fight had saved him from the equal trauma of drug addiction – nonetheless, he continued to suffer nightmares from his own experience throughout the following decades. Having studied law, his first case proved to be fixed; disgusted at how easy it was to manipulate the justice system, he ended up falling in with a group of Black-Panther-inspired would-be-revolutionaries; due to his weapons-handling experience from Vietnam, he ended up being tasked to buy the group guns. On one such trip (the weapons were to be purchased for the purpose of a bank robbery), he chanced across a violin in a pawn-shop, and, on a whim, used the money intended for the guns to purchase a violin, the instrument he had originally studied whilst at school. His comrades, convinced that Vietnam had finally driven him mad, abandoned him and carried out the robbery on their own; several of their number were killed. You could say that music literally saved Billy Bang’s life.

“The reason why I become an artist was because I was really trying to evade society’s infrastructure. When I came home from Vietnam, I didn’t want to kill anymore, I didn’t want to be part of the conglomeration of sending people out to die for non reason. So, the only thing I could find the truth in was the music. I knew I wouldn’t make a dollar, but I didn’t care about the money. I said, as long as I believe in the truth, I can live with myself. I can get up, when I go shave, I can look in the mirror and be a happy soul.”

Though his playing was rusty at first, he had apparently convinced himself that music was what he wanted to do; and not just any music, but the esoteric and most definitely non-lucrative free forms of New York’s downtown jazz players. He moved downtown, just to be closer to them, and ended up studying privately with Leroy Jenkins. Technique now matching concept, he was ready to make his mark, and began forming his own ensembles: the String Trio of New York, with John Lindberg and James Emery, The Music Ensemble and The Survival Ensemble. The significance of this latter name is twofold: firstly, even if you’re never going to make enough money to become rich or famous, you have to make enough to survive, to feed yourself and house yourself and your family; secondly, this music is actually necessary ‘in order to survive’ in a society plagued by racism and poverty and inequality and the sacrifice of artistic endeavour on the altar of money and superficiality. Over the years, it was the former that would prove the hardest to accomplish: combine continuing psychological troubles from Vietnam with a hostile or indifferent climate for adventurous jazz-derived music (particularly if it was played by African-Americans), and there were times when Bang nearly went broke. Indeed, his eventual musical confrontation with the Vietnam experience, on those early 2000s records, only came about because of his plea to Justin Time label head Jean-Pierre Leduc for a recording project: Leduc suggested tackling Vietnam, and Bang, after much thought, agreed.

“Sugar, the sweetest thing out there – we put it in our teas, our coffee, our hot chocolate – is initially, originally brown – it’s brown, it looks like my colour. But they don’t want that, so they bleach it, they make it different and they make it white, because it represents their…thing – white people, Europeans, so they make sugar white. They don’t want nothing brown to be sweet. It’s a conscious thing, it’s not an accident – it’s not like, ‘wow, let’s just drop this colour in’ – there’s a purpose to that. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – I watched this as a kid – the cowboys that show up, the good cowboys, always dress in white. The bad cowboys, the evil guys, always dress in black. So black always means bad and negative and ugly. So I grew up with this – well, I’m saying, shit, I’m not bad and ugly and negative. The truth is, I had to fight through all this to become me, to become myself, to get beyond all this, to get stronger than anything out there, and that’s who I am to today. I learned to trust my own self and I applied that to my music. I learned that the universe is one place – the earth as we know it is only one home. I started thinking that I was a man of the planet earth, and that allowed me not to think in terms of borders and conscriptions and I was free – I was very free.”

Despite the difficulties that were to come, and those that had already been, the '70s were an exciting time for the likes of Bang: there was an abundance of music being played, recorded and released, and loft spaces finally allowed for an arena in which musicians could perform what they wanted, how they wanted, at whatever length, rather than having to kow-tow to the wishes and financial desires of nightclub owners perplexed by lengthy pieces that demanded prolonged and focussed concentration, rather than slotting into easy, manageable chunks, as the background to clinking glasses and cash registers. One gets the sense of a real community just by looking at the personnel lists on the back of the record sleeves – so-and-so appears as a sideman on this record by this other musician, who appears as a sideman on his sideman’s record…etc. Furthermore, the presence of figures about whom very little is known, such as saxophonist Bilal Abdur Rahman, who composed half the material on Bang’s own debut as a leader, ‘New York Collage’, suggests that the scene was made up of far more than just a handful of initiates and masters – especially given the fact that the ‘masters’ weren’t exactly well-known in their own right. As Valerie Wilmer puts it in her liner notes for the 1983 record 'Intensive Care' by The Jazz Doctors (Bang, Frank Lowe, Rafael Garrett, and Denis Charles): "To have reached [this] point in music history, thousands of men and women have gone unsung and unrecorded. Only a handful of individuals are allowed to enter the history books despite the clearly collective nature of music practice."

And Bang himself makes the same point, in a more generalised way:

“You can be yourself to some degree, you have to be strong within oneself, but if you just think the world revolves around you as a person, being yourself, you cannot co-exist – and co-existence makes peace, it makes love, it makes harmony. This is my belief.”

Bang’s first recording came in 1974, though it was not released until the end of the decade, as part of a compilation of music recorded at various dates over a period of several years: William Parker’s ‘Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace’. In fact, Bang appears on two cuts from the final album – the 1974 date, which finds him somewhat submerged into a medium-sized instrumental ensemble (‘Rattles and Bells and the Light of the Sun’), and a 1976 piece forming part of the music for the ballet ‘Dawn Voice,’ in which he joins fellow violinist Ramsey Ameen (later of the Cecil Taylor Unit) to accompany Parker’s poetry recitation.

William Parker - Face Still Hands Folded
Billy Bang, Ramsey Ameen (violin) William Parker (recitation)
Recorded October 1976
from 'Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace' (1981)

This Parker album also featured a couple of other ‘Downtown’ violinists besides Ameen and Bang: Jason Kao Hwang and Polly Bradfield, the latter of whom would appear alongside our man on Frank Lowe’s 1977 ‘Lowe and Behold’. Whereas Bradfield (a musician virtually unknown today, except to the extreme cognoscenti) has an at times shockingly abrasive approach, Bang can be heard as a contrasting lyrical (if somewhat off-kilter) voice (the track opens with his short duet with John Zorn, who was here making his recorded debut proper).

The Frank Lowe Orchestra - Heavy Drama
Frank Lowe (tenor sax, arr), Joseph Bowie (trombone), Butch Morris (cornet), Arthur Williams (trumpet), John Zorn (alto sax) Peter Kuhn (clarinet) Polly Bradfield, Billy Bang (violin) Eugene Chadbourne (guitar) John Lindberg (bass) Phillip Wilson (drums)
from 'Lowe and Behold' (1977)

The following year, Bang released the already-mentioned ‘New York Collage’: an opportunity to demonstrate his compositions, it also featured his own poetry recitation on the second side. The record opens with a tribute to John Coltrane, as was fairly standard for free jazz dates (Frank Wright’s ‘One For John’, for instance), but from the start it clearly has its own aesthetic: a brief violin solo gives way to a jaunty unison theme, soon moving into an accelerating repeated figure which provides a transition between tight written material and more ‘out’ ensemble playing, everyone soloing at once with enthusiastic abandon. Though there are plenty of fire-breathing moments here, Bang’s violin tones and compositions give a more studied, thoughtful, pre-structured feel to things than, say, is the case with the Arthur Doyle school (indeed, as Hank Shteamer suggests in a recent post on ‘Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches’, even the album that is supposedly the definition of ‘out-there’ free jazz, Peter Brötzmann’s ‘Machine Gun’, is, in fact, a suite alternating composed elements in a variety of genres, moods, and tempi.) Still out-of-print, half the album can be heard in a vinyl rip provided by Destination…out.

Billy Bang - Nobody Hear The Music The Same Way (Dedicated to John Coltrane)
Billy Bang (violin, bells, shaker, percussion), Bilal Abdur Rahman (tenor sax, soprano sax, bull horn, percussion), Henry Warner (alto sax, bells, shaker, percussion), William Parker (bass), Khuwana Fuller (conga), Rashid Bakr (drums)
from 'New York Collage' (1978)

Bang was certainly not hanging around: in the next year he released his first solo recording (from which we hear a track built around urgent, swirling repetitions and bright, hard-edged clarion calls), and his first recording with the String Trio of New York, a group he had co-founded with bassist John Lindberg and guitarist James Emery in 1977. (The Trio has continued until the present day, though Bang left in 1986, his placed since filled by a rotating cast of violinists, including Charles Burnham and Regina Carter). Though the line-up suggests a somewhat neo-classical, or perhaps third-stream side, the music contains plenty of propulsion and gut. Characteristic of the group's releases was a sharing of compositional duties between each trio member; Bang's contribution to their debut is the intriguingly-titled 'Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan', who at the time had vanished from the scene, having been an important mentor for and collaborator with New York's 'New Thing' musicians during the mid-60s. Dancing, winding, interlocking improvisatory lines over dot-dash bass rhythms suggest the high-flung conversation between Bang and Logan, the two free jazz travellers - mystical, intellectual gravitas within the alien technological rush of the modern city. (Perhaps they didn't even speak; musicians yes, but in this case choosing to communicate through their silence, to communicate through simple presence - songs of the unspoken, songs of the unsung.) No matter the evocative nature of such contextual musings, it's an exhilirating track, tricsky yet flowing, tripping and dancing and flying through air.

Billy Bang - Part of Distinction Without a Difference
Billy Bang (violin)
from 'Distinction Without a Difference' (1979)

String Trio of New York - Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan
Billy Bang (violin) James Emery (guitar) John Lindberg (bass)
from 'First String' (1979)

As is obvious from the larger ensemble recordings, such as the Lowe, or the varied instrumental line-ups on the Parker, Bang’s group-playing interests were moving far beyond the trumpet/ saxophone/ piano/ bass/ drums format inherited from be-bop. One might immediately think of his incorporation of traditional Vietnamese instruments on the later Vietnam projects, a timbral quality foreshadowed on the final piece from a 1980 trio session called ‘Changing Seasons’. For me, this closing track is one of the most texturally interesting of all Bang’s recordings, the combination of Toshi Tsuchitori’s autoharp and the plucked strings of Bang and William Parker giving the music an insectoid yet somehow stately quality, moving with abstract dancing flickers and flecks and sometimes even near-grooves (Parker’s grounding bass). Much of the piece’s feel – of a music on its toes, dancing quickly and skitterishly but with a certain amount of energising nervousness and trepidation – is surely due to the way Tsuchitori plays the autoharp (I suspect with some sort of drumstick). Bang, meanwhile, nicely mixes up simpatico staccato with squelches and scrapes – towards the end, contributing and developing one particular upwards-rising bowed figure (with added squeaky-door frequencies) that introduces a palpable and building sense of tension, of being inexorably drawn/ driven to some climax – compelled to go there, whatever the risks. And then the introduction of flutes right at the end, and the dissolve into the sound of crickets which opened the record as a whole. Really, I think, one of the highlights of the Bang discography. (And it’s not in print, of course.) Tsuchitori, incidentally, plays mostly drums on the record – since then, he’s moved from free jazz percussion towards investigating ancient instruments and Asian / African music and dance, recording alongside some prehistoric paintings in a French cave along the way), as well as collaborating with theatre director Peter Brook.

Billy Bang - Winter Rains
Toshi Tsuchitori (autoharp) Billy Bang (violin) William Parker (bass, flute)
from 'Changing Seasons' (1981)

We hear a different side of Bang on a perhaps dated, but nonetheless still exhilarating jazz-rock number from Bill Laswell’s ‘Material’. His violin adds bite and textural variety to the tricksy ensemble passages, and another, wilder dimension in during a solo towards the end of the track. This was recorded around the same time he made his sole appearance as a member of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s similarly funky electric band The Decoding Society (alongside Byard Lancaster, Vernon Reid and Charles Brackeen on their debut album, 'Eye on You'). On the selected track, 'Shaman', Bang gets to play the shaman in his trance, whirligging furiously in between a Shannon Jackson drum solo and the weirded-out guitar and quizzical, almost mocking melody line that dominate the tune. Also in this 'punk jazz' vein are a later appearance with British avant-rock band Sonicphonics and a guest spot with Last Exit and Diamanda Galas at the 1986 Moers Jazz Festival (available as a bootleg recording).

Material - Upriver
Olu Dara (cornet) Billy Bang (violin) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Michael Beinhorn (synthesizers, tapes, radio, guitar, drums) Fred Maher (guitar, drums, percussion)
from 'Memory Serves' (1981)

Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society - Shaman
Billy Bang (violin) Byard Lancaster (alto sax) Charles Brackeen (tenor sax) Vernon Reid, Bern Nix (guitar) Melvin Gibbs (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) Erasto Vasconcelos (percussion)
from 'Eye on You' (1980)

Last Exit with Billy Bang/Diamanda Galas - Enemy Within
Peter Brötzmann (tenor sax) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) + Billy Bang (violin) Diamanda Galas (voice)
Recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, 1986

Enjoyable as they were, Bang's electric adventures in general remained something of a sideline: the real meat of his playing came during acoustic collaborations. And it was during one of these collaborations that he was pushed to perhaps his furthest extent, in a spark-generating quartet led by pianist Marilyn Crispell. At this stage, one hears her fascinatingly weaving her own sound out of (broadly speaking) Cecil Taylorian territory: the music is loud, passionate, heavy, the heavy piano chords and echoing lines really spurring Bang on to whooping, wailing flights. Bang's violin sometimes gets rather lost in the mono radio mix (there's an official recording, doubtless with better sound, called 'Live in Berlin', which I haven't, thus far, been able to get on my hands on); however, the audio is generally adequate, and this track has the added bonus of a superb Peter Kowald solo, ringing tones from his rasping, growling bass as though determinedly wringing the last drop of water from a wet sponge. Comparing all this to Crispell's rather placid recent albums on ECM makes one wish she’d continued developing what she’d started here. I'd include the whole recording in this playlist, if it weren't 38 minutes long: it can be downloaded, however, from Folly For To See For What.

Marilyn Crispell Quartet - Chant
Billy Bang (violin) Marilyn Crispell (piano)Peter Kowald (bass) John Betsch (drums)
Recorded live at Donaueschinger Musiktage, 1982 (SWF2 radio broadcast)

Rather 'lighter' in tone, but no less 'worthy', is a 1984 live date with Don Cherry, who once again proves himself as a player uniquely capable of fitting into any given context without modifying his essential style (check his collaborations with Peter Brotzmann, Rip Rig and Panic). Like Cherry, Bange was as capable of playing with an infectiously 'happy', joyous tone as he was of delving deep and stretching out. That same joy comes through in one of his catchiest tunes, 'Rainbow Gladiator', also taped in a live setting; and in a tribute to Stuff Smith recorded with, all of people, Sun Ra (who had actually played with Smith back in '50s Chicago). It's a mark of the respect with which Bang was heard that Ra took one of his very few sideman jobs in a group led by the violinist; and the date itself is a wonderful example of ostensibly 'free' players digging deep into the tradition without the slightest hint of neo-conservatism. After all, as Bang points out in the liner notes, "[Stuff Smith] was avant garde too, in his own way... By the nature of his instrument, basically. People still don't understand the notes of Smith or can catch him. He was so far-fetched, so far away from jazz. Not for the main people, not for the people that are inside, but even for people that are in my neighbourhood [The Bronx]. I had never heard of Stuff Smith. It too me a long time. You would hear Papa John Creach before you'd hear Stuff Smith. You would actually hear Ray Nance before you'd hear of Stuff Smith. So he was outside of that medium, somehow." Steve Holtje, in this same liner notes, succintly captures how the Bang-Ra group find their own way into Smith's legacy; Ra, "finding complexity in simplicity", playing a solo on this track that "almost any pianist could play - but only Ra would think of it. And while comping under Bang, Ra turns the music inside out with his off-kilter rhythms and harmonies. Bang is hardly overshadowed, spinning out inventive yet swinging, structurally sound lines. With Ore's fat bass sound and Cyrille's pointillistic drumming providing a rock-solid but supremely flexible rhythm section, the liberties Ra likes to take are perfectly supported." (Incidentally, Bang revisited this tune on his most recent recording, 2010's 'Prayer for Peace'.)

Billy Bang & Don Cherry - Unknown Title
Don Cherry (pocket trumpet) Billy Bang (violin) Wilber Morris (bass) Denis Charles (drums)
Recorded live at Tramps, NYC, 1984

Billy Bang Sextet - Rainbow Gladiator
Billy Bang (violin) Roy Campbell (trumpet) Oscar Sanders (guitar) Thurman Barker (marimba, percussion) William Parker (bass) Zen Matsuura (drums) Eddie Conde (conga)
from 'Live at Carlos 1' (1986)

Billy Bang/ Sun Ra - Only Time Will Tell
Billy Bang (violin) Sun Ra (piano) John Ore (bass) Andrew Cyrille (drums)
from 'A Tribute to Stuff Smith' (1992)

In some ways, Bang's whole life was shadowed by his experiences in Vietnam, but it wasn't until his last 10 years that he directly approached the subject in music, recruiting a band of other ex-Vietnam vets, including Ted Daniel and Butch Morris, and releasing two of his best received albums, 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' and 'Vietnam: Reflections'. Having made his peace with Vietnam, tragically, it was still Vietnam that had the last word; the cancer that caused his death was apparently a result of Agent Orange.

It was that first Vietnam album that brough him some added notice in the jazz press: people seemed surprised at its easy, swinging nature (as if Bang hadn't shown them how capable he was of playing in that style already), respectful of its historical resonance. As Jim Santella wrote in a review for All About Jazz: "The music moves evenly with a peaceful country air. Dirges, dances, ceremonial rites, a little dramatic counterpoint, and swinging anthems take on surreal qualities through Billy Bang's compositions.[...]Bang and five other members of the ensemble are veterans. They've turned these memories into a positive affair. Culture, society, and a deeper meaning color the session thoroughly, but they're couched in lively, straight-ahead jazz terms."

Billy Bang - Tunnel Rat (Flashlight & a '45)
Billy Bang (violin) Ted Daniel (trumpet) John Hicks (piano) Curtis Lundy (bass) Michael Carvin (drums)
from 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' (2001)

One of Bang's finest recent recordings came in a quintet with Frank Lowe; this was also one of the saxophonist's final performances before he too, succumbed to cancer, and, indeed, he played this concert with only one lung, becoming so out of breath at the end of proceedings that the promoter wanted to call an ambulance. Bang and Lowe’s musical relationship had lasted for more than twenty-five years, and by this stage, both had, perhaps, ‘mellowed out’ a little: Lowe’s solos, while retaining atonal interjections, are less burry and ferocious than they had been in the ’70s, instead taking on a pithy and even pretty edge, while Bang swoops between grandstanding, super-fast runs, staccato rhythmics, and smoothly expansive melodies. The track I've chosen, 'Nothing But Love', gives Lowe and Bang the least solo space of any of the tunes on the record, but their unison statements of the righteously hopefuly melody attain an added poignancy with both mens' passing. Another side of the band is shown in the video embedded below; recorded five years earlier, it finds Lowe in fine fire-breathing mode, yet manages to slot deliciously into a fairly straight (yet not cliche-laden) jazz & blues-based approach.)

Billy Bang / Frank Lowe Quintet - Nothing But Love
Frank Lowe (tenor sax) Billy Bang (violin) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Todd Nicholson (bass) Tatsuya Nakatani (drums)
from 'Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids' (2005)

The technological boom of the past decade has meant 'obscure' musicians such as Bang can, theoretically, be seen and heard by tens of thousands of people all round the world - something undreamed of in earlier days of day-to-day struggle. And if that might be a rather utopian way of looking at things - it still is a struggle for those playing this music, and the internet isn't going to change all that - it's nonetheless true that there's more than enough good-quality video evidence of Bang's playing during the 2000s to allow even the laziest music fan to investigate his work. I've chosen to embed a few examples below (they won't be featured in the playlist, obviously). To begin with, Bang guesting with the band Trouble) contrasts Harvey Cowan’s freescrape violin solo with Bang’s own melodic, building approach. Cowan (who is apparently also an architect) sounds a bit like Bang used to – not that either approach is less relevant or valid, just that Bang plays differently now (though he can of course whip out the dissonances and rough finishes - they are what gives his playing its spice). Following that, two trios with Hamiet Bluiett, the first also featuring Jin Hi Kim on komungo (a Korean zither dating back to the 7th century), the second with percussionist Kahil El'Zhabar; another trio with Kim and William Parker; and a very fine duo with Parker (all recorded live). Roulette TV, meanwhile, has a full-length solo violin performance from 2010, opening with an introspective piece self-descriptively entitled ‘Daydream’, proceeding through a poem dedicated to Denis Charles and ending with a trademark super-fast cadenza. It's both a fine example of Bang’s solo technique and of the relation between his compositional and improvisational methods (as explained in the interview which appears towards the end of the video). Interesting also to compare it to the solo violin piece from 30 years earlier which I posted nearer the top of the playlist.

Roulette TV: BILLY BANG from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

Bang appeared, if anything, to be growing stronger, rather than withering with age: albums like the Sirone-Bang Ensemble's 'Configuration' and the William Parker Violin Trio's 'Scrapbook' have some of his finest playing on record, and ‘Prayer for Peace’ had been among the best-received jazz albums of 2010 - so the news of his death came as quite a shock to quite a few people. Perhaps, those closest to Bang knew; and at last year’s Vision Festival, he’d announced his battle with cancer. But he was determined to keep on playing through it, and there were planned appearances, for example, at this year’s Vision (where he was going to pay tribute to the recently-deceased Marion Brown), and a number of other dates. The video below, from Feburary 2011, is perhaps his last documented performance: a quintet featuring Dick Griffin on trombone, Andrew Bemkey (who we heard with the Lowe/Bang Quintet) on piano, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Newman Taylor-Baker on drums. As a shaven-headed Bang leads with the solemn, hymn-like melody of 'Prayer for Peace' over churchy piano chords, trombone and bass drones, and rumbling drums, one reflects that the title of the piece he dedicated to John Coltrane could just as well apply to the man himself: "Nobody Hear the Music the Same Way."

Billy Bang Quintet - Prayer for Peace
Billy Bang (violin) Dick Griffin (trombone) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Hilliard Greene (bass) Newman Taylor Baker (drums)
Recorded live at the Savoy Theatre, 4th Feb 2011

Download the Full Playlist Here
(THIS contains some tracks from bootleg recordings and MP3 versions of videos: sound quality on these will not be up to the standard of the official album tracks.)

The quotations interspersed throughout the post above are transcriptions from a video interview given by Bang in 2007, and available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXJ2uzM9Vo. George Scala's Billy Bang discography can be found at http://www.mindspring.com/~scala/bang.htm, while John Lindberg's reminiscence of his time with Bang in the String Trio of New York is at New Music Box.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)

2011-04-15T13:35:00.004+01:00

Starring: Werner Herzog et al
Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Director of Photography: Peter Zeitlinger

Given the almost-universal acclaim (if not widespread cinema release) with which ‘Cage of Forgotten Dreams’ has been greeted, one gets the feeling that it’s a film most people don’t even need to watch to like. Werner Herzog, the Chauvet Caves, 3-D (3-D?!!!) – what could go wrong? Yet, while it’s certainly a competent piece of work, often it feels like a straight documentary which has self-consciously been made 'Herzogian' round the edges - most notably, with the 'characters' of the perfumier sniffing for cave and the fur-suited man playing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' on a bone flute, as well as (of course) the postscript about albino crocodiles. As one review notes, Herzog's typical view of nature as, at best, indifferent, at worst, actively hostile, takes a back-seat here for a reverent approach to the dynamic, yet ultimately rather benign depictions of animals inside the cave itself. There would have been plenty to stress about the hunter-gatherer way of life, humans placed in a world of actively hostile animals where they were not yet top of the pile – and yet this element is not emphasized, Herzog even suggesting that the footprints of an eight-year old boy found next to those of wolf might hint at some sort of companionship – yes, the wolf may have been stalking the boy, but they may also have been walking side by side. This seems to provide an instance where, because the history is so far back, Herzog can play on his old ‘ecstatic truth’ trope, inventing stories and fantasies and dreams about what the cave artists’ life may have been like (somewhat akin to the original idea of creating a sci-fi out of the desert landscapes, wrecked vehicles, and drought-riddled corpses of the African desert in ‘Fata Morgana’) – and yet, much of the time it feels as though we are actually witnessing something rather sanitised, National Geographic-style. This reverent approach is underscored by the ever-present sound of Ernst Reijseger's music, which pairs Reijseger's own high-pitched, folkish improvised cello melodies over organ drones, quasi-medieval choir, and, in the final montage of the cave paintings, an 'ethnic flute' deployed in something approaching early ’90s chillout fashion. As a result, sections of the film are actually rather dull, the most notable culprit being the 5-minute sequence in which we follow a female professor around the caves as she points out what we can actually see with our own eyes - 'here is a painting of a lion' – like a tour guide who cannot let her charges experience the place first hand, but must constantly place it under a contextual veil, sterilising it, removing it from the realm of the living. Also notable is the way that she constantly refers to the cave artist(s) as male - 'he stood here, he made this mark' - something her briefly-glimpsed colleague corrects (changing 'man' to 'human') – but to which she soon returns as the camera dutifully follows her around. Surely, one speculates, the assumed male-ness of the artist belies the fact that we witness statues of giant female deity-figures with enormous pubic regions in similar caves, suggesting some sort of fertility cult (cave as womb). Indeed, the one representation of a human form in the whole of Chauvet is the lower half of a female being embraced by a bull – and here one thinks of Simone de Beavouir’s notion of ‘woman’ as mediatrix between natural and human worlds. “She is endowed with mind and spirit, but she belongs to Nature, the infinite current of life flows through her; she appears, therefore, as a mediatrix between the individual and the cosmos.” (‘The Second Sex’) (If this appears too solemn, one could always counterpose the following: “For me, to recognize that so many of the preserved Paleolithic images were done casually, by both sexes and all age-groups, more often than not by youngsters, who even left their tracks under renditions of wounded bulls and swollen vulvas, in no way makes Paleolithic sites less hallowed. The possibility that adolescent giggles and snickers may have echoed in dark cave passages as often as the rhythm of a shaman’s chant demeans neither artists nor art. Instead, it opens the possibility for us to conceive, with familiar warmth and greater immediacy, the entire range of preserved Paleolithic art.” (That’s R. Dale Guthrie, from ‘The Nature of Paleolithic Art’.)

We might consider also (of course, this will remain speculation) the role of these paintings, once more using de Beauvoir’s terms: are they ‘priestly’, the work of a caste who “control and direct forces they have mastered in accord with the gods and the laws, for the common good, in the name of all members of the group,” or ‘magical’, the work of one who “operates apart from society, against the gods and the laws, according to his own deep interests”? The fact that the cave contains so few human traces, in contrast to the large number of animal skeletons, suggests that it was infrequently used, or at least, used only temporarily: small bands of people, or individuals, holding their torches to the walls and making riddles, invocations, codes apart from the main social and practical functions of diurnal life; art as cultic ceremony, with a power understood only by the few, perhaps not even by them in their own selves (instead through possession, access to some form of higher, other power, spirit); as something potentially dangerous, potentially over-spilling the limits even of primitive social structures. No system of patronage, not that kind of art-cult; but still speaking from somewhere other than the place to which people are accustomed. Are audiences invited in to witness shadow-ceremonies, shows of music and light and movement? Or are these kept as private invocations, experiments, searches for knowledge that may be applied to the other world of the everyday, but which must first be tested, fine-tuned, played with? Magic as creative act – making something happen – naming as magical act – drawing as a kind of naming (the representation of the animal as the visual equivalent of its spoken name) – or the combination of the two, the visual/totemic element alongside the sounding of the name, of magical words/spells/formulae (science today still has that magical inheritance – balancing the equation, getting the correct formula is equivalent to getting the right words, pronouncing the spell correctly).

One of Herzog’s most intriguing notions (though, it has to be said, a fairly obvious one) is that the Chauvet paintings are an early form of animation/ cinema (and, we might add, gesamtkunstwerk, or opera), combining sound, visuals, and movement. We see this most clearly in the attempt to capture motion – animals with multiple legs, drawn round contours of the cave wall (e.g. a bison chasing an ibex from out of a shadowed recess) – and they could seem to come alive when ‘animated’ by the play of torchlight on walls – shadows interacting with the paintings of animals (here Herzog rather whimsically inserts a clip of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow). This is not merely a kind of 3-D-style wow-factor – rather, it fits in with notions of transformation and fluidity. A scientist in the film speculates that human identity was viewed as permeable and porous, rather than fixed – humans can transform into animals, animals can stand on two legs and walk about, trees can speak – thus, the play of light and shade, breaking down visual distinctions between human performers and animal paintings, is not merely play, but becomes part of an entire mode of seeing the world very different from our own. I would quibble, however, with the claim, also made in the film, that visual communication was regarded as more reliable than oral (the ‘ecstatic truth’ of an image, perhaps) – it seems presumptuous to make judgements on the predominance of the visual just because that’s all we have left from the cave (sound, of course, doesn’t survive; while certain patterns in song, music and non-written language may become traditions, tropes, repeated and passed down through generations, they are still subject to change and revision to far greater degree than solid visual marks). The Chauvet paintings, however astounding they might be, are merely traces; as if one had been left with the stage sets from a play, without the actors, the script, the director, the lighting, the audience – as if one entered this empty theatre and attempted to make judgements about what took place within. The indications, though, are that the Chauvet caves were the site of a kind of total artwork; they were a ritual space, a theatre-temple rather than an art gallery. For instance, a bear skull placed on an altar-like rock appears to have been surrounded with incense (maybe the perfumier sniffing the caves out isn’t so crazy, after all…); combine this with bone flutes and voices, and we have a fusion of ‘primitive’ light-show/shadow-play/magic lantern with ‘art’ (painting), smell and music. The attempt to privilege visual over oral, then, is not merely misguided, but part of the whole modern process of specialisation, tied to the division of labour: “As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Marx, ‘The German Ideology’)

Perhaps the cave artists were already part of the process towards specialisation, acting as part of a separated cult, an elite caste akin to William Blake’s hated priesthood– the cave was not inhabited by humans (there are no human bones inside, though there are plenty of bear skeletons (and bear scratches on the wall), but instead seems to have been a secret place, at a remove, hidden, separate – a place for rites, for cults (the production of sacred objects as a dangerous task – see the Dogon production of sacred statues away from the village) – art originating as a cultic activity, secret, magic, involving hidden knowledge (gnosis) – that which binds together the elite, or the unspoken/unspeakable backbone of the social community as a whole. In Herzog’s film, the circus performer turned scientist recalls an anecdote about an aborigine artist, who touches up an old cave painting whilst accompanied by an anthropologist. The anthropologist, curious, asks him what he’s painting, to which the response is ‘I don’t paint, the spirit does’ – this of course, part of the whole notion of the ‘muse’, of creative inspiration, of channelling something other than oneself. At the same time, one does not simply abandon oneself to chance, the willing servant of a god whose purpose one cannot divine but in which one must absolutely trust; one invokes a presence (animal, spirit) through imitating it, through actively embodying it. This might take place through sound (bearing in mind theories about the onomatopoeiac origins of speech and song) – sound as invocation, with the power to make things happen – not a representation but the thing itself – one can directly channel the voice of an animal, a spirit (shaman, medium). Does it follow that sound, then, offers a more unmediated access than visual art? Well, perhaps I’m reversing that visual/oral distinction unnecessarily, for it seems that the cave paintings play their own invocatory, creative role. The Chauvet walls are drawn on in long, sweeping outline – as is pointed out in the film, one animal, over six feet in length, has been sketched out with a single, stretching gesture. Here, once more, Blake springs to mind: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art.[…] Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it again before man or beast can exist.” (Blake, ‘A Descriptive Catalogue’) Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’ is depicted sitting in the sky with his hand stretched out, two lightning-like streaks emerging from his thumb and fingers, tracing out that originary line of creation, “the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements” which enables us “to distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox.” This is not simply the original creative action of a separated sky-god, but the work of ‘The Eternal Great Humanity Divine’ (man himself, in his spiritual being) which is put into practice every single day. The act of invention and execution is a single act (no mind/body separation here – creation is the almost instantaneous flash from brain to arm); drawing a line is a continually repeated act of creation, as is our perception. All our experience depends on our creating it, in every moment – to exist is to create – we create our existence. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Each perception…re-enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some elements of creative genius about it: in order that I recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath the familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree.” (MP, ‘Phenomenology of Perception’). Like the Australian songlines, which constantly re-enact the original moment of creation, the Chauvet paintings are not mere decoration, not mere ‘form’ into which ‘ideas’ are poured, but dramatizations, if you will, of the act of perception itself – creative acts, gestures that (once more) make something happen.

Both Blake (and, to some extent, Merleau-Ponty, with his desire to re-achieve an inalienable, “direct and primitive contact with the world, endowing that contact with a philosophical status”) were against a linear notion of time as always regular, always unfolding as a succession of points along a straight line; such thinking merely fits with the capitalist need to commodify time, to measure it in terms of pay and employment rather than in terms of human perception (or in terms of vast distances beyond the measure of human perception, and certainly beyond the reach of capital). For Blake, real value lies in the moment of epiphany, of creation, the minute particular, the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”; “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery/ Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years, / For in this Period the Poet’s work is Done: and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are conceiv’d in such a Period, / Within a moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.” (‘Milton’) Given this, the Chauvet caves, with their refusal to fit into any (art-)historical schema, any pre-ordained genre (animal portraiture? devotional image? totem? record of psychedelic experience?) and their almost unimaginable distance in time (and space, if we consider how recently they were re-discovered, and for how long they were sealed off by rockfall) prove an exemplary challenge to our neat notion of narrative; not that we can necessarily experience them with the immediacy of Merleau-Ponty’s “direct and primitive contact,” nor Blake’s “pulsation of the artery”, but that they do somehow stand outside measurable history (we can say that one drawing was executed several thousands of years after the one it overlaps, but can we really imagine, conceive of such distance except as a meaningless figure?). Twentieth-century humanity, with its eye constantly on both the future (the threat of ecological catastrophe; the need for ‘progress’ and technological development; the possibility of making more and more money; the measuring of political/imperial trends in a globalised world) and the past (constant conservative appeals to notions of empire and racial purity; a sense of generational change and loss in morals, fashions, ideas; the fetishization of historical images thought to stand for some heroic past era from which we have regressed (Churchill, the Blitz, Henry V)) loses a sense of the present moment which – we dangerously speculate – may have been much more immediate, much more accessible (because not really considered, simply acted upon without thought) by the artists of Chauvet. It’s that palimpsestic revision that does it – who now would think to draw over the Mona Lisa, for instance (and that’s only a few hundred years old) – the fetishization of historical art objects as untouchable, holy, the past as a foreign country, rather than as marks on a cave wall that exist in the present, no matter when they were originally lay down, and over which one re-inscribes another image. Herzog’s prompts us to go further, his suggestion that the Chauvet artists were somehow outside history, with no sense of the future, made explicit in John Berger’s concluding comments from his own, earlier, visit to the caves: “The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.” At the same time, it would not do to romanticise the paintings as some primitive art-ideal; life was undoubtedly ‘tough’ at a time when (Berger again), “the average life expectancy was 25”; furthermore, “the nomads were acutely aware of being a minority overwhelmingly outnumbered by animals. They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped. Beyond every horizon were more animals.” Life as a short flash, in which every moment is that much more vital for not being followed by an interminable succession of lengthening moments into the dreariness and inactivity of old age? (The myth that ‘the good die young’; stone age man as a tribe of Mozarts.) And a notion of co-existence with, rather than destructive dominance over nature (this belied, as with the ridiculous notion of the Mozart tribe, by the fact that one had to hunt to survive, that animals aren’t naturally disposed to be ‘nice’ to each other, and, above all, by the ferocious physical conditions which enveloped the planet – a glacial landscape of freezing temperatures, in which fire assumes a special, almost sacred meaning (the myth of Prometheus). This, of course, actually counts for much of the vitality of the cave art – fire and warmth inside a cave are that much more precious, and thus endowed with something more than mere theatrics; there is a sense of landscape, not merely as a pretty view one looks out upon (the landed aristocrat surveying his estate) but as something one is placed within, which one is a part of – something much more interior, a sense of being literally inside the earth. As much as possible, then, we should attempt to read the paintings in their historical dimension, from their physical circumstances, as much as a more mythic and metaphysical reading suggests itself; perhaps the two interpretations can go alongside each other, at least, until we invent time travel. So the paintings can be at once the scrabblings of a cold and hairy man/woman called ‘Ug’ and something akin to the founding myth/ act of origin we cannot name; akin to Heidegger’s “question [which] has today been forgotten” – ‘what is the meaning of Being?’ A question, an act, before records, across what Herzog calls an “abyss of time” – not to reduce the paintings to a Life magazine “oo, they were just like us” platitude, but neither, perhaps, to go as far as Herzog does in the film’s coda. Most critics seem to have left analysis at the door by this stage, and simply noted this concluding segment as a delightful example of Herzog’s wackiness (rather like the way they let the hack-work of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ off the hook because it had such self-consciously ‘crazy’ touches (lizards! Nicolas Cage! point-of-view shots! breakdancing souls!)). That’s perhaps slightly unfair, though, and in some ways the sequence clarifies the film’s entire view, beyond the restrained solemnity of tour-guides and overdone music and ten-minute pans round the cave walls; it’s as if Herzog can say, ‘at last! back to the unknowability and indifference and magnificence of nature! (this “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”which “I love against my better judgement”)’. So, the scene shifts further down the valley, to where (supposedly) a nuclear power plant has caused genetic mutations in crocodiles; cue footage of these small, albino creatures in a greenhouse, being followed above and below the water line by Herzog’s camera, overlaid with his speculative commentary about the alienness of other species; these crocodiles may look back at/ on us with the same confusion as we look back on the Chauvet artists, across an ‘abyss of time’. This “unfathomable depth of time” applies equally to the far distant past and to an imagined sci-fi future: “The film goes completely bonkers at that point, during the postscript. It's like we are entering pure science fiction fantasy. But it's not just for the sake of that fantasy, it has to do with our perception and the perception of the people at that time, 32,000 years ago. We cannot reconstruct it - we do not know. Of course, we can describe our perception, but what is going to happen in 20 generations from now? And how would albino crocodiles see it if they expand all the way to Chauvet Cave [laughs]? In fact, reality is much wilder than my science fiction fantasies.” The ‘abyss of time’ means that ancestry, then, is not a guarantee of stability or value; we wish to know it (hence our ceaseless wondering about the mysteries of the cave), romanticise it as a primitive, creative, originary period, and at the same time fear what it might reveal about us, the murder and hardship which exists just as much now as it did then (‘how far have we really come?’) and which existed just as much then as it does now (no backwards-utopianising to a more ‘innocent’ time (mankind’s childhood, as it were)). The reason this coda has much more power than the rest of the film’s mix of Discovery Channel/ National Geographic competency and selected moments of oddness is, perhaps, that it moves further from the straight documentary style into which Herzog had seemed to be uncharacteristically shoe-horned; now for ‘ecstatic truth’, now for fabrication in order to access some ‘deeper’ insight beyond the check-list of facts and figures. (Particularly given the fact that he appears to have made up the whole story about the crocodile mutation.) One would have thought that the entire subject of Chauvet would offer ample opportunity for this (odd that Herzog should fictionalised more about Gesauldo than about Chauvet), and the coda therefore makes the film that preceded it feel like something of a missed opportunity. Still, it’s a fascinating subject, one which raises all sorts of other considerations and provocations, and there are moments where Herzog nails this; perhaps best to view it as a one-off, rather than as part of a ‘corpus of works’ (that historicizing urge, again), enjoy it for what it is and reflect that, since you or I are unlikely to ever gain access to Chauvet, this may be our best opportunity to see those marks and shadows and recesses and contours for ourselves.

Where Now for the UK Anti-Cuts Movement?

2011-03-31T19:55:00.004+01:00

OK, so a lot to unpack from Saturday's TUC march/rally in London. Much of the subsequent online discussion, it seems, has centred, not on the rally itself, but on the aftermath, with the arrests of 145 UK Uncut members who'd staged a peaceful occupation of Fortnum and Mason. This seems to mark the moment at which 'softer' activists (i.e. those who are not experienced black bloc members, well-versed in outwitting the cops) encounter the true hypocrisy and opportunism of the police, their willingness to: (a) exploit a situation for maximum threatening effect (don't do this again, don't dare challenge things or disturb the political/social order, don't dare to cause even the slightest hint of 'disruption' beyond the usual managed routes - don't do these things, because if you do, we'll arrest you again, you'll have a criminal record for life which may mitigate against job opportunities, and we might rough you up a bit as well); and (b) to do this while maintaining the media advantage, which ignores the march itself to focus on the 'disgusting' activities of a 'violent minority'. Sample headline on Sky's Rolling News service: '500 anarchists are heading towards Oxford Street'. Sitting in a pub on that very street, we looked out of the window and wondered how anyone could possibly believe such nonsense. But then again, we had actually been on Oxford Street and on the main rally for the previous few hours, so it appeared obvious to us that we were just watching a desperate attempt to stitch together a false narrative from a few innocuous images (protestors in the streets; journalists running at a small line of cops with riots shields, make one of the cops flinch their shield slightly; a couple of hooded people smashing a window and an ATM). As the same footage was looped for the next five minutes, however, the hypnotic and suggestive effect of the false narrative became apparent; and anyone coming at this coverage ‘cold’ (i.e. with no knowledge of what had actually happened on the day apart from what Sky News was telling them) might plausibly buy into the story. And even though this was a particularly hysterical variation on the ‘peaceful march hijacked by violent minority’ line, one also saw such a stance coming through in the pages of ‘liberal’ papers like The Guardian; Millbank might have been fun, something of a journalistic coup for those close enough to capture it, and something which might prove to have symbolic capital later on (perhaps plastered over some gallery showing of ‘subversive’ or ‘rebellious’ images of protest, neutered and neutralised like a Che Guevara T-shirt) – but this, well, this is just a bit awkward. We like to go shopping on the high street on our weekends; so are you implying that we’re in with the bad guys? Tory HQ is one thing (it’s clear who the enemy is then), but BHS is a whole different matter…Considering complicity in this way is not something of which centre-leftists seem capable – thus the need to disguise any real debate about the use of direct action or disruptive tactics with a blanket dismissal of ‘violence’.

Of course, such coverage begs the question, since when is paint-balling a few buildings and attempting (rather unsuccessfully) to smash a few ATMs 'violent'? (And since when is such ‘violence’ considered more newsworthy than policemen wielding batons and dragging protestors to the ground? If half as much column space had been devoted to Alfie Meadows and Jody McIntyre as has been taken up by supposed leftists’ blanket condemnations of anarchists, then the police might actually start to worry about being held accountable for their actions.) This whole argument about destruction of property was one I discussed in my blogposts on last year's education protests, and I stand by my view that: (a) Far more 'violent' than breaking a few windows is the espousal of the exploitation and immiseration of all those not fortunate enough to have been born into wealth, or to be part of the capitalist buddies club; and just as violent, by implication, is to simply accept this as 'the way things have to be' (let's all tighten our belts (well, some of us will tighten our belts, some will just talk about it from our comfy seats of power), the market must be placated because it threw a little tantrum and caused some bother). (b) Sometimes, the 'legitimate', 'peaceful' means of protest are not enough; sometimes, you have to hit them (those in power) where it hurts, just as they hit those in whose interests they are supposed to govern (but manifestly regard as a doltish mass of benefit cheats, scroungers, immigrants and hooligan leftist who might even let them get away with absurd economic and social policy). They are clearly rattled by public expression of dissatisfaction, clearly rattled by the destruction of property - a visible, concrete, physical sign, an ACT that cannot be misinterpreted or 'spun' to mean something other than what it is; a manifest truth. As Rob Ray writes on libcom.org, a protest that simply stays within the white lines scares nobody:

“Tory MPs are not stupid sheep to be panicked or genuinely outraged by ITN throwing a "breaking news" strapline on the TV screen; they'll take note of the size of the march, its overall level of militancy and what it has to say (which is apparently "oh pwease don't be nasty, pweeeease" even though this approach manifestly didn't work in 2003 using three times the number of people against a supposedly more liberal Labour government which wasn't being directly pressured by the markets). In reality, if this is just a nice, pleasant walk-around, said MPs will almost certainly heave a huge sigh of relief and put those notes in the bin.”

I take Dan Hind's point that smashing things up can play directly into the hands of the cops: as he points out, undercover police instigators love encouraging this sort of behaviour, as it provides perfect material for the ‘violent minority’ media coverage.

“I support direct action. I was at the UK Uncut occupations in December, for example. But I am wary of photogenic attacks on shop windows precisely because they distract attention from what is a serious - potentially fatal - challenge to the Coalition.

In general I am very reluctant to adopt tactics that are actively encouraged by police agents. Peaceful civil disobedience and rational argument hold out our best hope of stopping the cuts and securing a wider transformation of the country.

The state wants to encourage violence because it can win a fight.

It cannot win the argument.

So, let's have an argument.”

Given this, one might feel that one is stuck between a rock and a hard place: a mass, peaceful demonstration of public opinion can be politely noted and then completely ignored (as per Iraq), while simply ‘smashing things up’ plays into the hands of those who wish to bring repressive tactics to bear on protestors, thus threatening peaceful protestors as well as those who want to take things further. I’m not convinced, though by Hind’s “[the state] cannot win the argument”; I’m not convinced that the current government wants to have an argument in the first place, or that they would be willing to have one in the second; and neither I am convinced that they give a flying fuck what anyone on the left of the political spectrum believes should be done in response to the financial crisis, or, indeed, about any ‘movement of the people’.

What am I advocating, then? Despite the impressive turn-out on Saturday, I remain sceptical about the TUC’s ability and willingness to organise a genuine resistance movement; it still seems to me that they will end up compromising with the Labour party leadership (as per Ed Milliband’s insipid headlining speech at the rally), hoping that the ConDems will shoot themselves in the foot and that we’ll be back to New Labour for the next election (which will suddenly seem like rather a good option after several years of Tory rule, much as we despised Labour’s right-ward turn under Blair and Brown). To which it could be said: but what do you really expect? Stop being so idealistic (unrealistic) and put your efforts behind something that can actually work, that can actually have some effect. Well, perhaps some people are fed up of the pressure to be all peaceful and unthreatening and 'reasonable', when something more angry and maybe, yes, 'violent', would be much more convincing. I don’t just mean paint-balling high-street shops and smashing ATMs, but strikes, sit-ins, occupations, street theatre, squats, ‘actions’; all these are visible, public measures which do not have to be governed or organised by a centralised, nationwide leadership. Given the extremity of the government's right-wing measures, calling for something as 'extreme' as a general strike or civil unrest is not unreasonable, and one feels it’s only because we’re in England (where the tradition of resistance and protest is either ‘underground’, glossed over in the official histories (the Luddites, Ranters, Diggers, Chartists, poets, artists), or becomes neutered by mainstream acceptance (punk’s (semi-)recuperation by the culture industry)) that something like a general strike seems so extreme, seems beyond the pale.

In the end, perhaps that’s the problem: we are too scared, too often; we are too timid, too afraid, when, perhaps, encouraging/ forcing the powers that be to play their hand, to step up repressive measures, might allow us (we, the opposition), to start winning the media battle, to make things go so far that even woolly liberals start braying in unmediated anger. Or perhaps we should stop focussing on media coverage so much and focus on scaring the shit out of the government through a movement full of spontaneous, unpredictable action as well as mass, organised protests such as Saturday’s; for while big rallies in London are all very well, London is not the only place in England – the cuts will be felt across the country, and mobilising support, moulding a network of interconnected pockets of resistance, seems like a more attractive option than simply relying on centralised union bureaucracy. The student protests were (I use the past tense, though I’m not suggesting the movement has died away; instead, it may align itself with the general anti-cuts outrage that will surely become more and more prevalent in the coming months) a loose coalition between students and supportive academics; when the NUS failed to take the lead they should have, despite organising the first big march, a much looser group of occupations and protests filled the gap left by an insufficient/non-existent centralised leadership. Millbank didn’t happen because Aaron Porter directed us toward it like a lollipop man; it happened because a general feeling seized a small and spontaneous crowd, and it suddenly seemed possible to take action rather than simply standing politely and watching some well-meaning anti-cuts videos. With general anti-cuts protest, the scope is clearly much wider, and a broader movement may have to be more organised; yet local, less centralised occupations, squats, etc, will still be vital as the main meat of the movement, the bricks in the wall for which central organisation is merely the cement. Those are a couple of dodgy metaphors; and the idea of wall is not fluid enough for what I mean to suggest: collectivised decision-making processes; workers’ councils; direct action; self-organisation; that which is organic, rather than circumscribed.

This is necessary because circumstances have changed, and the traditional leftist modes of resistance may not always prove appropriate. In particular, I’m thinking of union organisation; the history of trade unionism is indeed a vital one, but there is a sense that it is not always adequate to changing standards and practices in working life. For instance, say I have just left university, and cannot afford to do a post-grad course; so I sign on at the local job centre (where the workers tell me that their own jobs are unsafe, thus filling me with confidence), and eventually get a lowly office/admin job at a big financial firm. For all the disadvantages of old-style factory jobs, at least they offered a certain amount of job security, opportunities for collective organisation, a tradition of standing up to the bosses, going on strike, etc; with the new, information-based job market, organised around job agencies and temporary contracts, it is that much harder to organise oneself into a body that can negotiate with the bosses to ensure fair pay and working conditions. Each individual is in competition with at least 200 others from similar backgrounds and with similar skills; they are all scrapping over one crappy little six-month temporary contract, after which, if they’re lucky, they may get re-employed by the same company for another six-month period. Of course, everyone hates the fluorescent lighting, the inane and anal little do’s and don’ts, the senseless office rules for whose instigation no one claims responsibility and which no one seems able to change; but, if you’re not careful, if you complain too much or to the wrong person or at the wrong time, then you can be dismissed as if you were simply a fly, idly swatted away with the back of the hand on a summer’s day. Everyone, then, is encouraged to toe the line, to mutter and grumble a little (but only when no one’s looking), to chat about the X factor or Heat magazine, and to get their head down over their desks. ‘Solidarity’ exists only as a tamed and regulated ‘banter’ that disguises deep-set anxieties about getting fired for doing something ‘inappropriate’ or because the boss just doesn’t take a shine to you; and traditions of unionism and campaigning for one’s rights as a worker have been virtually erased. You are an individual, trying to get by, and living for the weekend; screw everyone else. Elements of this fit with what Nina Power’s analysis of ‘the feminization of labour’ in ‘One-Dimensional Woman’: the sort of secretarial, admin and call-centre work that used to be done by women has now been ‘generously’ extended so that men can do it as well. This is not a fine sign of gender equality, but an extension of old means of oppression/ keeping women down, across the board – a kind of reverse equality, in which we don’t make give some people rights equal to those enjoyed by others, but give everyone the same rights to inequality.

So, let’s take our prototypical mid-twenties graduate working on a temporary contract in an anonymous admin job (soon to become our prototypical mid-twenties non-graduate (who wanted to go to university but was frightened off by the rising cost of tuition fees, so squandered themselves on the job-centre scrap and a life of very English ‘quiet desperation’)). Depending on their level of political awareness, they make take trade unionism to stand for a distinguished and important history of workers’ organisation; but it will remain just that, a history, and one to which they have no access as a present means of support. Public sector workers may be in a more favourable position vis-à-vis unions – though they are obviously in dire straits in general terms – but the growing generation of educated/aware but financially badly-off admin workers cannot be ignored. And it is for those such as them (I’m sure there are many other thumbnail social analyses one could do for similar categories) that new methods of resistance and organisation have to be found, away from union bureaucracy and centralised TUC initiatives (remember that these people may not be able to afford the extortionate train fare to London in the first place). This will require people taking the initiative, taking matters into their own hands, rather than waiting for the next big march in London; it may involve hours of tedium, apparent failure, and miserable, poorly-attended rallies in the rain outside the local shopping centre. It will also require creativity, a desire and a willingness to disrupt and go beyond social norms, without simply retreating into an ‘underground’ of those who are ‘hip’, those who are ‘in the know’. Can it be done? Of course. Will it? Let’s see what happens…

'Dogville' (2003)

2011-03-23T17:54:00.007Z

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany
Music: Antonio Vivaldi, David Bowie
Director: Lars Von Trier
Screenplay: Lars Von Trier
Director of Photography: Anthony Dod Mantle

"And they asked me which heads should fall, and the harbour fell quiet as I answered 'All'."

(Berlot Brecht, trans. Marc Blitzstein, 'Pirate Jenny')

Internet summaries of the film's plot are plentiful, but I'll add my own re-cap to start things off in any case. On the run from gangsters, Grace (Nicole Kidman) is taken in by the citizens of tiny, dead-end town Dogville, in return for doing (paid) manual tasks. After a honeymoon period (capped by her guest-of-honour status at a Fourth of July meal), the town’s kindness turns to distrust and abuse, as they shackle her, repeatedly rape her, and force her to work as a slave. Eventually, they call her gangster father to come and take her off their hands; he does, but, with his daughter’s permission, also massacres the whole town in the process, thus contributing yet another of Von Trier's head-scratching 'happy endings'. So that, in broad outline, is what happens during the film's three hours: talking points and moments of controversy aplenty, as you can imagine. Let's begin our exmination of the film proper, then, with what has been perhaps the most controversial of the many controversial issues dogging Von Trier throughout his career: namely, his attitude to women, his supposed misogyny. Well, the way Grace bears her sufferings does uncomfortably play into the stereotypes of woman as suffering saint (not only because she refuses to give up her virginity, but because she persists in doing so (rebuffing Thomas Edison Jr.’s advances) even as it is repeatedly taken from her by all the other male inhabitants of the town; at once virgin and whore, have your cake and eat it). And her turn to avenging angel at the end is no better: it seems that the only option she has is to be a victim and to rely on 'daddy' to over-react to the bully when the time comes. (Yes, she shoots Edison Jr. herself, but only because daddy's gangster thugs give her the ‘manpower’ to do that). Consider briefly: what if the victim figure in the film were not a white woman at all, but a man of colour? Or even a white man? Would the things that happen to a female character be allowed to happen to a man? Or can they happen as they do only because Von Trier is following in a long tradition of exploiting and even glamourising female suffering, albeit with a twist of apparent knowing irony? It's unlikely, for example, that a male character would be repeatedly raped with a look of winsome resignation on their face (and then there's the whole S&M aspect of Kidman's collar (joined as it is with her fur-lined coat)). In addition, the sexual violence takes place in a way that doesn't really feel violent at all - like much of what happens in the film, it seems somehow to be veiled with a certain knowingness, a caustic and dispassionate knowningness. It's almost as if we, the viewers, are supposed to be in on some sort of joke, of which rape is a part. Von Trier, then, does not really intend to convey a wider point about the status/treatment of women in American society, or any society – not that he's above trying to make (quite heavy-handed) political points, just that he's got a blind-spot in his view of women which doesn't enable him to give even the remotest justification for their exploitation.

OK, so what about the Christian angle? Well, it would be a mistake to view ‘Dogville’ as too overt or direct a Christian allegory – not only because Von Trier hasn't emphasized that interpretation in his interviews, but because the Christian elements in his films seem to me more window-dressing than thought-through theological tussle. This is hardly a surprise given statements such as: “I don't know if I'm all that Catholic really. I'm probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen.” Like everything else that his perplexed interviewers scribble down, this is designed to shock, without necessarily having a specific programme behind it – if he contradicts himself, so much the better; who said that he should be the conscience of society? (“I also don't want you to think I'm a moralist. I want you to think that I'm cruel, hard and manly” is another eminently quotable line from the same occasion, in which he also proclaimed: “I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.”) Still, even with all that deliberate contradiction and provocation taken into account, the statement about Catholicism does capture something about the way his films unfold – hinting at, even blaring in your face, a certain type of symbolism, or allegorical reading, or horrific/absurd shock-image (remember the talking fox in ‘Antichrist’? or those more famous moments of sexual violence in the same film?), but never connecting these fragments into an cohesive overall picture. (In that sense, one thinks of Jodorowsky’s mystical-psychedelic kaleidoscope of symbols in ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’.) He's good – very good, in fact – at general effects (in ‘Dogville’, the combination of John Hurt’s snide faux-story-book narration, the bare Brechtian backdrops, subtle jump-cuts within scenes adding a kind of fluid discontinuity to their flow, ranging camera-movements around the studio set giving an efficient sense of the community as pervasive, invasive, looking in, looking on, spying, complicit), less so on sorting through the specific points he wants to hammer home (the credit sequence at the end, in which David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans' accompanies photos of poor US citizens, both white and black, is caught between being wilfully ambiguous and wilfully didactic – it ends up awkwardly placed between the two). Nonetheless, that Christian element is undoubtedly there: Grace (yes, a loaded name) as female Christ figure, come to earth to be taken into our community, her good nature abused, persecuted; yet maintaining an attitude of acceptance despite all the suffering. (The shedding of tears, like Christ's shedding of tears on the cross, happens not because of his own pain but because of how far others have stooped – well, ok, both because of others’ sin and because it’s actually quite painful to be crucified.) But here comes the twist away from the traditional resolution of the Christian story; 'Dogville' doesn't end with the redemptive, sacrificial death of the lone victim, but switches to the rather different moral territory of the revenge climax. Grace does not utter the words, 'forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do', given that, in this case, 'Father' is mob boss James Caan. No, after a chat in his car, she comes to believe that they know very well what they do, the moral hypocrites; they are unredeemable, and therefore it’s only right to have them all killed as payback. So that is what happens. Grace's attempt to bear suffering with, yes, grace, and to always give people the benefit of the doubt, to think the best of them, comes a-cropper, and the only alternative is just to exterminate the scum, the dogs. In that sense, we're really meant to go along with Caan's speech in the car about not trying to understand rapists or murderers, just blowing their fucking heads off. Social explanations – pah! – who needs those?; just kill them all. Here is where Von Trier's social sense falls short, because, although he wants to present a vision of nasty small-town America and its intolerance, he himself has an intolerance for poor Americans that doesn't just condemn their racism or ignorance or whatever else he wants to attribute to them, but refuses to listen to any justification for it, refuses to think, for example, about the way that poor whites were set against poor blacks as a distraction against their own exploitation by governing classes (as documented in Howard Zinn's 'People's History of The United States'). Dogville is such an isolated community – at the edge of the wilderness, the limits of what is acceptable – that it could be considered a rogue, extreme or distorted version of small-town America, with all of its flaws and none of its virtues; trouble is, it's this very isolation that prevents it from being very effective as the wider allegory that Von Trier wants it to be. For all their dialogue, then, the townsfolk end up not all that far from the nightmare-cartoon-rapist hillbillies of 'Deliverance'.

This enables the revenge aspect to seem more uncomplicated; yes, OK, the gangsters shoot kids and a baby, but we'd only seen the baby as a rocking cradle prop anyway, the only kid with dialogue was a nasty brat who's getting what he deserved, and Kidman spares Moses the dog at the end anyway (‘Gee, I do hate it when animals are killed, don't you? I can watch a hundred people blasted away quite happily, but I blub like a baby if one animal is harmed.’) I had a similar problem with the Coen's ‘True Grit', a film which was much more about efficient story telling and nice period-atmosphere touches than about grand narratives, allegorical dimensions, but still…Like the original novel and the John Wayne film, it rendered its villains ill-drawn, not exactly pantomime baddies, but not exactly characters anywhere near as fully-drawn as the three protagonists either. We end up accepting revenge as 'just the way it was back then', revelling in it, going along gleefully with the simple law of 'an eye for an eye'. That's partially to do with the whole western genre, which so often turns on that element – though of course the notion that the hero must lose this bitterness and forego their revenge is also a part of that tradition. (Even if they do manage to have their cake and eat it when the antagonist tries to kill them, so that they've no choice but to fire back. Yes, you did kill them, even though you’d foresworn revenge; but, don’t worry, your conscience may remain clear; you only killed them ’cos you had to, not because you were hunting them down for any selfish motives.) Often, a pretended moral grapple with the whole notion of revenge is simply window-dressing for the violent denouement we knew was coming – at least the spaghetti westerns were less hypocritical than that in their straightforward revenge narratives. Even 'Unforgiven', one of the most thoughtfully considered views of violence and revenge clichés within the genre, turns on its head at the last minute – all the talk and demonstration of the griminess of violence, its ingloriousness, the toll it takes on lives, is swept aside for a western gothic shoot-em-up, Eastwood then riding, almost literally, into the sunset (not when he leaves the town, heading into the portentous raging storm, but over the final credits, as he stands silhouetted by his wife's grave). I’ve always wondered: was this Eastwood playing on the audience's demand for revenge, only to reveal its disgusting reality? Or was it something more unresolved, simply a re-tread of Pale Rider’s atmospherics, a cloak of style disguising a sudden lack of substance? The difference in 'Dogville' is that we're not in a western, the bloody revenge shoot-out is not what we've been waiting for/ expecting/ dreading/ enjoying in equal measure (à la any number of Peckinpah movies, ‘Straw Dogs’ (a western in all but setting) in particular). So is Von Trier lulling us into a false sense of security? – not so much that we don’t expect the harmlessly eccentric townsfolk to turn nasty, and are suitably shocked when they do, but that we expect the process of the innocent saint's abuse to lead to her martyr's death (perhaps then leading the townsfolk a realisation of what they've done, or to another hypocritical moral justification revealing their essential meanness). Instead, not only are we given the revenge we weren't expecting, but we can enjoy it all the more for its unexpectedness (urging Kidman on as she ponders whether or not to spare the townsfolk). Is Von Trier doing a Haneke (Funny Games)? Well, not really, he hasn't thought it through that much – essentially, what I get from it all is: small-town hick, dirt-poor America is nasty and mean, full of people grasping for what little money and advantage that can be extorted from their desperate situation, and from people in that situation even worse off than themselves (e.g. immigrants, which Kidman’s character isn’t exactly (in fact, she comes from a far wealthier milieu than the small-town hicks and pretenders into whose midst she is cast), but for whom she could easily be taken as a metaphor). Not only this, but said abuse is ‘backed up’ by all sorts of sentimental/sanctimonious cod-philosophical/religious justification. Such moral hypocrisy means that the aforementioned small-town, dirt-poor America thoroughly deserves what’s coming to it. Chickens coming home to roost / the glamour of gangster violence (all 1930s cars, hats and tommy guns; if the small-town milieu is America is seen/filtered through the perspective of stage plays (Brecht, ‘Our Town’), this gangster element is America as seen through the movies) / this glamorous violence as an efficient solution? I wouldn’t have a problem with this if it was so obviously within the moral context of a movie – Tarantino’s ‘Inglourius Basterds’ isn’t pretending to be anything other than a ludicrous fantasy, the ultimate WW2 entertainment – but Von Trier seems to be consciously trying for a wider moral high-ground (particularly given the fact that he decided to make his ‘US trilogy’ at around the time the whole business of American intervention in Iraq was rearing its head), and thus forces himself into a corner, where provoking liberal do-gooders turns dangerously close to espousing view such as the following: “Rapists and murderers may be the victims according to you, but I call them dogs and if they're lapping up their own vomit the only way to stop them is with the lash.” So “Shoot them and burn down the town.” These are the words given to the mobster father, but Von Trier himself seems to endorse them: “I liked the idea that the father, this hard-nosed gangster who's not particularly likeable, brings a sort of truth to the story. He has a healthy understanding of people. His daughter wants to be good to everyone and only causes damage.” We know that VT delights in making provocative statements (“Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background. But I'm really more of a Nazi” (he’s referring to his genetic background, in case you’re wondering); still, how much slack can you cut? How many pinches of salt can you...etc. Maybe it’s the Zizek syndrome: because you’re expected to be a good leftist, you constantly try to provoke your own audience (who lap it up and love it – treat me wrong, Slavoj, treat me wrong), by making points about cowardly liberals and honest fascists, and, consequently, you end up valorising racist working-class violence against gypsies. Not that you really believe all that, but your own status as a provocateur has driven you to a position where you can’t back down, where everything that you say has to be controversial, even when that position of constant controversy becomes little more than a stylistic tic which often misses the mark (that well-worn strategy: ‘this well-known fact is often trumpeted; but does it not mean the opposite of what it is commonly thought to be saying?’ recurs throughout Zizek’s writing, but, especially in the recent work, one often ends up thinking, ‘well, no, it doesn’t. You’re just saying that for rhetorical effect.’)

But, following that off-topic wander, I’ll leave it to someone else to lay down a better final word on ‘Dogville’ than I could:

“The sequence in Dogville that inspires the strongest reaction is the closing credit sequence, which is accompanied by a montage of photographs of American poverty and misery — Depression victims immortalized by Dorothea Lange, dead bodies lying in the street, miserable inner-city images of hungry children and unsteady adults. (It’s jauntily scored to David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” [Interpolation: I’m not sure that ‘jauntiness’ of the song isn’t belied by its lyrics, actually, which one might read as linking into what’s just happened in the film, bringing out an analysis of female exploitation – on those grounds, though, I think Bowie’s analysis in three minutes is actually more thoroughgoing than Von Trier’s in three hours…] Looking at these faces right after you’ve spent three hours seeing America as it looks through von Trier’s eyes has the most extraordinary effect: whatever feelings of respect or sympathy or righteous anger these faces might have inspired before, now they look like the denizens of Dogville, and it would be natural to make the next leap and conclude that wherever they are in life, they’ve gotten what they deserve. (The conclusion of Dogville, like that of Unforgiven, is likely to make you feel that way even as your brain dutifully recognizes that you’re meant to see the horror in it.)”

I think that gets it spot-on.

Common - Nag Champa

2011-03-12T00:16:00.007Z

I've been listening to this track a lot over the past few weeks and thought I might as well pop down a few thoughts; not anything structured, just a brief (or not so brief) glance through some lines which seem to me particularly to stand out, and attendant reflections which may be sparked off by them. Having only come to ‘Nag Champa’ recently, I can't help but view the song through several lenses – that of Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's orchestral version on the Suite for Ma Dukes album, that of the original track sampled by Dilla for the song ('Morning Order', from an obscure 1980 duo album by Hugh Hopper and keyboard player Alan Gowen), and that of the mix (available on youtube) which pairs Common's original vocals with Atwood-Ferguson's orchestral arrangement.

Given that Hopper and Dilla both died in recent years, the track takes on a poignancy it wouldn't have previously had – a poignancy, a nostalgic, sentimental quality which suffuses the Atwood-Ferguson album and gives it its emotional weight (for instance, listen to the way that the eight-minute version of 'Stakes is High' becomes near-epic, stretched out in length and intensity not just by the way that it takes a full three minutes for the song proper to begin, but by the weight of Dilla’s memory, by the crowd who have come to the concert to pay him homage, by the self-consciously ‘classic’ status of it all – treading the right side of that fine line between simple rehash/ retread and true tribute, true memorial). The downside of this is the sense that Dilla's death has made it impossible to criticise his work – ‘the good die young’, etc – and he's become a virtual saint within the hip-hop community, as if invoking his name is a placeholder for talking about 'quality' hip-hop, music that doesn't go along with the 'guns/ hoes/ bling' or cheesy naffness of mainstream rap. Of course, his own attitudes with relation to women, or at least, certain attitudes that appear to be expressed in lyrics (though I'm aware that over-identification of the voice in the song with the voice of the singer in all aspects of their life, outside the music, is something which can land us in hot water; and which is a problem with much hip-hop misunderstanding, perhaps) were not exactly exemplary. And in this song we get Common’s own casual homophobic toss-off: “You couldn't hang if you was a poster/
Posin like a bitch for exposure/ It's rumours of gay MC's, just don't come around me wit it / You still rockin hickies, don't let me find out he did it.” One might think here of Amiri Baraka’s almost obsessive use of the word 'faggot' (just look through any sample of his mid 60s-mid 70s work), compared to which Common’s “gay MCs” seems fairly tame – and yet the seemingly milder slur 'gay' in fact hurts more, because, unlike ‘faggot’, the word is not in itself an insult, merely a description; it only becomes a slur through intention. Baraka seemed to pour a whole lifetime of rage and despair and fire into the word ‘faggot’, not only on behalf of himself but on account of the racial and political injustice of sixties America, and on account of his own disillusion with the quietism and 'drop-out' attitude of the bohemian artists with whom he had previously associated – a lifetime that did not, of course justify him using the word, and did not disguise the fact that his homophobia was genuine (along with anti-semitic, anti-italian, anti-irish and anti-female tirades) – but a lifetime that seems trivialised by Common's casual, off-hand dismissal of what might more normally be called “wack MCs” as “gay MCs” (particularly given the fact that ‘Nag Champa’ comes a few decades after ‘Black Art’ et al, and might be expected to know better). It appears that C has since modified his views, most notably in the song 'Between You, Me and Liberation', in which he describes his shock at a close friend's coming out; but even so, there's still some way to go – one might, for example, reasonably take offence at the way he likens his friend's revelation to the revelation that his girlfriend has been raped by father and to the loss of a relative to cancer. Still, I suppose, it’s a start.

OK, so far, so unsavoury: but over to Dilla again, his voice on the song’s chorus like a ghost, fuzzed up and hazed over with echo, not 'amplified' by electronic treatments but made strange, other, honeyed-haunting. Yet there are also moments where the untreated, original recording of the voice itself sounds through – fragile, not ‘weak’ exactly, but not 'strong' either (in the sense that Dilla is not normally a 'singer'); it has a delicate quality to it, accentuating and counter-pointing the underlying, under-running sample, emphasising its melodic qualities as Common emphasises its rhythmic qualities during the verses.

And that brings us to the rap itself, Common really entering the 'flow' (yes, that word) of things, entering into things proper after an initial psyching up: "Yeah baby boy...in the place...to be". The place/space established by setting up a particular mood, vibe; nag champa as a device for mood alteration – ashram incense, fragrance, Dylan and the Dead using it as part of their concert rituals (a complete sensual experience - sound, sight, smell, touch (vibration)) – also, "When I was working on Like Water for Chocolate, I would go to Detroit like two to three times a month. When we would go to Jay Dee's basement we would always burn nag champa incense, that's where I got that title from"; so "the place to be" is the place where the music was made (the physical place that Common was in when he recorded the words of that intro), but also the place where you the audience will listen, using this as make-out music or chill-out music or just simply as music). Into the rap: dividing up three words to emphasise the final "-ting" at the end (like a modified version of the 'ping' sounded at the end of a line when writing on an old-fashioned typewriter) – "Excite-ting, enlight-ning, invite-ting" - an invocation, invitation in, a slight brag, a self-description, a calling card, but also a kind of manifesto: music and lyrics that will seek both earthly excitement and spiritual enlightenment (teaching), and will embrace an audience to whose concerns they speak, with which they chime. "I'm writin' shit that I feel, [I'm not a faker, I'm not just doing for the cash, this is not just a pose] Raps are Black Steel In the Hour of commotion, the motion of Com": here a nod to Public Enemy, and perhaps the song's best wordplay, free associated from the PE reference, as '[Black Steel in the Hour of] Chaos' becomes its synonym 'Commotion', and the motion of that word moves forward into Common's own name (alias), so that this becomes *his* (finest) hour ("in the hour of the motion of Com"), *his* movement, *his* flow; moving with the times, moving in them, even against them (against the commercialisation or 'corruption' of hip-hop); moving with others (co-motion) - and now moving to the next line, rhythm in the music dictating rhythm in the speech and also shifts (movements) in the meaning of the words, hip-hop's alliance of beats and speech leading to free associations/connections that reach beyond themselves, beyond initial intention or mere propositional statement, despite the fact that, on first listen, raps can sound very straight-up, accessible on first hearing (‘what you hear is what you get’). There's something more subtle at work here, however – allegiance to rhythm and rhyme almost working against allegiance to 'sense': "Raps are Black Steel In the Hour of commotion, the motion of Com/ Is like that of a ocean, devotion cuz I'm / The Earth, Wind, and Fire of hip hop" - from Public Enemy (musical forebears, inspirations) to the speaker himself (Com) to movement/(e)motion in metaphorical comparison to oceans and elements - which brings us back to musical forebears, beyond rap this time to Earth Wind and Fire, connections sliding smoothly and suggesting something exciting about a mind's movement, a mind's play. The rest of the verse is more straightforward - a nice routine on the ‘common’ "time is money" catchphrase ("time is money/ The mind is funny, how it's spent on getting it") - and then we're into the chorus (already discussed) for the first time, the words of which are, I now notice, again about *movement*.

New verse: “this never-ending battle to please” – the difficulties of expectation, now Common’s moved “from bashful to asshole to international”; play on ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ – “Niggas, magazine writers, MCs/ Who request hot shit, I freeze/ And tell em where I was rose, we always said cold” [the need for a scoop, the pressures of being a ‘spokesman’ or merely the pressure to give a juicy tit-bit of gossip deflected back to talking about the ‘hood’, the origin, ‘where I come from’, grew up, a suggestion of allergy (rose cold/rose fever)]; a few lines on, another nod to influences, predecessors, forebears (“You not gon' respect self, at least respect the heritage”), with the attendant responsibilities of being a major artist –(“Affect the lives, the spread of wealth and the merit is/ I realize what I portray day to day, I gotta carry this”) – a well-placed line break “I gotta carry this/ And beats” [as well as the somewhat grandiose notion of being a spokesman, the realisation that rapping skilfully – not simply speaking polemics over beats, but allowing word and music to reciprocally mould each other – something physical, mental, at this moment, now – “And beats, rhymes and life is where the marriage is”]; now onto religion – “Picked up a fallen angel on the path that I MC / Familiar voice, come to find out the angel was me” (this is, for Marc L. Hill, “a Common who is deeply spiritual but no longer looking to the sky for help”; and the couplet reminds me of Saul Williams’s ‘Wine’, which, coincidentally, I wrote about around this time last year: “So never question who I am, God knows/ And I know God personally/ In fact he lets me call him me / In fact he lets me call him me.”)

What else? Next verse: “My refrigerator poetry's magnetic like ultra” – poetry as down-to-earth, domestic, about life and its niceties, as well as all the grandiose boasts and metaphors and claims; poetry (rap) as moveable, alterable, not fixed but as spoken utterance, existent in the moment of speaking rather than on the page; words as physical things, a kit of objects which can be moved around, re-arranged. (It would be interesting, in fact, to know Common’s writing process, given the way the lyrics’ flow is very much determined by the particular beat they ride.) “Got my eyes on the tiger, eyes on the prize” – wonder about the shift from ‘of’ to ‘on’ – he’s watching the tiger, rather than watching with the tiger’s eyes, as per Rocky III… - “Eyes on the thighs of Mary J. Blige” – hmm, well, the succession of long assonant “I’s” match the “-ting” triad from earlier in the song in terms of delivery, at least. “My verse depth is that of a baby's first step / Or the old lady who died and the nurse wept” – voice as coming from a spectrum of experience, infancy to age, joy to sorrow, the poet as speaking from a collective standpoint, speaking from beyond themselves. Parallels between the spoken and written, words once more as physical objects– “I flow like cursive writing” – water (remember “the motion of Com / Is like that of a ocean”), ink, liquid. And finally, the repeated “We be that, we be that / Afrodisiac, disiac” – does this reveal the whole song as a sexual boast? …as another instance of African-American male pride, those boasts, from the 60s and onward, of sexual potency, which at once played on and fell victim to the old racist notion of the black male rapist/stud – that Black Arts notion of the strong, virile Blackman against the weak white ‘faggot’? But we note that the subtitle to the entire song is, in fact, “Afrodisiac for the world” – we move out to a global scope (‘Common’ ground (noting, on the way, that Common’s alias at once suggests his ‘realness’, the material poverty of his origins, and implies his uncommonness, the fact that he stands out from the crowd)), and we think on the way that hip-hop’s use of sampling increasingly traverses borders, cultures, musical and geographical, in a manner akin to, say, Ghedalia Tazartes – think, for example, of Mos Def’s ‘The Ecstatic,’ or Nas and Damian Marley’s recent collaboration – the way that it elides, glides, jars, brings together, smashes and mashes and mixes up – Madlib’s production on ‘Madvillainy’ (from Sun Ra to Steve Reich’s ‘Come Out’ (itself an early example of ‘sampling’/looping) to 40s educational programme and superhero parody) – Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad – the kaleidoscope of samples on the Beastie Boy’s ‘Paul’s Boutique’...No wonder the record companies started cracking down on hip-hop’s poly-vocal/-phonic/-morphous appropriation, its free treatment of authorship, its opening up and out (“invitin you and yours to my openness”…

Links:

Full Lyrics to ‘Nag Champa’
Marc L. Hill - Common, 'Like Water for Chocolate' (review)
Eric S. - Homophobia and Indie Rap
'Suite for Ma Dukes' EP

Eartrip 6 - Out Now!

2011-03-10T01:14:00.002Z

là-bas

The Nut Cracker

2011-02-20T19:00:00.006Z

Wandelweiser/ Fluxus : Concept As Score
Holywell Music Room, Oxford, 17.02.2011

Angharad Davies (violin) Rhodri Davies (electronic harp, nutcracker, paper) Tim Parkinson (piano) / The SET Ensemble: Dominic Lash (bass, nutcracker, paper), David Stent (electric guitar, paper), Bruno Guastalla (cello, nutcracker, paper), Paul Whitty (accordion, nutcracker, paper), Patrick Farmer (drum, acoustic guitar, nutcracker), Sarah Hughes (autoharp, nutcracker)

After attending this gig, I was away for a few days, and thus haven’t had get a chance to write it up until now; perhaps that's a good thing, as it's allowed my thoughts to settle, even if I might have lost some of the more specific details of my immediate impressions. The slight time lag has also enabled to research some of the conceptual pieces that were performed on the night, tracking down the instructions/scores (although, in the end, most of the 'information' needed came across in the performances – it's not as if there was some magical 'key' that allows one to unlock the puzzling 'mystery' of the pieces, and they seem fairly transparent/accessible in any case). And finally, those extra few days have allowed me to read Richard Pinnell's review of the gig (posted at 'The Watchful Ear'). As with his review of the Michael Pisaro 'Mind is Moving' event, we both appear to have noticed similar details and moments in the music, so it might seem rather pointless for me to post my take as well. In fact, though, I'd like to draw out elements of Richard’s analysis into some broader argumentative threads which will, hopefully, prove useful ground for debate.

That will take us down some side-tracks, however, so I’ll begin by examining the concert itself. Part of a three-day festival organized by the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, it paired Fluxus scores from the 60s with modern-day conceptual pieces by composers associated with the Wandelweiser group. This marked only the second time that the full version of the SET Ensemble had performed in a public location, having previously concentrated on private house concerts; on this occasion their ranks were further swelled by the addition of Rhodri and Angharad Davies and Tim Parkinson. Consequently, there was a fairly sizeable ensemble on stage (as well as the smaller configurations within this); nonetheless, things remained quiet throughout, and the ‘loudest’ part of the evening – a composition for violin and piano by Tim Parkinson – occupied nothing more than the decibel levels of an average classical concert.

There’s a particular kind of tension about enforcing restraint within larger groups, and, at times, one senses that a kind of competition is taking place, to see not who can play hardest, fastest, longest, loudest, but who can play least, quietest, last. This became particularly apparent in the more conceptual pieces; the first item on the programme, a new composition by Radu Malfatti, focused more on a collective ensemble sound, taking full advantage of the range of instrumental textures available. Strings merged with e-bowed guitar and electronic harp, Tim Parkinson’s strummed strings down at the lower end of the piano adding an undulating, palpable background shimmer that was almost as much sensed at the edge of perception as heard outright. Given the title (‘Heikou’), I thought we might have some arrangement that reflected the structure of haiku poetry; as it was, the relation of title to composition remained more cryptic, drones alternating with silences in four barely movements differentiated by little other than the musicians turning the pages in their scores. It was a nice-sounding piece, if conceptually rather too well-worn to make much of an impression; nonetheless, it functioned well as an introduction, establishing a particular atmosphere and necessitating a particular mode of listening.

Following this came the first of the evening’s Fluxus performances, Bengt af Klintberg’s ‘Orange Event Number 24’. Less reverential, more consciously absurd than the Malfatti, it nonetheless took place within the same aesthetic, perhaps due to the score’s focus on silence: “Stay for a long time in a room in which there is silence. Breathe silently, move silently if you choose. At a time that you choose yourself, crack a nut.” In this realization, the performers moved off the stage to come and sit amongst and near the audience. Having taken up various individual positions (Whitty standing in the passage between main floor and doorway; Lash and Hughes on opposite sides of the stage; Davies higher up in the hall; etc), they then remained in poses of concentration and stillness, each eventually taking up the nutcracker they had placed beside them and fulfilling the score’s instructions. Here we saw the competitive aspect for the first time: who would be the last to ‘crack’, who could remain the longest time without making a sound? One sensed also that this was a kind of social experiment, testing the politeness of the audience (a prominent cough at the start of the Malfatti had been loudly shhh’d), as well as the tendency for serious contemplation to descend into giggles and absurdity. It’s that fine line, between the respectful and the ridiculous, that perhaps differentiates Wandelweiser from Fluxus, which has room for the former, but tends towards the latter (and towards the one-liner) – thus, it felt more appropriate to sneak a smile and a side-ways glance during this, and the following George Brecht piece, than it did during the Wandelweiser works. Nonetheless, the room did not descend into giggles, and the silence was maintained, as it turned out, for a further ten minutes, as Rhodri Davies and Lash took to the stage to perform Sarah Hughes’ ‘for Rilke’. Lash’s impressive ability to stand stock-still while holding his bass has been refined through the several SET Ensemble performances of the last year or so; Davies was similarly immobile for the most part, although he did occasionally glance across at his duo partner, as if questioning who should make the first sonic move. Eventually, he let slip a single e-bowed tone, sustained and rising in volume (but not too much) for several minutes; Lash, meanwhile, plucked a smaller sound from his bass that echoed in the naturally reverberant, high-ceiling’d acoustic of the Holywell before vanishing again, as if enveloped by the higher-pitched drone. I guess there’s a certain fragility to these kind of conceptual pieces that depends very much on the particular circumstances of the performance; nonetheless, and though I’m not sure for precisely what reasons, this one came off well.

One other segment before the interval; this being in some ways, and despite appearances, the most conventionally ‘musical’ item of the night, as well as one of the most visually arresting and jokily amusing. George Brecht’s ‘for a drummer (fluxusversion 2’) reads: “Drum with sticks over a leaking feather pillow, making the feathers escape the pillow.” Patrick Farmer placed a small table in the middle of the floor; on the table was the pillow, and in the pillow were two vertical rips, out of which peaked handfuls of feathers. The setup was completed by the pair of drumsticks in Farmer’s hands, with which he proceeded to unleash a virtuoso drumming display, keeping up fast rhythms while also striving to strike the pillow at points which would cause the maximum possible number of feathers to escape onto the floor. The sonic qualities of a pillow are, as one might expect, rather muffled and dead, but the feathers billowed out nicely, and one got enough of a sense of the kind of patterns that were being played for satisfactory listening. This was a piece that didn’t outstay its welcome; soon the pillow was emptied, falling upended on the floor to reveal the copy of The Guardian newspaper which had been protecting the wooden table underneath. Upon reflection, it had been a well-balanced first half, offsetting the seriousness of the Malfatti and Hughes with the more playful elements of the 60s Fluxus scores – and the Brecht was a nicely ‘upbeat’ way to finish it.

In total, this was a fairly lengthy concert – a good 90 minutes, at least; not too much of a surprise, then, to see the auditorium empty by more than half during the intermission. Tim Parkinson’s piece for violin and piano, played by the composer and his wife, Angharad Davies, seemed less broadly conceptual, more thoroughly through-composed, than anything else we’d heard on the evening; presumably, however, it was based on some kind of specific (mathematical?) system. Figures that sounded something like scales and exercises were played in unison and alternation by both instruments, with lengthier solo episodes for violin taking on a slightly more expansive melodic edge. On the whole, the music was played with a rather dry quality that seemed to amount to a deliberate avoidance of emotional connotations, even if its tonality was more conventional than the post-12-tone language of much modern classical music. A few minutes of this were attractive enough, but as similar patterns and figures kept recurring, it felt as if space was being filled without much new being said; for me, the piece could have done with being half the length, and it lacked the improvisational edge of the more open conceptual pieces with which it shared the programme. During Ben Patterson’s ‘Paper Piece’, I benefited from being able to peek at the score as it was being performed; thus, a random spectacle of grave-looking men tearing up strips of paper one by one was transformed into an interplay between system and interpretation, and a study of group dynamics. Each of the five performers is given a specific number of pieces of newspaper, tissue paper, card, etc; they then select items from a list of different ways of tearing and manipulating the paper, mark these on their sheets, and then go through the list at their individual chosen pace. The consequence of this freedom was that, while four of the musicians finished at roughly the same time, Bruno Guastalla suddenly found himself alone, with half his pile to complete. He continued, however, at the same pace, apparently unworried by suddenly being the centre of attention, which made for a rather dignified ending. Hard to judge the piece in terms of its sonic quality, though this was probably as wide a variety of sounds as is possible to get from sheets of paper; nonetheless, if one took it on terms of spectacle and ‘performance’ as a general category, it was, again, a nicely-done piece.

The final item on the programme: Stephan Thut’s ‘many 1-4’. I believe this is a variation on an earlier text score, entitled ‘some’: the musicians can choose any two combinations of ‘x’ and ‘y’, where x=sound and y=noise, playing these at ‘some’ point over an unspecified period. The SET ensemble took this to mean very long silences, pin-pricked with tiny sounds (although there were some more sustained moments, such as Paul Whitty’s held accordion note and Angharad Davies’ slow sliding of her violin bow along the wooden surface of her instrument).

I’m not going to comment on the work as such, which was, as it turns out, rather overshadowed by the environmental sounds that took place behind/within/alongside it; instead, it’s here that I’d like to take up a point made by Richard Pinnell in relation to this particular realization of the piece. In particular, I’d like to address the contrast he draws between beautiful, minimal sounds and silence, and the crass, noisy, brutal world outside.

“It wasn’t that external sounds were present as much as precisely which external sounds. It seemed as if this little group of musicians, and the few of us watching were a little bubble of calm and consideration in a world full of ugly, vociferous crudeness. It wasn’t too difficult to bring myself to bear on the contributions of the musicians and try and zone out the intrusions, but for a while at least this fifteen minute or so experience seemed to sum up so much of what I feel about modern life.”

This notion of art as cocoon or contrast to the nasty outside world is one I have some problems with, for I believe that art is more implicated and caught within the webs and structures of that world than is often acknowledged; indeed, one might ask what, precisely, it is that this world is ‘outside’ (outside us in our little nooks and crannies and cubby-holes?), and argue that there is no world ‘outside’ that world in which music, and art, is created, in which we have our social being – art does not have access to ‘eternal’ truths in some supernatural, a-social sense (though of course it does have changing meanings over time).

After the student protests of late 2010, I mulled over some ideas about how art might tie in with the spirit of resistance and excitement that briefly flared during those months (and which is currently flaring, far more brightly, in Egypt and across the Arab world), concluding that one might view the separate studio and performance spaces in which 'avant-garde art' happens as laboratories, sites for experiment in which new modes and ways of being and relating and creating and making and sharing can be explored, can be tested out, away from the strictures and routines of the world of work and routine and the triumph of neo-liberalism. In that sense, my view would seem to tie in with Richard's; at the same time (and I think this ties in with some of the points I was beginning to articulate in my previous post on the Pisaro gig), I'm a little worried by the way in which critics and fans of the Wandelweiser group, and related tendencies in free improvisation/composition, seem at times to espouse something approaching dangerously close to an ivory-tower aesthetic in some of their statements. I half-wonder if this is because much of the impetus behind Wandelweiser et al comes from the classical world, rather than the jazz lineage of, for want of a better term, European Free Improvisation. Of course, the historical lineage is not that simple, as I've argued before; furthermore, Wandelweiser is still quite a small movement, relatively speaking, both in terms of widespread critical attention and in terms of size of venues, audiences, numbers of record-buyers, etc. Nonetheless, free improv, with its background in the back-rooms of pubs, its working-class, entertainment-industry-schooled pioneers (Derek Bailey), and its connections to African-American musical traditions and all the political and racial connotations that brings, seems to me to have a 'grit' to it that the newer, post-Cageian, silence-focused musics do not. At times they can seem almost prissy, which is certainly not the case with Cage's own work: think of the uproarious Musicircus, or the connections to Fluxus and its anarchic political visions, or the babble and chatter of the radio music. (For that reason, bringing together Wandelweiser and Fluxus and showing what they have in common, as the concert under consideration did, was a particularly valuable manoeuvre. And yet, and yet…)

I admire the way that much recent criticism (Richard's in particular) exhibits a determination to be honest about the role played by one's personal preferences in making critical judgments. This does not mean a simple 'I like record X because it like sine tones, and I don't like record Y because I don't like free jazz'; instead, an attempt is made to grasp and understand one's preferences, even as one does not simply pretend they do not exist and play some role in one's listening. Neither does one pretend to a standard of objectivity which is actually just personal preference smuggled in under an ideological or taste-making guise (I'm thinking here of the sort of borderline racist jazz criticism analyzed by LeRoi Jones in 'Jazz and the White Critic'). At the same time, there is a danger that such honesty can at times shade over into ideological judgments which might do with some further examination. While the inclusion of silence would seem to follow from Cage's 4'33", along with the attendant focus on environmental, 'accidental' and found sounds as a valid and valuable part of the musical experience (which renders 4'33" as much a piece of 'noise music' as a 'silent piece'), it seems that a grammar, or vocabulary has developed in the past fifteen years or so, as to precisely which extraneous sounds are allowed in silences. Permitted human sounds, or sounds associated with human activity are sirens, the muffled rumble of urban traffic, creaking chairs, the occasional sounds of movement to let us know that the audience is still alive and breathing; permitted natural sounds are things like rain or hail or wind. This is a space oddly poised between being a separated, sealed-off, isolation chamber in which beautiful sounds and silences can unfold in peace, and being somewhere in which the door is left half open to let certain 'ambient' sounds trickle in, something of the 'outside world' to emerge (though nothing to frighten the horses).

Silence, as much as it exists at all (remember Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber? (“until I die there will be sounds”)), and as it is used in music, contains a dialectic. It at once forces a focus on specific, physical details of being human - breathing, bodily rhythm - and demands a reduction, or exclusion, of the more social and noisier elements of living. It is a shared experience for the devoted few, creating, to some extent, a communal space in which relations that are social as much as musical can be explored and created, but also excluding those people who lack the ‘sophistication’ to appreciate the virtues of quiet, sustained drones and ten-minute motionless pauses. There is always a danger point in artistic, cultural, political movements, in which the initial rush of creation and discovery and innovation risks stalling, going no further, becoming just as entrenched as that which it sought to replace; and thus, though I enjoyed Thursday's concert, finding it valuable, and inspiring, and exciting in many respects, I also find myself wary of certain aspects of Wandelweiser that I feel may be too easily overlooked in the almost overwhelmingly positive coverage that this music has been receiving. Returning to Richard’s point, I would have to admit that I, too, would have preferred the final piece if it had not been accompanied throughout by drunken pub sing-alongs. But at the same time I find myself thinking of music as a valuably social, communal thing in which collective singing, familiar melody, the sense of camaraderie and shared experience, are an essential and vital part of folk traditions; yes, of course, that feeling can be co-opted by undesirable elements, and yes, manufactured pop songs might not be quite the same thing as the oral inheritance of anonymous ballads and tales, but I’m pretty sure we weren’t listening to an EDL or BNP rally next-door – it was just a pub sing-along. In any case, how were the ‘singers’ to know that a roomful of 30 people or so were busily trying to listen to long silences, just across the road? Such a question may seem trivial; yet it forces us to ask one that's far more difficult: namely, 'just where exactly is it that this music is situated?', and that’s a hard nut to crack.

“Get Thee to a Nunnery”: Michael Pisaro's ‘Mind is Moving’ at The Nunnery (Bow Arts Centre), London, 12/02/11

2011-02-13T17:12:00.004Z

Jennifer Allum (violin), Rebecca Dixon (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), Henri Växby (guitar), Jamie Coleman (trumpet), Tim Parkinson (voice).

Michael Pisaro’s star has been rising recently – at least, his work has become a frequent subject of discussion within improv circles, and there’s been an increase in the frequency with which his works are performed (albeit in small and sparsely-attended venues). What this means in relation to the usual connotations of ‘rising stars’ is harder to judge; and, indeed, one of the main points of interest with Pisaro, and other composers and performers associated with the Wandelweiser group, is the fact that they are hard to place within pre-determined narratives and positions. Thus, Radu Malfatti comes from a background playing ‘high-energy’ free jazz, while Pisaro assumes the role of ‘academic composer’ (he teaches at CalArts); but it doesn’t seem strange to discuss their works in the same sentence. Of course, this closeness has always existed (AMM, Musica Elettronica Viva and Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza come to mind), contra the journalistic method of building up and stratifying divisions which are not nearly as important to the practitioners of the music themselves as to critics and ‘taste-makers’. Nonetheless, there is a definite sense that something new is afoot, given the way that Malfatti, Pisaro et al straddle clear-cut lines between ‘modern classical composition’ and ‘free improvisation’, finding common aesthetic ground within both camps.

The ‘Mind is Moving’ series is actually a fairly early work, dating from 1996, and it’s interesting to come to it, in a new ensemble ‘arrangement’, on the back of the ‘hype’ of the past couple of years. At the same time, it’s hard to disentangle serious critical consideration from what might seem almost petty concerns relating to the physical circumstances of attending a continuous three-hour concert performance on a British winter’s evening.

Performances like these come to seem like endurance tests, not just because of the extreme length, but because of the details of the music itself, which, rather than ‘moving forward’, alternates between non-developmental drones, staccato plucks and bursts, and lengthy silences, or near-silences. Furthermore, the fact that what we were actually witnessing was the simultaneous performance of several separate solo works added to the ‘severity’ of the aesthetic: just as a particularly gorgeous swelling concord between several different instruments was reached, one voice would suddenly drop out, introducing an abrupt change in texture. This was not music that one could easily relax into, as can be the case with more ‘blissed-out’ drone material, but neither was it an exuberant, chaotic Fluxus happening. Despite the softness and the quietness, the simultaneity was something jagged and uncompromising, to which the listener had to adjust themselves –to move their minds to the movement of the music. Once this happens, once that shift occurs and everything clicks into place, it’s amazing – but it may take a slightly uncomfortable half-hour or more for that to happen.

Yesterday’s performance, as I experienced it, fell into something like three sections, one for each hour. The first contained more ‘ensemble’ playing – overlapping drones in concord and gentle discord, the preponderance of stringed instruments giving something of the feel of La Monte Young’s early Trio for Strings. The second saw the piece start to unravel, to spread and splay out, to become more sparse – and at the same time, the audience began to grow more fidgety, people moving about and leaving or arriving, the ritual of creaking wooden floorboards and the shuffling retrieval of bags from under seats coming to take on the feel, almost, of a kind of slow-motion dance, an integral part of the piece. Ross Lambert’s uncorking of the lid of his thermos flask, and subsequent pouring of small portions of steaming coffee, seemed deliberate, even staged, as if the music was there to accompany a kind of updated, low-key tea ceremony. In some ways this was welcome, imbuing the audience with a sense of participation, heightening the sense of occasion and the social/ ritualistic function of the music; but it was also the section I enjoyed the least, finding it hard to get into the lengthening silences, irritation at the way these silences were filled with the distant echo of voices and various other creaks and thuds, visual disjunct between the sounds I was hearing and the garish, Pop-Arty exhibition pieces on the walls and floor (a pink canvas with silver lettering that read ‘my subconscious drove me’; a giant free-standing cut-out decorated with the Stars and Stripes), and, most importantly (perhaps leading to all of the above), physical discomfort from sitting for hours in a hard plastic chair as the room got steadily colder. This stage is probably inevitable when one is faced with a concert ‘marathon’ (I’ve no idea how audience and performers coped with the 12-hour Wandelweiser show up in Glasgow last month) – and it was, arguably, the necessary preamble to the final section on the night, filled with long, long silences in which the audience finally breathed in unison with the performers, even the traffic outside dying away to just a murmur. Eyes closed; bass plucks giving a body to various drones, only to echo out again, leaving the initial sound modified, yet the same; guitar strings maintaining and sustaining their sounds as they were struck with a vibrating HB pencil; a cello tone held for a beautiful age, harmonics ringing and singing and mourning and keening; Jamie Coleman’s trumpet now muted, lending a plaintive jazz inflection (through single notes and timbre rather than through any specifically jazz phrases); rougher violin bow scrape; spoken words, sounded single and separate, sometimes coalescing into a story or poem, or a suggestion of such – names – hints at phrases – ‘historicism’, ‘angel’, ‘Louis’ – often audible only as acoustic presence, as a half-heard signifier without the signified; vocality as only semi-linguistic expression, semantic in a musical sense.

Applause followed quickly on the end of the piece, and everyone had to hurry out of the building (some people probably wanted to get away as soon as they could in any case); one almost felt that it would have been more appropriate simply to end in silence and drift away more quietly, rather than snapping out of that mood which the room had shared during that final hour or so. I’ve no idea how the event would come out on a recording (I noticed a Zoom tucked away behind a chair, so presumably some sort of permanent document does exist); to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have much patience listening back on a home stereo, but it felt important to make the step up from the hour-long live Wandelweiser performances I’d heard previously, to one of three times the length.

That’s the main body of the report out of the way, I suppose, but there are still a few more questions, raised by the concert, which I’d like to consider before concluding. In his liner notes to the CD release of ‘Mind is Moving I’ (as played by Pisaro himself on guitar), Jürg Frey notes that, apart from the ‘regular’ guitar notes themselves, "in this music other things quite simply turn up: like the occasional whistling or soft scraping of the strings; not effects, but pure matters of course. Perhaps there is here the faintest reminiscence of the image of a folk singer, who whistles along with his guitar playing, and uses the noises to clarify the rhythm." For me, that kind of idiomatic register wasn’t really present in the realisation of the work that I heard yesterday, and what struck me about the whistling was the fact that it was part of the written score: the notation of accident, or, if not precisely of accident, of material that might normally be considered ‘incidental’ to the ‘proper musical substance’, the ‘meat’ of a piece. One might say that there are two levels to the score: first, the notated material, which, though it will vary according to the musicians’ control in playing – for example, how well they can sustain a held forty-second tone on trumpet – remains broadly the same, set up, as it is, within certain, fairly strict parameters; and secondly, the material that arises from the physical circumstances of the performance location. This latter element may only emerge at certain, relatively brief moments (and can be edited out entirely during studio recordings); nonetheless, it can prove important. During yesterday’s performance, for example, there were plenty of low volume sections in which the score actually took a back seat to the environment accidentals around it. Some of the very quiet sounds that peppered the near-silent portions of the collective realisation (short, pp or ppp single notes) were barely louder than the ‘incidental’ sounds which invariably fill such silences in live performances of Wandelweiser material (muffled traffic roar, people’s chairs and clothes creaking and rustling, their stomachs rumbling, their throats clearing), and one might argue that the (notated) whistling had, at times, less of a presence than audience member Eddie Prévost’s rhythmic rubbing-together of his hands to keep them warm. Prévost is, of course, a musician, and perhaps this hand-rubbing (which occurred several times throughout the concert) was a kind of cheeky musical contribution, smuggled into the space on the sly. After all, the lesson we’ve learned from Cage’s 4’33” is that all the material, sonic and otherwise, that is present within the performing space, is part of that particular interpretation of the piece. Of course, there are ‘undesirables’ which one might want to filter out (the excessive coughing that marks concerts of classical music during any moment of quiet, for example) – and yet, perhaps, the attitude towards this has remained somewhat uncritical. For every moment of coincidental magic (rain on a resonant roof, a strategically-placed police siren) there are numerous other longueurs, in which the typical sounds of an urban environment come to seem clichés of the music, despite the fact that they all come from ‘outside’ the control of the performers.

Frey, once more, seems to disagree: "Many pieces created today are written for specific places or opportunities (whether for the concert hall or a special performance), and then fulfill the function intended for them in that place. However, in a piece like mind is moving (I) the prevailing impression is that the piece itself must first create the site where it can sound[…]The piece[…]creates, all by itself, over the course of its long resounding, its own site: a place where it can Jive." Maybe this is true when referring to a recording, but it hardly seems realistic when one considers the typical circumstances of a live performance – and, indeed, even the circumstances of listening back to a recording (where does one listen? in a comfortable arm-chair with noise-reducing headphones? on a walkman in a crowded street? in the background while surfing the internet?). There is no such thing as the ‘pure’ work, only something that exists in the world, which it modifies and is modified by. Perhaps, then, it would make more sense to come to a synthesis of the two positions: what occurs is not exactly the creation of a new site (a bloody-minded imposition on a previously-existing space), nor is it a situation in which the music is placed helplessly at the whims of environmental accident. Instead, it is a play, a dialogue, an argument or collaboration between the space and the music that takes place within it. And while I’m a little uncomfortable with the way in which experimental work like this gets sequestered away into the pristine, cloistered space of the white-walled art-gallery and arts venue, I must admit that the Nunnery proved very much conducive to such spatial exploration.

Cecil Taylor – Burning Poles

2011-01-31T16:44:00.008Z

Mystic Fire Video 76240 (VHS), 1991)

Recorded at National Video Industries, NYC

1. Poles [10:20]
2. The Silence of Trees [30:50]
3. For (1st Part) [7:10]

Cecil Taylor (piano)
William Parker (bass)
Tony Oxley (drums)
André Martinez (drums; percussion)

Cecil Taylor’s 1987 poetry record ‘Chinamapas’ (still a document that requires further investigation on the part of literary, as well as musical, scholars) begins with the lines: “Angle of incidence / Being matter ignited.” Taylor’s sibilant stress on the dying, expelled breath at the end of the third word invites one to read a pun on ‘incidence’ and ‘incidents’, referring at once to the ‘action-packed’ density of the music – its delirious surfeit of events (incidents) – and to the occasion and extent of those events (incidence) – the place/ space where things happen, the angle into which one fits and from which one views the world in a particular way. The technical meaning of the phrase “angle of incidence” is “a measure of deviation of something from ‘straight on’ ”, and we might see this is as an indication of Taylor’s trajectory away from (or parallel to) the history and tradition of ‘straight-ahead’ jazz (and also, in his adoption of a distinctly camp aesthetic, his improvised-composed queering/ querying of the sexualities of jazz); also, of the way that the ‘straight line’ of his overall musical system allows for a myriad of variations, deviations, digressions, alternatives; the one at harmony with the many, the individual with the group. (We think here of that often-used group name, ‘The Cecil Taylor Unit’: ‘unit’ meaning unit of measurement – time, length, breadth; ‘unit’ meaning part of a whole; and ‘unit’ meaning ‘unity’, a group of individuals merging to form one group entity.) That phrase, “angle of incidence,” now rolls into the next line, which completes it or adds to it; but, like the musical phrases Taylor plays on the piano, it also has its own, independent existence, not necessarily directly dependent on what has preceded it. Thus, we can read the first word of “being matter ignited” as a noun, ‘being’ and ‘matter’ fusing into a kind of Joyceian compound stressing the physicality of existence, the inseparability of the spirit; the essence, the essential ‘being’ of an individual and their ‘matter’ – their body, their atomic structure, their bones and blood and breath. Perhaps such a reading is deliberately willful, capricious – though in line, I would argue, with Cecil’s own poetic practice – if we return to the original context of the poem, we find, of course, that “being-matter ignited” is actually “being matter ignited,” a line referring to the “angle of incidence.” But the word ‘ignited’ could arguably refer equally well to ‘being-matter’ as to the ‘angle of incidence’, both being ignited, set aflame – impassioned, torched off by the creative spark, Promethean, generating heat/ sweat through physical exertion, playing ‘hot’ as Louis Armstrong did, ‘burning’ as in the jazz slang for a player who’s really gone ‘into’ the music; ‘burning’ as in ‘Fire Music’ or even ‘Great Balls of Fire.’

In any case, the ‘being’ and ‘matter’ of ‘Burning Poles’ (another fire reference) certainly has its fair share of sparks and flames; that same ignition that set off the ‘Hard Driving Jazz’ of Taylor’s much earlier collaboration with Coltrane; that same illumination that Taylor has always cast back on his audience, allowing them, through his dedicated and exhaustive examination of self, to see themselves as much as they see him. ‘Poles’ is a film document of early-90s Cecil, available only on VHS, with no talking heads, interview segments, or ‘contextualisation’, and instead a good slab of pure performance footage, seemingly shot in a TV studio, with the players lit against a totally black backdrop. The material seems to have been edited in some way (was more filmed and then discarded?): an opening piece for poetry and percussion (Taylor's typical introductory tactic since the late 70s) gives way to the performance which makes up the bulk of the video, seemingly shot in the same studio but with Taylor sporting a different outfit, and the closing 'encore' goes back to the initial session. As a result, there’s a somewhat truncated feel to proceedings, though the film as a whole still lasts for almost an hour. No matter, what we have is nonetheless some meaty material that provides a fine opportunity to observe Taylor's technique, his physical approach to the piano, first hand. The music comes from the era associated in Taylor's discography with the mammoth box set of recordings from his 1988 Berlin residency, released on FMP; it was there that he first played with Tony Oxley, who in the following twenty or so years, has proved to be one of his most frequent collaborators, and clearly loves the sparks thrown out by Taylor's fleet-fingered pianism. In performance, his upper body stays quite still, his eyes remaining focused on the drumkit while his arms swing round it almost casually, producing a sweeping wash on the cymbals, or accentuating the leader's fiercely rhythmic attack with metallic interjections and clattery, herky-jerky rhythms of his own. When he does look up, catching Taylor's eye (both men momentarily playing by touch and locking each other's gaze), the pleasure he gets from being in such a context is clearly visible. There's a real twinkle in his eyes and a smile on his face; he looks as if he might burst into laughing at the sheer joy and exuberance and energy of all that sound just pouring out all around him.

The other members of the group – William Parker, who makes up the final third of Taylor's 'Feel Trio', a 90s mainstay - and André (credited here by his middle name, Henry) Martinez, might almost seem to be overshadowed by such a dynamic relationship. But it's worth listening closely, in particular, to Parker's melodic shadowing of Cecil (a technique also used by Dominic Duval on the more recent duo CD ‘The Last Dance’ (and here)): the way he picks up on and parallels, but does not quite directly imitate, Taylor's trademark 'licks', those melodic figures, 'cells' or 'units', that have formed an ever-present, yet fluid compositional element in almost all of the pianist's improvisations during the latter third of his career. Martinez, who the camera virtually ignores (all we see of him is a hat and sunglasses, peaking out from behind the raised lid of the Bosendorfer), surely contributes to the dense propulsive percussive barrage behind Cecil, though it's hard to separate his contributions from Oxley's. He's most visible in the opening poetry section, which he introduces by alternately striking a gong and some chimes, to eerie and rather striking effect. Though Taylor's 'recitation' is, as ever, somewhat off-mic (and here the words are rendered almost entirely inaudible), it can be enjoyed nonetheless for its sound qualities: squawking, scratching, rasping, almost bird-like, well complemented by Parker's own semi-sung backing (or humming) chorus.

Some of the film's most striking visual effects occur in this section too: Taylor's dance movements seem to resemble a kind of kinetic sculpture, as he raises an arm and a leg and stands poised (posed) on one foot, while declaiming off a sheet of hand-written paper stashed inside the body of the Bosendorfer, or holding a mallet between thumb and forefinger, ready to strike and scrape the piano strings in a manner that actualizes his frequently-cited description of the instrument as '88 tuned drums.' The camera-work is fairly unfussy, cuts between the musicians remaining unobtrusive and not piling on too many distracting visual rhythms counter to the flow of the sonic interaction. Most often, it’s Taylor who occupies the frame; there are some nice close-ups of his fingers on the keyboard, and we notice the way his hands turn into sharp, jabbing prongs during those infamous dissonant runs from the top-end down, the two strongest fingers of each hand doing the hard work while the others curl up for a moment of temporary respite. Here we might also recall the title of Taylor's first duo encounter with Oxley, 'Leaf Palm Hand', and note the way that, at times, Taylor looses the tight muscular control which forms the basis for his extreme virtuosic style, instead simply letting his fingers slip and slide across the keys in rippling, downward runs, or banging out fortissimo clusters with his palms. Also present are those signature Taylor 'licks', which can by now be said to constitute a kind of rhythmic thinking hard-wired into his brain: just as certain poets become such masters of their craft that they can think in verse, their thought emerging through and in metrical form rather than existing separately from it, so Taylor's specific harmonic and rhythmic tics mark a total absorption in, and control over, the formal qualities of his music. Though there are suggestions of the melancholy minor-key romanticism which peppers the solo recordings in particular, things are generally kept at a fast, high-octane pace throughout, any suggestions of a pause or hiatus quickly dispelled by a single note strum from Parker or another tap of the cymbals from Oxley. Things never quite reach the peaks of the late ’70s Unit, where performances would last for over two hours and the music would reach such a peak of information density and total commitment of energy that it seemed to erase linear time in favour of an endless, ecstatic, hyper-kinetic present: a kind of eternity in music created, not from the stasis and peace that the word 'eternity' might suggest, but from pushing things to the limit of mental and physical possibility in a process filled, packed, crammed with action. But then again, despite the absence of any horn players, the music created on 'Burning Poles' is about as far from the conventions of the jazz 'piano trio' as it's possible to get, and that's not entirely due to the presence of two drummers. Over the years Cecil has somehow managed to transform into a full band or even an orchestra in himself: he takes care of the bass end of the music, with those punched-out figures right down at the bottom end of the Bosendorfer (what he's called his 'James Brown shit'); the rhythmic/percussive side (in everything he plays); the harmonic middle-ground; and the top-end usually occupied by the horns. When you add other players on top of that, there is the danger of an overly dense and muddy texture, but what is particularly amazing is how rarely this happens: in fact, the only occasion I can think of is the twenty-first century big band performance with the Sound Vision orchestra, which entered the sort of free-jazz territory exemplified by Alan Silva's 'The Seasons' or 'Luna Surface'; and, by contrast, the solo work, as it's developed and coalesced and crystallized over the years, has become more luminous and clear and straightforwardly beautiful than ever. The same clarity applies here, with busyness in detail and speed of execution matched by the ability to listen and respond with sympathy and understanding (but not timidity, which the music could not countenance).

In some ways, it’s hard to make a final judgment or assessment on the music presented on ‘Burning Poles’; Cecil, who, early in his career, bemoaned the narrow- and simple-minded criteria of the white jazz critics of the day, has subsequently succeeded in creating such an imposing body of work that it is near impossible to digest, analyze and absorb is output in any completely systematic way. When each performance contains enough material to last about ten releases from anyone else, one’s hard put to compare and contrast things too much: you simply have to let things wash over you, focusing in on particularly striking details and familiar touching posts as anchors and absorbing everything else by osmosis. In addition, Cecil’s style has become more and more firmly established as a unique, inseparable imprint, a form of thought that flows throughout everything he plays. One cannot imagine him ever recording as a sideman; everything has to take place on his own terms, a rare place and one that he’s earned with strenuous effort over a period of half a century – more. As a result, anyone who plays with him has to fit into his world; not since Jimmy Lyons has anyone, with the exception of Derek Bailey, been able to claim a near-equal share of a piece’s overall conception and sound (and Lyons was, in a sense, transmitting Cecil’s ideas to the rest of the band himself – think of those luxuriant melodic ‘heads’ on ‘3 Phasis’ and the 1978 ‘Cecil Taylor Unit’ recording). That said, you still need a hell of a lot of technique and instant understanding to be able to enter the vortex that is a Taylor performance – while Taylor is his own best interpreter, so absorbed in his own musical language that it might almost be said to emerge from him involuntarily, automatically, other musicians must adapt to his system from a position of relative ignorance, putting into practice a quick-thinking improvisational mindset that can challenge and provoke the best from the pianist without compromising or getting in the way of said system. Thus, while Taylor is pretty much a given – we know roughly what to expect, in terms of characteristic patterns, licks, ebbs and flows (though the multiple re-arrangements and permutations within this overall picture still contain boundless possibilities of change, transformation, delight and surprise) – his ‘sidemen’ can make the difference between simply a good performance and a great one, one to stand up alongside ‘One Too Many Salty Swift’, ‘Conquistador’, ‘Dark to Themselves’, and all those other classics. There’s no questioning that Oxley is a remarkably sympathetic and inspiring collaborator – his expanded kit and loose but firm approach form an ideal complement to Taylor’s late style, just as Max Roach’s more directly melodic, jazz-based playing sat well with the fire of the ’70s and ’80s Cecil – and Parker has proved adaptable to pretty much any context in his packed career. Nonetheless, ‘Burning Poles’ perhaps lacks the cutting-edge, telepathic interplay demonstrated on the contemporary box-set ‘Two T’s for a Lovely T’, where The Feel Trio really got to grips with their particular aesthetic, their particular dynamic, during a week-long residency at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Maybe it’s just proof that, when it comes to music of such scale and scope and grandeur, more really is more: 56 minutes just doesn’t do Taylor justice. Whatever the case, ‘Poles’ is an interesting, if not entirely essential document (though it’s hard to know what exactly ‘essential’ means when it comes to CT, as many collectors and followers of his work over the years could no doubt also tell you). Historically, one might argue that it’s of importance for the way it tracks the collaboration with Parker and, especially, Oxley, and also for shedding some light on André Martinez’ role in the Cecil saga (Martinez was with Taylor for ten years, though he only appears on two officially-released recordings). But in the end, I suppose one has to say that, if you’ve got far enough into the man’s work to read about an obscure document like this, you’ll probably want to check out the video regardless. For even if it is just – to quote ‘Chinampas’ once more– “one-sixtieth of [the] luminous intensity” of Taylor’s output, that still renders it luminous indeed.

Michael Pisaro - Fields Have Ears

2011-01-08T18:04:00.006Z

Label: Another Timbre
Release Date: November 2010
Tracklist: Fields Have Ears 1; Fade; Fields Have Ears 4
Personnel: Philip Thomas: piano (all tracks); on ‘Fields Have Ears 4’, with Patrick Farmer: natural objects; Sarah Hughes: zither; Dominic Lash: double bass + members of the Edges Ensemble – Julian Brooks: laptop; Stephen Chase: conical blow horn; Richard Glover: slide whistle; Johnny Herbert: spring drum; Ben Isaacs: trumpet; Joseph Kudirka: cymbal; Bob Lockwood: melodica; Scott McLaughlin: cello; Liz Nicholas: frog guero; Hannah Sherry: clarinet

This was the first disc of the ‘Silence and After’ series to which I listened, and it proved so compelling that I chose not to play any of the others until I’d really dug (into) it, acclimatised myself to it, let it form a part of my listening habits for the next few weeks at least. Perhaps I didn’t pay it as much close attention as I’d convinced myself I had, for I actually still find it quite hard to write about; but perhaps, also, the fact that this music can resist analysis after being lived with for a certain period tells you more than any lengthy critical spiel would have.

In any case, what we have here are three compositions by Pisaro (I’m assuming that the first two, at least, are fully notated, though the final, ensemble piece, would seem to allow more space for a certain amount of improvisation, within certain, fairly strict parameters, especially given that it’s credited as a ‘realisation’ of the original work). ‘Fields Have Ears 1’ is for piano and tape (a fairly sparse field recording which features birds, the occasional distant rumble of a passing plane, and the hiss of the recording device). One might say that the tape functions in much the same way that silence does on the other two pieces – i.e. as the actual substance of much of the piece, often seeming to take precedence over any notes that are played. (I’m reminded of Pisaro’s comments in the liner notes to last year’s Terry Jennings/John Cage release, ‘Lost Daylight’, along the lines that even the sounds in Jennings’ piano pieces have silences in them.) What piano we do hear reminds me, a little, of the way that Jennings’ work emerges from European serialism and the La Monte Young/ Cageian turn to Oriental philosophy with what one might call a softer side – being unafraid to use consonant, ‘pretty’-sounding chords. As I noted in a previous review of the Pisaro/Taku Sugimoto duo album on erstwhile, this is a risky policy to adopt – the shock of the pretty in an avant-garde context can wear off into mere gloopiness if not done exactly right – but the note combinations Pisaro asks for on these works are actually less up-front in their prettiness than Jennings’, particularly given the way that they’re strung out between such long silences.

‘Fade’, a work that is by now ten years old, is more immediately stark: the pianist plays a repeated (pedall’d) note, slowly, before pausing and playing a repetition of a different note, pausing again, playing another note, and so on. There’s a kind of lag here that’s implied in the title – not in the sense of “echoes, dying, dying, dying”, but as something vaguer, a slight blurring at the edges, repetition of the note not so much emphasising it as enclosing it in a kind of haze (a consciousness emerging from the use of delay effects that’s been enabled by electronics). I’d concur with Yuko Zama, who writes that, “in Pisaro’s piano pieces, the composer and performer’s personal voices are not on the centre stage” [1]; but this does not make the piece in any way ‘mechanical’, ‘cold’, ‘impersonal’, etc: rather, we approach an egolessness that is at the heart of much post-AMM ideology, and that has something akin to the communal approach which western classical music forgot about for a couple of centuries, but which the rest of the world managed to retain and partially teach us back once we began to realise our mistake. I’m not saying that Pisaro’s music really has make in common with any of these communal musics – in terms of sound it’s very much part of a particular western lineage (the piano being the ultimate symbol of western classical music, even) – but it does approach similar insights from a different angle, particularly on this disc’s third track.

‘Fields Have Ears 4’, the most recent piece, expands things right out, to include an ensemble of fourteen players (in which Thomas’ piano is the most prominent and recognisable sound), but it manages the feat of making the large group sound incredibly delicate and small. Here we have exhalations, indentations, modifications of silence; slight change, but no ‘development’ as such. And yet something is changed; as the ensemble musically breathe together, as they repeat the process of unison sounds followed by silences, those sounds and those silences start to change, to shift. Whilst one is first conscious of Thomas’ chiming chords – a kind of early signal at the start of the sounding sections – and can just about pick out a clarinet from the quiet cloud of players, one gradually comes to recognise other elements in the texture; in particular, at the prickling edge of stereo picture (preventing things from becoming too smoothly ‘pure’), the rustle/crackle of Patrick Farmer’s natural objects. How a large ensemble controls itself to such quietude is quite astonishing, and lends the piece something which a small group playing at the same level could not have achieved – and something which is more than just a trick or an example of human dexterity.

In both ‘Fade’ and ‘Fields Have Ears 4’, one might visualise the sounds as having physical presence – sculpturally or architecturally, as objects that hang in space – sound as such being material in space. Let’s say, somewhat fancifully, that silence functions like the air between the columns of a colonnade; or perhaps it would be more apposite to reverse the metaphor, so that the sounds are the air, the silences the actual structural that intersects and defines it. Then again, let’s just ditch the analogy altogether, for the relationship between sound and silence is more symbiotic than it allows. Sound modifies silence modifies sound (and the subsequent sound/silence of life after you listen). That’s the great legacy of 4’33”, as explored in Kyle Gann’s recent book ‘No Such Thing as Silence’ – a listening awareness expanded beyond the conventionally musical to include one’s environment as a whole (which is an expansion outward but also an expansion inward, into the ‘minute particulars’ of a particular moment or location or space – “the / flight back/ to where / we are” [2]; “the original experience of now and here and this; […] not […] to look at a different world, but to look at this same world differently.”[3]) Thus Pisaro’s use field recordings – listening back to the world and incorporating it into the music, not so much in a ‘chance’ manner, but with structural intent. If the aim is not to introduce natural sounds for aleatory effect, neither is it to mimetically replicate anything as a kind of hyper-realist version of programme music, a couple of stages beyond Respighi’s or Hovhaness’ decorative incorporation of bird- and whale-song into otherwise fairly conventional orchestral works. [4] In point of fact, the sounds we hear on ‘Fields Have Ears 1’ are not pure field recording – there are a couple of unobtrusive sine tones in there, I believe, though they take up a smaller part of the sonic picture than the tape hiss which is up-front throughout (and yet doesn’t give a lo-fi impression at all, perhaps because Thomas’ piano playing is so lovingly recorded). The danger, nonetheless, is still that one will be tempted to say ‘oh, nice bird song, that’s pretty’ and leave the music on the level of a BBC sounds effects cassette tape with some added piano chords here and there.

Further, one might argue that the use of field recordings is an established technique for Pisaro now, and is perhaps even in danger of becoming a tad hackneyed at times (I wasn’t too keen on the ocean waves that appeared in the third piece of his duo recording with Taku Sugimoto). On the evidence we have here, though, I don’t think that at all; I find it impossible not to admire the care of shaping, refining, honing this aesthetic of silence in a way that extends beyond initial theoretical generalisations and into the fabric of the work’s construction and execution. Perhaps it’s the compositional framework that imposes a necessary rigour on what could become unfocussed, random, or meandering in improv contexts when everyone’s having an off-day – though that said, Sugimoto’s turn to ultra-ultra minimalism in his recent composed work doesn’t, for me, have the same rigour in its translation to disc (live, it may be wonderful, the creation of a specific kind of shared experience). I don’t think I could pin-point exactly why this is, but, somehow, the recordings of Pisaro’s pieces that I’ve heard do work as discs, as albums separated from their live moment of creation; they do still function as compelling experiences.

‘Fields Have Ears,’ then (the album as a whole), possesses a spareness which is not emptiness, and a real clarity – each note is weighted and considered and placed, each pause judged, each element considered. In a way, one can’t distinguish too easily between whole and parts because it’s not developmental (apart from that it occurs in time; as music, it is necessarily linear on the most basic level). Close focus is, then, on the moment, though the music is generous enough to allow for moments of inattention too, occasional drifts in concentration, without severely harming one’s ability to pick up the thread again when one zones back in. That lack of distinction between episodes, that lack of build and climax might seem like mere flatness to some, but it’s actually pretty hard to achieve, especially on a long, large-ensemble piece like ‘Fields Have Ears 4’; a state that cannot be conjured without real dedication, on the part of both composer and performers, to the particular aesthetics which enable and prompt it.

Notes

[1] Yuko Zama, review of ‘Fields Have Ears’ (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/yukoz/20101220)

[2] J.H. Prynne, ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, in ‘Poems’ (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005 (1969))

[3] John Osborne, ‘Black Mountain and Projective Verse’, in ‘A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry’ (ed. Neil Roberts) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003 (2001))

[4] Nor is it to reproduce natural patterns or rhythms in a stricter sense (the ‘breathing’ effect of ‘Fields Have Ears 4’ is simply my subjective interpretation, and one could easily listen to the piece without thinking of it as breathing-like at all. That said, it is capable of making one conscious of one’s own bodily rhythms, asserting themselves just at those moments when one is trying to still oneself, to hold one’s breath, to listen closest (I could feel my ear pulsing against my headphones at the quietest points in the music).

Michael Pisaro/ Taku Sugimoto - 2 Seconds / B Minor / Wave

2010-12-30T16:42:00.006Z

Label: Erstwhile
Release Date: November 2010
Tracklist: 2 Seconds/ B Minor / Wave
Musicians: Michael Pisaro: composition, guitar, field recordings; Taku Sugimoto: composition, guitar, misc.

I’m torn about this one, for reasons I’ll go into later: but to start off with, I’ll admit that, certainly, it’s interesting and valid and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about and evolution of the music. It’s simpler (as in, less full of musical events) than the two recent Toshimaru Nakamura duos with acoustic guitarists (‘Crepuscular Rays’ with Havard Volden and ‘Semi-Impressionism’ with Tetuzi Akiyama), and more obviously transparent; indeed, it lays its materials out so clearly that it could almost be accused of being an entirely conceptual work – Pisaro’s and Sugimoto’s contributions were recorded separately, after all. That said, the separate recording technique has become common enough recently to justify it being called a legitimate technical resource, rather than a case of one-off experimentation: the MIMEO album ‘sight’ from a few years back is perhaps the most famous example (though it’s actually a slightly different case, as the larger ensemble gives it more of an aleatoric element – the probability of there being concurrences and agreements between the separate recordings becomes lower once the number of participants starts to spread). With duo recordings, however– ones as sparse as this one, anyway – it’s much easier to get some sort of concurrence, if not active ‘dialogue’ in the EFI sense: indeed, if one was played Sachiko M/ Ami Yoshida’s collaboration as Cosmos (recorded live, with both musicians in the same room) and the Nakamura/ Yoshida collaboration ‘Soba to Bara’ (in which both musicians’ contributions were recorded separately), one would be hard pressed to say which one featured the performers in the same space. The new approach to duo playing fostered by the influential ‘lowercase’ scenes in Japan, Berlin, London is one in which sonic proximity means sharing the same space, rather than direct imitation or facile ‘conversational’ interplay; each player pursues their own particular direction, following the consequences of one idea or texture or type of sound in a way that overlaps with, rather than directly parallels, the activity of their partner. (A fine recent example would be Angharad Davies and Axel Dorner’s ‘AD’). Given this, the separate recording technique fits perfectly; and, given also the way that recent developments of post-Cageian theory and practice have blurred the lines between composition and improvisation (as documented on the new ‘Silence and After’ series on Another Timbre), one can argue that the music is as much conceptual as it is musical, that theory and practice, sound and pre-planned framework/manner of execution are too closely tied to be usefully or easily disentangled.

This does not mean, though, that one cannot judge it by musical standards: indeed, they are the primary means of measurement, the yardstick by which to make one’s mind up. The criticism which has developed (mainly on blogs and online fora ) alongside the new methods (well, OK, by now they’re not that new, as Mattin would no doubt argue) does, in fact, stress personal subjective judgement just as much as any theoretical or systematic analytical system: one is more likely to get a story about the circumstances in which the record was listened to, minute details of the sounds of passing cars, neighbours’ noises, etc, than one is to get a treatise of aesthetic jargon. It’s an interesting intersection indeed, where pursuing theoretical goals with great rigour, embracing deliberate limitation and an almost monastic intensity of focus, leads to the creation of a music in which such simple and ‘old-fashioned’ criteria as ‘I like this sound’ and ‘that is a beautiful chord’ become surprisingly important. That’s not to say that there is no critical rigour involved, and most committed listeners to and writers about this music would be able to have a long and considered debate about whether something works artistically or not – it’s not just a simple ‘I’m partial to this’. Still, all this builds up to the statement with which I began the review: I find myself in two minds about the merits of the disc because both my personal sense of enjoyment (probably not the right word) and my critical, evaluative sense raise problems for me when listening to it.

Firstly, let’s consider the conceptual (compositional) framework which has been used to construct the three pieces. All three last twenty minutes exactly; all bring together two separate compositions/performers based on a particular idea. ‘2 Seconds’ is a unit of pulse; ‘B Minor’ a key; ‘Wave’ was left more open, with each musician free to make their own interpretation of that word. The opening track finds Pisaro using layers of sine waves, looped to create beats which fit in with rhythmically with Sugimoto’s own short, electronic beeps (a guitar tuner?) and striking of what sounds like two wooden objects (claves?). The sine tones build up to create rich chords that are sometimes Sachiko-M-stark (though not quite as tinnitus-inducingly high-pitched – there’s a significant low-end rumble which occasionally caused my headphones to vibrate), sometimes gorgeously, spacily rich (this ‘beautiful’ aspect to sine tones is one that’s not been explored that much – the only example that springs to mind is the work of the clarinet/electronics duo Los Glissandinos). Some of the tones are held to create the chord, but the more abrupt, dial-tone like elements ensure a kind of clipped-feel round the edges; the piece is at once comforting in its rhythmical regularity, and somewhat forbiddingly robotic (like a kind of soft industrial music). Occasionally, we hear sounds from (I presume) Sugimoto’s recording which allow ‘real-world’, non-electronic sounds into proceedings: occasionally we hear the squeak of someone shifting their weight on a leather chair, and at one point what sounds like an electric drill is briefly switched on. Given these fragmented glimpses, one supposes that Sugimoto’s contribution had a visual, theatrical/ritualistic quality to it which is lost on the recording, suggesting other dimensions to the piece that belie its apparently fixed and rigid quality, opening out beyond the recording to different spaces, times, contexts. Ultimately, though I do admire the restraint of the concept, I can’t quite fully enjoy the track as a whole: at times I admire the bloody-mindedness of the clockwork electronic beep and the sections of layered sine-tones, at others I feel unable to fully pull myself into the soundworld, stepping out of that immersion into which I had briefly been drawn.

My fault? Perhaps. ‘B Minor’ is next, and evinces the same sort of rigour in terms of the gestures each musician allows himself; this time, though, what is played is deliberately pretty, imparting things with a Loren Connors-style minimalism. Of course, we remember this from the classic Sugimoto of ‘Opposite’, and we think too of his recent recordings of simple, haiku-like melodies, rendered with a sparse and often beguiling, hesitant delicacy in tandem with vocalist Moe Kamura. You can have too much of a good thing, though, and, while this might have been absolutely gorgeous if restricted to three or five minutes (as were the pieces on ‘Opposite’, and as are the pieces on ‘Saritote II’), it does pall somewhat over the full twenty. Both men are on electric guitars: Sugimoto plays the harmony (in B Minor, of course) – slowly-paced, equally-placed chord sequences – Pisaro, the melody– sustained handfuls of notes that mesh with and accentuate the chords, rather than back-grounding them. It is lovely, yes, but…And then I think: to what absurd, acerbic levels of ‘beauty’ have I become accustomed which would lead me to think that this music, perhaps palpably ugly or just plain boring to some people who have no idea of onkyo or taomud or wandelweiser, is overly pretty? But we enter a difficult area when we consider beauty as the generation of prettiness, delicacy, sweet tinkling textures: and, while Marion Brown’s contribution to Harold Budd’s ‘Bismali 'Rrahman 'Rrahim’ ensures that that track remains one of my all-time favourites, the rest of that Budd record, sans Brown, goes too far into gloop and sickliness. Or once again, I know people whose musical views I totally respect, and whom one would hardly call un-critical New Agers, and yet I just cannot share their enthusiasm for Laraaji’s ‘Day of Radiance,’ the third in Brian Eno’s ambient series. It’s the same here – I’m not sure what the optimum number of minutes for the track would have been, but somewhere, things step over an invisible (l)edge and that kind of simple beauty is not quite enough.

Onto the final track, anyway, in which Sugimoto interprets ‘waves’ to mean ‘(sound)wave’ – a sustained (e-bowed?) drone – while Pisaro chooses a field recording of ocean waves breaking (or it may be an electronically-generated sound), which enters and drops out of the texture at regular intervals. For me, this is somewhat spoiled by Pisaro’s contribution, which doesn’t seem as integrated as were the elements that made up the other two pieces. It sits on top of the overall musical flow, rather than being fully integrated – it feels like an add-on, rather than an interesting juxtaposition. And it also works against the rigour of the drone, rendering it almost New-Agey, like an avant-garde version of one of those ‘Sounds of the Sea’ easy-listening albums you find in British garden centres. Perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of the aleatoric way in which the music was put together, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily true: as the other tracks, and other separately recorded improv collaborations attest, it’s perfectly possible to create something cohesive and symbiotic using this method. Maybe it’s a kind of reminder, a jolt that prevents us getting too comfortable, that lets us know the element of risk and failure we had forgotten about in our easy immersion into beauty and prettiness. Here one thinks of Boulez distinguishing between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ chance operations (in the 1957 essay ‘Alea’ ), and wonders ‘have I become as tetchy as that’? On the other hand, I just don’t feel that the piece works, whatever the methods behind its construction.

Overall, then, there are elements about each piece I like, both conceptually and musically. Of the three, I think ‘2 Seconds’ probably works best over the entire twenty minutes; ‘B Minor’ is more immediately pretty/ beautiful, but somewhat outstays its welcome; and ‘Waves’ is (perhaps deliberately) less cohesive (or at least, more slight), which, for me, makes it less successful musically. Summarising in this way, I’m aware of how subjective, in an almost petty manner, these judgements sound; and I’m grateful to this recording for making me want to examine my own critical approach as much as I examine the album itself. Whether it ‘works’ or not, it is, as I argued at the beginning, an important document, a springboard for debate, and a musical experience with some genuinely lovely moments; very much worth investigation if you haven’t heard it already.

Captain Beefheart as Poet

2010-12-19T16:05:00.004Z

From an old essay:

Van Vliet has an almost Wordsworthian sense of the whole condition of everything as infused with meaning and living. Take the poem ‘Hey Garland I Dig Your Tweed Coat’ (Garland being the name of the poet’s cat), where, in a ripe moment, a tomato (in the process of being eaten) forms into an “O” and “bleeds red” – a mouth (vagina), sexualised, wounded. This can even apply to taking a shit, as in ‘81 Poop Hatch’ (recited on Beefheart’s last album, ‘Ice Cream for Crow’), in which hearing “some jumbled rock ‘n’ roll tune” on the radio leads to the line, “a typical musician’s nest of thoughts filter through dust speakers,” uniting the ‘natural’ and the ‘mechanical’ in a manner similar to the way the short poem ‘One Nest Rolls After Another’ links the animal and the human, comparing falling nests to lashing tongues. It’s hardly a ‘mystical moment’, the “naturally magically” fantasies of ‘Trout Mask Replica,’ but it is a kind of ‘coming together’, of moments and activities and objects, perceptions and faculties. And, indeed, that might not be too dissimilar to ‘Replica’ after all: take lines such as “wild life, wild life,/ I’m going up on the mountain for the rest of my life,” where the insistence of rhyme leads to a kind of Bob Dylan-esque associative lyrical flow, a sense that the materiality of words is suffused with meaning as much as their surface ‘meaningful content.’

Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart.
January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010

December 9th 2010

2010-12-13T14:05:00.006Z

I was away for a few days after 'attending' (is that the right word?) last Thursday's protests in London, and thus missed the majority of the news coverage (though I did catch a little snippet on the BBC where Nick Robinson complained about vandalism, the disrespect shown to Mr Churchill's statue (Churchill being, let’s remember, the man who advocated using gas against the Kurds in the 1920s: as he put it, "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes"), and the terrifying ordeal suffered by Prince Charles and his wife when their car was attacked by a group of 'yobos'). Now that I'm back, I've been able to check a broader spectrum of reporting and, though I shouldn't be surprised, still can't fucking believe the extent to which the protestors have been demonized and the cops get off virtually scot-free.

There was some speculation among protestors on the day (though not in the media) about what motivates riot police: one cop apparently agreed with those opposing the cuts as he let them out of a kettle (he had three children who would probably now not get to university), but the majority remained stony-faced, advancing behind shields and body-armour or on horses, and brushing aside injured protestors in search of medical treatment (let the fuckers bleed, serve them right, seems to be the reasoning behind this). It comes across as sheer brute force against rational argument, against intelligence, intellect, expression - captured neatly in the photos of cops attacking students who were carrying sandwich boards painted with the titles of books such as Brave New World, Spectres of Marx, The Waste Land, and Society of the Spectacle.

The police, whatever the true motivations of the individuals that make up their ranks, are functioning at the moment as the strong arm of the government – the necessary violent enforcers without which the Con-Dem’s policies could not be sustained. Perhaps some of them fear they’ll lose their jobs if they show too much ‘leniency’ or sympathy towards protestors (which in the current context would probably just mean not charging them and not hitting them over the head), despite the fact that they stand to lose out in the wake of the cuts, just like everyone else. There is also, in all likelihood, a strong thug culture, as there is in the army, that other bastion of legalized criminality – in other words, some policemen get off on clashes with ‘rioters’, with wading in armed and ready to kick the shit out of people.

But speculating about police motives isn’t really that much use to people on the ground, in the midst of the ‘action’ – you don’t care about the internal moral struggle that may be going on behind the riot helmets when you’re in a crowd of people running away from a line of charging horses or anxiously looking around to make sure you’re not being cordoned off into a fresh kettle. It’s as if the entire march has been orchestrated by the cops lining the streets, trying to siphon protestors off down particular routes; and even the spontaneous, guerilla-style breakaways down alternative routes (those breakaways which allow people not to get kettled) are done with an eye over one’s shoulder at all times. On the one hand, this produces an adrenaline buzz, turning the city into a kind of assault course, but on the other, this same adrenaline also leads to the mounting frustration that the cops use as an excuse to wade in. And after the hours of kettling, the shouted slogans and chants and songs gradually start to die down, and a weird kind of hush descends, broken by occasional upsurges of shouting as there’s a fresh cavalry charge or stand-off. When the vote passed, one might have expected a fresh wave of anger, but the crescendo of noise and anger (an energy), seemed to have been reached earlier on, on the way to Parliament Square, before everyone was blocked in. So you head to the pub and then head back and the kettle is still in operation, and ‘sub-kettles’ are opened up as some people break through the first line only for another to form around them; and you think about tactics, how this could become a real live street war, a quasi-military operation (how should we go about organizing and mobilizing against the police when we can’t rely on the media to scare them off?), and you talk about the best way to tip over a car and set it on fire (though you don’t, of course, then go out and actually do it), and talk about the English radical tradition (Abiezer Coppe Ranters Levellers Diggers Luddites) and how it can be resurrected, and talk about Burroughs and Genet, out-of-place perhaps, but still there at the Chicago Democratic Convention riots in 1968.

And so, “back now to our studies,” to that radical re(in)surrection (Raise Race Rays Raze), against the e-rasure of our voices that the government and their flunkies, the Metropolitan police and the Right-leaning media, are trying to effect. Obviously the case of Alfie Meadows and the other protestors who were injured and physically intimidated is not enough to cause a propaganda backlash (which is perhaps no surprise given the craven Tory bias of such hacks as the aforementioned BBC correspondent Nick Robinson); instead, the British public are judged to be so attached to Charles and Camilla...

...that they will willingly countenance a 'stronger police presence' – to do what? Protect the Royals if they happen to choose to come to London again in the middle of a protest? Perhaps some of the proles will attempt to invade Buckingham Palace, or Balmoral, or Windsor. Damn, we can't let the Civil War happen all over again! Even though that incident was a minor one, and the overwhelming media focus on it (the increasingly right-leaning The Guardian made it front page news too) is pretty disgusting, it does capture some truth about what's going on at the moment: an unleashing of forces of desire, of a momentum which I described in relation to the Millbank attack, a momentum which "cannot be made simply to dissipate and disappear, to tail and trail off back down the road into ‘normality’; we – you – want something more and cannot suppress that longing any longer." Sure it’s amusing when Theresa May says the Duchess of Cornwall was “poked with a stick” by a protestor (nudge nudge wink wink), but it also signals something of symbolic value – the desiccation the stiffness the traditionalism of the Royals coming up against the real facts of the real lives of their ‘subjects’, the real facts of discontent and history (history as moving thing rather than static conserve or ‘jam tomorrow’). Dominic Fox has said what I’m trying to say, better: “What I think's uncanny in the above image, and therefore most difficult to "spin" coherently, is that it breaches the boundary between two distinct times: a past that is defunct, over-with, de-libidinalised, and a present that is massively energised and "happening". Look at their faces again: pure car-crash orgasm, like corpses being jolted back to life. No amount of regal "calmness" and "dignity" can erase the memory of that look, its spooked intensity. It's as if they're saying: what the fuck is this? History? Dear God - make it go away!”

But of course while it’s easy to get exhilarated about this – I’d just about given up hope on any widespread anti-Royalist sentiment appearing through the cracks of Will and Kate’s wedding and the dear old Queen soldiering on – it’s important to remember the flip-side, that the Right have seized on this story (or, really, on just that one photo, which to be honest, doesn’t look much different to your common-or-garden paparazzi-shot) and will use it to justify an increase in police presence and in the force that that presence is allowed or encouraged to use. No, charging horses and bone-breaking batons are not enough – we want cannons! But, hey, they’re only water cannons – just like water pistols really, only bigger, fun toys that we can use to teach the young whippersnappers a lesson. Look at that picture of a happy black man getting sprayed with water! He looks hot and it's cooling him down. Protestors actually enjoy having the cannons turned on them, so it's all alright. Of course, what they forgot to mention was this. And, as just another example of how brazen those in power now are: "Sir Paul said one reason water cannon had not been used is that the Met did not own any. It was reported last year that the Met had considered buying six at a cost of £5million." At this time of 'austerity', five million pounds can suddenly materialize to buy weapons to turn on those who protest - some of whom, let's note, feel that their democratic rights have been taken from them, given that Clegg got into power on the back of student support, only to blatantly and quite unapologetically go back on his word. (As Richard Seymour reminds us , “Democracy is not law and order. Democracy is the mob; the mob is democracy. Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government.”) The message: we don't want to hear what the people think or do or say, we want to turn the propaganda machine and the police brutality machine onto them to quell them into submission. Once again, "there is no alternative." And one wonders, how long before we see police holding guns, as in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, and how long before another Blair Peach, another Ian Tomlinson, another Jean Charles de Menezes?

Finally, after all the anger and adrenaline and exhilaration and upset and rage and potential, a reminder of what's at stake, what the government voted in on Thursday:

The vote may have passed, but opposition to the new education measures is not going to go away, and now it’s time to add on top of it a wider campaign against ‘austerity’, against back-slapping for the rich and a boot in the face for everyone else – time to build a bonfire, fight back, raise the dead.

Running Scared

2010-11-30T19:21:00.006Z

Today saw the third wave in as many weeks of student action in protest at the coalition government's education cuts. Once more, universities are going into (or are continuing with) occupations, and marchers have taken to the streets across the country, despite the snow. This has obviously got someone rattled, as the police have been kettling before the fact: i.e. forcibly surrounding and detaining people as a method of intimidation, rather than as a 'defensive' measure to protect property. The tactic is, in effect, a temporary mass arrest, a temporary forced detention as a means of punishment and intimidation for daring to protest. (And if the word 'temporary' suggests a certain softness, bear in mind that being kettled at this time of year means being forced to stand in the middle of the street for as long as six hours, forced to stand in freezing winter weather and to piss on the road because there is nowhere else to go.) Of course, this is no different to what the cops were doing before, but last week in London, the sacrificial police van was strategically placed so as to give an excuse for the kettle: blur the chronology, ensure lots of photos get taken of the poor innocent van, and you've got the licence to scare, bully and physically tangle with schoolkids. This week, though, the cops (or their superiors) don't seem to have been as bothered about how they were perceived: or, perhaps, the protestors out-witted them, denying them the propaganda upper hand by running away when they saw the vast police presence and spreading throughout the city in a kind of psychogeographic protest dérive. After all, it's hard to present people as violent protestors when they're running away from hordes of uniformed policemen in riot gear...

Beyond the specifics of what happened today, what's crucial at this stage is that the momentum is kept up - and so far, there are still thousands of people turning up to vent their frustation and outrage, which the police intimidation and the almost universal equivocation and condemnation of the protests from the mainstream media seems only to have fuelled. A related danger is the hijacking of the movement by bureaucracy and by parties who will negotiate only token compromises, sucking the real life and energy of the movement (i.e. down on the streets with the slogans and placards); because, in fact, seeing so many people who just will not take the shit they are being forced to swallow really has got the government intimidated, caused sweat patches to emerge on 'Dave' Cameron's fashionably tie-less shirt. There's thus no reason that we have to assume they have the 'upper hand'. Finally, some sort of connection with broader concerns about the government's policies must be established - otherwise, it will easy to dismiss the protestors as just a load of selfish/ priviliged/ naive students moaning away, unlike 'real people' who have to hold down jobs and take care of families, etc etc. There's a wave of public outrage just waiting to be tapped into - from those forced onto the dole and made to feel like shit for not beeing able to find a job in a climate which makes that task harder than ever day by day; from those at risk from cuts to public services; from those who don't actually belive in the neo-liberal agenda and still have some sense of social justice. That wave is what the student protest movement can and must recognise, stir up and engage with. After the initial surge of excitement about what happened at Millbank and elsewhere, the next few weeks will be crucial.

The Idea of an Alternative: Further Student Protests, 24.11.10

2010-11-25T14:00:00.006Z

Richard Seymour calls it the “biggest student rebellion since ’68,” and, whether or not one thinks of that as an exaggeration, something does seem to be in the air at the moment. Yesterday saw students across the UK stage a wave of occupations, walkouts, and marches in protest at the proposed increased in tuition fees, the scrapping of the EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance), the marketisation of education, the decimation of Arts and Humanities…

Unlike the recent NUS-organised march, of which the attack on Tory HQ at 30 Millbank was a (large) off-shoot, rather than an intended consequence, this seems to have arisen from a spontaneous, only loosely organised, desire on the part of a crowd of mostly young people – again, many on their first protest, buoyed by the fact that so many of their fellow students had walked out with them from classes, lectures and seminars at 11AM, and further enraged/ encouraged, rather than cowed, by heavy-handed police tactics (charging protestors with horses, establishing a kettle in which thousands of people were trapped for hours on end with little access to water and sanitation, in the freezing cold of the British winter, and, reportedly, physically assaulting teenaged protestors).

Why did the police act as they did? Their actions indicate that they (or their leaders) were severely rattled by what happened at Millbank; after the flak they received for their handling of the G20 protests, they had to appear a little ‘kinder’, perhaps, but they also had some licence to ‘crack down’ given the way the media had painted the Millbank protestors as dangerous anarchist troublemakers. (Intriguing how the word ‘violence’ is so often bandied about in connection to the protests, when the only significant violence against people is perpetrated by armed hooligans (sorry, police) – violence against property is hardly on the same level, and, anyway, might be said to reveal the latent violence hidden behind the smooth glass facades and official spin-talk (lies) of the power structure.) In coverage of both occasions, news coverage has crystallised around violence against, or involving, a specific object : the fire extinguisher thrown from the Millbank roof, and the police van which was abandoned inside the kettle and subsequently trashed. Not sure what to make of this – I don’t think most people are that devoted to vans, that bothered if they get trashed – so why the building up of such spluttering outrage? And why would anyone care? Surely no one really takes seriously the idea that, unless the kettle had been established, there would have been a horde of rampant teenagers running through the centre of London like the zombies in ‘28 Weeks Later’, trashing everything in their wake, a danger to the public and to private property…And surely most people would be more worried about their 15-year old son or daughter being forcibly detained for hours on end by armed and volatile police than by the thought that their offspring might smash a window?

The fact that so many of the protestors were young (mid-teens), does provide an opportunity for those in authority, and their media flunkies, to dismiss the protests as youthful idiocy, the violent action of confused teenagers (who are always angry at mum and dad, even though they know what’s best for them). (The Daily Mail, bizarrely, provides a sexist angle on the whole thing, as does The Telegraph.) But, at the same time, their youth, and the fact they many of them were obviously not experienced leftist organisers, is very exciting – it indicates the potential radicalisation of an entire generation who might otherwise have ignored, or swallowed, the coalition government’s heinous policies.

Finally, to focus solely on the events in London would be to distort the overall picture; whereas the NUS march of November 10th saw students from around the country descend on the capital, yesterday’s walkout, organised mainly by word of mouth and through the new social media (facebook, twitter, etc), saw events happening all over the country – clashes with police in Brighton and Bristol, occupations at many, many universities, peaceful marches elsewhere. Another walkout is planned for next week (November 30th), and hopefully the youthful exuberance and belief of the students can kick some life into the trade unions as well; while these actions may not immediately cause the government to crumble, they will be rattled, and, most importantly, their may be a gradual change in the general mindset, an alternative to the ‘there is no alternative’ fatalism that has been so prevalent recently – or, as Badiou argues in ‘The Communist Hypothesis’ the idea of an alternative.

“As in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.”

And perhaps something more as well...

More details on the protests:
A further post from Richard Seymour
Rolling updates from Libcom
The Guardian's Live Feed
Laurie Penny
Openned H.E. Protests Posting Page

28 Weeks Later (2007)

2010-11-16T18:57:00.005Z

Starring: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner
Music: John Murphy
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Screenplay: Rowan Joffe, J.C. Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jésus Olmo
Director of Photography: Enrique Chediak

By its fast pace and (for a modern movie) short running time, the film avoids the usual horror-movie structural clichés of exposition and false shocks followed by quiet moments and real shocks; or rather, it amps and speeds them up so that they regain their full, adrenaline-pumping combined impact. Deployment of the over-used False Shock technique tends to be minimised in favour of real threat, apart from one early, self-conscious parody of the device, which nonetheless manages to provoke a jump: shadows fall across the face of a soldier who’s fallen asleep in his helicopter on sentry duty, and he’s awakened with a jump as something jumps up beside him with hideous growlings, poised to rip out his throat…Turns out that it’s his fellow soldier, come to relieve him and to take the next watch, and he relaxes into banter and camaraderie – only for the same trick to be repeated, moments later. In a sense, it’s a false false shock – the character in the film pokes fun at the device not once, but twice, satirising both the initial shock (the one which is ‘really nothing’) and the ‘real’ one which succeeds it (the actual threat, for which one has been caught off-guard by one’s relief after the false alarm). At the same time, this comic sequence does not dispel the notion that false shocks bring with them – the dread of deferred brutality to come. When it does come, that brutality, that outpouring of blood and guts and action, can come as something of a relief in itself – at last! now we get to the meat of the film – but here, it’s sickening and frightening rather than exhilarating. ‘28 Weeks Later’ specialises in real violence (rather than withholding it through suspense sequences) – panic, panting, sweat, sprinting – a sensory overload that, crucially, is bolstered by an underlying and more lingering sense of dread and terror in details, in ideas as much as in outright gore. Apart from the aforementioned ‘false shock’ send up, there is little in the way of humour here; the aim is to present a realistic contemporary context (modern day London) and a set of people (rather than characters with lengthily developed back-stories and relations), who find themselves in situations where they face impossible choices and where life is so fragile that it does not even bend to the rules of movie narrative (one feels that anyone could die at any point, that the film will not respect story arcs, will not respect the need to keep certain characters alive longer than others, the need for a ‘star’ to guide one through the carnage). To say, as some critics have, that the lack of ‘character development’ renders the film’s protagonists ‘faceless’, and that we consequently don’t care about their fate, is to ignore the film’s sense of in-the-moment terror, that basic human instinct. It also skates over the way that this amped-up, scarifying sensibility is mixed with snatches of bleak, quasi-sociopolitical allusion (not so much commentary as atmosphere, echo – visually reminiscent of ‘Children of Men’ in its contemporary-dystopian concentration on the consequences of catastrophe in recognisable British locations, both city and countryside, though without that film’s more drawn-out and thought-through critique). Thus, we might consider the truly unnerving scene where a crowd of frightened, fleeing civilians are trapped in a darkened, windowless, underground-car-park-type space – locked in by the US military after a fresh outbreak of the ‘Rage’ virus, which it had been thought was fully contained – and set on by the new carrier of that virus. Here we have the visceral suggestion of anxieties about detention centres, asylum seekers, the treatment of displaced victims of political conflict, without engaging in overly schematic or obvious allegorical parallels; the scene is as much about the absolute primal terror of being trapped, not only in a crowded place, carried along by the mass with little control of one’s own desired, individual direction, but also in the dark, with monsters leaping out at one from the shadows – or worse, maiming, damaging, killing one before they can be seen.

Since ‘Night of the Living Dead’, zombie films often seem to revolve around such use of confined, forbidding spaces, though here the tension is in wanting to escape from that space, rather than trying to keep the threat out (see also the French film La Horde). The climactic (though not final) sequence of ‘28 Weeks Later’ also takes place in a dark, confined space – this time, an abandoned tube station, were the film’s surviving protagonists (two siblings and a female US army officer who has been attempting to protect them) are menaced by the children’s infected father. Here, we have the suggestion of a near-Freudian take on the family unit, with the father’s abandonment of his wife in the opening sequence (he jumps out of a window and flees across a field, leaving his wife trapped in a house with hordes of zombies) and the sense of an older generation’s guilt; the virus break loose through his kiss with his newly rescued wife (who, it turns out, survived the attack due to a genetic immunity, but still acts as a carrier through her saliva), followed by a savage, cannibalistic destruction/rape. In the tube sequence, then, the wheel comes full circle, as the daughter ends up shooting her father while he menaces his young son in similar fashion. This doesn’t quite fit a psychoanalytic scheme (really, it should be the son, rather than the daughter, who does the killing); instead, it is a queasy and hysterical derangement of familial ties that fits well with the film’s numerous other set-pieces and situations, in which the comfort of established personal and social ties is torn to shreds in much the same way that ‘the infected’ rip out the throats of victims with their teeth. Here, one thinks too of the US military who try and fail to contain the fresh outbreak, having successfully defused the first through establishing martial law in Britain. Though the choices they face lead them to impossible decisions (this is not simple ‘anti-Americanism’), the scenes in which orders to fire at specific targets (anyone who shows signs of infection) change to orders to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd are particularly hard to watch, as soldiers mow down hordes of civilians; the computer-game body-count of indiscriminate, mindless violence translated back into horrifying reality. (And, one might note, so effective for a white, western audience due to the way in which the victims are white and western too; for, as we – yes, even we ‘liberal’ white westerners know, those two attributes endow a person with a humanity that ‘ragheads’ or Africans or anyone who does not have the right skin colour or cultural background do not possess.) The influence of computer-games/movies on the ‘generation kill’ mindset thus slimes its way into proceedings, but the film’s true appeal (if that is the right word) is the way it avoids hammering home the obvious, the obviously symbolic; specific situational details cannot help but evoke wider social, political, theoretical concerns, but these remain in the background as a kind of aura, or haunting, that unsettles much more than if it had been stated explicitly.

What ‘28 Weeks Later’ presents best of all is a growing sense of things slipping out of control, both for the individual people caught up in the chaos, and in terms of the general situation: for instance, the film’s final shot has a crowd of ‘the infected’ racing across to the Eiffel Tower like deranged tourists, silhouetted against a picture-perfect Paris sunset. (If it weren’t for the way this final twist adds a kind of final, nihilistic sucker-punch to all the film’s previous deaths and disasters, this might qualify as a moment of near-comedy.) There is no standard ‘loss of innocence’ – in contrast to ‘Children of Men’, the kids here, possible biological saviours from the virus, are not treated as Christ-like embodiments of hope, but as vulnerable and scared people; even if they survive, they are just as likely to fall victim to a panicky US army who would rather slaughter them to avoid the virus spreading, than try to work with their genetic condition in order to find a cure. (There are, of course, echoes in this scenario of the conflicts between the military and scientists in George Romero’s ‘Day of the Dead’.) The solidarity of the family or group has little chance to flourish in such situations, moments of conscience and morally-motivated action becoming seemingly impossible in the panic-stricken battle for survival. Robert Humanick, writing at the 'Projection Booth' blog, mentions “the film's ruthless morality plays; what remains to define love when even giving your life amounts to an act of futility?” Truth be told, however, there’s little time for much exposition of such a theme – death and mayhem are always just over the horizon, just over the grassy rise in that idyllic English park, just round the corner of that high rise flat or down the end of that dark alley. And, even if the question were to be asked more explicitly, it’s unlikely that the filmmakers would come up with much hope in their answer – or give an answer at all. Romero’s desert island paradise coda to the savage conflicts of ‘Day of the Dead’ may be partly parodic (and illusory – compare it to the nightmare which opens the film, and one senses that it could be just another dream, a fantasy of escape from which one will fall back into the waking nightmare of what is actually happening (as in the ending of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’)), but it does at least offer us some ray of hope, of light, however tentative. Here, there’s no respite, only fresh horror; after the two children have been airlifted to safety in the helicopter of an army officer, we flash-forward some months to a shot of the helicopter, abandoned, a desperate voice begging for help over the helicopter’s radio headset going unanswered, the zombies having crossed the channel from Britain’s isolated island and onto the European mainland.

That’s the horror of the general situation, but ‘28 Weeks Later’ works on more than just (high-)conceptual grounds. One feels, rather, that horror has penetrated into the very fabric of the film, infecting it as the virus infects humans. On the level of sound, it penetrates the musical score, dominated by the crashing strains of John Murphy’s In the House, In a Heartbeat’. This cue, used only at the climax of '28 Days Later', recurs through the sequel like a leitmotif, underscoring many of the action sequences, with no peaceful or romantic counter-theme to offer contrast or hope – just the electric chug of ominous, unstoppable chord progressions and sudden, dread-filled silence. On the level of sight also, we find yet more horror; indeed, Sight is an important thread throughout the film – as in the aforementioned scene where a crowd are trapped underground, unable to see in the dark (though, here, the horror movie contrast between ‘dark night of the soul’ and the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ (the dawn after the vampires or werewolves or zombies have been vanquished and there is safety in the sunlight) does not exist – there is as much danger in the daytime as the night). Indeed, in the film’s opening sequence, that trajectory is reversed, so that danger is actually signalled by the move from darkness (a house boarded-up as protection against the infected hordes) into bright sunlight (the surrounding fields into which a character flees after the infected break in) that signals danger.) Most notably, though, sight becomes apparent in the focus on Eyes. The first we see of a virus-carrier in that opening scene is their bloodshot stare through a gap in the window-boarding; in the father’s murder of his wife, possibly the film’s most gory sequence, thumbs are pressed into eye-sockets with much spurting of blood and screaming. (Indeed, the role of the Eye in horror films is something which could well form a topic for future examination in itself – think ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’, or the camera/eye in ‘Peeping Tom’, or the notorious eye-slicing scene in Fulci’s ‘Zombi’.) In the case of ‘28 Days Later’, it is with the treatment of eyes that the film’s near-nihilism once more rears its head. Though eyes have been supposed by some to be ‘the mirrors of the soul’, here, one cannot trust what one sees; the connection between appearance and what we might call soul, or empathy, or emotion – any of those intangibles usually signalled by facial expression or tone of voice or by raising or lowering or widening the eyes – is gone. Though the infected still retain their human, bodily frame, this becomes, as in the zombie films, little more than a walking corpse (even if, here, the infected are not actually ‘undead’, but live carriers of a terrible disease); and it is in the eyes that the first signs of infection appear, with the development of a blood clot that soon swells to fill the whole eye, an eye which becomes totally bloodshot, monochromatic, an unreadable void, gazing out but offering nothing in return, the human as sheer violence, sheer brutality, as the animal in the midst of the hunt: transformed, unreadable, savage, Other. We might recall how, in ‘Day of the Dead’, the scientists discover that the zombies do not actually need to eat to survive – they exist on pure extinct. The terrifying thing about them is that their action is unmotivated (and here it might have been a mistake to turn the infected father into something of a main antagonist, akin to the disappointing slide towards conventional bogey-man scare tactics in the otherwise marvellous ‘Sunshine’; in both cases, what is suggested is some sort of motivation or planning on the part of a previously instinctive or inhuman force). Of course, this lack of motivation, and the tendency of zombies (or, as they’re called here, ‘the infected’) to move in crowds, enables them to ‘stand in’ for something else, to fit into whatever allegorical and metaphorical framework the film-makers wish to load their film with; but, whereas the parallels between shopping-mall consumers and zombies in ‘Dawn of the Dead’ allowed Romero to indulge in the near-cartoonish destruction of faceless hordes for purposes of comic relief, here, in one particularly harrowing scene, the consequences of such full-scale massacre are moved back into the human realm, back into the realm of – perhaps – ethics.

‘28 Weeks Later’ is very much a big-budget, ‘A-List’ picture (though it does borrow some of the grimy, shadowy, hand-held and shaky griminess of its predecessor). Thus, we have swooping helicopter shots of shiny London skyscrapers, big explosions, multiple-zombie-massacre-by-helicopter-blades, and the booming sound of John Murphy’s climactic cue for ’28 Days Later’ used several times throughout the film during big action scenes. (Thankfully, we don’t have A-list actors, and one of the film’s virtues is that it doesn’t feel the need to preserve any of its characters for the sake of an obvious narrative arc or the presence of a recognisable face. As Robert Ring notes in his review: “I have seen few films so true to the [situation] that it progresses with total disregard for its characters. This is a good thing. No one is kept alive just because the plot needs them or because the story has invested too much in them. It's as if the writers aren't even sure themselves if the film is going to make it to a satisfactory end. Of course, this is how a horror film should be. It creates a world where anything truly can happen to anyone at anytime, and survival is not at all guaranteed.”) One might argue that the film’s texture is often not slick enough for ‘A-List’ status – and here we come to a realization of what has happened to ‘mainstream’ pictures in recent years: they have drawn on and cannibalized the techniques of exploitation films, of low budgets, of the ‘grindhouse’ aesthetic, and used them as an element of surface sheen (or its opposite, of apparent rust and grime) in a self-consciously manipulative way. Think ‘The Passion of the Christ’ (which would be treated with as much scorn as ‘Hostel’ were it not for the religious ‘justification’ offered by its scant narrative); think the near avant-garde metallic clunk, the techno assault of ‘Terminator: Salvation’ or ‘Transformers’; think Tarantino’s ‘movie-geek’ aesthetic. Perhaps the most obvious signal of this shift – whereby one can no longer separate the ‘big’ films from their seedy and sordid low-budget cousins (giallo, Euro-shlock, spaghetti western, etc) – was ‘The Bourne Supremacy’, which drew the techniques of ‘guerrilla’ film-making (primarily, the use of the hand-held camera to place the viewer physically ‘in’ the scene) into the mainstream action film, initiating them as just another part of mainstream cinema’s loud, metallic, crunching assault on the senses. True, ‘Blair Witch’ might have had something to do with it, though there at least, the aesthetic was preserved as an integral part of the film, almost its raison d’etre. But Paul Greengrass’ selective jigging of the camera in what was hardly an ‘underground’ movie (in contrast to his more persuasive neo-realist use of the technique in the TV movie ‘Bloody Sunday’) arguably neutralises the effectiveness to which the technique can be put in the future, for the sake of a few ‘punchy’ fight scenes.

Horror films are one of the main battlegrounds here, with the idolisation of 70s cinemas as a kind of benchmark, the rise of Hollywood remakes of cult classics (‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘Last House on the Left’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’) in a manner that doesn’t attempt to sanitise or tone down the gore (indeed, revels in it), the rise of films and film-makers whose entire aesthetic seems to derive from Tobe Hooper et al. (For a negative take on said movement, see this article at Reverse Shot.) This is, one might argue, a kind of zombie-like, parasitical feeding on the dead, the past, a weird kind of retro-nostalgia, not for the wholesome days of Clear-Cut Morality, Cowboys and Indians, Black Hats and White Hats, and a belief in Progress and the Future, but for moral uncertainty, grunginess, unspeakable violence and taboo-breaking, rape, murder, mutilation, torture, unhappy endings, nihilism, and belief that Progress and the Future are illusions and lies used to justify and excuse hideous violence, a belief that we’re fucked because we (or they – those in authority, the bigots, the hypocrites, the moral high-grounders) have fucked everything up. “No future for you/ no future for me.” If, as is argued in the persuasive and thoroughly watchable documentary ‘The American Nightmare’, a whole species of horror films arose as a reaction to the loss of 60s hippy ‘innocence’ and the failure of the ’68 generation’s radical hopes as the bad 70s drew in, what is the status of the new breed of horror film that seeks to revive this species? Does it represent a welcome return to seriousness after the meta-fictional, post-modern jokiness of ‘Scream’ et al, a necessary re-assertion of the horror film’s dark heart after a generation of slasher movies and self-conscious parody, or is its supposed ‘bleakness’, ‘braveness’ and ‘uncompromising’ attitude really an excuse for lazy film-making? Is it a genuine attempt to engage with contemporary socio-political realities (or shall we just say, the Iraq war and the Bush regime), using similarly engaged past films as a template and example, or is it merely empty generic posturing, using the political resonances of, say, Romero and Cronenberg to score cheap credibility points, and, essentially, to cover up the core trashiness and nasty exploitation which is its real obsession? Perhaps this is such a key issue because horror has always been a somewhat uncomfortable presence in the world of film, despite being one of its staples across countries and cultures. It’s a genre which retains certain associations with a kind of filthiness and nastiness, a near-pornographic exploitation streak, not only occupying moral grey areas but taking pleasure in doing so; a genre where some of the classics are, essentially, B-movies that form a kind of apotheosis of a crude and shlocky form: ‘Psycho’, ‘Halloween’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’. (Which is perhaps why those the two most famous mainstream horror films of the 70s, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘The Omen’, used a religious framework as a kind of safety net for their set-pieces of blasphemy, sexual transgression, the disruption of the safe family situation by evil children run amok.) Herschell Gordon Lewis, Lucio Fulci, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, and now, Eli Roth, Alejandro Aja, Greg McLean, Rob Zombie: these are the true ‘auteurs’ of the horror world. Even if film noirs and westerns, beloved of the French New Wave and their quasi-academic ‘legitimisation’ of genre cinema, were just as opportunistic and ‘tacky’ as horrors, there’s still a certain griminess that just can’t be shaken from the horror pic, as it can with noirs (now viewed as nostalgic evocations of a certain stylised period, time and place) and westerns (which, if they are made at all nowadays, can engage with issues of history, myth and nation-building as much as with purely generic signifiers).

‘28 Weeks Later’, then, is surprising in that it manages to remain an ‘A-Picture’, despite drawing on the B-picture, exploitation lineage of gore movies (dating back to ‘2000 Maniacs!’) and that more general horror-film-feeling of moral and emotional bleakness, resulting from irreversible, or near-irreversible, societal breakdown. I’m not sure that I’d quite call this dishonest – though I do, as I’ve been arguing in the previous paragraphs, harbour certain suspicions about the mainstream embrace of shlock-techniques. Does the fact that a film like this can be received with little fuss or moral panic serve to neuter its impact? In the end, the answer must be no, because ‘28 Weeks Later’, despite its gory nature, aligns itself as much with the non-horror (though certainly horrific) dystopia of ‘Children of Men’ as with the ‘torture porn’ of ‘Hostel’ or ‘Wolf Creek’. What emerges from the film’s potent mix of a furiously-paced, balls-to-the-wall action/suspense/gore quotient (panic and terror) with a more creeping, invidious, nightmarish sense of horror is a truly grim and despairing contemporary take on a well-worn genre, one which avoids the pitfalls of much recent ’70s nihilist-chic for something more truly and lastingly unsettling.

Spitting Words and Rocks: The London Education Protests, 10.11.10

2010-11-11T13:21:00.009Z

Oh hello, there was a march through the centre of London yesterday, it went past the House of Parliament and along by the river. It was organised by the NUS and UCU and was protesting education cuts and said things like: “NO to scrapping the EMA / NO to the privatisation of Arts, Humanities and Social Science teaching / NO to cutting ESOL provision / NO to higher fees / NO to fees in FE for ‘adult learning’ / NO to soaring levels of debt / And YES to fairness, equity, and a properly funded state education system.” And this march was supposed to go along its route and then there would be a rally at the end and we would watch some videos and speeches projected on a big screen and then everyone would go home or to the ‘afterparty’ at LSE; and there would be around 15,000 people there, in the middle of the week, in the early afternoon. But then there were 50,000 people from Wales and Scotland and England and some 5,000 of them went to the nearby Millbank Tower and caused damage to private property, which is a mortal sin, and they were not orderly and glass was smashed and there were figures on the roof with an anarchist flag and with fists and they stood out against the blue sky.

So, the media coverage of the demo was predictable, given the way that any of the past few years’ protests and riots in Greece or France have been routinely denounced as dangerous, irresponsible, ‘against common sense’ – the work of thugs, hooligans, ‘yobbos’. In article after article we see the 5,000 protestors who gathered and merged and jostled in the courtyard of 30 Millbank, Conservative Party HQ, similarly denounced as a small ‘extremist’ element (“a minority of idiots” as the NUS president described them). These ‘evil, or at best misguided’ [by whom?!] idiot-thugs (never mind the fact that a number of people there looked delicate and fragile and might be trounced by football hooligans) ‘damage the cause’; these thugs make all reasonable people hate them because they smash a few windows and enter the hallowed sanctum of those who are pushing the low of competition and profit and the law of the market down our throats and telling us to like it and stop choking; because they threw a few eggs and rocks and because there were flares and a small fire was lit with small and delicate wisps of charred paper floating over the crowd and down on them like some sort of confetti; because someone brought out a ghetto-blaster and the crowd started nodding their heads to muffled Drum ‘N Bass and suddenly everything felt like a cross between a rave a riot and a soundtracked piece of film or theatre (a surreal revealing of the real unreality of life under the present system); because the atmosphere was that of a carnival or a party, albeit one driven by frustration and anger – and yet the overall feeling was one of exhilaration – as someone said to me afterwards, ‘I realized when I was standing in that crowd that this was the happiest I’d felt for a long tine’; because this was a piece of fucking street theatre, a performance, an action, a happening; because this was where the avant-garde and performance art met and merged with ‘popular’ culture and the mass euphoria of the crowd in a club or a music festival or a football match or a demo; and where the impulse to destruction stemmed from the same spirit as the impulse to creation and enabled it and fostered it and fuelled it; because this is where theory becomes, became feeling. ‘My education is a fist.’

The point of an action like this is that it cannot be restricted, cannot be shepherded and moved on by the march stewards or the cops, cannot be made to move on rather than sitting down in front of the Houses of Parliament, cannot be reduced to the end-point of a big-screen and speeches made on a bus parked in front of Tate Britain and videos like movie trailers with pounding orchestral music and bogey-man Nick Clegg so that the march becomes the multiplex; all the momentum of whistles and drums and chants and people standing on the roofs of bus-stops and builders on scaffolding being cheered by crowds of students and grinning back could not be made simply to dissipate and disappear, to tail and trail off back down the road into ‘normality’; that we – you – want something more and cannot suppress that longing any longer.

The chants and songs, the rhyming couplets and swearwords and plosive voice explosions that you hear on marches such as this respond to the sloganeering and slick phraseology of advertising/ political-spin-culture, where a catchphrase cons us into acceptance and lulls our thinking minds to sleep; “Ready for Change" comes up against “Tory scum, Here We Come”. We might even say that this is poetry, poetry as antagonism and response and counter-thrust. It may not be ‘good poetry’, the slogans might even ‘embarrass’ you or seem trite and child-like. Yet they are there; this is change we can believe in, or at least it is a glimpse of the change that might happen were the momentum of yesterday afternoon to continue, to build up, to be followed up.

“When we mourn violence done against buildings more than violence done against people, we have totally internalised capitalist rationality. Perhaps attacking buildings is the only way to reassert the importance of being human.”(The Third Estate)

"The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy." (Emmeline Pankhurst)

“He was in the street, not a professional context but an open framework, a social and public space where all types of different people pass by, and there he was, taking risks without being afraid of looking utterly ridiculous! It reminds me of something that happened during the recent riots in Athens, where journalists came across a gang attacking places that represented neoliberalism to make noise, using breaking glass and burglar alarms as instruments. Improvising in the city. That's so inspiring, like the Futurists, the Scratch Orchestra and Black Block joining forces in an extreme form of sonic dérive! Imagine using police sirens as your instrument! Imagine what a beautiful drone twenty of them would make! The urban space offers so many possibilities for noise production, let's use the city as our venue – we'll always have an audience!”(Mattin)

"Love is not the unswerving bias of police dogs; it has to be made from scratch at the first indication of its possibility.”

“The wall of glass smashed in, looks like what Wordsworth saw; in the flint windbreaker, lying on the empty floor; to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life; psychosis as the mirror of your dreams, or justice.”(Jow Lindsay)

R.I.P. Marion Brown

2010-10-19T18:12:00.014+01:00

Sad news: Marion Brown passed away on October 10th. Absolutely one of my favourite 'New Thing' saxophonists (well, New Thing and beyond, into early ambient (with Harold Budd), AACM-style 'little instruments' avant-gardism ('Afternoon of a Georgia Faun') and straight-ahead jazz, later in his career); he was also an ethnomusicologist and composer. He hadn't been playing for a number of years due to illness, though his 'profile' might have been raised somewhat in the rock world by the fact that His Name Is Alive released a (very lovely) tribute album a few years back.

Below, a track from the 1967 album 'Porto Novo' - perhaps one of the very finest recordings from the free jazz era, and yet somehow still out-of-print (though I posted a full rip from the LP on this blog, some time ago); from the same year, some gripping concert footage of Brown in free-jazz mode; by way of contrast, his meltingly beautiful interpretation of Harold Budd's composition 'Bismalli Rrahman Rrahim' (not the lengthy original performance, but a reworking from the album 'Vista'); and finally, Brown as composer - his Jean Toomer inspired piano music, as played by Amina Claudine Myers.

I presented a two hour radio show on Brown back in 2008 - unfortunately there wasn't time to play anything from beyond 1974, but there's still a decent range of stuff on there, I think.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago:

Despite his neglect, [Brown] was certainly as good an improviser as the better-known 'New Thing' musicians [Archie] Shepp and [Pharoah] Sanders. All along though, he wasn't so much 'New Thing' as into his own thing - a good dose of classical influence, an interest in ethnic musics (which, admittedly, Sanders and Shepp shared), and, above all, a sparer approach than the other two musicians. Whereas Shepp and Sanders were well capable of emoting to great effect (the prelude section to 'Creator has a Master Plan', or Shepp's gorgeous, impressionistic reading of 'In a Sentimental Mood' (from 'On this Night', 1965)), Brown was more understated, relying on the carefully chosen phrase, on clear motivic development rather than the pure sound/smear/scream tactic. Listen to the phrase he plays in 'Improvisation', from 'Porto Novo' (a phrase which also crops up in his solo on one of the other tracks). Just perfect.

There's a general quality to a lot of his music which is hard to define, to pin down, but can nonetheless be found on some very different recordings. Listen: it's there when he takes elements of the keyboard-rich sound found on early Miles Davis fusion - all those twinkling electric piano melodies and chordal textues - to build something that's soothingly lovely, static and hovering ('Sweet Earth Flying'); it's there when, with different instrumentation, he conjures up the wonderful, hazy, later-summer, small-town feel of a piece like 'Karintha' from 'Geechee Reccollections'; and it's there when he presents a challengily indeterminate avant-garde soundscape on 'Afternoon of a Georgia Faun' - music which seems to be half-asleep, yet is crafted with subtly shifting, delicate improvisational care.

Marion Brown: a masterful musician. Born, September 8, 1931 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA; Died, October 18th, 2010, in Hollywood, Florida, USA.