Saul Williams - Amethyst Rock Star (2001)

I’ve been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately – which has been tying in with some of my thoughts surrounding the role of the oral and aural in poetry – and Saul Williams has been one of those who has most interested me. His use of contemporary rock elements, particularly on his more recent albums, isn’t always to my taste, but, lyrically, he’s someone I can very much admire as a true poet –as someone who bends and twists language like it was a physical thing, to make it mean to turn the head and spin the mind. Below are some extended notes on his first album, ‘Amethyst Rock Star’.

As might be apparent from the title of this, his debut record, Williams is not your easily categorisable artist. While what he does has some affinities with ‘conscious hip-hop’ in the vein of Common or Mos Def, its musical setting is often quite different, and, lyrically, it tends more towards the ‘spoken-word poetry’ with which he made his name than to the tropes of rap, which are included as part of a word-play centred commentary (“While you rhyme about being hardcore, be heartcore”), as objects of reflection rather than as carriers of the message. Such a refusal of category conventions arguably originates from hip-hop’s own use of sampling to provide a wide range of generic backdrops to the vocals – including not just music but snippets of film dialogue and ‘slice-of-life’-style conversational interplay as part of a line-blurring performance act – but, given hip-hop’s emergence as a much more marketable, solidified, and less fluid thing than it was in the past, Williams’ category-dodging is fraught with both entwined musical and racial tensions that complicate the critical position taken on his work. On ‘Amethyst Rock Star’, Williams is working with (a) politically-conscious aural poetry (b) such poetry as it shades into ‘hip-hop’ (c) rock music inflections. Thus he announces himself not as a ‘rapper’ (though from comments he’s made in interviews, it seems that producer Rick Rubin was trying to get him to make a ‘hip-hop’ record), not as a ‘hip-hop artist’, but as a rock star – and not as just another rock star either – rather, as one restoring to the word what it has lost in terms of its stellar potential, its light-filled metaphoric power (Williams as a poet is much into outer space (as Sun Ra): the use of space as a fantastic realm which, rather than just providing escapism, liberates into a new understanding of the world away from hackneyed modes of perception, racial social cultural models leading to a slow dying which extends to the way life is lived as much as it does to the preponderance of death). At the same time, the notion of the ‘amethyst rock’ succeeds in bringing things back down to earth – to the first line of poetry that Williams ever wrote (see the Introduction to ‘The Dead Emcee Scrolls) – “I stand on the corner of the block slinging amethyst rocks” – which is at once the (generalized) nonchalance of the man ‘just hanging out’, watching, observing, waiting, and (given the story surrounding the creation of this poem) the very personal experience of the poet discovering himself in a moment of inspiration that seems hardly explicable by means of ‘rationality’, but as part of the same kind of logic as dreams, as the surreal. This process of transportation is prompted by a physical object – the piece of amethyst Williams carried around with him in his pocket – valued at once for its material qualities and for the spiritual awakening that somehow surrounds it, becomes associated with it. I’m sure that what also appeals to Williams is the notion of the rock star as an individual set apart from the crowd, though very much an embodiment of a collective will – as a voice channeling and having an impact on the thoughts and feelings of (sometimes) a whole generation, as vehicle for the people (and the spirits) to speak through.

As this star like a precious stone, Williams also plays off the ‘bling’ culture of contemporary hip-hop, suggesting a spiritual power rather than the mere glitter of baubles – an insistence on the divinity of the human (a la William Blake) which extends into what many might see as an excessive egotism (in itself another familiar hip-hop trait – bigging oneself up at the expense of others, the bragging song – though Williams isn’t about cursing out his rivals as the mere trading of insults; rather, he castigates those in power or those pretending to a ‘gangster’ cool, to ‘keeping it real’). This reaches its apogee on the final track where the poet shouts out the words: “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” – which he follows up with a hint at the matriarchal, eastern-oriented God of his book, ‘Said the Shotgun to the Head’ (as opposed to the phallic, male, western model, its apogee found in the shotgun pointed to the head, the suicide of civilisation): “And I know God personally/ In fact she lets me call her me/ In fact she lets her call her me.” It’s a suitably overblown climax (and really quite exhilarating – though more so when he digs into his chanted rhythmix than when he bellows out the sung chorus), bringing things full-circle from the record’s Wu-Tang-style opening: “Nigga you better drink half a gallon of Shaolin before they play on the strings of my violin.” That opening is typical of Williams in its word-play twists, as a colourful boast moves into the more complex notions suggested by “my life is orchestrated” – at once a kind of tight-wired organisation (against the forces of oppression), and something weighted against by the deadening organisations of routines and category-placements – as well as a claim to equal legitimacy with the bastions of white culture (“london symphony, concentrated”), and a move out beyond America (to be taken up on the Greek and Egyptian references later in the song).

And overblown boasts or aspirations to the divine within are not the records’ only lyrical themes, with the debts owed to others figure just as strongly. The most noticeable example of this is the massive shout-out list mid-way through ‘Coded Language’, where the chanted names take on the quality of a ritualistic utterance, an incantation, magic syllables – it’s as if Williams thinks he can actually channel the spirits of these predecessors the louder and more forcefully he yells out their names, and, listening to it, you might almost come to believe that yourself. As throughout the record, this wouldn’t have the same impact translated onto paper – it lives and breathes as sound, language as larynx, as breath and lung, as tongue and teeth. The best approximation I can think of this effect, beyond listening to the album itself, is provided by the computer’s sadly inadequate caps lock-key: “in the name of: ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITHE, LOURDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GUARDSIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMNINOV, ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHOWAY, HENDRIX, KUTL, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON, MARY, ISIS, THERESA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERONE, MARLEY, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE STILL AFLAMED, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED.” Of course, this isn’t quite as simple as it seems – it’s not just another list of African-Americans of note, for it incorporates Hiroshima and Nagaski, and blends said African-Americans with white poets, South American revolutionaries, English playwrights, Russian pianist-composers, and Indian Gods. “In the name of” – that opening phrase, which takes on something of the quality of an intake of breath before the great exhalation of words, echoes the ‘exorcism’ conducted at the end of ‘Penny for a Thought’; Williams takes on the language and tonal gravitas/fever pitch of religion and translates it into his own idiosyncratic cry for a new way of seeing. This new path incorporates diverse and esoteric religions, political figures, and reconfigured attitudes to sexuality, class and race – “we enlist / every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference”; reconfigured relations between humans and, ultimately between humans and the world – “Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees.” The aim is not to draw up a simple “list of demands” that can be ticked off some bureaucrat’s checklist as if that erased the stains of past guilt and continuing injustice – the aim is (and Williams seems to mean this literally), to “uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world.” And this is not merely a utopian dream content to remain simply as a dream, the goal stated so as, in effect, to maintain its difference; it is a battle-cry designed to be implemented, for such uplifting is a responsibility: “Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.” These are aims that other hip-hop artists – even the most conscious and ‘right-on’ of the lot – don’t even come close to approaching, and it’s these aims which make Williams’ poetry so refreshing, so invigorating, so necessary.

On the more subdued moments – for they do exist as well! – there is just as much to admire. ‘Robeson’ has its ostensible subject and atmosphere the surrealism of a dream in which the human and animal disconcertingly entwine through the distortions of a marriage ceremony, overseen (and burdened) by the ghosts of oppressed ancestors and those (like Robeson) who spoke out against that oppression; but ends up as Williams’ earnest plea for his daughter to forgive him for his neglect – though no coincidence here that her name is Saturn, thus connecting the responsibilities and emotional niceties of the domestic with the longings and the upward reaches of the cosmic, the necessary entwining of ‘real life’ and imagination (because the two are one): “How could I ever neglect to hug you? You are a planet hugged by a rainbow”. Williams is acutely aware of the dangers of having one’s head filled with dreams of the cosmos and of total liberation – political, social, cultural, sexual, spiritual – which might lead one to neglect relationships with the very human beings for whose benefit and in whose name this revolution is supposed to exist. It’s characteristic that he chooses to address this through a fusion of the two modes – the elevated poetry and the simplicity of his care for his daughter (“God’s will be done. I love you.”) I’m not sure that we’ve heard such penetrating honesty since Michael Franti’s ‘Music and Politics’ (“If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics, I would tell you that sometimes it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention and admiration of 100 strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of those closest to me….If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics, I would tell you that the personal revolution is far more difficult, and is the first step in any revolution”).

In terms of the music, this is a rap record with a rock band – rock would manifest itself even more explicitly in Williams’ following releases: ‘Saul Williams’, where he ditched the band for backgrounds which he mostly produced himself (though, rather than sounding home-made in any lo-fi way, they tend to come across as rather standardised, Rage Against the Machine-style rap-rock – repeated hooks blared loud with the focus moved away from the words and the pell-mell or reflective delivery they generate, which is where the subtlety and interest is really at), and ‘The Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust’, where he covers U2 (nice to hear a contemporary American rapper talking about injustices outside the usual remits – in this case, Northern Ireland) & whose title responds to shape-shifter white rockstar David Bowie. Mind you, ‘Amethyst Rock Star’ doesn’t really feature a typical ‘rock band’ as such – primarily because it includes cello and viola alongside the bass, drums and guitar. In fact, the cello appears to be electric and is often used to double or complement the guitar, to play guitar-type riffs – which can be rather effective, as on the storming 11-minute concluding track, ‘Wine’, or the urgent propulsion with which it begins ‘La La La’. What we don’t have here is the sampling culture of hip-hop; but then again, one might argue that, in Williams’ case, the sampling is in the words, which, seemingly carried along on the weight of their own propulsion, bring in whole cultures and frames of references that you could all too easily miss if you switched off for a few seconds. And, as I’ve said before, Williams isn’t exactly a hip-hop artist, in a strict sense, anyway – and neither he is ‘just’ a slam poet – he is not ‘just’ anything. And thus, on his debut ‘hip-hop’ record, he operates over a drum n’ bass hook (the title cut of DJ Krust’s ‘Coded Language’, reprised on this album), his voice switching to lilts of half-sung Rasta (“seven mountains higher than the valley of death”), his words full of metres and rhymes that spill over the standard couplets of rap, his interests (as I’ve been stressing, and as he’s admitted in interviews) very much embracing rock (this embracement of a piece with his strategy to dare and to defy – to reclaim rock, a whitened version of black music, and in doing so to connect with the neglected the work of the Black Rock Coalition as well as with all those blues forebears). And finally, given his criticism of the trend towards “realness” in much modern rap – “keeping it real” as promoting an ersatz sense of how things are, when the necessity is to change them – it’s entirely appropriate that his reconfiguration of the racial stereotyping of the black man and woman is also part of his quasi-mystical philosophy: “The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.” From where we are to where we could be and back again with that changed perspective: Williams is nothing if not ambitious, and ‘Amethyst Rock Star’ remains a clarion-call whose vibrations continue to ripple the air nearly a decade after its release.

Gil Scott-Heron: I'm New Here (XL Recordings, 2010)

Let’s not talk about the release of this new album as an ‘event’, if we can help it. Yes, Gil Scott-Heron, ‘godfather of rap’, a hugely important voice in bringing socially-conscious messages to both black and white youth, has not recorded an album since 1994’s ‘Spirits’. Yes, he has been in and out of prison, has had plans for recordings and for books planned and then postponed, has made intermittent public appearances but been generally been shrouded in rumours of ill-health and personal breakdown. Yes, all this has happened – and the record’s title suggests a very specific engagement with the notion that Heron is a quote-unquote major artist who must add to his legacy, must teach us all once again, must justify his absence with another classic. Might it suggest that Heron is a new man, reborn, coming out of hard times with his head held high once more? And would that mean a return to the Heron of the old days, or would it mean a re-invented, re-invigorated artist, starting over just as strong but in a different place?

These are all questions that Heron does not need to answer: he has done enough, whatever the critics may say about missed opportunities, not to have to make another statement if he does not wish to; his position is assured. But, as listeners, as critics, we cannot help but make them – we cannot pretend to listen in a vacuum. And so the comparisons begin almost as soon as we press play.

First off, after we get past the spoken-word of the opening track, we’ll notice that Heron sounds less comfortable singing now (perhaps explaining the choice of Smog’s neo-folk acoustic number ‘I’m New Here’ to cover; in the original, Bill Callahan’s sung voice was always on the brink of shading over into laconic, spoken reflection, and here, Heron speaks most of the words, singing only the short, recurring chorus). His voice is now partially possessed of the ‘lived-in’ croak that characterises latter-day Dylan and Tom Waits. Though that has always been part of Waits' cigarettes-and-alcohol mystique, and seems to have become an accentuation of Dylan’s famously less than smooth vocal stylings (albeit one so extreme that its burden must be borne by his status as a ‘living legend’ fondly canonised by both a generation of fading hippies and Professor Christopher Ricks), in Heron’s case, as his voice was quite mellifluous before, this may have necessitated a stylistic change, as it can’t quite carry the righteous soul style. (It will be interesting to hear what material Heron tackles in his upcoming live shows – one would have thought that a record like this wouldn’t really be feasible as a stage show, and a return to the jazz/soul instrumental styling would seem likely.)

But, given all this, one must remember that spoken word is how Heron started off in the first place – his debut record announced him as ‘A New Black Poet’, and it is as poet as much as singer that he appears here. Despite the apparently low-key title of that record (‘Small-Talk at 125th and Lenox’), the wide-ranging subject matter and the urgent desire to speak political realities meant that he was soon aligned with the poet-teachers of the 1970s African-American urban experience: June Jordan, Jayne Cortez, Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Father Amde Hamilton, Otis O’Solomon, Richard Dedeaux, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan. Of course, such a reduction – to a list of names – would mitigate the approach that all these artists shared, one that was about ‘the revolution of everyday life’, rather than about soapbox sermonising or political platitudinising divorced from the thoughts and feelings, the insults and injuries, the imposed or unwitting failures, and, yes too, the joys that occupied every minute of every day for vast numbers of ordinary people. Thus, while all the reviews will focus on the fact that ‘I’m New Here’ is a ‘personal’ record, a chastened Heron’s reaction to years of silence through addiction and imprisonment, it’s worth noting that the material which made his name was precisely defined by its absence of sloganeering (this is the narrative of ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ – moving revolution, as a movement, away from the simplicity of oft-repeated clichés, catchphrases, and images), and by its focus on the inseparability of the personal and the political (think of the way the narrative of black poverty and institutional callousness in ‘Pieces of a Man’ is filtered through a sentiment of personal and private grief). Nonetheless, while Heron, particularly as time went on, did take on the position of spokesman (shouting out against the Reagan era, then advising the hip-hop artists who followed in his wake to take more account of their social responsibility, as potential teachers of, and voices for their generation), his absence from the scene perhaps mitigates against his effectiveness as the wise elder – having passed on the mantle, he can self-reflect, in a manner of course still tied to the forces that shaped him, but with the specifics of political concern not voiced explicitly.

Instead, what seems a more imaginatively exaggerated world emerges. This may result as much as anything from the ominous sound of the music: its samples and murmurs, its hisses and whirrs are a world away from the soul-drenched piano chords and jazz bass of the more familiar work, though the references to Charon and to Satan, and the flickering, high speed urban ghosts of the video to ‘Me and the Devil’ certainly have their say in the matter too. Given further reflection, however, one realises that the words frequently turn on themes familiar enough to count as archetypal. The personal demons of alcohol-fuelled sleeplessness and the drudge of routine (‘Where Did the Night Go’) form a quieter, more intimate variation on ‘The Bottle’, while, elsewhere, it is the classic themes of the blues that are returned to: the old theme of urban decay as contrasted against the simplicity of a poor, but perhaps more ‘honest’, rural past (‘New York is Killing Me’), the attractive yet unsettling force of the supernatural (‘Me and the Devil’) – where the supernatural becomes a potent force, not so much structured into simple moral schemes but as figured as part of the complexity of human behaviour, and – crucially – part of the complexity of the traditions formed over centuries by African-Americans reacting to their transplantation and subsequent isolation in ‘the land of the free’.

Transformation is a major part of this experience – the practice of ‘signifying’ – jazz’s transformation of white instruments through black music – Sun Ra’s transformation of a multitude of subjects, from spirituals to space travel – Ray Charles’ transformation of gospel styles from the sacred to the profane – Heron’s non-televised transformation of the slogans of consumer culture into their negation. And ‘I’m New Here’, too, is about transformation – two of the stand-out tracks are covers, back to the roots with Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and the Devil’, and, more surprisingly, turning to acoustic guitar and the (musically) lilting, (lyrically) self-interrogating ‘I’m New Here’ by Bill Calahan (a.k.a. Smog). Connecting the subdued, whimsical delicacy of white folk-tradition in the latter, with the blues’ more extrovert, dramatically strident position doesn’t so much seal their differences as emphasise the common thread of vulnerability and personal honesty underlining both – as well as the fact that such apparent straightforwardness is always an assuming of a role, a self-dramatisation that stands, often ambiguously, for a truth, rather than presenting that truth direct in itself. This is a balance between frailty and strutting confidence that the record treats as central. It doesn’t shy away from the increased weakness of Heron’s voice; rather, the production takes account of it, even foregrounds it – rather than compensating with a thicker background texture, it keeps things sparse and stripped-down, to emphasize rather than to hide.

This turns out to mean that we have here a striking generic difference to previous Scott-Heron albums. The aforementioned production is decidedly lo-fi (with tape hiss and sparing use of murky samples), and its sparse, semi-industrial sound owes much to the spaciousness, to the minimal, almost empty ghost-traces of dub-step, where samples drift in and out almost un-noticed, where tracks float along on skeletal beats that pound with mechanical precision but that never feel fast or driving. There are no saxophone, flute or piano solos to add more complex improvised variations over the song’s basic structures; instead, there are the pauses between phrases, the tension hanging on each word, the wait for each weighted-syllable.

And, given that the fifteen-track record lasts for only 28-minutes (including a number of ‘interludes’ – 10-second, reverb’d snippets of Heron in conversation), each syllable is most definitely weighted. Such brevity makes it important to experience the whole thing as one, continuous, flowing entity: the recurring Kanye West sample which opens and closes the record, giving it an element of circularity; the transference of mood from tales of spirits and the threat of damnation (‘Me and the Devil’, ‘Your Soul and Mine’) to personal ruminations hung-over with depression and unease (‘Where Did the Night Go’, ‘Running’), to warmer reminiscences and reflections on a life – the way it was lived, the influences that shaped it (the short spoken-word snippets). Though the songs themselves generally have a clear and simple structure, the predominance of spoken word and the sparseness of the background mean that tracks don’t split as easily into single entities as they do on, say, ‘Pieces of a Man’. Because of this, some might slant this as a record of half-started (or half-finished) demos and sketches, spliced together and put out there before it’s reached the stage of a rounded, completed artistic statement. Indeed, the quick-fix critic in me suggested that very angle when I first heard these tracks, but, in trying to actually listen to and experience the album with an open attitude, I realised that trying to impose such a structure would not be to take this record on its own terms – which is the only way it is going to make sense. Forget pre-conditioned ideas about how an album ‘should’ be constituted – as much as you can – and, allowing that the distance of time may allow a more finely-balanced judgement once a few years have passed, I think one can say that this is a good piece of work: sincere, not bombastic, not expected; unsentimental but frank, not directed towards melody as on the classic albums but with enough melodic aftertaste to satisfy. And in that sense, assessment as to whether it is a ‘major album’ or an ‘important comeback’, and attempts to place it into a particular model of ‘late recordings by former legends’ (all the Johnny Cash comparisons we’ve been hearing), come to seem rather unnecessary, rather out of place. You can hear it for what it is, and you should.

"Threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress"

This story emerged in The Guardian last week. In sum, it seems that carrying placards and shouting slogans at British soliders is now enough to get you arrested (retrospectively arrested, too – if we decided we don’t like what you’ve done after you’ve done it, we’re going to come after you).

It really goes without saying that this is an obvious manifestation of a worrying trend that has emerged in recent years in the UK; a trend towards racial, social, and cultural profiling. (Of course, this is something that never went away, as the ingrained Thatcherite mindset of our times could too readily attest, were enough attention paid to it. For example, our newspapers & politicians have often told us (though not in so many words), that miners are brutish, unrefined working class animals – or at the very least, unfortunately, regrettably, expendable. Names, labels, faces, modes of dress, and justifications for singling out those possessing these, may change, but the motivating force remains at root the same.)

Those charged by the police were Muslims. One might well ask whether more worried heed would be paid to these arrests if those arrested were concerned white liberals protesting the BNP. Of course, this would never happen, as the BNP are a group we can all unite in hate against – they are the bogeymen we can all agree to loathe. (I don’t in any way mean to smooth over the worrying rise in their popularity, and the genuine concern felt by many at this rise; but I do wonder if they provide an easy way out for the increasingly right-leaning ‘mainstream’ parties– by being so openly racist and all the rest of it, they allow, for example, the Tories to present their own policies as eminently reasonable)). Well, white liberals might have been one thing – though of course they are much less worrying than evil hardline leftists like those nasty anarchists who have quite rightly been cracked down on in Greece or in London if G20 provokes them into their bestial action. These anarchists are acting merely to create turmoil, to disrupt our tourist snaps and the picture-perfect political co-operation of our leaders. No, not to dream of or to provoke the dissolution of insane systems of ingrained cruelty and of a loss of compassionate relation beyond the packaged tendresse of ‘charity’ (through which we can have the sensation of smoothing out troublesome creases in the fabric of society, through which we can feel good about ourselves, can bask in the warm cocooned glow of self-satisfaction with the excuse that we are really feeling good about helping other people.) Not to reflect, along with Martin Luther King, that “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”; not to reflect, along with Blake, that “Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor/ And mercy no more would be/ If all were as happy as we.” No, the message is: smash no windows whatsoever, straighten your tie, and smile as you actively benefit from the misery of spirit and material circumstance suffered by others.

The terms are set, it seems: both as to who can protest and who they can protest against. And they most certainly cannot protest against ‘our brave boys’, who are our ‘heroes’, fighting for ‘freedom’ ‘on our behalf’ (forget ‘not in my name’ and all that bullshit, OK?). Yes, you may question (within the timid terms of tremulous liberal anxiety) the cause in which they have been sent to torture and ravage another’s country, another’s land, to commit everyday cultural rape. But they themselves are blameless as lambs.

Well knock me down with a feather if the real situation isn’t a little more complex than this nice fantasy. These soldiers, apparently so sensitive as to need the police to protect them from insults, are known as ‘The Poachers’, a name that implies that they hunt their prey as mere animals to be killed. Not exactly the most shy and retiring souls then – and perhaps, if their mindset is as suggested by their name, they view the use of force as the most obvious and logical ways to solve all disagreements (hence the police intervention; the soldiers themselves could obviously not lash out at citizens of their own country – at least, not yet, as the climate is still not quite ripe (though I venture to suggest that the time when such a response would be accepted is not far off, and is not merely the cautionary and never-realized warning of dystopian sci-fi)).

OK then, so I find ironic and bitterly laughable the notion that soldiers need defending from a few insults thrown (aren’t these the people whose job is to have deadly missiles thrown at them, and to throw deadly missiles back?). But I also find it worrying, as the obvious clampdown on civil liberties, on the right to protest, that it is; I find it worrying (though by no means surprising) that ideologically-motivated force is being exercised in the name of ‘law and order’. ‘Keeping us safe’ is always the excuse, though it’s unclear who ‘we’ are and what exactly our position is in the citadel we inhabit. Well, whatever the answers to those questions, the message here is ‘think twice about expressing dissent if you’re a Muslim, and keep your fucking trap shut.’

[Before anyone accuses me of spitting out one form of repression (right-leaning white western government) only to implicitly favour another (‘Islamofascism’), I should point out that I certainly do not support the use of religiously-motivated insults such as “British soldiers burn in hell” (though I would not go as far as to censor them by means of police intervention); I am firmly against repression and intolerance in the name of religion generally, let alone in the name of Islam. (And I'll note that a number of those arrested waved a placard reading, "Islam will dominate the world, freedom can go to hell.") But I would point out that slogans about hellfire and damnation do recall those used by White Christian Fundamentalists picketing ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. (On his website, Stewart Lee has published an example of the many hate mail letters he received; it warns him that, unless he repents, he will burn in hell). Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought that writing a satirical musical was less grounds for burning in hell than going to a foreign country and shooting people – though, evidently, that’s not what the police and other instruments of ‘law and order’ believe.]

Bill Dixon: Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)

As Stephen Haynes notes in his online journal/blog on the recording sessions for this project, one of the challenges involved was providing enough distinction in the sound mix between five trumpeters/cornet players with similarly dark sounds. But Dixon does, after all, favour a dark palette, as amply demonstrated by his previous orchestral release, ‘17 Musicians In Search of a Sound: Darfur’, where the slightly larger ensemble produced slowly emerging chord-clouds and slowly shifting unison passages in which the ensemble mesh was produced by individual instruments in near, but not quite, total alignment. The effect is a kind of blurring, produced by a very careful manipulation of individual detail; a more horizontal than vertical approach, with solos emerging as parts of the texture – like a colour highlighted in a particular portion of a canvas – rather than as monologues supported by an ensemble background. This has always been the case with Dixon’s own playing, particularly given his use of electronics, and the fact that the other trumpeters also deploy electronics, in some cases seeming to mimic his approach – muted growls, breathy whispers, repeated mid-register notes, high-pitched flurries cascading into silence – adds to the collaborative feel. That’s not to say that there aren’t solo spots, though – for instance, ‘Motorcycle ‘66’ starts with melodic material for unaccompanied bass which succeeds in forcing an initial concentration, in ushering the listener in to a music which needs to be heard with open ears. In any case, neither ensemble nor solo passages contain a wasted note; as Dixon puts it: “Listen to the space in the room. If you can't do something more beautiful than that, shut the fuck up.” The result is a kind of substantial minimalism – very slow, seeming to lack any overtly linear development, predominantly atmospheric, almost trance-like. And yet even this apparent lack of activity – most pronounced on the sustained hush of ‘Adagio: Slow Mauve Scribblings’ – reveals itself upon closer inspection to consist of complex structural balances and connections. Low, slowly-shifting drones, shimmering vibraphone, occasional electronic tweaks, overlapping melodic lines, repeated upward flurries all combine to create a sound field that is unique in modern music. Inexorable yet fragile, ‘Tapestries for Small Orchestra’ is slow-moving, meditative, and deeply affecting.

dog star man - by brakhage

a brief note on structure might be in order to begin with: as much as the film can be said to have a 'narrative' (which in any case is in the order of epic or myth, rather than the 'story' of traditional film-making), it concerns the rise and fall of the dog star man (though the title can be taken two ways: either as the name of the man, or as a conflation of the three main visual threads of the film - a man, a dog, and a star (the sun, shown both in archive and original footage)). the man undertakes a physical journey up a mountain, where, accompanied by his dog, he chops down a dead tree: various dreams and remembrances (of his child and his wife) combine with sense impressions of the landscape around him (mountains, trees, snow, clouds, sun), as well as less obviously referential visual patterns created through superimposition and handpainting on film. the prelude combines footage from the four following parts and is concerned, broadly, with the cosmic - much use is made of footage of the sun (the 'star' of the title). part i introduces the footage of a woodsman, the dog star man (played by brakhage himself) climbing a snowy mountain with his dog, and chopping down a dead tree. part ii superimposes onto footage of a baby (one of brakhage's children) a riot of colour and rapidly changing visual phenomena, achieved thru the technique of painting on film, a kind of animation which he intended to approximate 'closed-eye vision' - i.e. what one sees when one closes one's eyes. part iii, a 'daydream of sex', is visceral and supremely physical, mixing footage of the sexual act with blood and organs - most notably, a beating heart. part iv returns to the woodsman, whose journey up the mountain comes to seem increasingly futile; trapped in an endless ascent, with no hope of reaching a summit, and made, through looping, to continuously chop at a tree which never falls, the man collapses on the ground, grimacing in agony, his wild long hair giving him a caveman appearance - the struggles against nature and physical limitation are unchanged from man's early beginnings. a mystical quality briefly emerges, hinting at some kind of hope, as the man reaches for a nightsky of twinkling stars, but these stars are, in reality, full of molten, deathly heat, as we see from the footage of the sun.

that's a very brief outline of what 'happens' in the film, although, in order to provide some sense of cohesion, i've inevitably imposed a too-schematic narrative outline on a film which lives moment by moment, as a profoundly immersive and visually busy experience. it's almost as if the absence of sound is made up for by what might at first seem to be an OVERcrowding of visual event; and watching the film silently, as intended, provides a very different experience of how one experiences the medium - one's eye trained to become more active, more able to discern connections, cohesions and fractures. therein lies the main problem with trying to describe 'dog star man' - for, fundamentally, the film teaches one how to read it itself, as it progresses: no amount of preparation will really equip one to the same degree as this instantaneous visual training. in that sense, the film is, like the best avant-garde art, a PARTICIPATORY piece, an experience which the viewer can share - but to do so, they must work, they cannot sit back and let the film-maker tell them something. this makes watching 'dog star man' a very personal experience, and the film itself is a very personal piece, showing the most intimate details of brakhage's life, the most intimate and extreme details of his fears and hopes. but at the same time, it has an epic scope rarely matched in conventional feature films. it is about the simultaneity of the local and the cosmic, about the struggle for security, for a home base, and the dangers and rigours of manual labour, of making one's way in a world full of overwhelming sense data, a world that shapes one and that is shaped into being by sense perceptions, rather than existing as something 'already there' which one can schematise, organise and make sense of.

moving in, from outline to detail, we might ask 'what do we have here'? and to answer that question would require a whole book (a frame-by-frame analysis is out of the question!) but, in brief, we can say that we have: perception nature repetition cycles recurrences man in the cosmos light movement the body organs sex fluid secretion the breast the penis the axe the tree the eye/ man as mythological figure an epic made from home movies the handmade handscratched handpainted the sun's molten leaps clouds passing the ascent the struggle up the mountain interludes lightness the woodsman playing with his dog (who, as we know from 'sirius remembered', decomposes in a quite horrifically beautiful way)/ back from the sense of narrative based around character development to the epic cipher figure yet with an utterly intense focus on the body inside and outside its environment (the dog star man, the woodsman, is brakhage himself but his motivations are not considered in the sense of a 'character study', though the preoccupations ARE very much diurnal - his baby, his home life sex, the mountain near his home, his cabin (in part iv), manual labour, struggles and fears in the moment revealing huge cosmic dramas) its environment snow falling thru and landing on trees twigs branches hand drawings of crystals superimpositions snow caught in hair snow struggled through and slippery hair skin organs blood opening and shutting the mouth beating of the heart blood red black/ we can say that we have the elemental (which is never, really, elementary)

Ulzan's Raid (1972): A Re-Revisionist Western

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Jorge Luke
Music: Frank DeVol
Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Alan Sharp
Director of Photgraphy: Joseph Biroc

In 1954, Robert Aldrich directed and Burt Lancaster starred in ‘Apache’, a re-consideration of the negative role accorded Native Americans in the western film. Just under twenty years later, they re-united for another examination of the same subject, but the revisionism this time was as much a response to the kind of film made possible by the likes of ‘Apache’, as it was to the old myths of whooping villains (a la ‘Stagecoach’). Attention is paid to creating an almost deadpan examination of the minutiae of life in the west, with a literate script depicting the complex moral dilemmas that were faced in a time of rough-and-ready law-and-order and rampant racism. Not only the settings but the characters are more believable than was the norm for the western at the time (and, given such recent efforts as the re-make of ‘3:10 to Yuma’, is the norm today as well). Thus, we have such closely thought-through detail as the army scout shooting himself and the settler he’s escorting back to the fort, to save them from being tortured by the Apaches, and the tactical manoeuvres centring on how long horses can last during a lengthy pursuit. In addition, the scout played by Lancaster isn’t (as he probably would be today) the ‘cynical’, ‘world-weary’ character who must redeem himself by some heroic action; rather, he’s a competent professional, a man who lives with an Apache wife but who doesn’t buy the ‘Little Big Man’ myths of the peace-loving noble savage– a hippie era antidote to the racism of ‘classic’ westerns that actually presented a view just as distorted as theirs. ‘Ulzana’ is far from a one-man film, though, and it’s the relations between Lancaster and other characters that make it such an interesting picture. Most notably, there’s the idealistic young officer (Bruce Davison) who leads the expedition to chase Ulzana, the Apache who’s fled his reservation in frustration and is leading a war party to rape and murder local homesteaders. The son of a clergyman, the young man believes that it’s “an absence of Christian feeling” that’s led to the situation of mutual enmity between white men and Native Americans; however, when he sees the aftermath of Ulzana’s raids (for instance, a mutilated settler has a dog’s tail placed in his mouth; as Lancaster wryly observes, Apaches have a strange sense of humour), he quickly swings to the opposite view, and wonders how Lancaster can have dealt with the Apache for so long without hating them. The fact that men could be so cruel offends his notion that man is essentially good (“made in God’s image”) – particularly so when members of his own cavalry troupe start to mutilate the corpse of Ulzana’s teenage son. Lancaster, though, sees through the bullshit, implicitly pointing out that such a ‘humane’ viewpoint over-simplifies the questions of culture clash caused by the white man’s invasion of Native American territory. It would be easy to characterise the tribes as mistreated innocents suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty colonialists (the hippie view), or, as the young officer does, to believe that a little talking and good-faith would sort things out, and that both sets of men could exist together in peace, motivated by similar feelings of love and brotherhood, following ‘good moral principles’ in harmony. What that ignores, though, is the brutality present in the tribal culture (at least, in that of the Apaches, who were feared by other tribes as well as by the white men); commenting on the rape of white settlers, several characters note that “they don’t treat their own women much better.” A culture that is based around rites of manhood (as documented in ‘A Man Called Horse’) and the feats of male warriors is not all that dissimilar to that of bloodthirsty white men masquerading behind Christianity, ‘the American way’, or simple lust for land. Yet just as one is not going to be able to ‘understand’ the Apache by caricaturing them as evil, heathen savages, one is also not going to be able to understand them by trying to view them as surrogate white liberals: there is a difference, an otherness which should neither be romanticised nor ignored. Appropriately enough, all of Ulzana’s dialogue is presented, unsubtitled, in his native tongue: no cushy Kevin Costner characterisations here. Overall, then, one might characterise the film’s nuanced approach as re-revisionism: a corrective both to the old Hollywood myths which everyone by now knew to be untrue, and to the new hippie myths which were perhaps more ‘worthy’ but were also riskily naïve.

NB. Ward Churchill's 'Fantasies of the Master Race' might help to point up some of the errors in the above post. At least, it might teach me to do some more research, rather than just taking on trust what I've seen in a film (which is, after all, fictional).

Valdez Is Coming (1971)

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Susan Clark, Jon Cypher
Music: Charles Gross
Director: Edwin Sherin
Screenplay: Roland Kibbee, David Rayfiel
(based on the novel by Elmore Leonard)
Director of Photgraphy: Gábor Pogány

Like Martin Ritt’s ‘Hombre’, made a few years earlier, this was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, and, like ‘Hombre’, it presents as its hero someone from an oppressed minority who is forced into a confrontation against heavy odds, due to the violent actions of some unscrupulous characters who hold him in racial contempt. Happening across a shooting party, Mexican lawman Bob Valdez (Burt Lancaster) is forced into a confrontation with an innocent army veteran, a black man accused by the rancher who’s leading the party of a murder he didn’t commit. Stricken with guilt at having killed the man, Valdez tries to get the rancher to give him $100 to compensate the dead man’s Native American widow; however, he’s met with contempt and physical violence, and the main part of the film sees him taking his revenge. (Although one should note that it’s not straightforward revenge, as Valdez is acting as much to prove a point – to make the rancher accept his guilt and show some concern towards the oppressed – as he is to avenge a personal slight or injury.)

Less downbeat and more unbelievable in its development than ‘Hombre’, this is nonetheless a film I wanted to like, and one which certainly has something to lift it above your average western. It’s not a ‘message’ picture, as was the vogue at the time (‘Little Big Man’, ‘Solider Blue’ et al); rather, its revisionism is gentle and easy to miss, often just a seemingly throw-away line (asked when he hunted Apache, the titular hero replies “before I know better”). The fact that Valdez is a Mexican also runs counter to the usual western clichés of those ‘over the border’ being either caricatured bandidos (Calvera from ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and General Mapache from ‘The Wild Bunch’) or poor, oppressed farmers, essentially innocent but often incapable of defending themselves without the help of white mercenaries (again, we can turn to ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’ for examples). Indeed, an exchange between Valdez and his old friend Diego, where Valdez impersonates the rancher who will prove the villain of the piece, nicely captures the mix of scorn and idealisation which characterises the white man’s view of the Mexican: “well, you’re a good greaser, Diego. As long as you’re a good greaser, I treat you fair and square – yes sirree, Diego, you people sure know how to live: singing, dancing, screwing – you don’t worry about nothing.” It’s one of the best moments of the film, in part because it’s so understated, yet underlain with a certain dramatic tension: having begun wryly, ironically, Lancaster delivers the final line with what is almost a sigh; a shift to a new, quiet seriousness and determination which is signalled by the faint rattle of Morricone-esque percussion on the soundtrack, and which sees him ride out on his horse for his near-fatal second encounter with the rancher.

Given all this, it’s unfortunate that the Mexican is played by a white man in make-up, although I’d accept that, back in the 70s, there were less bankable Latin stars of the kind who crop up in Hollywood films today (one can imagine Benicio del Toro playing this role, for example). Not that Burt Lancaster’s make-up is particularly bad; and, after all, the fact that he played the hero of Robert Aldrich’s ‘Apache’ in similar ‘brown-face’ didn’t prevent him from giving a very fine performance in a very fine film. His blue eyes do look a little out of place here though, and the henchman character, ‘El Segundo’, looks like a pantomime villain, with hair that sprouts in huge, wild tufts on either side of his head, and dollops of face-paint which make him look like Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Indeed, several of the protagonists also look distinctly like 70s TV characters: I’m thinking primarily of the woman Valdez kidnaps, and her man, the villain of the piece.



Particularly in the second half of the film, ‘Valdez is Coming’ threatens to become a rather tedious revenge/chase movie, though the plot is slightly more complex than this. Nonetheless, there is something rather pulpy about the way that Lancaster turns from put-upon minor lawman to brilliantly competent guerrilla fighter, shooting a man from a 1,000 yards, easily picking off the numerous armed riders sent after him, and sneaking into the heart of the enemy camp without anyone noticing. It’s particularly noticeable partly because of the understated, resigned quality that characterises his performance in the initial stages of the film: moving slowly and speaking carefully, almost deferentially, Valdez is a character not exactly resigned to his lot (which is being treated with open or concealed contempt by his white neighbours) but understandably cautious about being too outspoken. From the moment he pulls his old army gear from under the bed and starts to growl, “Valdez is coming,” he is suddenly athletic, hyper-alert, and a crack shot who never misses the target. The one-man-against-impossible-odds storyline seems here actually more unbelievable than in ‘Chato’s Land’, where Charles Bronson’s character has the advantage of knowing the terrain – as the film’s title indicates, it is the desert which accounts for the fate of the posse he stalks as much as it is the actions of Chato himself. Valdez, though, eludes capture with such ease that the fact he is forced into a final showdown comes as rather a surprise – though, given the mechanics and conventions of plot, it has to happen.

It’s the old Elmore Leonard trick (seen also in ‘Mr Majestyk’) of having the passive, good-natured hero take his revenge after suffering some memorable indignity (in ‘Majestyk’, this involved the machine-gunning of a crop of melons; here, the incident has Lancaster forced to struggle through harsh terrain with a wooden cross strapped to his back). But whereas that sort of thing might be expected in a simple action film like ‘Mr Majestyk’, imposing such a cliché on what could have been a reasonably realistic look at life in the Old West means that ‘Valdez is Coming’ fails to live up to its initial promise. The end result is a rather uneasy compromise between action-movie set-pieces and something more thoughtful and interesting. Still, it’s worth an hour and a half of your time – even if that’s for what it could have been more than for what it is.