Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)

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?

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)

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

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!

là-bas

The Nut Cracker

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

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.