Straight Outta Crouch End

In Praise and Defence of Richard Dawkins

2010-09-21T21:23:00.002+01:00

The Pope came to Britain last week, which must have been nice for him, as he always gets to pass through Italy on the way from his country to anywhere else in the world. Gosh, he must think, as he rides through Rome - I've picked such a good neighbourhood, in such a good city, for my country to be in!

While in Britain, the Pope's lamentation that Britain has become a sadly atheist country full of militant secularists, attracted a lot of attention - and not just for being the obviously bitter comments of a very old man who never comes to Britain and whose sources of information are Catholic priests. The coverage suggested that he had committed a gaffe, and that it had been impolitic of him to speak in that manner - but it wasn't the manner that was wrong, in my view, so much as the substance: the atheists and secularists of Britain are, by and large, not at all militant. Of all Britain's secularists and atheists, how many marched against the Pope on Sunday - against the noxious role that religion has come to play in public life, and against its ongoing offenses against human rights and free speech, and against its opposition of science and against its positing of blind faith as some sort of valid rejoinder to argument and reason? A middling percentage. There are some vocal atheists, yes - but they are a very small minority; the rest are busy cowering and accepting, being trod on and letting people get on with things very nicely.

Over the last few weeks, in the run-up to the Pope's visit, I've had occasion to discuss atheism and secularism a little with people, and a line I've heard again and again, from atheist, reasonable friends, is 'Oh, I can't stand that Richard Dawkins'. And this from people who, often as not, haven't read The God Delusion, and therefore have little idea of Dawkins' engaging powers of argument, his humour, his passion for his subject and his generosity of spirit. I can hardly begin to fathom the perverseness of rationalists attacking a scientist when there are targets like liars and criminals to have a go at instead. The point of view seems to be that he is too strident in attacking religion and that he should let religious people have their say. Who are these religious people who cannot take debate, who cannot take scorn? Is it somehow defiling their beliefs to question them? Just how far exactly ought an atheist or secularist go, according to the people who think Dawkins goes too far? Do these people - friends of mine - ever question anyone's beliefs, or do they just let everything pass? I let the lies and wilful misunderstanding of our world pass, too - I cannot pretend to be the bravest and most argumentative of atheists, standing up for the truth at every opportunity; but at least I respect the nobility and courage of Dawkins in opposing falsehoods and demagogy.

Philip Pullman wrote a very interesting article in the Guardian - of which more later - a while back, which I can now not find, but which essentially argued very convincingly that ideas themselves are not worthy of respect. People, he said, must have our respect, but their ideas must not, and in fact the most respect one can pay an idea or an argument is to probe it and question it. It isn't disrespecting a person to call their thoughts into question: the problem comes when someone's idea is presented not as an idea or thought or argument but as a 'belief'. The word 'belief' uninvites argument, and tells you that you should not counter it. But this is patently absurd: everything must be questioned. Dawkins' method infuriates some because he applies strictly scientific systems to his arguing: what is your proof for saying something, what is the truth in it, what makes you say it? At times when he has become irritatedwith his interlocutors it isn't because he disrespects the people, but disrespects their reasoning: if you posit a God, then don't be offended if someone asks you what that God is made of. If you cannot answer that, and no-one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer, your argument is ipso facto invalid.

The Guardian - trying to shed its image as the atheist vanguard - chose to comment after the anti-Pope marches on Saturday that the marchers should have shown sincere faith the respect it deserves. Faith does not deserve respect, no more than true love deserves respect or grouchiness deserves respect or a penchant for chocolate deserves respect. I have plenty of respect for people who believe in a God, despite having no respect for the idea of believing in a God, and on Saturday I was marching against the undue influence of religion in our world, as represented by the Pope, whose ignorant and hateful pronouncements on contraception, abortion, women's rights and gay rights are constantly reported as if they had some sort of validity by our press. I live in a world where faith schools get to choose which children they want to educate, despite practising religious people being a minority in Britain. I was there protesting against these things. In what way is protesting against the covering up of known acts of paedophilia a sign of disrespect to people of faith? It is a disrespect to people of faith, on the contrary, to assume they might not be as outraged by these things as non-believers.

A line that is always parrotted about Dawkins is that he is 'as bad as the people he attacks' because he preaches and tries to convert people to his cause. Let it be said once more that stating facts in a bid for people to understand the way things actually are (and again I urge everyone to read at least the chapter on bats in The God Delusion, to see with what elegance and clarity Dawkins presents the facts of the bat's evolution and of the evolution of the eye as an organ) is not preaching, but educating: it would be a completely different matter if the things that Dawkins was 'preaching' were patently untrue and had been proven as such. His means, at least, justify his method. Dawkins speaks with bravery, knowing that he has made himself the person who people criticise when they want an easy atheist target. He is unflinching in his intellectuality and morality, and has made enemies because of his unwillingness to accept the parity of fiction with facts. In his brilliant speech on Saturday, you could sense the candour and fury in him when he decried the immorality of planting the lie of hell in children's minds. What is ignoble or wrong about taking religious people to task for creating falsehoods with which to frighten and silence children? Attack him if you will, atheists, but we should all follow his example more.

Quick Monday Playlist

2010-01-25T17:10:00.003Z

These are a few songs I've listened to today:

Holiday reading

2010-01-07T21:19:00.004Z

Hail, readers! Yup, this is the second post in one single day. I've got a lot to say to the world, and I'm not afraid to put it all down in this blog. So for part two of my holiday re-cap, we'll be looking at what I read this holiday, why I read it, and how you should read it too if you haven't already.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

I love it when you take a book out with you somewhere, and your memories of reading it are fused with the sights and smells around you. For me, the last few chapters of Cat's Cradle - which I tore through in a fit of delight - will always be indelibly connected with Chinese villagers working by the roadside as my bus sped into the curvy hills around Yangshuo and down a rocky path, past dusty villages towards the Yulong river. It's not an entirely wrong sort of landscape to associate with Vonnegut's godless world, in which disenchanted islanders live in a hopeless sort of state, governed by power-crazed idiots. Reading Vonnegut's furious conclusion, in which the self-styled prophet Bokonon thumbs his nose at God as all around him the world lies in tatters, I thought of the pointlessness and misery of some of our existence, and the crazy rules and lives that are meted out to us by governments and religious leaders. It sort of made sense in this context - although the lush beauty of the surrounding mountains gave my heart some relief from Vonnegut's dystopian vision.

To say that Vonnegut's book is angry, biting and contemptuous of the modern world and its violence and superstition, is to give an impression of a dour book without heart. Yet Cat's Cradle bristles with life and hilarity - a sort of raging comedy - and is sometimes truly moving, even as Vonnegut strives to disconnect us from his narrative and his characters by cutting the book up into short chapters and routinely plunging his story into the realm of the farcical. To begin with, I wasn't sure what he was up to, and his world didn't make sense to me entirely - but as the book gathered speed and Vonnegut began to show that he had entire control over these characters and this invented world, I started to marvel at his vision and his cleverness. Briefly: Cat's Cradle deals with one man's attempt to piece together the life story of Dr Hoenekker, the inventor of the H Bomb. In the process, he stumbles across the lives of his children, and ends up with them on a pointless island with its own stupid religion, where the end of the world is about to take place. Vonnegut creates his religion (Bokononism) gleefully, writing hilariously daft prayers and chants that pepper the book, and also invests this hopeless island of his own creation with a sort of manic, believable life. Along the way, he very sharply skewers war, patriotism and religion, and it's a joy to behold. The greatest moment of the book is when he lets his guard down for one chapter, dropping his virulent, cynical tone to give voice to one lone reasonable character, who pleads for an understanding of our human barbary. In this chapter, where he memorably says that instead of honouring the war dead with marches and parades, we should paint our bellies blue and roll in the mud, we see a great despair and humanity in Vonnegut's prose. It's a startling book, and it made me feel quite tingly with excitement at its originality of tone and purpose.

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, by Sheila Rowbotham

From one opponent of war to another: one of the causes that the mighty Edward Carpenter adopted throughout his astonishing life was pacifism, which he took up in his seventies during the First World War. It made sense, given his opposition to the British Empire and his sense of interconnectedness in world cultures, and given, too, his interest in the human individual and a return to simplicity in life. In this context, war, pollution, and the ravages of modern British life registered for Carpenter as a blot on human existence, which he fundamentally believed to be spiritual.

If this makes him sound like a Victorian hippie, he wasn't. He was first and foremost a socialist, committed to social reform, who lobbied the government from a variety of associations that he fronted or participated in, such as the Fabians. His belief in spirituality and a simplicity of life ran somewhat counter to his carnal appetites, for he was a gay man advocating free love - and he was aware of this contradiction in a life both spiritual and fundamentally material. What is so tremendous about him is his energy in fighting for these causes, and his intellectual interest in taking up new fights and embracing new ideas. His reading, from Heidegger to Marx via Freud, Plotinus, Plato, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore and countless other writers, made me feel at once defeated (I will never have that understanding and intellectual ability) and inspired - inspired to understand the world through the philosophy and fiction of these great people.

Sheila Rowbotham's somewhat hefty biography makes for a thrilling read as you count all the causes that Carpenter had a hand in getting off the ground: recycling, women's rights, gay rights, nudism, free love, socialism, back-to-basics living, pacifism. He championed his beliefs with real conviction, and was always interested in his time, and in people. Rowbotham's book is also very clever in highlighting his real quality, which was a capacity for friendship - although I think it could have made a more pointed connection between this talent and his sexuality, especially since he was himself so interested in Platonic love. Where Rowbotham does hit the mark, though, is in observing how Carpenter's queerness made him able to fight for other causes, because of a feeling of otherness which would have opened his eyes to other suffering. I loved this study in marginalisation, where a man makes the most of his public position, while using his insight into difference and intolerance, to struggle for others.

A few complaints about the book, which is very poorly edited. There were so many mistakes in syntax and vocabulary, it sometimes came close to ruining the experience. I read about Alf Mattison's "fiancé Florence Foulds", about Carpenter being "empathic", "clambouring along the stony beach", having "self-depreciating charm", and "pouring over" photographs (all italics mine). I kept reading the word 'dubiously' used for 'doubtfully', and also read about people being "signalled out for comment" instead of being singled out. The Adamses are referred to on separate occasions as "the Adames" and "the Adams", and I lost track of all the hanging clauses after a while - but here's one f'rinstance: "Like Carpenter, always ready to help young talent, he [George Bernard Shaw] fell for Lena Connell". Here, Rowbotham means that Shaw was like Carpenter in that he was always ready to help young talent, not in that he fell for Lena Connell. Carpenter was decidedly homosexual, which is one of the main points of the whole biography.

Still, it's a fantastic book, brilliantly researched, and one with a cast of characters who made me feel very happy. I fell in love with George Hukin, the tender northern knife-grinder who Carpenter was besotted with and who was very fond of Carpenter in return. Hukin nevertheless married a woman and wrote a heartbreaking letter to Carpenter expressing a wish that they could all sleep together in one bed. He and Carpenter stayed on good terms for the rest of Hukin's life, and he pops up throughout the book as an ever noble soul. I also loved George Merrill, Carpenter's later lover, who placed lavender under guests' pillows and pinched E. M. Forster's arse when he visited Millthorpe. I loved Edith Ellis and her ballsy letters and opinions, and Olive Schreiner with her modern haircut, and the Fords, and the Salts, and the Mattisons. These people are drawn with great affection, and Carpenter's world seems to come alive. It's chiefly worth reading, though, for its humane and intellectual understanding of all the movements and writing that Carpenter embraced, and for its appreciation of this incredible life.

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Which makes it three excellent books that I read this holiday. I'm still making my mind up a little bit about whether it's a consummate masterpiece or merely a very excellent book, but it was certainly a real tonic, and I haven't read anything so original since - oh balls, since Cat's Cradle - but you get the picture. The Blue Flower is marginally the better book, I think, since it is so truly different, and always so faithful to its subject and tone. It has such an oddness to it, which means that you can never really know the characters, and yet you somehow feel their inner lives, from displaced comments that they make, or some slight observation in the narration. The tone is always one of slightly absurd, always wry detachment - but the book is also suffused with a true beauty in its prose; a beauty which is nevertheless exceedingly tamped down, and which plays second fiddle to dialogue and a kind of personal philosophy.

Oddly, The Blue Flower is the book out of these three that I have the least to say about, even though I am sure that it is the best of all three - I think because it is so extraordinarily self-contained, and answers so many of its own questions. It is about the nature of art, and the nature of desire and selfhood, and it elegantly shows that we can never really know other people - but that the act of creation, and particularly the telling of stories, allow us to bridge some of that psychological divide. I loved Fitzgerald's insights into the mind of her characters, especially Fritz's friend Karoline. Elsewhere, the strange main family are drawn with great affection, and the central character makes for quite an original composition - all the more incredible given that Fitzgeral is conspicuously embroidering onto the early life of the man who would later become the poet Novalis. It's an astonishing act of creation.

Aeroplane Films!

2010-01-06T22:17:00.006Z

I might post a bit more about my trip to la Chine (cultural observations and what have you (but then again I might not)) but seeing as this is predominantly a blog about films and books and music etc, here are my two cents on the aeroplane films I saw this holiday.

ON THE WAY OUT

For her: Julie & Julia
For him: G.I. Joe

Julie & Julia is the better film, inasmuch as there are at least ten shots in it that don't make you puke with their business, loudness and ugliness. Julie & Julia is the better film because when the actors say their dialogue, it feels reasonably as if an actual person might ever have said those words or might say them some time in the future. Julie & Julia is better because - well, because G.I. Joe makes Jackass 2 look like Solzhenitzyn. Just who, exactly, gets off on this ceaseless parade of idiocy and explosions, in which morons make a point of running really fast and kicking each other hard? I understand that there are men in the world, and many of these men like to watch films with other men in them, doing manly things with cocks - I mean, guns. Fine. So be it. But is there anyone in the world who doesn't think he was hoodwinked into seeing G.I Joe, and that two seconds of the Bourne Adinfinitum is worth a thousand minutes of this shit?

G.I. Joe is bottomlessly stupid and banal, featuring the sort of bad directing that should be shown to people in film school. There are the most hilarious flashbacks, lasting about ten minutes, at the most inopportune moments, such as when someone's about to be kicked in the head; there are shit costumes, bad names, terribly edited chases, awful special effects, and Sienna Miller. It's an awful, awful film, made by morons for morons, with extra moronic touches added by non-morons, just for the hell of it.

Julie & Julia: better. That's not to say that it's an especially good film; it isn't, and in fact it's ultra forgettable. It would have been 118% better if the producers had just called it Julia, and got rid of Amy Adams and her depressing haircut entirely, to concentrate solely on the glorious Meryl. Ah, Meryl. It sounds silly to say it, because everyone does, but she really is the utter gonads. Every look she does, every creak of her voice, every hand gesture - everything is done in the most wonderful synthesis of character, with such joy in reproducing this great person and breathing life and invention into her. It's a treat through and through. Best of all is her relationship with Stanley Tucci, and there are terrific scenes when her sister (PLAYED BY JANE LYNCH! BY JANE LYNCH! JANE LYNCH!) comes to visit: the chemistry makes your hair stand on end. Anyway: long story short, Julie & Julia is a rather silly film that gets it almost half right.

ON THE WAY BACK

For her: The Time Traveler's Wife
For him: Transformers 2

Again, the film for the ladies is the better film - but only by the merest of distances, which is saying something since Transformers 2 is one of the very worst films I've ever seen. Transformers 2 is incomprehensibly, absurdly bad: dreamed up by a teen-brained action adventure wank fantasist with barely two neurones to rub together, it is an endlessly bewildering set of chases and explosions and laboured gags for the attention-deficient or the seriously retarded. It's the sort of mish-mash of bullshit comedy and crap action that makes Men In Black look like 2001: A Space Odyssey - there's a 'funny' robot, a 'sexy' robot, two appalling lead actors, and John Turturro irrevocably blackening his heretofore good name. It made me want to cry.

When I say that The Time Traveler's Wife is scarcely better, you'll get some sense of what a sorry, wet, stupid bundle of clumsiness and poppycock this truly is. Let's start with the obvious. Eric Bana(l). Oh, Eric. Eric Bana and his charisma-free potato face, with its range of expressions varying from 'bemused' to 'uncomprehending' via 'dormant'. Eric Bana and his collection of body muscles, which he likes to exhibit. Eric Bana and his own peculiar way of delivering lines, so that you forget them immediately afterwards; he could play Hamlet and you'd still only remember the word 'to' from his most famous monologue. Eric Bana is your favourite actor if you're the sort of person who enjoys a long walk down an under-lit university corridor when no-one else is around, or if yoghurt is your favourite food in the world, or if you watch GMTV for its news coverage, or if you go to Stoke-on-Trent for your summer holidays.

While I'm giving The Time Traveler's Wife a (thoroughly deserved) kicking, I'd like to vent some rage at this particular type of film, in which a silly, sappy, senseless and weepy woman moons over some unbelievably inaccessible guy. This film (like Twilight, like A Beautiful Mind) should be renamed 'Oh, That Tortuous Boyfriend!' The device by which the woman can never live a happy life with her man is so painfully laboured or irritating (he's a time traveller! he's a fucking vampire, yeah?! he's a spazzy scientist!), that I wonder what it is about women that they're willing to accept these dumb roles, these stand-by-your-man fuckheads; that they fantasise about fleetingly capturing that dark, troubled man who got away, the one who they can never quite understand. Women! Wake up! I was reading a biography of Edward Carpenter just before subjecting myself to this appalling slush, and I read about women who 120 years ago were fighting with Carpenter for their independance from men, for their sexual rights; I read about women who pioneered lesbian politics and wrote daring poetry and who lived on their own and cut their hair - and now, 120 years later, what have we got? These maundering, doe-eyed, will-he-be-my-boyfriend flibbertigibbets, fetishising their waiting for a man. It's so grating, so pathetic, I want to bang their heads together.

The Time Traveler's Wife, then: it's about a man who has to go away a lot, and he has a relationship with a woman who has to stay a lot, and they get together and are happy and then aren't, but really are, because she loves him because he's so mysterious.

So there we are. For the boys: mindless action films, because you don't ever really have to grow up, and after all, the world's your playground, so go ahead and explode things and onanise! You're a man! Well done! For the women: Meryl Streep has dignity and talent, and you'll have to cling to that for dear life. For the girls: another boring, ugly, badly scripted mess of a film in which the man flits around and she sits back and sighs lovingly. Pick a gender - they're both shit.

Out Of Control

2009-12-17T22:38:00.005Z

I'm too lazy to do some sort of retrospective of cinema this decade (although I will say briefly that this decade gave us, amongst other films, In The Mood For Love, There Will Be Blood, Talk To Her, Hidden and The Son's Room; not bad, right?), so I want to round out the decade - and this much-neglected blog - with a post about three wonderful films I've seen fairly recently, that have given me many great moments to mull over and delight in. I keep coming back to these films, in my mind - with visions of their worlds, snatches of dialogue, some fragments of colour or some sort of mannerism, coming back to me again and again. These are the best films - the ones whose reel continues to unspool in your head, long after the first projection. Those films are: The White Ribbon, by Michael Haneke; A Serious Man, by Joel & Ethan Coen; and Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze.

Thinking about these films, it strikes me that some of the best cinema is concerned with central characters struggling to create order out of chaos, to pin down the rules of the world, in order to create something controlled, that is understandable. That's - for instance - what Synecdoche, New York (by Jonze's former collaborator Charlie Kaufman, and another serious highlight of the year for me) is about: the director's inability to make his life fit into any recognisable pattern, and the impossibility of representing our human existence, in all its complexity, futility and grandeur. Synecdoche - and indeed all of Kaufman's work - takes a sort of perverse delight in noting how we cannot arrange our world according to our own vision (think of Jim Carrey trying to re-write his and Kate Winslet's existence, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and in that sense the cinematographer's attempt to nail down our world into a pretty narrative is a quixotic one (and here you might think of Charlie's inability to adapt Susan Orlean's book, in Jonze's film Adaptation.; life overtakes him, and his efforts are overpowered by external circumstances).

The Coens, likewise, have often depicted this sort of scenario. Jeffrey Lebowski - the Dude of the Brothers' brilliant The Big Lebowski - finds his slacker existence thrown into pandemonium after a heist goes ridiculously awry; Marge Gunderson spends the entirety of the film Fargo trying to find the criminals, but still cannot answer, by the end of the film, why people would wreak such havoc in the lives of perfectly ordinary people, while in the same film, William H. Macy's character wrestles with the way his life has spiralled totally out of control. This theme makes it all the more surprising to me that people have seen A Serious Man as such an anomaly in the Brothers' filmography. It shares with many of their other films this sense of life being unknowable, and humanity being a mere pawn of fate. Larry Gopnik - the serious man of the title, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg - finds his whole life taking a turn for the decidedly hellish, as his wife leaves him for a smarmy arse, his backward brother is arrested for various offences, his bid for tenure at University is under threat, he's blackmailed by a student, and he appears to be suffering from some unknown illness. It's actually classic Coen territory - especially considering the generally absurd treatment of Gopnik's woes - which recalls their film The Hudsucker Proxy, with its treatment of fate and time. In that picture, Tim Robbins is rescued from tragedy by a ukulele-playing angel; Gopnik, in A Serious Man, goes to ask three rabbis for assistance, hoping they'll be more clued up about matters of fate and man's place in the world. What sets this film apart is not so much the theme - life, with its various comedies and tragedies, is an absurd or cruel joke - but the way they've anchored their film in Jewishness. It gives the film a certain weight - something to anchor the whimsy - and makes it one of their best yet. Everything is perfect, from the lightly stereotyped characters, filmed in vivid cartoon colour, to the Coens' depiction of this world, which makes absolute sense and yet no sense at all. It is a very funny film - another thing reviewers have strangely not noted - while retaining great humanity and pathos. The Coens can appear snide (think of O Brother Where Art Thou?, with its disgusting depiction of the KKK as inept buffoons), but in this film we've invested so much emotionally with this family, it almost makes the whole joke of the film (the joke being that life itself is a joke - to look for meaning or order in it is self-defeating) somehow charming. All of it is so cleverly and intricately woven together, it makes the mind reel to think about it. I cannot wait to see it again.

Where The Wild Things Are, by Spike Jonze, has a shot at this question. The key line in the film, which does not appear in the book, comes from Max's mother, who - when he bites her - says, "What's wrong with you? You're out of control!" Or perhaps she says it the other way round. At any rate, in Sendak's book, the line is simply, "Wild thing!" - making Max one with the monsters whom he sails off to meet in the foreign land of his imagination. In the film, Max is not one with the monsters, and the tone is very different - less roustabout, more melancoly. Mas is decidedly at odds with the monsters, who do not see him as one of them, but as someone significantly different. This is a world where owls can be friends, and where humans do not exist. The idea of being out of control is key to the film, which sees Max attempt to exert some sort of control of his own over the wild things in his mind. Where the film builds on the book most significantly, it sees Max plan for the monsters a proper living space - a clear act of civilisation, aiming to turn this tribe into a society. The monsters are at once facets of Max's mind, and the aspects of other people that he does not, cannot understand. It is a classic trope of innocence and experience - except that Max undergoes his coming of age in the company of himself, pretty much. Only when Max has managed to control himself, as it were, can he return to the real world of civilisation. The film's fantastic conclusion, though, is that a lot of this is unknowable; the monsters of Max's id cannot truly be helped, and it is not his role to help them or order them. The child must not try to know; the fun of things and the feeling of things, are a good enough substitute for understanding. This is where the film really does succeed most brilliantly: its grasp of the importance of feeling - and by this I mean the literal sense, of grasping textures and sights and sounds; the film has a very wonderful raggedness to it, where twigs are knobbly and snap with a crack; where rocks slip and crash and crumble. You can practically feel all these sensations through Max. Again, another triumph of the film is its proximity with its subject - Jonze trains his camera on the hypnotic Max Records, capturing rays of sun in his hair, the dirt n his face - but everything is filmed at his height, from his perspective, so that we approach the monsters with the same apprehensions and wonder as he does. It makes it a terrifying film in those moments where it has to be - when Max must confront the aggression of the world, and try to fit into his own perception - justly because the fears are very real, and we are psychologically invested in the characters. It's a beautiful film - and I mean beautiful in the sense of visually beautiful, with a wonderful palette of colours and gorgeous shots in counter-light - that captures quite astonishingly the awkwardness of childhood; its boredom and its sense of alienation, but also the wonders and delights of it, even in trying and failing to make things fit a very narrow framework of understanding.

From the out-of-control Max to the almost demonically wayward children of The White Ribbon feels like a big step. Haneke's film is the stylistic antithesis of Jonze's broad, colourful, quirky film, instead shot in rigorous black and white, with great formal mastery. It is a quite lugubrious film, but incredibly involving right from the start, with that very strange tone typical of Haneke's best films, where you are involved despite the characters being only briskly sketched, and despite being plunged immediately into some horrible sort of situation. In this instance, strange and horrible goings-on in a German village at the turn of the century, seem to be connected to odd behaviour in the town's children. A horse is maimed and a Doctor severely injured; a woman likewise; a barn is burnt; a field's entire crops destroyed; a family bird is tortured to death. In the midst of all this confusion, the town's teacher is trying to work out what is going on, and the parents of some of the children attempt to control their children by making their two eldest wear symbolic white ribbons on their arms to symbolise their wickedness, and tying up their elder son at night to prevent him from masturbating. It is an almost relentless circle of retribution, with harm begetting harm. Through this nastiness, Haneke weaves an astonishingly delicate narrative, that of the teacher's courtship of a young governess.The scenes between them are beautifully acted, and shot with such respect and attentiveness - I'm thinking here of a one-take scene in which the two are out riding in a carriage, and take a turn off the path; he seeks to kiss her, and she asks that he does not, and they ride on. To see the dynamic between them work in this particular way, as the camera follows them off the road and they are presented in a seemingly stiff frame shot, is to note Haneke's genius: he crafts a sense of wonder - the obverse of dread - in very small goings-on. His eye for detail is peerless, and his sense of greater rules at large in the world (specifically, how all human actions are political, and therefore impact on the world in ways which are unpredictable) gives his films wonderful depth. The White Ribbon is a glorious masterpiece, in which every scene, every shot, is beautifully thought out and composed, and every line finds something to delight in or be unsettled by. The film's implied conclusion - and again, Haneke spells nothing out, but allows his ideas to emanate from his film - is that this generation of children added controlling behaviours to their cruelty and wrought havoc on the world. There is no tyranny in this film's creation though - the control that Haneke exerts on his subject is humble and natural, of a piece with its subject matter.

A Decade In Music

2009-12-01T13:19:00.005Z

When I think back to music this decade, I get such an almighty headrush recalling all the joy - and some of the sadness - that accompanied my listening. My most important musical memory of the decade is this: driving to Coventry with Ben and Laura, singing 'Wagon Wheel' by Old Crow Medicine Show. I've never sung so loud in my entire life, and they too were braying at an inordinate volume, and I have an exact visual memory of whizzing past a roundabout as we sang, "But he's a-heading west to the Cumberland Gap - Johnson City, TENNESSEE!" I could feel the happiness warming my body and hurting my cheeks.

This is to say that context is so important to understand music - where you were when you heard it, what memories it brings back, what significance it had, who you associate it with; perhaps just as importantly these days, how you heard it. You need to have some sense of fluidity in music: what music led you to what, what your path was. I'm pleased to say that all my discovering of music, practically, happened this decade. When other people think of their formative years, and the music that most influenced them, they often go back to their teens - but I was such a boring little prick when I was a teenager, and all of my sense of discovery, of awakening and hunger, my sense of myself: I attribute really most of it to this decade. In the first half of the decade, I lost two friends and a grandmother, at least two sorts of virginity, and so many illusions and preconceptions about the world. So this is my self-built soundtrack - what shaped me, and what I chose to shape me.

This decade, I didn't just hear the Strokes, Kanye West, Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom and Dizzee Rascal for the first time - I also discovered Joni Mitchell, Orange Juice, Robert Johnson, Jonathan Richman, Bessie Smith, Public Enemy, Kate Bush and Hank Williams. So I feel a bit funny picking music from this decade, because all of this was happened upon at the same time - and I'm grateful to my age that it made all of this available to me at a time when I was anxious to strip myself down and start over. Pitchfork, Myspace, Last.fm, Salon, Spotify, various downloading sites and blogs: I read up on everything, and tried to be in touch. It was also a way of trying to work out my thing, like Tigger eating thistles and honey and all sorts before settling on cough medicine. The old came in with the new: Rufus Wainwright got me onto the McGarrigles and Loudon, and Leonard Cohen; I heard about Elizabeth Cotten on Pitchfork; Fiona Apple covered Bessie Smith, Blossom Dearie and the Boswell Sisters, so I hunted down the originals; likewise Fleet Foxes with Judee Sill, Final Fantasy with John Cale. Not counting friends and their influence: all the country music, gospel and Devon Sproule from Laura; Dave and Bonnie Prince Billy; Sophie and her Joni; Stef and Bright Eyes; Ben and - jesus - all that indie stuff I had a go at, and some of which stuck. I first heard Rufus on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, for crying out loud. It just feels like such a whirl, this decade, that picking out albums seems not quite right. But I'll give it a go.

My best music this decade is probably not the actual best music of the decade. In fact, it's definitely not. But I suddenly got that thing, in or around 2005 - that tingly feeling of music speaking to me, and just to me. What I was going through that year, Rufus Wainwright voiced exactly in 'Foolish Love' and '14th Street': not just in words - although they were also spot-on - but with the tone of the music, with its cadences and instruments. I suppose that's the teenage rush.

Go on then - let's attempt a list. Of music merely from this decade. Which is wrong:

Albums:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
2. Rufus Wainwright - Poses
3. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender
4. Kanye West - Late Registration
5. Bjork - Vespertine
6. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days
7. Gillian Welch - The Revelator
8. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
9. Antony & the Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now
10. Denison Witmer - Are You A Dreamer?

Some songs:
Rihanna - Umbrella
Jens Lekman - You Are The Light
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Cat Power - Salty Dog
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Beirut - Postcards From Italy
Fiona Apple - Not About Love (Jon Brion version)
Lupe Fiasco - Go Go Gadget Flow
Britney Spears - Toxic
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
Dizzee Rascal - Dream
Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - Knotty Pine
Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game (acoustic)
Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel
Ol' Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis - Got Your Money
Devon Sproule - Plea For A Good Night's Rest
The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?
Shivaree - Goodnight Moon
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
The Strokes - Hard To Explain
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Raining In Darling
Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog
Ryan Adams & Emmylou Harris - Oh My Sweet Carolina
Micah P. Hinson - She Don't Own Me
Rufus Wainwright - Dinner At Eight

Devon Sproule - Don't Hurry For Heaven

2009-10-01T09:57:00.002+01:00

I know I go on about Devon Sproule too much. I also know that there are perfectly intelligent, tasteful, sensible people who will never, and not for want of trying, understand what on earth I see in her. But I do honestly think of her as one of the very loveliest things I've ever heard - a woman whose freshness and sincerity are matched so obviously by the clarity of her beautiful singing voice, and whose folksy, loopy guitar-playing in turn echoes that voice so well. I love her strange phrasing, and the deep chords she plays; I love the way her voice alternately swoops and hushes or closes a line with a squeal; I love her lyrics, which are full of love and wonder for the world she lives in: its sights, smells and sounds, all conjured in slight strokes. Nowhere is this more evident than on her best album, Keep Your Silver Shined, in which she paints an assured picture of her conjugal bliss: 'Old Virginia Block' is an ode to her home state set to a rollicking country stomp complete with racy fiddle, while 'Let's Go Out' is a jazz-inflected ballad telling the tale of her and Paul Curreri's homely courtship, with clarinet fizzing in the background. 'Stop By Anytime' is the very essence of a lazy afternoon in the country - "if you could come around, I'd take you out to see the bugs in the big woods shine", she says, betraying the eye of someone whose awe for the world is immense: "cat bells' jingle in the middle of the night,/fruit flies drown in the undrunk wine/cracked blue china in the rack going dry". I think that perhaps I'm especially drawn to this trait in her because when I return to my house in Normandy, I feel a similar sense of wonder and delight in all its particularities - the creak of the stairs, the smell of the cupboards, the feel of the lawn under my feet, the sight of the well through the curtained window, the shine of the brass pans against the dusty red-bricks where they hang above the blue wood-stove in the kitchen fire-place. You never really hear about this sort of thing in song.

Anyway. The reason I'm going on like this is that I'm finding it so very, very hard to convey just how disappointed I am in her new album, Don't Hurry For Heaven. I hear in it none of the energy and fizz and delight that are so obvious in her two previous records - she is so lacking in zip and sass, and for the arrangements of these songs (which, though not a patch on some of her more beautiful stuff, still contain some moments of loveliness) she has chosen to go down a curiously bog-standard route. I can see that to her this may have felt like a new direction: making her sound more accessible, with more guitars and some call-and-response-ish stuff. But it just descends into dull mid-tempo jamming so often, and you lose trace of her lovely guitar-playing, which really is the best accompaniment to her voice. Her voice in this is too polite, too unlikely to go off in a funny direction. And she was obviously uninspired with the writing: where once she gloried in the everyday, some of these songs are merely commonplace.

There's still some good stuff, but it could have been so much better: 'The Easier Way', for instance, would have benefited from a very simple treatment to offset its delicate love message. Lumbered as it is with pedal-steel and added voices, it loses the freshness of its melody. It could have been one of my favourite songs, but it's so timid, so staid. As it is, I merely like it, and I do still think the pure tune is Joni Mitchell-worthy. 'Don't Hurry For Heaven' has been ruined, and from being a charming, sprightly country ditty it has now been given more vocals and guitars and that omni-present pedal steel. 'Julie' has its moments but is maudlin, and 'A Picture Of Us In The Garden', contrarily to so many songs here, should have been beefed up. Throughout, the production is completely wrong, giving a grainy texture to these songs and to her voice - when her main asset is the wonderful clarity of her voice and playing. And I'm dismayed that the jazz-folk-pop direction of her last album has been jettisoned, when it was actually so original and clearly suited her style so well.

So now I don't know what to do. Sproule was beginning to make a little bit of a name for herself with her last record, with a television appearance and some radio play here in England - and I don't think this record is going to keep up that upward curve in her career. I'm desperate for her to return to her roots and realise what made her such a breath of fresh air.

Reading: Lorrie Moore, Like Life

Saturday Playlist

2009-09-19T13:20:00.002+01:00

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Listening to: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Hometown Girl

Best of the Noughts, #10: 10, by Abbas Kiarostami

2009-09-17T12:08:00.002+01:00

I went to see Abbas Kiarostami's film 10 in 2002, on my own, and loved it immediately. It has the sort of immediacy that makes you grin and cry and yet look at yourself as from the outside, during the moment, so that you can appreciate your own reactions. I was expecting a dour cinema lesson from the great Iranian film director, the conceit being so very formal (10 segments, filmed inside a taxi in Tehran) - but the film pulsates with life and wit, and has such depth and sorrow to it, observed in everyday situations. Its political points are made lightly, but have a great acuity.

I haven't seen the film in seven years, so you'll have to bear with me; I'm going on memories. A woman drives a taxi around Tehran, then, and in each segment she picks up a different passenger. In segments 1 and 10, and one segment in between, she ferries her young boy from one part of town to another - he is the only male to appear in the film, which otherwise exists in a purely female sort of dimension. As such, it's only natural to take him as a representation of current masculinity: and being a young boy, he makes for a faintly depressing state of affairs - he is already well versed in the art of brow-beating his mother, and seems to be content in his role as a male tyrant, not questioning his position of power. Of course, he could merely be a spoiled child, but Kiarostami is clearly also training his gaze on Iranian gender politics, and the subjugation of women. With the character of the young boy, he shows us how these behaviours are learnt, and transmitted from generation to generation. It's a beautiful way of making his politics known, and the boy and his mother are beautifully observed.

At the same time, Kiarostami sounds a few positive notes: the boy's mother is newly separated from the boy's father, and making her own living as a taxi driver. She is obviously a modern, intelligent and aware young woman; a pity she is not involved in, say, politics. The boy appears in two other segments, and his relationship with his mother evidently has more to it than his dominance of her: she is smart and deflects his vitriol - perhaps Kiarostami hopes that future generations of women can outwit men, rather than have men come round to the equality of women. The rest of the film is dedicated to some very interesting segments, such as the one when a totally thoughtless, bumbling old woman takes a taxi ride and will not stop talking about her faith, and various saints she worships: in this character, the director quite clearly shows us how the older generation still clings to religion, and contrasts the woman with the more political, more modern concerns of the young divorcee taxi driver. At the same time, being so un-judgmental, he may be saying that he understands the solace that older generations found in faith; the younger generation seem so fragmented and - interestingly, in this film which drives around town for an hour and a half - directionless.

Two other segments are still memorable: one in which the driver picks up a prostitute, who gets in by mistake, thinking the driver is male and a customer. The prostitute seems totally senseless, laughingly describing her job as a bit of a laugh - and seems to want to make a parallel between herself and the taxi driver, and the way they both serve men. At the same time, Kiarostami finds a very human doubt behind her seeming inanity, under the questioning of the taxi driver. In another episode, she picks up an acquaintance of hers, who has just, dangerously, shaved her head. The driver asks to see her head, and the woman aquiesces - and this is the first time a woman removes her headscarf in the film: until this passage, the headscarf had come to seem natural, and the removing of it registers as a real shock. With this statement, the young woman is making political capital of her own body. It's sensitively dealt with, and yet you feel the pain behind these characters and their sense of being stuck in an oppressive regime.

I wonder if Kiarostami saw Jim Jarmusch's film Night On Earth, and took his inspiration from the way that film examined a cross-cut of society through several taxi journeys. Where Jarmusch allowed his film to free-wheel in so many different directions, Kiarostami keeps his firmly focused on one group of people, much like his fixed camera (which nevertheless gives the film a stern beauty), and his rigour lends the film so much humanity. It's a brilliant, brilliant film, and one that is endlessly surprising upon viewing and exciting to remember.

Listening to: A.C. Newman, The Slow Wonder

Saturday Playlist

2009-09-12T13:42:00.002+01:00

Happy Saturday everybody! Here, with thanks to my friend Doc Spender for the Harry Nilsson tip, are a few songs I've been enjoying lately:

Reading: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

(500) Days of Summer

2009-09-10T23:36:00.004+01:00

I put myself into tricky positions, really I do. The one thing I'm having to square with my inner self at the moment is my current crush on (500) Days of Summer, when I'm the lone bastard at the party who hated Amelie. How does that work? Well, I suppose my line of defence will have to be that I fell for Summer in a way I didn't for Amelie, which enabled me to look past the former film's more cloying, whimsical touches; in Amelie, the quirks sent me into fits of fury, but somehow I'm willing to indulge (500) Days of Summer. Just a little. I'll also be laying into it a little bit, because I do have principles.

(500) Days of Summer - for those of you (and I suppose I mean my parents, here) who haven't been anticipating this film ever since it caused a splash at Sundance - is about Tom Hansen, a sensitive young greetings card writer, who falls for fellow office worker Summer. They go out for a bit, then break up, he becomes heartbroken and then gradually gets over it. And that's it. I suppose the place I have to start, in defending the film, is that it's about a million times more honest, thoughtful and truthful than 99% of romantic comedies that came out in the last ten years. It's against these films that it sets itself out to be compared: it's an alternative rom-non-rom-trag-com for the mainstream. OK? So all of you hardcore alternatives just need to take it a bit easy.

Next: the sweetness of the film. I find - and perhaps I'm just blinded by my love for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and (the looks of) Zooey Deschanel (of which more later) - that the film wins you over, somehow. It doesn't take itself too seriously, yet it's sincere; it has a good tone to it, and some stylish cinematography. In particular it loves its main characters and films them radiantly: look at all those beautiful sunlit close-ups of Deschanel, or the way it captures Gordon-Levitt's charisma. I think it's also a pretty funny film, and lord knows I'm hard to please on that count.

About the actors: let me count the ways. Boy oh boy. Phwoar. Hoo-wee. Yabba dabba doo. Hubbada hubbada. In a word: OW! They are seriously good-looking. Let's not forget that part of cinema's quality is its capacity to produce beauty, and JGL and ZD are some quality eye-candy. Together, they add up to far more than the sum of their (glorious) parts. It's a bit gushing to say it, but star quality is so important to a film, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt has it, and it's captured here: the magic of his grin, especially, lifted my heart up quite a lot. Zooey D is no slouch in the looks department either, and the camera lovingly follows her, showing her with all the passion that Tom feels for her. I need to mention that Gordon-Levitt acts really well in this, effortlessly pulling off the smitten scenes, the joy and the heartbreak. Deschanel less so; her character is a little under-written and her performance could do with a touch more zing.

OK, so I think it's time to try and slip its weaknesses under the radar. It is rather over-laden with stylistic quirks: the irritating voice-over, the over-use of music to signpost emotion, the moment when Tom's character is turned into a cartoon; the stock characters of the wise young sister and the drunken friend. On the other hand, there are some touches that feel fresh and lovely, like Tom's impromptu street dance, or the expectations/actuality sequence, in which a split screen conveys the chasm between Tom's hopes for a party and the way it actually turns out: it's a slightly hokey comic device which is turned on its head for true pathos. Back to the weaknesses: the worlds of the two young lovers aren't believable, especially his love for architecture, which the film-makers seem to have no knowledge of whatsoever. And the very last scene is cringe-making in the extreme: I actually said out loud, "Oh no!", because it was so awful.

That may seem like a lot, which is why this post reads a touch defensive. But that's because despite all the clunkiness, (500) Days of Summer is a funny film and a charming film. True, it's slight, and it has its flaws - but when you fall in love, these are the sorts of things you're able to overlook. Doubtless in a few years' time I'll look back and wonder what made me fall so hard; in the meantime, Summer is here and I'm at its service.

Listening to: Joan Armatrading, Love and Affection: Classics 1975-1983

Broken Embraces

2009-09-09T14:09:00.004+01:00

Ah. Right, this scuppers things a little. I've been writing a few posts about the best things of the decade, and firmly intended to put Almodovar on it. I was already thinking about how my post would read: I was going to write about the way Almodovar has discovered a mature, stately sort of style since All About My Mother - and how he has become a master of narrative, talking about the secrets and deceptions between people in a roundabout and thrilling way, by marrying auteur cinema with genre.

But the thing is, I've just seen Broken Embraces, which is largely speaking a failure - and it puts a different countenance on the rest of his career, I'm afraid. It highlights the weaknesses of Volver, and seems to show that Almodovar is running out of things to say: it's all well and good to play around and indulge your cinematic whimsy - but after a while, you're running on empty. Volver at least had an emotional core, and a character you care about: Penelope Cruz is completely magnetic in that film, and you're able to invest in her emotionally. But its sillinesses - its ludicrous plot twists and its melodrama - still showed up through the lovely pictures. Broken Embraces takes these weaknesses and builds on them, creating a whole set of emotionally flat characters and submitting them to a wilfully abstruse and absurd plot. Meanwhile, Almodovar's style seems to be verging on the seriously hokey, and there is nothing of the devil-may-care cojones of his earlier films to rescue it.

I'm largely disappointed because with Talk To Her and Bad Education, earlier this decade, he had made two of my favourite films of his - and ones which brilliantly married his gleeful tone and stylistic mastery to difficult, unsavoury topics. I'm thinking here of the hilarious silent film pastiche in Talk To Her, and the way Bad Education re-genders film noir, with Gael Garcia Bernal as the queer femme fatale at its centre. These films dealt with murder and paedophilia - yet in his insouciant, genre-bending way Almodovar managed to pull it off, while keeping these subjects suitably disturbing. And in both these films, his sensuality was beautiful to behold.

Talking of sensuality, I don't think Broken Embraces has any. Penelope Cruz looks beautiful as all hell, and is filmed with a lot of admiration, but somehow it is a totally unsexy performance in a completely sterile film. Almodovar surrounds her with awful, charisma-free men, and essentially makes her fanny about in various costumes. There is no sensuality, merely some decently filmed sex, some badly filmed sex, and some blunt, unfunny talk of sex. Cruz can never make us empathise with her because she is given so little back story and her motives and mentality are at all times so obscure. At the same time, Almodovar's excesses are wearying because they are tied up in a flimsy, dumb plot.

That plot, in brief: a film director, Harry Caine (thanks for the James M. Cain reference, Pedro; sledgehammer much), is looking back on the events that led to his becoming blind, fifteen years ago. A woman that he was having an affair with was tied up with a rich magnate, and - er - she died, and the film they were making together got tampered with by the magnate as an act of revenge. Meanwhile, in the present day, his agent's son is revealed to be his son, and his agent confesses that she betrayed Harry's lover to the rich magnate. Oh god, it's all so half-baked and ludicrous, with stale, hammy performances from almost everyone, and some really bad writing. The whole film could have done with an assiduous editor taking a sharp pair of scissors to it - to remove the bad pastiches, the superficial backstory, the bad jokes, perverse homophobia (!) and crucially the cumbersome detail - people opening doors slowly, waiters serving people slowly before conversation starts, and jigsaw-puzzle flashbacks hammering home what we'd already gathered was the plot's big secret, because we're not morons.

The great irony of this film is that it seems to be a plea by Almodovar for artistic freedom - Harry Caine was prevented from making his great film, and at the end of the film looks as if he will re-edit it to its former brilliance - but Caine's film looks terrible, and so does Almodovar's.

Listening to: Dungen, Ta det lugnt

The Turn of the Screw

2009-09-03T14:35:00.003+01:00

This was Helen's suggestion for Book Group, or I wouldn't have read it - considering how sodding laborious I'd found What Maisie Knew to be. And it was a very annoying book, full of those writerly mannerisms of Henry James's that I've come to hate, with added lashings of emotional silliness.

It was bound to be a loser for me from the start, I suppose, since it's a ghost story and I just bloody hate that kind of crap - so here I was bored senseless right from the get-go with its tiresome prologue in which people sitting about after dinner regale each other with ghost stories, and one person, full of morbid dread (naturally), decides to tell the others a story so frightful that it will ~~bore them to tears~~ haunt their nightmares for ever more. Except it doesn't, because it's really so very, very tame and boringly plotted, and not at all interested in the psychology of the characters upon whom the ghosts could be reasonably expected to exert some sort of ghastly influence.

Oh god it's boring. So anyway, a governess is dispatched to Bly Hall, there to tend to two children. She must never let her employer (who lives in London) know how she's faring. (Thanks for the ludicrous fairytale conceit, Hezza) Anyway, it turns out there's a she-ghost and a he-ghost hanging about the place, and the woman becomes afraid that they're 'after' the children. And that's it. After a load of fussy nonsense in which the woman falls for the children's simple, earnest, beautiful manners, the ghosts start hoving into view and - er - not doing much, and for a second it becomes interesting as you think the woman might be a hysteric and imagining it all, and perhaps she'll sink into some kind of tasty madness. But (SPOILER ALERT!) nah, the ghosts really do exist, and wooooooh it's scary.

All the way through this there's an odd mix of James's customary style and interest in children and their perceptions (except that there's no pyschological depth here, so it's not worth bothering with) and some sort of heightened Gothic melodrama. But James's style is so convoluted that it totally scuppers any sense of anxiety. I craved a "What was that on the landing?... ONLY A FUCKING GHOST!" sort of moment to stir things up a bit. But James operates more on the level of (and I'm making this up): "Upon having delivered myself of my apprehensions to Mrs Brose, to whom the extent of my fear had lately become more apparent in the form of certain glances and starts of which she appraised me in her kindly manner, and passing through the hallway at the bottom of whose grand stair I marked a subtle change of air, such as occurs on hills at times when the weather changes, I thought a sound, or noise, or some such, reached my person. Turning, it presently happened that my eyes, upon whose perception I had heretofore not been unduly reliant, espied a form at once phantasmic and very real in the vividness of its hideous expression, betraying some sort of unspoken grudge. This was him, I was almost certain of it!"

Yawn. Still, at least I managed to read it very quickly.

Reading: David Constantine, The Shieling
Listening to: Harry Nilsson, Nilsson Sings Newman

Tribute albums

2009-09-02T17:51:00.001+01:00

Here's my final piece for Pajiba; after this week the Music section is going to be retired, and I will be heading someplace else with the other music writers. In the meantime, this is an article about some of my favourite tribute records.

Listening to: Sondre Lerche, Two Way Monologue

British Cinema

2009-09-02T12:49:00.002+01:00

This weekend the Observer published their list of the top 25 British films produced in the last 25 years, which makes for thoroughly depressing reading. The top ten of these, in particular, is rather disheartening:

1. Trainspotting
2. Withnail & I
3. Secrets & Lies
4. Distant Voices, Still Lives
5. My Beautiful Laundrette
6. Nil By Mouth
7. Sexy Beast
8. Ratcatcher
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. Four Weddings and a Funeral

Where do I begin? My problem with this list is that - you know, it's fine. There are - what - two or three excellent films in there and the others are good. Probably. But is this really all that could be cobbled together? The wider list of 25 feels like it contains practically every British film I can name. How is the British film industry so bare?

I noticed that Jason Solomons of the Observer at least had the dignity to post some sort of apology for the paucity of this list, in which he compares the British film industry unfavorably to the French industry, and laments a lack of funding etc etc. All of this is true and I want to go into it further. But there are other things hampering British film, and the first of these is that there is no real culture of cinema here, for a number of reasons. The ridiculous ticket price and the lack of interest in cinema as an art form - as opposed to an other disposable medium - means that English cinephiles are few and starved. I think there's a sort of national embarrassment at the idea of someone creating beautiful pictures - which would at least account for the way Peter Greenaway doesn't feature on this list; a real scandal.

I also think Britain is stuck in that it's always playing catch-up with the United States, except with far fewer funds. Since we share a language, our talent often gets swept off into American films, and British films are stuck. French films survive exactly by setting themselves against American, and using the difference in language to feed a difference in sensibilities, in images. Of these actors - Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Ewan McGregor, Clive Owen, Rachel Weisz - who is really, truly involved in the making of British cinema? Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani, Emmanuelle Beart, Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Amalric all make French films, and they make LOTS of them - up to four or five a year. I can hardly name five British films that came out last year. Let's actually see if I can, off the top of my head. Here goes.

1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. Hunger
3. Happy-Go-Lucky
4. Somers Town
5. Oh for fuck's sake, that's all I can think of.

There should be something more than that. The problem also lies with television, which is where the true creativity comes from in Britain - and even then, British television is being throttled and going through what feels like a bad patch at the moment. Still, some of the best stuff I've seen has happened on television here - I'm thinking of Boy A or The Mark of Cain, for instance - or Shameless, or Red Riding. The real auteurs of Britain are here: Paul Abbott, Jimmy McGovern, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Poliakoff. It's important to have auteurs - people taking the reins of their own work, and creating their own thing - because otherwise the inevitable kowtowing to commercialism actually ends up choking the industry: I'm thinking here of the way the British film industry has one or two supposed 'hits' a year. That isn't an industry.

The culture of television - led by the brilliant, pioneering BBC - has also contributed to the dying out of pictures. Play For Today created brilliant work, particularly in the field of writing, but I think it meant that grand, brave and soaring films came to be seen as an extravagance. So many of Britain's films are lacking in scope, in a cinematic quality.

A further thing is the lack of British antecedents and influences - where French directors look to the New Wave and since then to younger directors like Kassovitz and Jean-Francois Richet for inspiration in filming their world, and where Americans can feed off the Scorsese-Altman generation, Britain's older statespeople are diffuse or ignored: Lindsay Anderson, Michael Powell, David Lean. Good stuff all, but no trace of a movement. This means that the antecedents are few and every film-maker needs to look elsewhere or start again, in filming their country.

Still, this list includes Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Loach, Leigh, Meadows and Pawlikowski. That isn't bad. But this list really does seem to be picked from the few, not the many. Go back 25 years in France and you're looking at films like Le Grand Bleu, La Haine, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Trois Couleurs: Bleu or Un Coeur En Hiver, to name five completely off the top of my head, and all way better than anything in that British top ten. But also try Rois et Reine, The Beat My Heart Skipped, Betty Blue, La Belle Noiseuse or Les Amants du Pont Neuf. And I still haven't mentioned Godard, Techine, Resnais or Varda.

I think it's so important that cinema in Britain takes a long hard look at itself and stops congratulating itself on the occasional good showing at the Oscars. I long for a new government to recognise that the arts need proper, decent funding, and not just a few scraps from Film 4 and Working Title. But in Britain you still pass for a snob and a fussy aesthete when you suggest using the revered taxpayer's money for something so fanciful as art.

Listening to: Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

Best of the Noughts, #8 & #9: Picasso Sculpteur and Louise Bourgeois Retrospective at Centre Pompidou

2009-09-01T16:39:00.003+01:00

I saw Picasso Sculpteur in 2000 and the Louise Bourgeois retrospective in 2008, both at the Centre Pompidou. The reason I want to write about them in the same piece - beyond not feeling sufficiently confident in my ability to write about art - is that they are both exhibitions of sculpture showcasing a real profusion of work.

By profusion, I don't mean an amount of work (although clearly they are both astonishingly prolific), but rather a work that shows energy, invention, effort and passion. In both cases, the artist carefully and brilliantly re-works and re-works and re-works a certain artistic trope, over and over, feverishly, madly, and using such a variety of means and materials that it's somewhat dizzying to contemplate. In the case of Bourgeois, it feels a lot like work - what with the scale and intellectual depth of her art - whereas in Picasso's it feels a lot like play, particularly when you see all the little yet brilliant objects he has sculpted off-hand. In both cases, you sense an artist whose sole preoccupation is the act of creating, and of re-creating. It suddenly makes so much sense to you, this need to make, to recreate things, to remodel your world and imprint on it your feelings and thoughts: it feels like the most sensible thing there could be.

In Bourgeois' case, I was very interested in the way she reflects her thoughts on gender and family through a metaphorical kind of act: the spiders she sculpts - these beautiful, spindly, dauntingly huge animals - are rendered somehow with a mounting tenderness as the exhibition progresses. At the beginning they seem to represent a primal fear - and they allude to her parents, who were weavers - but grow in scale to represent her views on motherhood. The spider is a nurturing, creating animal. The detail of her work is so incredible: her delicate embroidery sitting next to great, smooth shards of metal. At the same time, she perpetually seems to be reworking ideas of femininity and gender: in her early work, the male form is seen as an aggressor in a female world of roundness; care; comfort. There is a lot of terror here - for example in 'The Destruction of the Father' - and a lot of misunderstanding between men and women is injected into these forms, which seem otherworldly in their lack of definition. She also hints at similarities between the sexes - with 'Torso' for instance, or her brilliant 'Arch of Hysteria', where a man's body hangs weightless and genderless to rebut male views of feminine madness. This is what I love about her: she is someone who can only refract her views through the act of creation: so her devastating work centring on her feelings of loss and defeat during her years in New York is emotionally devastating because it addresses these things so simply. What I mean is that words and explanations are not needed as an extra: these works are complete. What is thrilling beyond this is this figure of Bourgeois herself, hanging over the exhibition - a relentless creator, and distiller of ideas, who has carried on composing, making, sewing, sculpting, and all on such a magnificent scale, well into her supposed dotage . This isn't her job - it's her life.

I feel that Picasso was a lot more playful than Bourgeois: I'm thinking especially of some of the smaller exhibits in this brilliant show, like his clever distortions of everyday objects such as paperclips, or his neat use of objets trouves, which he re-works into delightful flights of fancy. Nevertheless, seen over the length of his career, all of this adds up to a great batch - a block of important work. What was great with this exhibition was comparing these sculptures to the images in your mind: here comes a sculpture of Dora Maar, which beautifully changes its looks as you walk around, gathering so many expressions at once from whichever perspective you contemplate it, and you're able to see in your mind's eye his paintings of Maar in which he attempts to capture several perspectives at once into a 2D image. You get a sense of the real thoughts behind Cubism here. And it just keeps on coming: here are the sculptures of guitars (making ingenious use of cardboard and string) to complement his series of paintings; there are the meditations on absinthe (bronze, with spoons melded into a ragged, jarring sort of surface). There's a musicality to his sculpture, echoing jazz - free-form riffs on a theme, distancing themselves from pure reality, from easy melody. And all the way through there's his trademark eroticism, finding a sweet and warm, honest sexuality in women in the most inventive ways: the female form is again distilled and re-jigged with planks of wood, old metal bowls, rope, whatever you got. Again, there's that sense I alluded to, of someone constantly experimenting, always working and re-working, of trying new things. Here's his straightforward and brilliant sculpture of a goat; here's a Cubist interpretation of a woman; there's a series of little joke sculptures. It's wonderful.

What these exhibitions made me feel were a sort of love and admiration for these artists - of course - but more than that an exultation not in the object but in the creation of the object: the sheer messing around with stuff. I don't get that sense from many artists working today, but it may be that this is because these are career-encompassing exhibitions, showing the tireless imagination of two remarkable people.

Listening to: The xx, xx
Reading: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Best of the Noughts, #7: Charlie Kaufman

2009-08-26T14:41:00.005+01:00

Jesus, I'm really falling behind on these lists of the best things of the decade. So to ease myself back in, here's what I consider a stone cold obvious entry in the list. Whatever your thoughts of Charlie Kaufman, I would hope that you can recognise his originality, and the way he has marked out his own niche in cinema through the decade, with scripts that are resolutely his own, and fiercely different to anyone else's output.

Those films and their plots, quickly: Human Nature (which I haven't seen and won't discuss); Adaptation. (Charlie and his fictional brother Donald Kaufman struggle and fail to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief); Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (about the supposed double life of Chuck Baris, TV presenter and international man of mystery); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a man wipes out his ex-girlfriend's memories of him after their relationship goes awry); and Synecdoche, New York (a man tries to put on a play based on his entire life, with that work finally overtaking his life itself).

The thing that these plots have in common - besides being dauntingly ambitious subjects requiring huge visual imagination, persuasive writing, and an intellectual rigour to see them through to the end - is that they are all focused on the mind, and on the nature of perception. So many characters in his books try to escape the framework of their normality: in Being John Malkovich by creating a portal into someone else's mind, to live there forever and defy death; in Eternal Sunshine by having their unhappiness physically removed from their minds; in Synecdoche by creating this heightened parallel world. Adapation. is also about a struggle to inhabit someone else's work - and an exercise in psychology by having Kaufman double up as two different characters to express his high-minded and base writing instincts, while Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is about the mental delusions of a small man seeking to bolster his own legend.

These are films of such consummate, mind-boggling boldness, and Charlie Kaufman's genius is to have convinced Hollywood to film his dark, brooding exercises in psychological analysis as hilarious, charming adventure films. Synecdoche, New York, his last contribution of the decade, is a natural segue from his earlier work, inhabiting a dark, melancholy sort of world in which people continually struggle and fail to know and understand each other. Kaufman takes ferocious stabs at himself, suggesting that the creative process is for the writer an egotistical way of staving off death. But this is to reduce that difficult, perplexing, hilarious, moving and awe-inspiring film to its mere thought: what keeps it alive, and makes it feel thrilling are an intellectual curiosity, some gaspingly funny moments, extraordinary visuals (his is a fully cinematic imagination, with memorably pictorial moments coming one after the other) and a great verve throughout.

About those funny moments: Kaufman is a philosopher of considerable depth and range, who yet has a background in sketch comedy. It serves him brilliantly well, and inflects his films with something airy and appealing to counteract the sometime pessimism of his discourse. I only need to think about some of his lines, or some scenes from his films, to grin broadly to myself as I go about my daily business. I'm thinking of "Sorry about the cunt at reception" and "I have no idea what you're saying to me right now" (Being John Malkovich), the scene with Meryl Streep getting high in Adaptation., or "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss." (Eternal Sunshine)

As for those visuals: I think a few writers who I admire still write in a way that isn't cinematic, but Charlie Kaufman has a real eye for cinema - which is partly why his directing debut is such a triumph. Think of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in bed by a snowy seascape, or the huge life-like theatre in Synecdoche: these are pictures that stay with you for years and years. I sometimes think I could write the sorts of film I admire: the family dramedies starring Laura Linney; the period dramas; that sort of thing. I know I could never write anything anywhere near as brilliant as Adaptation. or Synecdoche.

We're so lucky to have him. But I have to worry that his best work is behind him: you can't help but detect real hopelessness in Synecdoche, New York, and the film did not do well for him commercially. I hope he'll still be given opportunities to produce great films for us. We're so, so lucky to have him.

Listening to: Fairport Convention, What We Did On Our Holidays

Reading round-up

2009-08-25T09:52:00.004+01:00

Since I went ages without posting and got through a few books, here's a quick look at some of them. I can't remember if this is the whole lot I've read in the last couple of months - I have a feeling I'm forgetting some, but here goes

Vacation, by Deb Olin Unferth - Kevin lent me this one, and I enjoyed it up to a point. It's a strange and hazy sort of novel, built on the merest wisp of a plot: an inconceivable situation in which various lost people, whose relationships have broken down, follow each other around the world, and lose each other further. The central character, Myers - a walking, talking symbol for fragmentation, being a man with a broken marriage and a literally dented head - is searching for an old school friend, Gray, who has a fatal brain tumour. In doing so, he ends up on an island at the end of the world, far removed from humanity. Easy on the metaphors, Deb!

The whole thing is written in a very broken, syncopated sort of way, with sentences that ramble and then snap suddenly, and chapters that dissolve into first person disquisitions. I found that it was unconvincing in its attempt to give all of its characters a voice: apart from the cheery Gray, everyone seemed to have the same bleak syntax and narrative mannerisms. And though the book finds a murky, offbeat poetry in the odd situations it sets up, the Unferth never quite dominates her subject to rise above the contrivances of it all. Still, she's new and it's promising enough.

What Maisie Knew, by Henry James - sweet Jesus, so I managed to finish it at last, after the most epic struggle. It would be wrong to say I hated it all, because I did very much appreciate the way James's psychological complexity: the way he constructs characters and is able to convey all the intricacies of understanding between them, in the situations they end up in. It is a very brilliant device, to tell the story from the perspective of a child - James narrates it obliquely, so that you're always dimly aware, as an adult, of the complexity of everyone's relationships with each other, even as Maisie is blinded by her youth and innate innocence. Her very gradual realisation of everyone's deviousness and treachery, and the way she is drawn into the debates surrounding her parents' custody of her, are very acutely drawn.

The problem is that James's style is terribly dated, being so self-admiringly obtuse and difficult. I can't see that the book would have been any less interesting with a more simple style, with turns of phrase that are more inviting. I think it's worth remembering that James's style was overly elaborate even for his time; he was harking back to older novelists, while taking on a modernist streak. But this book, from his middle period, has not aged very well.

I was still interested to perceive aspects of his sexuality in the sensuality with which the character of Sir Claude is drawn; and I was intrigued by James's interest in the innocence and growing maturity of children. With 'The Pupil', this is another story centering on a child's perception of their dysfunctional parents. What is it about that topic that arrests him so much?

Mother's Milk, by Edward St Aubyn - I loved this one, although I don't think it's completely successful in everything. Similarly to What Maisie Knew, it accords some importance to a child's perspective on his parents' marriage. In those chapters, it elides the difficulties between the parents, cleverly - and then, when it slips into the voice of the father of the family, it takes on a furious tone, full of thwarted lust and intellectual anger. I loved the tone of the book, with its bitter humour - especially in the relationship between the father of the family and his own selfish and deluded mother - gradually ceding to something like pity, or humanity. There is an unforgiving causticity to it all the way through, however, and nothing is really resolved by the end of it. The children are painted as overly mature, which is a sad implausibility, and I thought the chapter in America failed to open the narrative out onto a political level when it was best at its most intimate - but overall it was a very stylish, intelligent and captivating book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz - I enjoyed this, too, while I was reading it, and lord knows I raced through it at the time. But now, having finished it a while back, I can't quite recollect what I loved about it, and the characters are tending to disappear from my memory. I quite liked sensitive, useless Oscar, and loved his feisty sister - and there was a great energy to the book, imbuing it with a sexy and reckless sort of verve right through to its conclusion. I still thought that all its talk of curses and fate etc. was very tiresome, and Oscar's hopeless, lovelorn life did start to pall after a while. Diaz seems far happier writing about the loud, tempestuous women of the family. I loved the style of it, with all the Spanish interjections and - as I've said - the sheer dash and zip of that prose and dialogue. I just don't think the book had very much to say, on reflection, and its ending was so drawn out that it kind of killed off my goodwill. I'll gladly wait for his next stuff and read that, though.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike - hilarious. I should have read the next few Rabbit books while I had the volume borrowed from the library, but I needed a break from Updike's quite frantically sexist and absurd character, just for a while. I think Updike will start to pick up after this book, in the years after sexual liberation when he can devote himself fully and unapologetically to being a perve. Perhaps the sexual liberation will also get rid of some of the chortle-worthy sexism of Rabbit, Run. About that book, briefly: I did enjoy the various qualities of the writing - the ripe beauty of his prose, and the good dialogue - but I found that it was aiming for psychological profundity while being a very superficial book, which has difficulty in deviating from its central character's ludicrous generalities about men and women, and their relationships. The women are all seen as shrews, harridans, mother-earth types and sex-creatures, and Updike is at his most comically unsuccessful whenever he tries to grant one of these 'other' beings a voice.

The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry - a crashing disappointment, in the closing chapters, after an enthralling, warm, devastating and beautifully told story. Barry quite irritatingly ties all the loose threads of his narrator's story together so that everything fits and slots appropriately, when precisely what had been wonderful about his book was the way everything was vague, deceptive and ambiguous in his heroine's recollection of the events she narrates so beautifully. It focuses on Roseanne Clear, a present-day centenarian woman recalling the tragic events in her youth that led to her being sectioned for life in a lunatic asylum, in 1930s Ireland. Meanwhile, Doctor Grene, in her current mental hospital, is conducting his own research into these events, and narrating the breakdown of his marriage. The book is so superbly written when it gives a voice to Roseanne, full of poetry and fire, and tells very vividly of a difficult and fascinating time in Irish history, alluding to its wounds in the lightest, most affecting and evocative way. A shame, then, that the ending polishes everything off so boringly, with its predictable and shallow deus ex machina.

Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, by Various Writers -a little disappointing, overall. I see that Junot Diaz has repackaged a central passage from Oscar Wao as a short story, titled 'Wildwood', fit for inclusion in this volume -and it stands alone pretty well. The real, indisputable winner here is Graham Joyce's wonderful story, 'An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen', which so ably shifts between heightened realism and a more dreamy, fantastical dimension. Set during the war in Iraq, it focuses on a soldier's near-death experience and encounter with some sort of phantasm. Later, haunted by this ghost after the war, the soldier's life is gradually ruined - a perfect, and beautifully handled, analogy for the trauma these soldiers endured. Elsewhere I struggled to find anything else that had something close to this story's style, its depth and energy and inventiveness. I liked E.V. Slate's story 'Purple Bamboo Park', one of many stories dealing with mothers and children: it is beautifully written, with a very original tone somehow. I also really enjoyed Paul Yoon's sad story, 'And We Will Be Here', Mohan Sikka's rather excellent 'Uncle Musto Takes A Mistress', and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's 'The Nursery'. These are good stories, though never thrilling. Elsewhere, I thought John Burnside's story ('The Bell Ringer') was completely pedestrian and Ha Jin's 'The House Behind The Weeping Cherry' was unconvincing, though well written: it just did not sustain my interest, chiefly I think because it didn't construct its characters evocatively enough.

I think a lot of this is quite good new writing, but as I say, if only more of it were as devastatingly new and thrilling as the Graham Joyce story.

Listening to: Tom Waits, Bone Machine

Speech Debelle: Speech Therapy

2009-08-19T17:48:00.002+01:00

Here's my review of Speech Debelle's album Speech Therapy, currently posted on Pajiba.

Listening to: Gang Starr, Full Clip: A Decade of Gang Starr

Gay Icons

2009-08-18T21:50:00.003+01:00

I went to the National Portrait Gallery's Gay Icons exhibition today which, as I'm sure you know, consists of portraits of supposed or actual gay icons, as selected by a handful of prominent contemporary homosexualists. So Ian McKellen picked Edward Carpenter and Margarethe Cammermeyer, amongst others, and Sarah Waters chose Du Maurier and Kenneth Williams - again, amongst several.

It's a brilliant idea for an exhibition, but it presents several problems - of which more in just a second or two - and ultimately the exhibition is merely interesting and thought-provoking when it could have been thrilling.

The first problem is one of selection (i.e. whether this is a good list of gay icons) and that problem incurs a second major problem: a lot of these portraits aren't very good - the reason being that these icons weren't chosen for the quality of their portraits but for their inspirational qualities. I can't argue much with Alan Hollinghurst's championing of Thom Gunn, or Ben Summerskill picking Martina Navratilova, who are both surely a great inspiration to many gay people - but these aren't great pictures. There are just a handful of excellent pictures in the exhibition: the anonymous one of Bessie Smith for instance (selected by Jackie Kay), which has a lovely sort of texture to it, and emits real character, or the simple Polaroid portrait of Versace by Andy Warhol (Elton John's pick), or the beautifully bold and soulful portrait of Benjamin Britten by Cecil Beaton (Chris Smith's selection). I also liked the guerilla shot of Peter Tatchell by Polly Boland, the beautiful picture of Joe Dallessandro, and the sweet, droll photo of Quentin Crisp by Fergus Greer.

The problem is that it's a photographic exhibition, and when the pictures aren't up to scratch, you might as well write a list. Also, it means the icons don't go very far back: Jackie Kay daringly picks Sojourner Truth, but it's a terribly small, dull picture, which does no service to the greatness of the woman.

I also take issue with so many of the picks: almost all of Elton John's selection are utter hogwash (Bernie Taupin, gay icon? John Lennon? You have to be fucking with me) and exactly all of Billie Jean King's are too. And some of these people are great, inspirational figures, but are they gay icons? I loved seeing Manley Hopkins and Tchaikovsky, Gene Robinson, Alan Turing, Patricia Highsmith, and Ian Roberts - but I think they're not icons as such, sadly. Icons, yes: Ellen, Diana, Will Young. Perhaps the word icon is useless in this context: too populist, too easy. I'd still have liked to see Matthew Shepard, Beth Ditto, John Cage & Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg, Jodie Foster, Stephen Fry, Matthew Mitcham, Rufus Wainwright and Joan Armatrading, maybe; and perhaps go back further and chuck in Sappho, Caravaggio and Catullus. It sort of lacks in scope and magnificence; it's a tidy, good exercise in gay rights and revision that is intriguing and hope-inducing, but merely whets the appetite.

Reading: Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

Jam & Jerusalem

2009-08-18T17:21:00.004+01:00

Ah, so this is why I've got a blog. Instead of bleating to disbelieving friends about how good Jam & Jerusalem is, Caspar, why not write it in your stupid online diary? Eh? You prize berk.

So. Jam & Jerusalem, for those people who aren't in their 50s or me, is a bloody marvellous series by Jennifer Saunders, currently in its third and - I suspect - last season. It's cosy and slow, and it's about the mostly middle-aged and elderly inhabitants of a little village in Cornwall. Oh, and it's really badly directed, and Dawn French is appalling in it, and it contains the odd bad line. So I'm having a hard time selling it. Oh, but when it nails it! When it nails it, it nails it HARD - and it has endless reserves of goodness, warmth and truth. Take Sunday's episode.

Jennifer Saunders's character, Caroline - a prim, stiff, stupid upper-class snob - is somehow shanghaied into asking some of the villagers round to her very chic place for a dinner that doesn't turn out right. All the while, she is plagued with worry about her son who is fighting in Afghanistan (which she brilliantly pronounces Afghaniston, like Taunton). Her inability to maintain appearances, as she crumbles before his recorded online message, is emotionally devastating - or would be if the aforementionedly shit director didn't overlay the moment with mood music. Later, the vicar undergoes a very plausible crisis of faith as a result of that war - and is rescued from it by the village warden, a woman who bonds with him by saying, "We're quite alike, you and me. I think people find us quite annoying." She is annoying, and he is; and Caroline is deeply silly - but we care about them tremendously, and so does Saunders.

Her writing has never been better. The church warden delivers a solemn speech to the vicar, about believing in himself, and trying not to give up, and then says, "Do you Twitter?" It comes as such a shock, as they're sitting on wild moors discussing these existential matters. Likewise Caroline, speaking of her husband's penchant for going online: "John can spend all night on Myface". The first joke I mentioned is whimsy; the second is bawdy; and a lot of it comes from Saunders' brilliant splicing of the old-fashioned and the new. Saunders' character talks about the importance of keeping one's emotions to oneself. The vicar concurs:

Vicar: We've become a country of high-fives and blubbing!
Saunders: Yes. John blames Princess Diana.

It's for the way that these lines are half obvious, one quarter well-observed and one quarter fantastical, that the show makes me so happy. I love lines like, "It's in John's study, next to the Amstrad, on top of the Grundig." That is just wonderful - but it slips past almost without you noticing it.

All the way through, the actors are believable and touching - apart from Dawn French, hamming her way along as if in some useless sketch show. I really think - after Absolutely Fabulous and The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, that Saunders has a very particular genius for creating characters. The way she is relaxing away from full-on gags is also encouraging; she still has the nack of a well-turned phrase, but character leads joke these days - and her sense of obversation is wonderful to behold. J&J is thoughtful, political, delicate, and original. She is an incredible actor - as is Sue Johnston, the star of J&J, playing the main character who anchors all the oddballs who people the village - and she should be celebrated and cherished as one of Britain's most inventive, wonderful artists.

Listening to: Davy Graham - Folk, Blues and Beyond

Pajiba round-up

2009-08-12T16:43:00.002+01:00

OK, so I haven't posted in ages, and this isn't a real, proper blog post. I know I haven't blogged in ages - and I don't know if anyone minded, at all - but that was simply because, to be perfectly honest, it slightly slipped my mind. I didn't forget about it for whole months on end, but I never got that urge. I'm going to try and get back on top of it now, and will maybe post a film or book review soon. In the meantime, here are my last few articles for Pajiba. Keep reading!

Here's my review of Cass McCombs' album Catacombs: http://www.pajiba.com/music/cass-mccombs-catacombs-review.php

Part One of my Favourite Labels articles: http://www.pajiba.com/music/favorite-record-labels-part-2.php

Part Two of my Favourite Labels - a split post with TK: http://www.pajiba.com/music/the-best-record-labels-volume-4.php

My review of Dirty Projectors' album Bitte Orca: http://www.pajiba.com/music/dirty-projectors-bitte-orca-review.php

My review of Jarvis Cocker's album Further Complications: http://www.pajiba.com/music/jarvis-cocker-further-complications-review.php

Blind Reviews: Cannes Special

2009-05-28T12:23:00.003+01:00

Part Three in my series of blind reviews: here is my take on the films screening at the Cannes festival this year. Crucially, did the jury attribute the right awards?

The line-up at the Cannes festival this year was too mouth-watering to be true: all the greatest art-house directors in the world seemed to be preparing to do battle, and the question was, would they all live up to their reputation? Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais, Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Lars Von Trier, Hou Hsiao-Hsien: if they all delivered their best work, this would be a really difficult decision to call. And calling that decision? No less than Isabelle Huppert, France's greatest living actor, twice a recipient of awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals each. I couldn't have been more excited.

So what are the films like? Haneke's White Ribbon is, as usual, a cool meditation on the thin divide between harmony and violence: but this time he has given us a period drama, shot in beautiful black and white, set in Weimar Germany. This is most likely not his masterpiece - that would probably be Code Unknown - but it was a highly deserved winner of the Palme d'Or: a rigorous, intellectually fierce and well-acted drama. Some reproach Haneke his steely academism, but he is a brilliant stylist and a quite formidable thinker, who trains his camera on us to reflect a harsh, cruel world.

Folks on the Croisette had Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete down as favourite for top prize, but ultimately it only got the Grand Prix - a terrific achievement, still, for a film that successfully melds genre and auteurism, in the vein of Audiard's earlier The Beat My Heart Skipped (young man tries to escape a life of crime) and Read My Lips (a couple pulls off a heist). Once again, Audiard coaxes a great performance out of his male lead, just as he did with Kassovitz, Cassel and Duris before: Tahar Rahim can be sad he missed out on acting honours.

Those went to Christoph Waltz for his wicked turn as the baddy in Tarantino's ridiculous WW2 re-imagining, Inglourious Basterds (sic). Tarantino disappointed this year (as did Ang Lee, Almodovar and Ken Loach, with amiable but very minor fare), with a picture that never reins in his penchant for verbosity. Tarantino's story sees him re-telling the story of the Second World War, with a different ending; it's an interesting idea, but one he executes with little of his customary panache. Tarantino has got so dreary, hasn't he? Waltz's character is the only one with any of the charisma of his characters of yore, and his style of filming is becoming very hackneyed. I don't think Tarantino has ever grown up, and he continues to indulge himself with his silly fantasies - these genre essays - instead of directing a big, important film.

It was quite a good year for women, with films by Jane Campion, Andrea Arnold and Mia Hansen-Love garnering admiration, admiration and adulation respectively. Hansen-Love's film screened in a parallel selection, but she is one to watch. Isabel Coixet was widely derided, however, for Map of the Sounds of Tokyo.

It was also a year in which middle-Eastern cinema came to the fore: film-makers such as the Iranian Bahman Ghobadi (Nobody Knows About Persian Cats) and the Israeli-Palestinian Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains) and Haim Tabakman (Eyes Wide Open) showed this brilliantly - the latter with a story of homosexual love in orthodox judaism. (Lou Ye of China also confronted this taboo subject with Spring Fever, a film which has disgracefully seen him banned from his home country). These directors are necessarily political, and their selection by Cannes shows that the festival is continuing in the vein of its creation, since it was established in the 1940s as a liberal answer to the rightwing propaganda of the Venice and Berlin film festivals.

Politics reared its head again with Marco Bellocchio's Vincere, a story about Mussolini and his mistress, brilliantly played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno (who missed out on the acting award to Charlotte Gainsbourg, for her role as a self-mutilator in Von Trier's self-indulgent prank-horror Antichrist). Not hard to see a parable in this story of a greedy head of the Italian state who controls the media with an iron fist.

Overall, this was a great selection of films - particularly White Ribbon, Un Prophete, Vincere, The Father Of My Children, No-One Knows About Persian Cats and The Time That Remains - that I am dying to see.

2009-05-21T19:30:00.004+01:00

Here's an article I currently have up on Pajiba, about the demographics of record collections.

Listening to: Department of Eagles, In Ear Park
Reading: Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation

White Noise

2009-05-19T15:19:00.006+01:00

I finished reading White Noise by Don DeLillo, at the weekend, at long fucking last. This has been quite a time for thinking about death. On Friday, I attended the funeral of my aunt Hillary, on Saturday I finished this book, and yesterday I went to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Both White Noise and Synecdoche deal with a main male character who is terrified of death. In the De Lillo book, the character is concerned about the world's steady encroachment on his life, and grows to fear death as a sort of disease gradually reaching him via the modern world. In the Kaufman film, the character comes to exert artistic control over every element of his life so as to preserve the illusion of his immortality.

What I take from this is that fear of death is a very male thing - and although I don't want to draw out comparisons with Synecdoche, I will say that I think Charlie Kaufman is more successful in showing the folly of this fear: he is able to take a step back and show the madness of this fear. Kaufman also tempers this male viewpoint with a host of female characters who both exist as the character's fantasies and obstacles to his phallocentric plans to shape his world. De Lillo makes the mistake, I think, of assuming that his character's concerns are everyone's: with deadly (no pun intended) seriousness, he rejects people who do not fear death as 'shallow', at one point. I would say that perhaps these people - and I have no great fear of death, so I resent the charge - might simply not have such a regard for their position in the world that their greatest fear is depriving the world of themselves.

What Synecdoche shows very well - and White Noise does this excellently, too - is how totalitarianism and the death drive are closely connected. In White Noise, Jack Gladney is a professor in Hitler Studies at a trendy university in the United States, whose fear of death he tries to combat by owning Hitler, by making that field of study his own. He also - in conversations with a colleague - comes to accept that to kill someone is to escape your own mortality, since you are exerting a power over the life of another person. This ties in implicitly with the Holocaust, and makes a very plausible point about the murderousness of man.

Where White Noise succeeds best is in its depiction of modern life - particularly, for the 80s, the way television encroaches on people's personal lives. In his representation of a modern family constantly at odds with each other, De Lillo shows how the contemporary world has exploded modes of thought, creating different patterns and beliefs between generations, and abolishing a linear, unique philosophy. Television does this by being the form of media that goes into people's homes (De Lillo also targets telephones). How visionary, to see the distorting and distancing impact of new media, at such an early time: what De Lillo prophesies is a future where mobile phones and the internet are able to remove people still further and sever personal connections and any Western hegemonic discourse.

De Lillo beautifully ties all of this in with a chemical invasion that hits Jack Gladney's town and makes the whole family seek refuge together away from their home: the way the toxic fumes permeate the family - and specifically Jack - and instil paranoia and fear in the family, is clearly a metaphor for the power of television to gnaw at our lives.

The book is written quite beautifully throughout - although with something of a patriarchal bias that sometimes undoes De Lillo's arguments, of which more later - and with sharp humour. His portrayal of the modern family goes beyond caricature, as he spins a multi-parented family who eat whole-grain, exercise, phone friends, and don't really know each other. I loved the dialogue between them - the way De Lillo affectionately captures their misunderstandings. It's also an unashamedly philosophical book, and one which is not afraid to lose human believability to that cause: many of the characters (particularly Babette, Jack's earth-mother wife) are merely vectors, symbols.

So overall this was an absorbing and funny read, despite some laboriousness. The problem is - as I stated earlier on - that De Lillo too readily takes the side of his narrator, and though he often highlights the foolishness of Gladney's death-fear, he also seems to ascribe to everyone the same voice as him in his dialogue, and to give more weight to Gladney's discussions with his male colleague than to anyone else in the book. Babette's fear of death is never engaged with: it is merely something that happens to Jack. I think it is a fundamentally male view, that death is this thing to fear. The unconnectedness of man, and his thoughts about himself and his place in the world, leading to a fear of dying, are an important topic - but it is unwise to assume that this is of universal interest and a thought shared by all.

Listening to: Tilly and the Wall, O

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone: Vs Children

2009-05-13T19:18:00.004+01:00

I've reviewed the new album by Casiotone For The Painfully Alone for Pajiba. This is the link.

The Frontline

2009-05-13T14:40:00.003+01:00

I went to see Che Walker's play The Frontline at the Globe yesterday. It's a bad play, made worse by some shouty acting (to compensate, I think, for the terrible acoustics at the Globe). The premise: a motley crew of characters in modern London interact with each other.

I nearly cried when we got there five minutes late and the cast were halfway through a song called 'The Invisible Ones' - the chief lyric of which is 'we are the invisible ones'. There on stage were: an obvious queer, an older gentleman, a black woman with a McDonalds cap on, a worker with a hard hat on - amongst other (stereo)types. In the background, the Globe had been made up to look like the exit of an Underground stop, and there were Banksy pictures on the walls. Imagine my horror at the thought of spending an hour and a half in the company of these modern-day-Britain cliches.

After this, some actors playing religious cultists came on and, in the manner of bad actors in a school play, distributed leaflets about God to members of the audience while another actor butchered 'Jesus Gave Me Water'. And then the play began, and we saw how two young black drug dealers, an old and wise hot dog vendor, a strip club owner, a forgetful old man, a philosophical bouncer, a gay man and his tempestuous young lover, a tramp, a disaffected single mother, an out of work actor and a sassy Underground worker all got along. Oh god. Oh dear god. Words can't describe the awfulness of the writing and acting in setting up the absurd premise for this play: the exposition was lamentable and the acting very amateurish, while the script insisted on having all these characters talk across each other (get it? like in real life!) rather than in the usual theatrical convention of to each other and with pauses. Needless to say, most of these lonely people who have come to be so disenfranchised by the modern world find something to bring them together: religion, or a pregnancy, or triumphing over adversity together. One of the young drug dealers has to die before - pathetically - lessons are learned and people are brought together.

The trouble with The Frontline is that it attempts to be a slice of modern, urban life - yet it cannot escape the conventions and traps of theatre. The truth of modern life is surely that we don't always learn lessons from the difficulties of urban living, and that we don't get to understand each other. Also, it so happens that not every Tom, Dick and Abdul is a philosopher of our times - so these characters given to meditating on their lot are jarring, to say the least. Occasionally, Che Walker nails a line of dialogue (my favourite being, "I haven't seen you in ages! I was hoping you'd OD'ed!"), in which vernacular marries well with an attempt to say something wise about our world - but more often than not, the slang is glib, the humour stuffy and the thought too patrician. At the close of the play, one of the characters came to the front of the stage and released a balloon in the shape of a heart, which flew up over the Globe and away into London. Pass me a bucket, someone.

The music was good enough, ably dished out by a cast of good dancers and singers - although a lot like Rent in places, and god knows it's ghastly to have everyone come together in song. I think The Frontline neatly proves that theatre, to work, has to deal with the universal - and not just the recent and the nearby - in order to make its points. Watching this at the Globe, I felt how vapid it was, and how irrelevant it would seem in ten years' time - I mean, it's already not quite spot-on now, and is supposed to be a searing reflection of modern times. There was some quite good acting in the quieter or the funnier moments, but the ridiculous tragedy of it all got everyone far too exercised and braying. It's an altogether trying time at the theatre.

Listening to: Mstislav Rostropovich, Bach's Cello Suites

Death and the King's Horseman

2009-05-08T14:55:00.004+01:00

I saw Death and the King's Horseman at the National Theatre with Kevin and Bailey yesterday evening: a riotous and beautiful show, full of music and colour, which nevertheless left me - us - with a sour taste.

In the play, by Wole Soyinka, a British official residing in Nigeria intervenes to prevent the King's 'horseman', Elesin, from committing suicide to be buried with the late King as is the custom. The British official - Pilkings - finds the ritual suicide barbaric, while Elesin is resigned to killing himself according to ceremony, for the good of his people. (The play glosses over exactly what good this might be, and doesn't address the silly mysticism of this tradition)

The problem with the play is that it is so in thrall to the mystic spirituality of the Yoruban tribe. While this has some happy outcomes - the exuberance of the play, its exaltation of sex and music and life and colour - it also comes at an intellectual cost, since Soyinka seems hell-bent of defending the most basic and unsettling Yoruban traditions. As his central mouthpiece, the village's mother decries British imperialists in the final act for destroying what they do not know. The character Olunde similarly tells Mrs Pilkings that she cannot understand the customs of the Yorubans. What on earth does this mean? This strikes me as a particularly wilful brand of obscurantism. No wonder Soyinka thinks some things are incomprehensible: he displays very little understanding of his white characters, showing them as insensitive, stupid, clownish freaks.

This is the language of the play: constantly setting up a fake debate between a 'white' thing and a 'black' thing. Olunde asks whether the Second World War, that white imperial venture, is any more excusable than ritual suicide. This is setting up straw soldiers: of course WW2 is no better than that! A bad thing being marginally better than a really bad thing makes it no less bad a thing. The logic and intellectual reasoning here are shoddy. Likewise director Rufus Norris's decision to have the white characters be played by black actors who have whited up: it's a really crass, manipulative ploy that completely balances the play in favour of the African argument.

It's a very disturbing argument to make that tradition is tradition is tradition, and some cultures just cannot understand each other - chiefly because it rests on the same argument of Otherness that Edward Said pinpoints in Orientalism. If something is unknowable, what is the point in trying? Soyinka is too busy knifing White narrow-mindedness to criticise the more shocking customs of the Yorubans, such as the sexism of polygamy. The women in the play are all mostly presented as minor, interchangeable characters, perfectly happy in their second-wheel status.

The direction, overall, has some good points. It makes a virtue of exalting Blackness - the show is a celebration of what Leopold Sedar Senghor termed 'negritude': the rhythms of dance and song and sex, specifically. They are contrasted beautifully with the stilted, tiresome music of the colonials. A shame that the rest of the play's comparison between two cultures should veer so wildly into caricature.

Solid acting throughout, and the play - though I don't like its discourse - reaches a real climax in the prison scene at the end, with deep, rolling poetry in the village mother's incantations, and a gorgeous tableau of a culture tied up and impotent.

Listening to: Kate Bush, Hounds of Love

Best of the Noughts. #6: You Can Count On Me

2009-05-06T13:40:00.004+01:00

The first thing I saw of Kenneth Lonergan's delightful and heart-mangling film You Can Count On Me, was a segment at the Oscars, showing a scene from Laura Linney's nominated performance. There amongst the shouty histrionics of her fellow nominees, her perfectly judged delivery and ironic tone seemed the freshest, most natural thing in the world. I'd never been so determined to see a film based on a thirty second clip.

The miracle of You Can Count On Me is that it never puts a foot wrong for the whole of its run - like those perfect thirty seconds I saw, it always amazes you with the steadiness and verisimilitude of its dialogue. The performances are so exquisitely attuned to that dialogue, too, finding the truth and humour in these lines, and the pauses and looks that accompany it speak of hardship and sadness. Linney plays Sammy, a single mother with a crap job at a bank, who is having an affair with her useless manager. Her drop-out brother, Terry, comes to stay with her, and forms a bond with her son; Sammy and Terry get to know each other again after some time without contact. Everything that happens alludes to the trauma they must have endured, growing up as orphans: Sammy is trying to create a world of stability for her child; Terry is too dangerous and fucked up to create stability even for himself. The bond between the two is acted so beautifully by Linney and Ruffalo, it's unbelievable: their dependence on each other; her over-effusiveness and his inability to express love; the way each of them rubs people up the wrong way with their no-nonsense attitude. They share mannerisms and looks, and inflections. It's incredible.

It's a very funny film, too - the way Linney's character sheds her clipped, controlled life for occasional forays into anger or madness or laughter; the way Ruffalo's character is unable to bullshit Rory Culkin's seven-year-old and talks to him just like a trucker; the script's sense of observation of small town life. The delicacy of the humour balances out the real nastiness of it, so that Ruffalo's selfishness and Linney's cruelty come as a real shock. The sadness of the film is that Ruffalo can count on Linney, but she can't count on him, and needs him so badly. Their farewell, on a bench, at the end of the film, is a lovely single camera scene - they talk to each other, and she cries, he leaves, the end.

Julia Roberts won the Oscar that year, for Erin Brockovich, which is a perfectly good film about a woman in small town America. But Erin Brockovich won her combat, and made it big, and taught the world a lesson. Linney didn't win, and Sammy doesn't win either: they're both too good, and too true, for that.

Here's that last scene. Sob.

Listening to: Lloyd Cole, Rattlesnakes

Blind Reviews. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

2009-05-02T17:15:00.003+01:00

Hello, and welcome to the second installment of my occasional series of Blind Reviews, in which I critique something I haven't seen/heard/read. Today, it's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I'd like to claim extra points for this entry, as I've only seen half of the first X-Men film, and none of the others, and haven't read any of the comics. So here's my review. Ahem.

I love X-Men. Like everyone else, I really relate to its story of embattled outsiders, whose superpowers are as much a handicap as they are a really, really awesome mega-cool thing for dweeby little idiots to envy. Who doesn't harbour a crush on Pyros, the man who can breathe fire out of his nostrils, but has never had a girlfriend? Or Wallina, the ultra-hot woman with purple eyes, who can walk through walls? X-Men - in the comics and then the brilliant series of films (apart from the third one, which for some reason I didn't like as much, even though it was exactly the same as the other two) - is pioneering in the realism and historical groundedness of its characters. Not for X-Men the cartoonish pyrotechnics of Superman! These cats suffer severe mental anguish, reflecting an inner trauma that everyone can get behind.

So it was with great sadness that I noted that - for some reason I can't put my finger on, as it's exactly the same as the X-Men films - the new installment, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, isn't as good as its predecessors. What a shame, because Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) was always the coolest - sorry, I mean most interesting - character. With his brilliant wolf powers and all. This could have been made into a great film. But the film loses its way because it doesn't have room for enough of those great characters we all loved so well in the the previous X-Men films. I'd have liked to see young Wolverine interact with Lykra, the mutant with skin like tights. And where was Gazzetta, the young girl with a disturbing ability to read newspapers? Add a few more of these superheroes into the mix, and you'd already have had a much better story on your hands.

The film is also saddled with ludicrous special effects. In the crucial scene where Wolverine discovers his ability to retract his claws and howl like an animal, I could see the CGI where they had filmed an actual wolf and transplanted it onto Jackman. The scenes in the Russian steppes are full of snow that looks like fog. The script also borders on the silly, at times. When Jackman, looking like a cross between a man and an actual wolf, howls at the moon and curses, "Oh lord, what twisted claws are these, what anger seethes herein?", there was something a little bit silly about it, for some reason I couldn't quite place.

There are also a lot of tedious scenes where the origins of the mutants' powers are explained. So Dominic Monaghan, as 'Bolt', is forced to endure a scene where his character witnesses his father being bolted to a wall by Nazis, in a Warsaw ghetto. The young man is traumatised by the event and takes on the ability to fire bolts out of his arse at will. It's an interesting story, but grows a little dull at length. Likewise Taylor Kitsch as 'Gambit', the mutant who's really good at debating - the actor makes a good fist of it, but it's a redundant plotline.

Some people have reservations about the way the X-Men series ties its absurd stories of other-worldly superpowers into serious, disturbing historical events like the Holocaust. Surely this is a craven bid for gravitas, and a crass desecration of the memory of people who died in these events, say the naysayers. To these people, I say, "be quiet, and look how hot Halle Berry looks in spandex".

Overall, then, this was a disappointing failure - but I'm sure the X-Men franchise will be reborn even more valiant and cool and ridiculous - sorry, I mean cool - than ever.

Listening to: Mississippi John Hurt, The 1928 Sessions

Bob Dylan and Noisettes

2009-04-29T18:09:00.002+01:00

My reviews of the new Bob Dylan album and the new Noisettes album are now up here, courtesy of those sassy bastards over at Pajiba.com.

Listening to: Skip James, Complete Early Recordings

Some Songs

2009-04-27T10:51:00.003+01:00

Here are my last ten contributions to Pajiba's weekly "What We're Listening To" segment. And you know what? Looking at this list with cold and unbiased objectivity, I have to say this is some pretty, pretty good stuff. Enjoy:

PJ Harvey

2009-04-25T13:54:00.004+01:00

I saw PJ Harvey in concert on Tuesday, with Luisa, courtesy of David and his ceaseless generosity. It was an OK gig, but I did come to consider that I perhaps don't like PJ enough to enjoy her fully. I sort of understand what she's doing, and who she caters for, but I find her music too difficult, too strident perhaps, with not enough moments of charm and levity.

In concert, she oozes charm and sweetness in person, and astonishingly turns on the vitriol, the fury and the sex for the music - that voice trembles and quivers, and becomes a shout and a wail, and she can storm through anything with it. It's the accompanying music - the squall of guitar noise, the pounding drums, and even sometimes the shape of the songs themselves - that troubles me; I think it doesn't let you in at any point, and certainly leaves me feeling very foreign to the music itself. There's something hermetic about it. This material with John Parish, too, lacks cohesion: in concert, they played a medley of their songs together, reaching back to their joint album twelve years ago, and the stuff feels scattershot. If you consider what different music she's explored in the last decade, it's obvious that a medley of old and new stuff would sound incongruous. Here in concert, Parish alternated between electric guitar and ukulele, and the setlist between slow torch songs and thrashing electric numbers, and it didn't quite add up to an exciting palette.

In terms of albums, I'm a bit sorry to see PJ swap the desolate and haunting atmospherics of White Chalk, her 2007 record, for this kind of stuff. It felt like White Chalk was a good direction for her, and it was a bold album in a new sort of style - alternating between deathly shanties and lovely piano meditations - especially after Uh Huh Her and its boring shoutiness. This 2009 album with John Parish, A Woman A Man Walked By, sounds very boring to me, with its electric guitar and feverish delivery: witness the ploddingness of 'Black Hearted Love', 'The Chair' and 'Pig Will Not'. I think PJ Harvey's musical style and adventurousness are compromised by Parish's more pedestrian instincts.

Listening to: Benjamin Wetherill, Laura

DOOM: Born Like This

2009-04-22T23:01:00.001+01:00

My review of DOOM's new album, Born Like This, is up here on Pajiba.

In The Loop

2009-04-21T17:15:00.003+01:00

I saw In The Loop yesterday, with Luisa, Dan and Kevin. It is mind-warpingly funny. If you live in Britain, are reading this, and don't know what In The Loop is, there isn't much I can do for you. For everyone else: In The Loop is the directorial debut of Armando Iannucci, and deals with British and American politicians caught up in a countdown to war. Oh, and Armando Iannucci is a genius, responsible for some of the best television in Britain (or anywhere) of the nineties and 2000s (or ever).

In The Loop is far and away the rudest film I've ever seen. And here lies the difficulty of reviewing it: all I want to do is write down these filthy, mesmerisingly offensive and inventive lines (and then dance round my living room, screaming them at the top of my lungs, and laugh and laugh and laugh) - but that would spoil the film. So let's just say that there are about 30 amusing lines in the film, 97 really funny ones, and ten or so that will make you spazz out in your seat, shaking with delight and hilarity.

In The Loop takes the filthy, furious humour of the wonderful series The Thick of It - and keeps its magnetic anchor, Malcom Tucker, who is based on Alastair Campbell - and runs with it. It is constantly one-upping itself in its efforts to take the scabrousness of its barbs further and further, like some high-wire balancing act, getting higher and higher. Throughout, the performances are absolutely winning - and Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker is the chief winner, but Gina McKee, Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini and Paul Higgins are all incredible too. McKee's timing is bang on, and she walks gawkily through everything with a bemused air of superiority; Hollander is beautifully silly, and whips out one of the film's best lines almost without trying.

I was astonished to see the fury of the comedy of In The Loop - it's something that an audience responds to with outraged cackles, and I think it captures a political fury in everyone at the moment - a sort of helpless rage which is somehow enabled by these rabid broadsides. It is also a comedy of class, and thoroughly British: based on bringing down the upper-class and the entitled. I don't know what to make of that so much.

I'm just so thrilled to have a British comedy that I don't shudder at the thought of seeing. It is intelligent, anarchic, erudite, fast-paced and - have I mentioned this? - ragingly, ragingly funny.

Best of the Noughts. #5: Etre et Avoir

2009-04-19T23:04:00.005+01:00

I don't think I've ever been as disappointed in someone as when Georges Lopez, the most wonderful teacher ever committed to screen, and the subject of Nicolas Philibert's awe-inspiring 2002 documentary Etre et Avoir, sued the film's makers for a portion of its profits. Lopez claimed he had been misrepresented by the film, and that his teaching methods were his own intellectual copyright, and that as the main subject of the film he was its co-author. It felt like a bad attempt to cash in on the film's popularity, and it was all the more saddening since it was Lopez's fair, charming, upright presence that made the film so wonderful.

Etre et Avoir is a documentary about a year in a small rural primary school in France, where Georges Lopez has been the schoolmaster for many years, teaching a dozen or so children aged 4 to 11. It is his last year in the school before retiring. In its own slow and measured way, the film follows him and his pupils as they progress through the year. We see him disperse fights, take the children sledging, and teach them their alphabet and times tables. There really isn't much more to the film than that. But the film is subtly, brilliantly sharp - it captures moments of disappointment, euphoria and revelation; it films the children on their own level, with a lovely eye for detail and individual character; it is quite mind-bogglingly funny (and I'm thinking especially about the photocopying scene, which brought absolute roars from the cinema where I first saw it, and the scene where a boy ropes his whole family into helping with his maths homework); it is slow and technically admirable, with its very own grainy and languorous aesthetic.

Etre et Avoir possesses that indefinable thing that I think of as cinematic magic. Throughout the course of it, it holds you in its spell - in scenes that are simple and true and life-affirming. For instance, the scene where Lopez quietly and calmly talks to two boys who have been fighting: with elegance, kindness, warmth and a knowledge of their character, he finds out what has been happening and coaches them through the reasons they should not be fighting, and elicits an apology from them that feels completely heartfelt. The film's quiet manifesto in these scenes is that only through a personal approach to children can we help and guide them; it is an apologia for a quiet and simple life. Make no mistake that this is a deeply political film. It is also a film that struck me as perfectly authentic: though the cameras are there through the year, and the film's artistic choices make it more than a routine documentary, there is no pretense to it; it is filled with sheer honesty and goodness. This is the sort of film that makes me depressed with blockbuster films about magic superheroes - packed with life-hating lies and stupidity, these supernatural action films neglect this world and its everyday miracles, and dream instead of a world of simple, manichean morality. Far better, in my view, to be from the Philibert school of thought. Etre et Avoir starts with a shot of two tortoises making their way across the floor of the classroom: slowly, first one then the other emerge from behind a chair, and plod across the floor. It makes you laugh and wonder, and sets the documentary's doctrine. BAM. Who needs anything more than that?

Listening to: Tom Waits, Closing Time

Micachu and the Shapes: Jewellery

2009-04-15T18:24:00.003+01:00

My review of Micachu's record is posted up here right now this very moment with my lovely friends at the reliably reliable Pajiba.

Listening to: Phosphorescent, To Willie

Producers Playlists - Part 1: Jon Brion

2009-04-15T12:27:00.006+01:00

What with Phil Spector being banged up at the moment, and critics spouting appalling guff about the relationship between madness and genius, I though I'd do a little series on record producers I like, starting with Jon Brion. Sorry, did I say 'like' just then? In the case of Brion, it's more like 'want to stalk and force into marriage'.

Jon Brion is a producer of rare genius, who started out in pop bands in the 80s with the likes of Aimee Mann. He went on to make a name for himself producing her solo records, and then just carried on getting better and better. I love his baraoque orchestrations and his fairground sort of sound; the lovely organ and chamberlin and bells he ropes in; his gorgeous, stirring string arrangements. His pop aesthetic - borrowed from the Beach Boys and Beatles - favours a certain bounciness, with sprightly little fugues interlaced into greater swells of sound. He's a smashing composer, too - turning in ace scores for Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in particular.

So what have we here? Well, it's a delightful ragbag: we kick off with his delicious arrangement on the discarded version of Fiona Apple's 'Waltz' (and he's done so much other good stuff with her: note the woozy fabric of sound on her cover of 'Across The Universe', and the delicate strings he weaves into her piano on the heartbreaking 'I Know'). There are some crazy arrangements for Rufus Wainwright on his debut, with timpani and bells spicing up the bouncy 'Beauty Mark', and chamberlin and marimba (and Brion really plays the hell out of the latter instrument) on the morbid cabaret song 'Matinee Idol'. There's a terrific ukulele-assisted paring down of 'An Eluardian Instance' for Of Montreal. There's the brass and strings on Kanye West's 'Bring Me Down' and 'Celebration', adding real body and elegance to Ye's already portentous stylings. There's the sombre texture of his collaboration with Beck on his cover of 'Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime'. There's the Beach Boys choirs, xylophone and snarly guitar with Aimee Mann on 'Fall of The World's Own Optimist' and the arrangements on the deceptively simple 'One' for the Magnolia soundtrack. He makes The Polyphonic Spree sound good, and adds brilliant brass and clippy handclaps to the fantastic 'Underdog' by Spoon.

Finally, there's his own material. The beautiful, dreamy theme to Punch-Drunk Love; the folk-pop 'Knock Yourself Out', with its layered vocals, flute and mouth organ for the I Heart Huckabees soundtrack; the peppy 'I Believe She's Lying' from his solo album Meaningless, with its worked vocals and snappy guitar and drums. Those songs seem unassuming, but they're all indicative of his way of working around sound, of playing with textures and inventing, coming up with new ploys. Listen to these songs, and hear the detail, the definition of the music, and you'll soon hear the talent of one man adding to the creativity of others, feeding in his own voice. Brilliant.

Listening to: Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps

The First Three Chapters of What Maisie Knew

2009-04-14T17:32:00.002+01:00

I seem to be making a habit of this - I already mislaid my George Saunders in New York last week and now, after leaving my new copy of What Maisie Knew on the train in France this weekend, I'm going to have a go at its first three or four chapters.

Pretty good, you know. Henry James's style can be quite mesmerisingly dull, with these sentences that Proustishly hold off their resolution until the very end, or fall over themselves in an effort to ward off a criminal preposition ending. Yet there was starting to be something quite involving about WMN (which has to be one of my favourite titles for a book, ever). I think it's due to there being a child as its emotional core: parsing the activities of adults through this person's feelings and thoughts, yet with a near omniscient narrator to extract irony from the situation, makes for a fresh sort of read. It's a little bit like that in his short story 'The Pupil', of course - a story I know quite well - where Morgan is at once frighteningly aware of adult inter-relations but emotionally incapable of understanding their complexities: the deception and ambiguities inherent in people's intercourse seem to him mere molehills to be overcome.

Similarly, Maisie comprehends on a certan level the growing affection between her father and her governess, but is incapable of understanding the intricacies of their relationship: the sting of the revelation of their marriage is seen through her eyes and cuts you as a reader. Likewise the certainty that her mother is embarking on some sort of other relationship herself: you guess this as an adult reader but understand it only through her refracted persepctive. I think this would have made for a progressively more enthralling read as Maisie's viewpoint is bound to gain more depth and insight - it's a fantastic set-up for a narrative about loss of innocence and a great way to examine the deceits and horrors of adult interaction.

Perhaps I'll get another copy and carry on with it.

Listening to: Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Reading: Don DeLillo, White Noise

Best of the Noughts. #4: Are You A Dreamer?

2009-04-11T10:05:00.003+01:00

Denison Witmer's most beautiful album is called Are You A Dreamer? and the cover for the record is a pattern that he knitted himself, with the words of the title crocheted into stars hanging from clouds which bear his name. It's very twee and very pretty.

That's a compliment - or a charge - that might be directed at the album overall. It is ridiculously beautiful, after all: those deep, wistful, rolling chords plucked out on his guitar; the gentle orchestrations bringing in banjo (from Sufjan Stevens), pedal-steel guitar, organ, bells and swoony harmonies (from Stevens and Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission); Witmer's cool, sweet voice itself, with its honeyed, slightly nasal tone. And to start with it does indeed seem twee: the first song is called 'Little Flowers', for chrissakes, and there's another called 'Grandma Mary'. But I think this is the record where Witmer really stonks up his sound - there is some surprisingly muscular drumming throughout, with wonderfully resonant crashes and rolls of thunder on 'Ringing of the Bell Tower' (which, with customary delicacy, he sees as "counting out the days you can't replace"), for instance. And it's such a mature record - one on which, to listen to his previous recordings, you can really hear him coming into his own.

'Little Flowers' is the first song of his I ever heard, and I bought the album on the strength of it: it is a sumptuous little song, full of hope, and is built on almost pure melody. When the chorus kicks in, with its group harmonies, you feel a surge of sheer joy. But Are You A Dreamer? is an album where your favourite song constantly shifts along the playlist. When you listen to the whole thing in a row, you stumble across a part you'd forgotten or never noticed before, a chord or an instrument that makes you perk up, and when one song has ended and you're debating whether to play it again immediately, another one comes on that makes you tingle with wonder.

I also appreciate the sweetness of Witmer's faith, and the way he sees it as a gentle guiding hand: in 'Ringing of the Bell Tower', for instance, he sings 'consider the lilies of the valley/Neither do they toil nor they spin/Still a quiet hand is watching over them', while 'Finding Your Feet Again', an exquisite song of strength and hope, culminates in a beautiful group-harmonised catechism: 'Go now in the light of your God/Go now in the love of your God'. Witmer is nothing if not a hoper - for him, dreams are a foray into another world, a vision of something else to strive for.

As I've mentioned, every single song is a winner - a slice of lovely, lovely goodness, containing many little nuggets of musical splendour. So I won't dribble all over every single one of them, but I want to write a last bit about 'Castle and Cathedral', my favourite song on the album and my all time number one shower song. It has the most delicious melody, of the sort that seem plucked out of thin air, as if they had already existed in our world for millions of years, and the writer managed to find one floating around somewhere and pin it down. But Witmer doesn't indulge in it - once he's spun his tale over two verses, he breaks the song down into sombre guitar chords and pedal-steel, and the song ends. You feel so hungry for more, it nearly kills you every time. Plus the lyrics are so enigmatic, I come back to them with new meanings each time: especially the image of a photograph taken together with someone and being cut in half, and his half being used for a bookmark which falls out as he is getting packed to leave. Oh god, it's so great!

Finally, this album always reminds me of that dear old giraffe, Ben. It's not the sort of record that he would ordinarily love, but he really does love and listen to it one heck of a lot, and I'm touched that we find the same sorts of relief and delight in it.

Listening to: Micachu and the Shapes, Jewellery
Reading: D. H. Lawrence, Selected Short Stories

The Brain-Dead Megaphone

2009-04-10T00:18:00.003+01:00

Kevin gave me George Saunders's book The Brain-Dead Megaphone for my birthday a few months back, and I've been dipping into it on and off, with total delight. Anyway, it so happens I left it in America by mistake, so I'll jot down some thoughts now, based on the first few pieces.

George Saunders is a humanist.

I don't mean this in the sense of atheism, but rather in the sense that you gather from Saunders that he has a faith in humanity, in people. In the title essay, he writes with something approaching despair about the ways in which people have been indoctrinated, misled, blunted - by our media and our politicians. It is a wonderful diatribe - an elegant, persuasive, comical and furious call to arms in the face of stupidity, talking about how clear-sightedness and goodness can have the power to defeat imbecility. What is thrilling about the article - amongst other things - is that it is a political piece (about the war in Iraq, particularly) written at a human level. This means that Saunders can eschew grandiloquent sermonising and great utopian flights of fancy; it makes his writing strong and puts his case across perfectly. Likewise in his article on Dubai, written for GQ, he finds a hidden depth of humanity and goodness in the god-awful money Mecca and makes sweetly trenchant points about religion in the closing pages of the article, about the intrinsic goodness of people. In this article, as ever, his humour walks very nearby his anger: the section about the inequality between the inhabitants of his hotel and the people who work there, and then again the difference between the people who work there and the people beneath even them on the financial scale, is imbued with an appropriately caustic tone. In this travel article, even, Saunders lays bare politics on a human scale.

George Saunders is a writer.

I mean that he writes beautifully: as an essayist, his comical propensity and his gift for clear writing serve him exceptionally well. In 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', he traces the origins of his love of writing back to Esther Forbes's book Johnny Tremain, which he read as a child - and especially the sentence 'On rocky islands gulls woke'. His marvellous dissection of this great sentence - luxuriating in its musicality, resonance and lack of punctuation - gives us a template for his writing: precise, intelligent, bullshit-free. He talks about the myriad ways this sentence could have been written and shows that only this sentence will do. It's a thing of beauty.

George Saunders is an imaginist.

By this I mean that he has a gift for imagining, inventing and - most crucially - for looking at things in different ways. When I mentioned just now that he tries to write that sentence 'On rocky islands gulls woke' in other ways, to show how just that way is perfect, this is true of his writing in general: he is not content to talk of things merely as they are, but talks about what they might be like if they were otherwise. This goes for the essay 'The Brain-Dead Megaphone', in which he uses the imagery of this incongruous thing, a brain-dead megaphone, to discuss the constant and brutal barrage of bullshit that we are submitted to in our daily lives, which has inured us to such things as stupidity and greed, so that we accept such a disgrace as the war in Iraq with less bad grace than we should. It is to Saunders's credit that he spins such a beautiful analogy, building up his metaphor with wit and glee, creating a crescendo towards the moment when he reveals what his comparison applies to - he holds a distorting mirror up to our world, and makes us reimagine it in the freshest of ways.

Listening to: Tim Buckley, Goodbye and Hello

Aeroplane films

2009-04-07T21:07:00.003+01:00

I saw two awful films in the plane and one quite good one. Of the latter - Frost/Nixon - let's just say briefly that it's an elegant, rather stylish film with some good performances (Michael Sheen nails David Frost - shudder at that mental image), which nevertheless suffers from a certain leadenness and a propensity to state its aims too obviously. Right - let's move onto the horrors.

Marley & Me and Yes Man

I actually don't often see really terrible films. I read reviews, and look out for directors and actors who have convinced me in the past, which means that I am usually good at eliminating the ghastlier fare from my viewing. This means that the few stinkers I do watch always come as a real shock to me, and draw one or all of these thoughts: is this what people are watching? Did someone actually write this? Did these actors get paid to do this? Who thought this was a good idea?

Of these two clunkers - and they're both astonishingly bad - I suppose Marley & Me is the worse, in that it doesn't even build on its (awful) premise. At least Yes Man starts out with a(n awful) premise, and limps with it as far as it can. Those premises in full: a couple buys a dog; a man changes his life by agreeing to everything. Marley & Me features Jennifer Aniston, playing the Jennifer Aniston type, and Owen Wilson, playing a normal role as an Owen Wilson type. Yes Man stars Jim Carrey - playing the Jim Carrey type - and Zooey Deschanel, who really needs to fucking pull herself together right now. I'm sick to the back teeth of this myth that actors need to make big, dumb, commercial films in order to support themselves through the small, good, indie ones. Where is Michelle Williams's blockbuster, or William H. Macy's?

Talking of Michelle Williams: in Wendy & Lucy, she loses a dog. That's the whole plot - yet the film (which I half dismissed as dull) is incomparably rich in detail, observation and insight. Marley & Me squanders its half-assed plot by never eking a single moment of truth or comedy out of its conceit. For example, when they go to buy a puppy, you might imagine that something funny happens - I'd even have settled for a puppy weeing on Wilson or Aniston, or tripping them up. But nothing happens: they see a puppy they like, and they buy it. End of scene. Scene after scene happens like that: should he change jobs? Yes - and he does. Should they move? Yes. Will they be able to have a baby? Yes. Our low expectations are consistently met, and met, and met - and then the film ends. Just who thought this was a good idea for a film? Here it is again: a couple buys a dog. They take it for walks, and bring up some children with it. It dies. The end. Starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, actors. Who paid them, and why?

Yes Man. Where do I begin? Hackishly adapted from Danny Wallace's dispensable book, it's about the unhilarious things that happen to you when you start agreeing to everything. Isn't it funny? He has to pay for the meal because his friends asked him! He has to agree to help his ex-wife plan her wedding because she asked him! There's comedy you can really get your teeth into. Yes Man is eye-wateringly bad, with a lethally unfunny central perf by Carrey and a phoned in one by Deschanel, but at least it has some (awful) energy to it, and at least it tries to imagine things that might occur because of its (awful) premise. Marley & Me is just (to paraphrase Alan Bennett) one fucking thing after another. Yes Man is the loud and depressing blokey neighbour who tells you about his night out on the town with the boys; Marley & Me is a watery-eyed Aunt who shows you her holiday photos.

Reading: Henry James, What Maisie Knew

Coming Soon

2009-04-07T12:15:00.002+01:00

Here's a brief thingy I wrote for the wonderful folk at Pajiba, about albums I'm looking forward to. Go to the music section for the albums that my fellow music writers are jonesing for.

New York!

2009-03-29T20:43:00.003+01:00

Right. This is it. After fantasising about the States for years and years, I'm about to go there for the first time. Imagine all the people there, speaking American, wherever you go! And all so good-looking, like on television! It's going to be great. Anyway, here are some New York songs to enjoy or hate, while I'm actually bowling around in the actual Apple itself. I can't wait. See you soon!

New York, New York @ Yahoo! Video

Best of the Noughts. #4: Mysterious Skin

2009-03-27T16:26:00.003Z

An interesting thing happened, this decade: the directors of the so-called New Queer Cinema grew up and matured into thrillingly adept, stylish, thoughtful artists. Todd Haynes, with Far From Heaven and I'm Not There, turned in two flawless films (certainly to my mind) that established him as a new intellectual filmmaker with real cinematic flair and vision. Tom Kalin's Savage Grace was an excellent film - elegant, beautifully composed, and with a painful brittleness to it. Pedro Almodovar - although never aligned with New Queer - also became a master of style, with films that are becoming increasingly regal and polished, far from the fury and hysteria of his earlier pictures. As B. Ruby Rich herself has pointed out, this is partly to do with a gradual, if still partial, acceptance of homosexuality by the mainstream: that has tended to dull the anger of these directors somewhat, and perhaps destroy the possibility of a real queer aesthetic. Aids, though still an awful scourge, is no longer the devastating taboo it was. And these directors have grown up, too: ten, fifteen years on, they want to tell stories and flaunt their finesse.

Likewise, Gregg Araki - always the more brutal of the New Queer directors, and whose early work isn't on a technical par with that of Haynes and Kalin - produced with Mysterious Skin a masterpiece of subtlety, technical brilliance, wit, substance and emotion. In addressing homosexuality, Aids and paedophilia, the tone of the film bears none of Araki's ragged, angry, D.I.Y aesthetic from earlier. Instead, it is a slow, languorous, dark film - and one whose shocks and tragedies (and there are many) are more powerful for being framed in this beautiful work of art. When Joseph Gordon-Levitt's teenage hustler is physically abused, for instance, or has sex with a man covered in welts and warts and bruises, you feel jolted and yet comforted, because the film has prepared you in its tone for these shocks. It ends with something like catharsis, but gives the audience leeway to see the darkness ahead for these two characters.

The film is about Neil and Brian - two young men who are both traumatised in their own ways by an incident in their childhoods. Neil has grown up to be a gay hustler, living dangerously; Brian is an introverted creature, who thinks he was abducted by aliens in his youth. The film tells their parallel stories, bringing them together in the end to talk about what really happened.

It's such a bold film. It bravely tackles the subject of pre-pubescent sexuality head-on, and in the intensity of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance as Neil it gives us a new Brando - queer and proud, sexual, disturbed. I find it incredible that this character, in all his pain and fury, is still seen so lovingly and with such desire: the palette of the film is dreamy and luminous, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt somehow captures that light, and makes the film his own. In inviting you to love him, the film gives you a sense of the horror of his life and his family. I can't think of a similar role in any other film I've seen. Brady Corbet is also fantastic as the timid Brian - and in one scene which made me gasp out loud in the cinema (and it's not a spoiler to say that it involves him fisting a dead animal), delicately plays out Brian's horrible moment of realisation about his infancy.

It's a terribly shocking and affecting film - yet it is carried off with such brilliance that it fills you with a kind of joy.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land

2009-03-26T16:14:00.003Z

My article on country music is up now at Pajiba.

Listening to: Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx

Fiona Apple Covers

2009-03-24T17:13:00.002Z

I make no secret of the fact that I love Fiona Apple. I loved her when I had no taste in music, and still love her now that I've acquired some - but there was an awful time in between, where I thought I shouldn't love her; that perhaps she was a poor musician. Her last album, Extraordinary Machine, made nonsense of that ridiculous notion: she's obviously a charming, thoughtful and inventive songwriter, and I think she's one of the best singers around; her piano-playing is unmistakable.

Anyway, she hasn't released anything for a while, and I miss her. So here are some covers of hers that I love. I'm eternally grateful to her for getting me into Blossom Dearie and The Boswell Sisters, and for making me seek out the original Ella Fitzgerald version of When I Get Low, I Get High.

Blind Review: The Boat That Rocked

2009-03-23T22:42:00.005Z

Hello, and welcome to the inaugural Blind Review - the first in what I hope will be a regular, if occasional, feature of Straight Outta Crouch End. In these reviews, I shall be giving my opinion of various films and albums etc, without actually seeing/hearing them. I'm so credit crunch. Anyway, we'll see what I can cobble together from hearsay, posters and rampant speculation.

Ahem.

Richard Curtis has always written about our times; or rather, his elaborate fantasies of British life have always been carefully signposted so as to resemble modern times. In reality, just as so many of his characters are types - bundles of traits and tics and cliche - so the setting of his films isn't really London, but an approximation of London, and not actually modern Britain but a semblance of modern Britain. Richard Curtis holds up a distorting mirror to the world - if you don't like his cold, hard falsehoods, get out of the funhouse.

Now Curtis has cast his glaucous, jaded eye on the 60s. Do you remember the 60s? God, they were such fun! I remember hanging out on Carnaby Street, decked head to foot in crushed velvet, smoking pot with Marianne Faithfull and Austin Powers. What a laugh we had. The point is that now the Curtis-man has given up any pretence of anchoring (no pun intended - or, as Tom Sturridge's lovably shy character from the film might say, "No er, erm, erm, pun intended. God, I'm such a fucking prat!") his characters in a reality. At least The Boat That Rocked doesn't feel as grotesquely indulgent and preachy as Love Actually, for that reason: in that film, 9/11 was a quite sickeningly ghastly hook for a film about irritating couples falling in love.

The Boat That Rocked is about a motley crew of pirate DJs on a boat off the coast of England, and their madcap japes on board the ship as they defy the musical establishment. Playing the louche one, let's hear a drum roll please for..... Bill Nighy! Playing the glam idiot, heeeeeere's: RHYS IFANS! Philip Seymour Hoffmann plays The Token American with as much dignity as Laura Linney did in Love Actually - in a role that has none written into it.

There's an easy affability to the cast, who are easily up to the task of tossing off these Curtisisms in an off-hand way that makes the dialogue feel almost real; in fact, it is a bag of redundancies with a smattering of swearwords and cod-British self-puncturing. Nighy is coasting in the sort of role he could - and does - play in his sleep, and Branagh is the worst of the bunch in a shrill, hammy performance. The women in the film - inasmuch as they can exist in such a world - are, as usual, more intelligent, sexy and fun than the men, but nevertheless inexplicably attracted to these bumbling, buffoonish troglodytes from an era of dinner parties past. Kristin Scott Thomas, Gina McKee, Julia Roberts, Emma Thompson and Laura Linney have been here before; it's a thankless task.

There is incidental humour, of course: Curtis's multimillion pound empire rests on his ability to write slick, snappy dialogue. But of late his conversation has tended towards the facile: the shallow mixes with the deep, the swearwords with the sincerity, and the romantic pay-off is always hinted at early on. More and more, too, Curtis relies on a clown character - the Welsh one, the stupid one, the fat one. Say hello Nick Frost, in a performance that is an insult to the actor's ready wit.

The story, like the boat, goes nowhere - and Curtis, like his characters, is adrift.

Listening to: Camera Obscura, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi

Best of the Noughts. #3: Bjork

2009-03-20T17:52:00.002Z

It feels strange to list Bjork here - of the things that I'm listing, most are intrinsic to their time: Shameless arrived in 2004 and is a show of the 2000s; likewise the Iron & Wine album, and indeed the band, who hadn't released anything before 2000. But Bjork was making pop with The Sugarcubes as far back as 1986, and claims punk as a direct influence; later, she defined the 90s in her solo career by riding the tip-hop wave and playing with electronica, and with her boundary-pushing videos by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.

Yet what happened to Bjork in the 2000s is just as exciting, if not more so, than her brilliant 90s career. In 2000, the last thing she had done, as far as I'm aware, was her (fantastic) song 'Amphibian' on the soundtrack of Jonze's Being John Malkovich, back in 1999. Then Lars Von Trier cast her as Selma, the lead character in his astonishing, bold, nasty and harrowing Dancer In The Dark, and to all intents and purposes changed the type of music she had been making. It seems Von Trier and Bjork were at loggerheads the whole time - she denounced him as a bully during the Cannes festival (where she deservedly won Best Actress for her startling performance), and did not allow her music to have the film's title on it. Instead releasing it as a mere soundtrack, she brought it out as Selmasongs - i.e. offering new life to the character that Von Trier created and tortured. Received with a slight shrug by the press at the time, it's actually pretty ace - especially the riotous 'Cvalda' and the gorgeous, lilting 'I've Seen It All'.

But I think the film took its toll on her, and she felt defeated. Her next album, Vespertine, from 2001, is the quietest of her records - and perhaps her loveliest. She recruited an Icelandic choir to sing on it with her, but mostly has them perform a kind of hushed soundscape behind her. The intimacy of the recording suggests someone trying to achieve a kind of peace; the beautiful texture of the record, worked over and over digitally (opening song 'Hidden Place' is composed of so many sections of song, like a felt tapestry) gives it a real warmth and crackle. Her mad enunciation fairly sparkles with life, as she sings softer than ever. I think this is the apex of her singing: on 'Aurora' and 'Pagan Poetry' she really turns in a lovely vocal performance. The arrangements are so dainty, too: 'Unison' has the sweetest little sound effects, music box-like. It's an album full of serenity, contemplation, and hope.

Medulla, her next album, was a real shock: she went further with her approach, curbing the music back to nearly only vocals, featuring a choir and beat-boxing from Rahzel. There are also collaborations with Robert Wyatt and Mike Patton. It's a batshit-mental acappella pop album - but opulent, weird and fractured. 'Where Is The Line' and the brilliant 'Who Is It (Carry My Joy On The Left, Carry My Pain On The Right)' are actually showboating pop singles, but so difficult, so intense. She arranges her choir, and chops its sounds up, to create a kind of choppy orchestration with it - here there'll be a whoop; there a mad crescendo, and over it she sings the hell out of everything. For the second album in a row, she sings an e. e. cummings poem - beautifully. And there are so many more treasures - like the great, majestic 'Oceania', with which she opened the Olympics in Greece in an extraordinary performance.

By the time she released the fairly disappointing Volta in 2007, Bjork had managed to transform herself from a global star into a cult concern - a shape-shifting experimentalist. Yet she changed tack again, bringing out a loud, angry pop record. For my money, it lacks an ethos, which is where it falls short of her other work, but there's still so much great stuff here: 'Earth Intruders' rattles along at a fair pace, with a pagan squawk of a chorus, and 'Vertebrae by Vertebrae' is excellent, as is 'Wanderlust'. It's a choppy record, full of disjointed songs, and featuring Bjork back at her vocally barmiest - save on 'Dull Flame of Desire', a duet with Antony. What made the album was the succession of performances she gave: collaborating with artists like Toumani Diabate, she constantly reinvented the songs and showed what a wonderful musician and consummate performer she is.

Lastly, she released the song 'Náttúra' last year, as part of her fight to protect Iceland's environment - and it's a completely brilliant, vibrant, drum-tastic slice of berserk noise, again produced to perfection. It's essentially just a dance record - really fun.

I think she is a great artist of this decade - her restlessness, and her trajectory, and her ceaseless invention and curiosity mark her out as someone keeping pace with the internet/iPod age. Always aware of new music, she seeks out new experiences, new sounds, new collaborators with everything she does. I love her, and can't wait to see what she does next.

Some thoughts on music and employment

2009-03-19T13:28:00.002Z

My new job is rather depressing, for a variety of reasons - and pretty much foremost amongst these is the realisation it induced in me, that I am not listening to as much music as I would like to be, nor finding out about it. In previous jobs, or when unemployed, I think I was always able to surf the web a bit and read reviews, and to listen to music and podcasts and so on. When I get home - on the evenings that I do; there are people to see and things to do - I'm a bit exhausted to look up new music. And now with my computer being broken, it's even harder to download things to listen to. Thank the lord for Spotify and last.fm, I suppose - but they don't entirely assuage my rancour.

To listen to music, and to know about it, and follow it, you need to work at it. No wonder that parents stop tuning in when they have children, and remain pretty much forever in that lovable time-warp precisely where music stopped when their kids were dropped. No wonder that careerists, when pressed, say - "oh, I just listen to whatever's on the radio, really. What's their names? Razorlight. They're OK".

I feel like a working mother being told by Delia Smith how easy it is to make your own chutney and keep it in jars, and how you should always make a stock, and so on. It's easy for you to say, Delia: you're a fucking cook! You've got NOTHING else to do all day but preserve things and stew things, and pre-prepare things; the rest of us'll probably have pasta when we get home because we want to watch University Challenge in twenty minutes' time.

Likewise, I've been listening to my own (perfectly good) reserves of music lately, but getting a little depressed at this work/music problem.

Listening to: The Mountain Goats, Get Lonely

Wendy & Lucy

2009-03-18T17:34:00.002Z

I can't imagine the writing of Wendy & Lucy - the new film by Kelly Reichardt, starring Michelle Williams (if starring is the right word (which it isn't)). The film rests on a structure as light as a feather, and I can only wonder at the script arriving at Michelle Williams' agency with a note requesting that she play the part of the young woman who loses her dog.

Wendy: Lucy! Lucy!

(Pause)

Wendy: LUCY!

(She looks under a car. Nothing there)

Wendy: LUCY!

(Two children walk past and stare at her)

Wendy: Lucy, come here!

(Pause)

Michelle Williams: I must play this role. Quick, before that bitch Gyllenhaal bags it!

There's more to it than that of course - but really, there is an awful lot of footage of someone calling for their dog. The film is very beautiful, with a slightly grainy look and awash with pale colours; each shot is full of detail. In contrast to the morose urban landscape in the town Wendy washes up in with her dog (she is a vagrant on her way to Alaska, fleeing lord only knows what, and sleeping rough), the countryside around is bathed in a tranquil sort of glow - there is a beautiful shot of a red sunset over a barren landscape.

So: Williams' character - to all intents and purposes a middle-class runaway - ends up in this town, her car junked, and promptly loses her dog after being arrested for shoplifting dog food. After a while, she finds the dog. End of story. In the meantime, she encounters a couple of people - a garage owner, a security guard: threadbare characters, but not necessarily under-written. These are realistic glimpses of a modern town; of boredom, and frustration. But the main interest is in the intimacy of the camera as it follows Williams: her gawky body and her blank, interesting face; the way she registers emotions almost imperceptibly. It's a lovely, natural performance, full of nuance.

A funny thing has happened since I started writing this, though: I've started wondering if the film is all that good. I enjoyed it well enough at the time - but in trying to discover things to say about it, I'm finding it a little thin. Certainly the film could do with a touch more humour; some small inventions. Where it captures is in the convincingness of its scenes - in particular her confrontation with John Robinson's small-time store worker - but it is not a memorable film, and has nothing in particular to say. Not that all films should, I think: like a lovely melody, their beauty is self-sufficient. But whoomph and weight - or even zest - are what lend films their greatness, and Wendy & Lucy's slightness, and slowness, are its flaw as well as its asset.

Reading: George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Best of the Noughts. #2: Our Endless Numbered Days

2009-03-12T17:40:00.003Z

I've loved everything I've ever heard by Iron & Wine - so it may seem unfair that in considering the best things of the decade I don't list the band itself, and not just this album. The collaborative EP with Calexico, In The Reins, is really quite excellent, for instance, and their mere snippet of a song on the recent Dark Was The Night compilation is one and a half minutes of sheer, unmitigated beauty. But the thing is that I love Our Endless Numbered Days, in particular, so bloody much, and I'm certain Iron & Wine are going to carry on making great albums next decade. Sometimes, if a song from the album comes on the shuffle of my iPod, it makes me tingle from head to foot with delight. And if someone chances to come into a room where I am playing this record, and start talking to me, I have to turn off either the record or the person, for I am practically incapable of doing anything while this beautiful music is there - except stand stock still with my mouth open like a retarded guppy, and my eyes staring into the middle distance.

To get the ugly matter of what Sam Beam sounds like over and done with: he's very much like Bonnie 'Prince' Billy crossed with Gillian Welch. His voice is a soft murmur, a breezy suggestion of a whisper - but with real texture to it. The word 'lick' was invented for his guitar-playing - on songs such as 'Sunset Soon Forgotten', he carves out these great roiling notes on his instrument, forming a splendid backbone to the song. On 'Each Coming Night' - of which more later - he has a beautiful repeated pattern of descending chords plucked delicately, and then some metallic banjo slicing a melodic line into it for the middle section - and both mirror his sweet vocals.

What I love is the pattern of the record: roughly every other song is a sad, deathly ballad. The intersecting ones are sturdy blues - bold country-rock in the vein of the Band, perhaps. And what I love is the subject matter - many of these songs are quiet, resigned, subtle meditations on death. 'Naked As We Came' sees approaching death as a gentle return to innocence - a couple contemplate each other's death with serenity. The guitar, the harmonies, the light touch of the lyrics - everything contributes to make this lovely. 'Each Coming Night' is the other biggie about death - and one that I want played at my funeral, whenever I should kick the bucket. It's just so thick with its own melody, so self-sufficient and complete - with this beautiful production, as Sam Beam sings, "Will you say to me when I'm gone /'Your face is faded but lingers on/'Cos light strikes a deal with each coming night'". I love the suggestion of the lyrics here - the way he leaves you to work out what that deal is - the idea of the pattern recurring. I love death imagined as the end of physicality - it makes me feel hopeful and alive.

These are the highlights, but the album is full of excellent stuff - 'Sodom, South Georgia', and 'Love and Some Verses', especially: sweet harmonies between Beam and his sister; some really woozy pedal-steel; classic bluegrass finger-picking, and always these hazy, lazy vocals, so well suited to the album format, and even to headphones particularly: that whisper, the softness of these breathtaking songs, all delivered like a dream in your sleep.

Best of the Noughts. #1: Shameless

2009-03-08T14:55:00.003Z

I remember how excited I was when Shameless first came out. I'd been out of university for about six months, and was living in my first flat in London, with Emma. This was 2004. There were massive posters advertising it in the Underground, and lots of features in the newspapers, building up to its first episode. It seemed to be a gritty series, with a touch of Paul Abbott's customary humour, in the vein of Clocking Off, the previous (and fantastic) show he oversaw. Nothing could have prepared me, then, for the brilliance of Shameless: how focused yet sprawling, funny, touching, filthy, inventive and madcap it is. Sadly, the programme jumped the shark in its third or fourth season and is still on television - a pathetic ghost of the genius, demented masterpiece it once was.

For people who don't know: Shameless revolved around the Gallagher family in Manchester - a bunch of thieving, lying, squabbling young buggers who live with their drug-and-booze-addled, dirty, incompetent father, Frank (David Threlfall), and their dependable, sweet-natured, selfless older sister, Fiona (played by the unbelievable Anne-Marie Duff as a doe-eyed teenage scratbag crossed with St Francis of Assisi). This was a family to make Roseanne's bunch look like the Partridges. Fiona starts going out with posh boy Steve (James McAvoy, oozing charm), who soon turns out to be a car-thief. Oh, the romantic things Steve does for Fiona! He blackmails a policeman to stop harassing her, and burns her house down so she can claim insurance and get another! It's a wonderful love story. Meanwhile, the kids are all running wild - older brother Lip is permanently fucking around and, in a memorable scene, pisses on his father from the top window of their house; fifteen-year-old Ian is screwing his male, married, Muslim boss; and twelve-year-old Debbie steals someone's baby. They, and everyone else, are continually scamming each other and everyone else. Not to mention their sex-crazed neighbours, and hypochondriac Sheila, who embarks on an S&M relationship with Frank.

Oh god, it's so good! The set-up is ripe for shenanigans, but Paul Abbott and his writers actually kept it very tight, always having a firm command of their brashly endearing characters and their storylines. That they always sort themselves out of their scrapes by teaming up and helping each other out, but always by screwing over someone or other, makes the series oddly heartwarming. It had real heart to it: the unlikely love story between Steve and Fiona gave it true warmth, especially since Duff and McAvoy had such chemistry - they started going out together on set. And all the other actors are wonderful, too: especially Gerard Kearns as Ian and Maggie O'Neill as Sheila, in the scene where for the first time in her life, she goes to have a meal in a restaurant. Afraid of being seen eating - because she's so neurotic - she ties a napkin to her face using an elastic band, and eats mouthfuls behind the privacy of this curtain. The series was brilliant because it combined, for the first time, the kind of social-realism of the likes of Alan Bleasdale and Ken Loach with very fast-paced sitcom stylings: snappy camera-work, and a script that damn near boils over with zingers. It was like Spaced crossed with Life Is Sweet. For my money, the first two seasons of Shameless are as good as any other writing on television this decade, and were a really modern, enterprising venture reflecting the tail-end of Blairism. I hope it is still remembered fondly in years to come.

Entre Les Murs

2009-03-07T15:02:00.006Z

I'm writing this a bit late, as I went to see The Class (original French title: Entre les murs) with Kevin on Wednesday evening. Briefly: it's about a French teacher's dealings with an often unruly class, over the course of a year - with Francois Begaudeau, whose novel the film is based on, playing the teacher, a character based on himself. Anway, perhaps it's good that I've had a few days to think about it a little, though, and compose my thoughts. If I'd written about it on Wednesday just after seeing the film, my review would have probably consisted of a single line, like this:

THE CLASS!! ENTRE LES MURS!! LAURENT CANTET FTW!!! BIG LOVE!!! WOOHOOOOO!!!

Ahem. Not that time has much dulled my enthusiasm for the film - for its rigour, for its formal excellence, and its thought-provokingness. I can really only find about two faults with the whole thing: it is a technically near-perfect package, from the acting to the directing (unobtrusive, stark, with a range of close-ups and intimate shots tracking the balance of power between the teacher and his class, and marking out a difficult, ambiguous viewpoint for the spectator to agree with or rebel against), to the writing - or perhaps I should say 'devising'. The piece was clearly workshopped with all the cast, creating an atmosphere, a proper framework for them all to exist in.

What the film does very well is show the difficulties of the French schooling system: how punitive it is, and how it always has a distancing effect on its pupils - witness the French teacher who tutoies his pupils, yet expels a student for calling him 'tu' back. This is not a system which naturally promotes equality. Nevertheless, French education believes whole-heartedly in the democracy of schooling - in idealistic notions of education for all, and in clear rules, clear guidelines. This is evident in everything the film shows: the discipline council that is held for the unruly Souleymane after his temporary expulsion, to decide whether or not to expel him permanently, features a lengthy debate and then a vote - with a shot tracking each ballot as the box is passed around the table. Or the grammar lessons: the laws of grammar, of written French, are meant to be for all - a democratising value to be cherished.

Yet the film shows brilliantly that this quest for democracy comes at the expense of the personal: the teachers cannot take Souleymane's personal history into account when voting to expel him, and therefore condemn him to probable repatriation to Mali. It is a tragic outcome - and one that shows the educational system's inability to deal with individual cases.

What the film does well, also - 0r perhaps especially - is show how language is always political. Not for nothing does the film focus on a French class: it is about the ways that different people use words; how words can harm, misinform, be interpreted in different ways. The essential dynamic of the film is one of conflict between the teacher and his pupils - they oppose his beautifully elegant French with the language of the streets, the straightforwardness of youth. In turn - and this is a great subtlety in the film - he fights them back with near-deadly irony, handing out real verbal lashings, always drawing them in and distancing them at once; opposing to their brutal intelligence his own subtle humour, his superior education. The film makes clear that the pupils understand on a level they cannot explain this condescension - in fact, 'condescension' is one of a number of words he has to clarify to the pupils during the course of a lesson. Again: a really delicate touch.

The tragedy of the film is that the teacher wants to find out more about his pupils, but they have their dignity and their own lives, quite separate from his classroom - and would want, as is normal, to know more about him, in return, before confiding in him. In this context, Souleymane's homophobic barb to his teacher, asking him if it's true he's gay, may be seen as a demand simply for more, personal information; or Esmeralda's retort that no-one uses the imperfect subjunctive in conversation - . do you use it?, she asks him. She is teasing, but her tease takes the form of a request for personal information. But he is part of a system that will not allow him to create a proper rapport with them. He is still an engaging, charming, often wonderful teacher - but there is a cruelty to him, and to his dealings with the pupils, born of the system's inequalities. He will always win any fight, in the end, because he has political leverage. Also, because he need never be himself; he plays a character - the role of the teacher. The children are judged on their actual selves.

Another brilliant thing the film does is put up a clever smokescreen: the charm of the central character, his resourcefulness, wit and empathy, make us root for him. Besides this, there is the usual format of a struggling teacher, hoping to get through to those darn kids - we've all seen that a million times. But this film is not those films: it makes you think it is, and it makes you think you're rooting for him, and then halfway through it breaks your heart by making you wonder if you should be rooting for him; if that makes any sense; if he can even get through to them - and can they get through to him? Will the children's voice be heard, at any point?, is the question you start asking yourself. It's as if you were suddenly gunning for the kids in Sister Act 2, hoping that they teach Whoopi Goldberg and the nuns a lesson - about their lives, and their world.

Best of the Noughts: Introduction

2009-03-04T16:13:00.004Z

With apologies to my much-esteemed colleagues over at the wonderful Pajiba.com, who are starting to run items on the best films, shows and albums of the decade (or at least a census on the site), I have decided I'm going to start writing about some of my favourite things of the decade. I know: where the hell did the time go? I'm pretty certain that just yesterday it was 2000, and then 9/11 happened, and here we are in 2009, staring 2010 smack in the nose and all of a sudden I'll be thirty years old before I know it. It makes me want to cry, a little bit. Still - at least I don't have any children. That I know of. Anyway, I'd better get started soon, because here are some of the things I'm probably going to talk about, and there are only so many weeks in the year:

Rufus Wainwright
Arrested Development
Fishscale, by Ghostface Killah
Bjork
Magritte at the Galerie du Jeu de Paume
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
Time (The Revelator), by Gillian Welch
La stanza del figlio, by Nanni Moretti
Michael Haneke
The Office
A Grand Don't Come For Free, by The Streets
Kanye West
Rois et reine, by Arnaud Desplechin
Mysterious Skin, by Gregg Araki
Pedro Almodovar
Are You A Dreamer, by Denison Witmer
White Blood Cells, by The White Stripes
Joanna Newsom
Six Feet Under
Picasso Sculpteur, at Centre Pompidou
Funeral, by Arcade Fire
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut
Etre et Avoir, by Nicolas Philibert
Curb Your Enthusiasm
La meglio gioventu, by Marco Tullio Giordana
Extraordinary Machine, by Fiona Apple
Gus Van Sant
Caravaggio at the National Gallery
10, by Abbas Kiarostami
Alice Munro
The Wire
Dizzee Rascal
Paul Thomas Anderson
I Am A Bird Now, by Antony & the Johnsons
In The Mood For Love, by Wong Kar-Wai
Le fil, by Camille
Charlie Kaufman
Heartbreaker, by Ryan Adams
Louise Bourgeois at Centre Pompidou
Waltz With Bashir, by Ari Folman
Jens Lekman
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Words and Sounds Vol. 1, by Jill Scott
Todd Haynes
Shortbus, by John Cameron Mitchell
Let's Get Out Of This Country, by Camera Obscura

This is all off the top of my head. I'm sure there'll be more people (perhaps actors) and things I want to talk about - but heck, just listing those few items, I'm starting to think it's been a pretty good decade. Also, I want to talk about singles, but I'm not sure how, really. But purely in terms of pop, I can't not mention: Outkast's Hey Ya!; Gnarls Barkley's Crazy; Britney Spears' Toxic; Rihanna's Umbrella; Peter, Bjorn & John's Young Folks, Kelis' Milkshake, or Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On.

Anyway - starting soon.

Jade Goody

2009-03-02T15:22:00.002Z

A word of warning, first: Jade Goody is not dead, yet. As most people who live in Britain already know, she has been diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer, and now has a couple of months left to live. This week, she was admitted to hospital for surgery. So this may seem a morbid entry - and it may seem a tasteless one. People are generally considered untouchable in the latter stages of their life, and rightly so: it's a time for reflecting with dignity on what a person meant to his or her loved ones, and perhaps for considering the nature of humanity somewhat.

Except that 'Jade Goody' does not have a private life. 'Jade Goody', the character invented live on reality television, belongs to the public and has no meaning without an audience at large. 'Jade Goody' - often just known as 'Jade' - for those who don't know about her, was created on the programme Big Brother in 2oo2. From the start, the character was widely derided as an absurdly stupid construct - one whose less than elementary general knowledge, screechy voice and lack of dignity made her almost a caricature. In particular, the character became famous for being the first person to fellate someone live on television in England. Coupled with her naked cavorting and pig-like appearance, 'Jade Goody' was set on the path to notoriety that would ensure Britain had its very own Truman Show for the next six and a half years.

From then on, 'Jade Goody' made a very comfortable living - somewhere between 2 and 8 million pounds earned in 4 years or so, according to different reports - by 'being herself'. The character was given an exciting backstory involving a horrific mother, and soon added a boyfriend on to her ever-growing saga. From the boyfriend came 'children' - real people brought in to supplement the story of 'Jade Goody'; they would be much mentioned in her 'celebrity columns' and various ghostwritten articles. The character produced a weight-loss video and a perfume, snapped up by millions of women who could not get enough of this 'Jade Goody'. All the while, this life in the public eye coasted along on - well, nothing. Weight loss, weight gain, thoughts on people's weight loss or weight gain in print, appearances on chat shows to talk about weight loss, weight gain, or a recent stint on a reality TV show playing 'herself', and her 'relationship' with the other characters therein: these formed the career of 'Jade Goody'.

Since then, 'Jade Goody' has appeared twice on Big Brother - once on the celebrity version (with her 'mother' and 'boyfriend Jack Tweedy', who appeared as themselves on the show) in early 2007, when the 'Jade' character fell out of favour with the public, who deemed the orchestrated fights and racism on the show offensive; and once on the Indian equivalent, for a rumoured £100,000, roughly a year later, to atone for her orchestrated fights and racism in said prior programme. On the Indian Big Brother, 'Jade Goody' was told of her cancer diagnosis live on television two days into her appearance on the show - and though footage of the tragic moment was not broadcast on the Indian network, it is available to see most anywhere else. The story had got even more exciting.

Now cancer-havingly rehabilitated with the British public, 'Jade Goody' sold the stories of her distress and fears about the future, plus wedding photographs and exclusive story rights to publications such as The Sun, Now! and OK Magazine - reportedly, in a sweet twist to the story, so as to ensure the well-being of her children, who will inherit her millions upon her death. The character is said to want to die in private.

What can be said of the life of 'Jade Goody'? She was the first entirely useless, vacuous, time-wasting celebrity of the quick-fix celebrity era - and now she will be the first of that era to die, and obituaries will have to say something. What can they list in lieu of a roll-call of achievements? What does her notoriety say about her? Will this awful event be some kind of clarion-call to gossip-mongers and shallow celeb freaks? We all own 'Jade Goody': she was created for us, and did not exist before us and won't exist after. And yet: this character has at last a humanity - in death, there, glimmering faintly, is some sort of human quality, an essence of the rights, thoughts and morals that make us human beings, and not merely characters to be picked over and used.

Elizabeth Taylor

2009-02-27T17:36:00.002Z

So, I've been reading Elizabeth Taylor's novel Angel, and a selection of her short stories, in a collection called Dangerous Calm. I'm not sure if all her books are still in print - these two volumes are old green-backed Virago editions - and certainly she isn't a fashionable writer anymore. I suppose her problem is that there's nothing flashy about her writing - even in the short stories, where a writer might be tempted into stylistic exercises, she builds up her characters with lovely, subtle brush-strokes, putting them through recognisable situations. The writer she reminds me of most in her short stories, Katharine Mansfield, is still famous for the style of the stories - the choppy, broken writing; the way a shock steals up on you in her stories. In Elizabeth Taylor, what happens is not surprising because it is human, it is plausible. There is no bitterness in her; not that she doesn't have a very ironic style, close to Jane Austen. What I mean is that she is generous, and not garish enough perhaps for current tastes.

I still have some short stories left, but I've finished the novel, and Angel has been so magnificent all the way through. Angel, the main character, is such a monster - pretentious, angry, stupid, oblivious, unkind - and yet is drawn with so much affection and flair. Taylor's omniscient narration does a wonderful job of parsing out all the difficulties of her relationships with people - how she slights people, and bemuses and horrifies and exasperates them. There are so many delicious scenes: I liked Angel wafting her dog's farts away with peacock feathers from a vase, when a young and terrified reporter comes to interview her; and I also loved Theo and Esme hiding in the stairwell and sharing a cigarette, cringing with embarrassment while Angel, upstairs, publicly unveils Esme's portrait of her. These scenes show Taylor's wonderful eye for detail, and her kindness to her characters; never mocking - but wry.

In the short stories, what's so great is seeing how Taylor's talents don't just correspond to the tyrannical character of that novel: she is equally adept at capturing other people's voices, and at slowing down time within the situations she depicts, to show the complexities of human interaction. I love 'The Blush', and 'Summer Schools', for the compassion of their look at these sad, middle-aged women. 'Summer Schools' is laced with all sorts of bittersweet detail, though, and is deftly humorous too in getting behind the mindset of the two main women - the kind sadness of one and the mean sadness of the other; she so brilliantly contrasts their storylines and brings them together for a sad, unresolved finale. It plays so well off Katherine Mansfield's 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', too: when Ursula imagines becoming a horrible old eccentric woman, she is conjuring up memories of that generation. Taylor probably knows that the inter-war generation weren't destined to such grandeur in their old age as the pre-war generation - not even, for the sad old ladies, the life of a mad old bat; just quietness, and more of the same.

I also loved 'Perhaps A Family Failing', 'Spry Old Character' and 'Oasis of Gaiety'. In the latter two, she so brilliantly veers off on a tangent, following a character you hadn't expected and taking her eye off what she had been building up. In so doing, she takes you away from the impressions you had been making for yourself, and dashes your preconceptions. So, so good.

I think I'm going to take the rest of the short stories very slowly, n0w, and maybe try finding a copy of Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont somewhere.

Listening to: Beirut, March of the Zapotec/Holland

In Praise of Kate Winslet

2009-02-26T10:58:00.003Z

Winslet gets a lot of stick, and I think it's because she's a bit of a luvvie and sort of posh; and people get a bit tired of her whole proud-Mother-with-full-figure shtick. Her Golden Globes speech didn't help, and now she's won an Oscar it's time for a real backlash, I suppose.

When I first saw Kate Winslet in Sense & Sensibility, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This girl who was only a few years older than me was so funny, so note-perfect, and held her own with all these other great actors - crucially understanding as well as anyone Emma Thompson's adaptation of the Austen book: the fast delivery, the wryness of it, and beneath all those crisp lines, the romance. It seemed like she'd come from nowhere.

I partly liked Winslet, growing up in France, because she was the way I imagined all English girls to be - confident, self-aware, bright, funny. In Jude, which I saw on the Champs Elysees on my birthday, her best moment comes when Sue consents to have sex with Jude for the first time. They're not married, and her character is taking a bold decision to live with him out of wedlock: she takes off her clothes and lies on the bed, and he looks at her - and then she says, "Oh! I'm doing this all wrong!" It's such a good line, and she delivers it with the best timing and delivery in the world. In contrast to Marianne in S&S, Sue is very self-possessed; she is a modern woman, and she is the equal of any man, with no romanticism, no silliness. It's a fantastic performance.

I think I loved her for getting naked so much, too. Even in Titanic for god's sake! People have stopped taking their clothes off in films, which is a shame. It's so nice seeing nudity in films - something that gives you a good shake, something beautiful. What could be lovelier?

I love her for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which, again, she's so fierce and strong. As far as I can tell, she's never played a pussy, which is refreshing. Oh hang on - perhaps that awful thing with Judith Law and Jack Black. I haven't seen it. I like her for playing confused people; American people; sexual people; dark people - in Little Children and Revolutionary Road, for instance. For a married person, she's not exactly taken a romantic view of marriage in the films she's made. I want to say a word about actors: they don't get to make their own films; they don't originate anything; they're pawns. So you can only judge them on their choices - on what they pick for themselves as their trajectory. Kate Winslet's first ever film concerns a teenage lesbian murderer (and she's brilliant in it: the only other debut performance that's so bold and immediate that I can think of is Emily Watson in Breaking The Waves), and her choices since then have always been odd, and different. Look how how she managed her career after Titanic: Holy Smoke and Hideous Kinky! Di Caprio made The Man In The Iron Mask and The Beach.

I love her for this exchange, recorded in Emma Thompson's S&S diary:

Kate Winslet: Oh! My pants have gone up my arse.
Alan Rickman: Feminine mystique strikes again.

It's Not Me, It's You

2009-02-25T23:03:00.000Z

My review of Lily Allen's new album is up now, with the good folks of Pajiba.

Travellin' On For Jesus

2009-02-24T17:40:00.001Z

My article on music and religion is up on Pajiba.

Listening to: M. Ward, Hold Time

Stephen Foster

2009-02-24T15:49:00.004Z

I've been listening to some Kate & Anna McGarrigle recently. I mean, I always listen to them absolutely loads; they're wonderful and I adore them. But what I've been thinking about is their devotion to old songs. When you see Rufus Wainwright perform 'Macushla' in concert as a present to his mother, it's very moving to think of him being brought up in a household that listened to the old John McCormack version. Likewise when you hear Martha sing 'Dis quand reviendras-tu?'. This is the meaning of folk music: passing on music of older generations, to inspire others.

In this vein, the McGarrigles' tireless devotion to the songs of Stephen Foster is a great thing. On their excellent The McGarrigle Hour, they play songs of their own composition, some traditional, and one by Stephen Foster: 'Gentle Annie'. And on the brilliant Songs of the Civil War they play three by the great man: 'Better Times Are Coming', 'Was My Brother In The Battle?', and the unbelievable 'Hard Times Come Again No More'.

I find it incredible that so many of Foster's songs from the 1850s have become national American heritage - I mean, he wrote 'Oh Susanna' and 'Camptown Races' ("Oh the Camptown ladies sing this song - doo dah, doo dah"), for Christ's sake! And I think the McGarrigles are doing a great service of patrimony to their country and to folk music by playing his songs and passing them on.

Notes on the Romcom

2009-02-23T23:45:00.005Z

Laura was surprised on Friday to hear that I don't consider When Harry Met Sally an excellent film. Well, I don't. I think it's a perfectly decent film, with a couple of funny moments in it, but otherwise I'm not especially fond of it, and find it technically wanting in terms of its artistic merit. It looks like a television film to me, for starters - and I find the characterisation a little flimsy; it lacks soul, I think, and guts.

What it boils down to mostly of course, as Laura pointed out, is that I don't like Romantic Comedies - the genre of which WHMS is generally considered the modern apotheosis. And yes, I abhor the romantic comedy, with its sentimental shortcuts, false obstacles to true love, and perfectly unsatisfying happily-ever-after cop-out. Which isn't to say that I don't like some films that are romantic - merely, that the romcom genre such as it has evolved since the 80s is insufferable to me. And I think that films we now count as romantic comedies - The Apartment, perhaps, or The Philadelphia Story, or Annie Hall - really aren't, at all. When they were made, I'm sure they were just considered films; there was no sense of the romcom being a genre at all.

The Guardian published an article in this weekend's edition, on ways that female characters are debased and patronised, and generally made to appear like hopeless love-chasers for whom a career, a sense of humour, friends and independence can never be suitable substitutes for the true love of a man. I think romantic comedies, for the most part, feature a really disheartening take on hetero-normative monogamy. When you don't care if people get together at the end of a romcom, and sincerely doubt that they'll stay together - or that, in the event they do stay together, that's a good outcome - then what's to enjoy about these films?

Annie Hall, which I love, is often called the grandfather of romantic comedies - and certainly I find it romantic, and funny. But let's not forget that the conclusion is not a happy one and that a great deal of it is very dark and concerned with the unbridgeable gaps between men and women. In The Apartment, I can find only scant evidence that Shirley Maclaine's character fancies Jack Lemmon's at all - and at the end when she runs back to him (a wonderful scene that always makes me cry a bit), there is little to point to a happy future for these two lost souls. In The Philadelphia Story, Tracy Lord's marriage to C.K. Dexter Haven has already failed once before - and the sharpness of their interaction gives gender politics and the institution of marriage a real kick in the teeth.

Contrast this with the sappy montage of people in WHMS who have been in a couple together for however many years - and this at a time when divorce was on a steady rise in America. It just doesn't ring true to me, and I don't care about that ending, and I don't find it romantic. I like films where the characters are drawn with believability, and where romance such as it exists is a by-product of some other situation. So here are my favourites:

The Philadelphia Story: divorcees Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant trade wits in a scathing battle of the sexes. Most romantic moment: Cary Grant lectures KH on how she'll never be a decent human being "until you learn to have some regard for human frailty", and then gives her a model of the boat they once sailed on together, called the True Love.

Bringing Up Baby: Hepburn and Grant, again. Most romantic moment: having ruined David's career and impending marriage, Susan turns up at his museum to declare her love for him, saying "all that happened, happened because I was trying to keep you near me and I just did the first thing that came into my head". She then destroys the dinosaur skeleton he's been working on for years.

Juno: two teenagers who probably won't stay together for much longer after the end of the film discover their love for each other during an accidental pregnancy. Most romantic moment: Michael Cera's Paulie Bleeker holds Juno, in hospital, while she cries about giving up her newborn baby.

Annie Hall: two people have a relationship and split up. Most romantic moment: Diane Keaton threatens Woody Allen with a lobster.

Shortbus: a group of New Yorkers have sex with each other and iron out their sexual issues. Most romantic moment: one of the Jamies has a trauma about penetrative sex linked to his past as a rentboy. A man who had been stalking him saves his life, has sex with him, and then hooks him back up with his boyfriend whom he'd left. They all go to a sex club together. The End.

Before Sunset: two people who met for a day, ten years before, spend a day together. Most romantic moment: Julie Delpy rants about the emptiness of her life while Ethan Hawke talks about how marriage has ruined his. She extends a hand to touch him but he turns towards her and she withdraws it imperceptibly.

The Apartment: Shirley Maclaine tries to commit suicide after being dumped by a married man, and sort of falls for Jack Lemmon's kindly office schmoe. Most romantic moment: Lemmon sieves spaghetti with a tennis racquet to cheer her up.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: two characters who grow to hate each other so much that they have all their memories of each other erased from their mind, grow to love one another again. Most romantic moment: Jim Carrey's character starts trying to hide his memories of Clementine inside his childhood, to cling on to what he knows of her - and fails.

Cold Was The Ground

2009-02-23T07:43:00.003Z

I've been listening to the really quite incomparable charity compilation Dark Was The Night, curated by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National for 4AD Records, in support of AIDS foundation Red Hot.

It's almost as if it was designed to please me, Caspar, specifically. Title alluding to Blind Willie Johnson? Yes please. Covers of Nick Drake, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone? Thanks. Appearances by Beirut, Andrew Bird, Iron & Wine, Antony Hegarty and Bon Iver? Oh, you lovely bastards. Collaborations between Ben Gibbard and Feist; Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch; Dirty Projectors and David Byrne? For fuck's sake, you're killing me here! It just feels too good to be true. You might as well just send a big cake made of sex and music to my house and have the Beatles, Bessie Smith and Beethoven jump out of it while covering 'A Change Is Gonna Come'.

The highlight on it so far for me, and the song I can't stop listening to, is 'Knotty Pine' by Dirty Projectors. It's got a driving acoustic guitar strum, and some great plinky piano, and is actually a really simple song - but it sounds just so fresh and modern and lively. I like the enthusiasm of the singing.

Next beauty: a wonderful, bluesy acoustic cover of Vashti Bunyan's 'Train Song' (for crying out loud; this album shouts 'Love me, Caspar!' so hard, it's embarrassing) by Feist and Ben Gibbard; it sounds hazy and a bit sexual, in their rendition. Then: a lovely song by Bon Iver. Then: an even more beautiful song by The National, ripe with a jingle-jangle rhythm and some sweet violins and whirring noises in the chorus. Oh christ, it's so good!

OK, so I can't dwell on each track. But Antony singing 'I Was Young When I Left Home' with Bryce Dessner is wonderful, and Iron & Wine's contribution is stupidly lovely and brief, like a snatched kiss.

The second CD can't compete with all that gloriousness, and the tension does drop a little therefore in the second act. But that one has nothing to be ashamed of, featuring as it does a punchy number by Arcade Fire, a song by Beirut that is as pretty as you'd expect, and Conor Oberst recruiting Gillian Welch for a gorgeous bluegrass retread of 'Lua'. Hooray! Plus a cover of Shuggie Otis! And something nice by Andrew Bird! And the New Pornographers! Just - just... just shut up, now. That's enough.

Anyway, it's so joyous and fantastic, and I'm having a lovely time with it, and urge anyone else who might read this to listen to it, and buy it, and tell people about it, and then listen to it again and tell some more people about it, and then start telling the same people about it, to the point that they ask you to be quiet, now, please.

Reading: Milan Kundera, L'art du roman

Ain't That The Way

2009-02-19T15:59:00.003Z

Devon Sproule has a new song up on her Myspace page, called 'Ain't That The Way'. I wasn't sure about it for the first couple of listens - it's a different sound to the simple, jazzy finger-picking of her two previous albums. It's got a noticeable beat, is more produced and heck, it then goes all electric on your ass during the bridge. But I'm coming round to it in a big way - I especially love the blissed-out coda with the glockenspiel and doo-wop kind of chorusing. It's also got a clever little yodel in it, and generally I'm just becoming a big fan of its lazy sort of groove.

Hey Ho!

2009-02-18T23:16:00.003Z

I started thinking about 'If Love Were All' today, especially after seeing Jack for a drink this evening and talking about Rufus Wainwright with him a little bit. Since buying Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall, that song has become one of my favourites, and for a variety of reasons that mostly pertain to the album as a whole.

None of the songs on the album are quite as exquisitely beautiful, though. 'If Love Were All' is a triumph of songwriting, where the simple melody and the devastating, understated lyrics work seamlessly with each other. The rhyme scheme is brilliantly simple yet elaborate, with lines rhyming absolutely miles away from each other in the song: the scheme makes you wait for further rhymes, and then delivers - but stops just short, at the end, of providing relief. "Hey ho! If love were all!", is the last line: yet we're hanging in suspense, knowing that the previous and indeed logical conclusion of the line is "...I would be lonely". And what is extraordinary is how the song masquerades as a bravura number, wiping away its tears with a 'hey ho!' and a conditional tense: love, it implies, almost certainly is all - and the singer knows it, but is putting on a tremendously brave face. It's heartbreaking.

What is more heartbreaking is Rufus Wainwright's performance of it, which kicks the living daylight out of Judy Garland's version: for him to sing, "I believe the more you love a man/ The more you place your trust/ The more you're bound to lose", is not just brave, modern and not much else heard of in pop music, but it restores a heart and a sexuality to the jaded old music-hall number, and reboots the queerness of it. It was written by Noel Coward. When Judy Garland sang it, it must have stirred a sense of recognition in her gay admirers, since it is a song about impossible love, and about carrying on with your head held high amidst continual and ongoing defeat. When Rufus sings it, it is more vivid, and more moving for his having endured the same sorts of things and written about it himself in his own keening way (I get the sense that 'Foolish Love' is about falling in love with a straight man, as is 'Harvester of Hearts', with its line 'If a person should ever love a person').

And this is what helps: Rufus Wainwright writes. Being a man restores all sorts of meaning to these Judy Garland standards, like 'The Man Who Got Away'; but having someone with experience, musical education, and verbal fluency perform these songs as living, breathing, written songs and not just old standards makes his renditions unique and essential.

Enjoy:

Die Tote Stadt

2009-02-18T15:44:00.005Z

You've got to pity poor Bruges, at the moment. First Martin McDonagh's brilliant film In Bruges treated us to an almost apocalyptic vision of a dying, drab city last year, and now comes a monumental revival of Die Tote Stadt ('the Dead City') at the Royal Opera, in which Bruges signifies claustrophobic desuetude.

Kate had a spare ticket for yesterday's performance, and very kindly asked me along with her. The last time I had been to the opera was with her brother Sam, over ten years ago, to see Angela Gheorgiu in Carmen at Paris Bastille. So I can't pretend to be any sort of connoisseur - but back then it was spectacular and here again I felt the same extraordinary power of the music and story. Not that the two works have anything in common, of course: where Carmen is all fiery ardour, Die Tote Stadt is a strange, twisted tale with a score that alternates between full-blown lyricism and sharp, crisp modernism - particularly in the dialogue. It was very exciting to see the disturbing mise en scene of the show, replete with uncanny mirror-images and strange visions of moving houses and choirs of nuns, and in the third act a very haunting children's choir heard/seen through a gauze even as the murderous story reaches its apex. Kate observed quite rightly that the distancing effect of the background action was used very interestingly - so that tonal shifts and variations in volume and sight unsettled you, and made you engage with the action in the foreground; it became a pyschological piece.

Musically, it's also pretty unbelievable - very full-blown at times, giving a sense of a love that can be reborn, but always featuring sharp notes and odd touches in the score that are a bit off-putting, and never give you a sense of peace. The third act really kicks some shit up, with massive orchestral sweeps, and a flurry of harp, timpani, woodwind-y things and glockenspiel. Very powerful singing from Nadja Michael as Marie/Marietta, and Torsten Kerl as Paul: bold and athletic performances. Some of the duets are just exquisitely beautiful.

Anyway, my thoughts are that I must go to the Opera more, given how much I've loved it every single time I've been. Of course, there will be some duff performances, and the cost is a fucking disgrace, but I was just thrilled with the soaring, near-overpowering quality of it.

This is the only good performance of 'Mariettas Lied' I could find on Youtube, in which man and woman sing it together (it's apparently often performed as a solo aria):

Reading: Elizabeth Taylor, Dangerous Calm: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor

Thoughts on Arrested Development

2009-02-16T13:21:00.004Z

I watched Arrested Development with some of my Good Ones yesterday, and as always after watching it, I want to go out and sing rhyming songs about how good it is, to people who for some reason might not already know. It's so good that I want to pause it after each joke (or succession of jokes: in the time it takes to pause, you'd probably miss about six or seven, so thick and fast does the funny keep coming) and stand up and clap. Laughing isn't enough, anymore: some sort of comment must be made. It's the only show I can think of where I routinely gasp and say out loud, "That is incredible". For so many jokes, I also am touched, honoured and astounded that they've bothered to put so much in: why have they worked so hard to make it so good for mere idiots like me to watch, when I'd be perfectly ecstatic with their second or third best effort?

I think part of what is phenomenal about it is that it's the most delightful show to re-watch: because the first time you watch and you're laughing your head off at something, you miss a joke or nine that you pick up on the next time. And you pick up on references to past and to forthcoming episodes, that they've also sneaked in there. For example in an episode yesterday when Charlize Theron is sitting on a bench that says "Wee Britain", she is sitting in such a way that she obliterates the 'IT' portion, so that the bench spells 'wee brain' (such an elaborate, brilliant visual joke) - a reference to the upcoming discovery that her character is mentally retarded. And when Gob mentions that he always goes for the girl who comes third in the beauty pageants, look out for who actually comes third in the beauty contest, and wait seven episodes to see who it is. It's just incredible. The foreshadowing alone places it head and shoulders above all other programmes.

Then there's the variety of comedy styles - it is constantly so cleverly meta that it starts to hurt your mind; it does slapstick, silliness, absurdity and smut better than anything else; it is more dangerous than any other programme (drugging, molesting, dealings with Saddam Hussein are just some of the things we saw in one episode yesterday); it is self-referential and refers to other programmes, genres and arts. What it also does so magnificently well is build up a joke until it's so bursting with comedy that you don't know what to do with yourself. Witness the chicken dance - it would be funny enough if only one person got it wrong, but AD has to find a way for nearly all the characters to do some variant on it, and for one character to be dressed up as a chicken. Or the joke when Buster escapes having a building fall on him: the audacious physical comedy of it, and the erudite reference to Buster Keaton, would be plenty funny without the character being called Buster in the first place. Or George Michael being unable to catch: we're treated to three instances of it in flashback, and then two in very quick succession so that you can't breathe with laughter, and then Tobias does one. Or the 'hey brother' joke. Or the 'her?' joke, or the 'come on!' meme. It's always flirting with overkill in this way, adding layer after layer of hilarity.

A quick note about the actors: all of them, from Tony Hale to Alia Shawkat, can do absolutely anything - any register, any line: timing, delivery, physicality, chemistry, believability. ANYTHING.

So. How can anything ever be so good again? Answer: it can't. We must all, every day of our lives, thank whoever let this wonderful programme air on actual television during our lifetime.

Here is a collection of the chicken dances - sadly set to music for copyright purposes.

Listening to: Devon Sproule, Upstate Songs

Stevland Judkins

2009-02-13T14:11:00.006Z

Did you see Stevie Wonder performing with the Jonas Brothers at the weekend? Phew. I managed to write that opening sentence without crying. How is a person supposed to react upon seeing his heroes slump so badly? It was bad enough for me when he re-released Signed, Sealed, Delivered as a duet with Blue - but this is another act of near-betrayal. How can he do this, just after being so hugely exalted by Obama: him, the elder statesman of soul? Yet I love the man so wholeheartedly and feel he needs defending right now. He is in danger of tarnishing his legacy.

Here goes: Stevie Wonder's run of flawless albums from Music Of My Mind to Songs In The Key of Life may be without equal in music. Hang on, you're going to say: what about Bob Dylan and The Beatles and The Smiths etc: yadda yadda yadda. But consider that by the time Stevie Wonder really started getting into his stride as a musician with this sequence of albums, he already had such songs as "My Cherie Amour", "Signed Sealed Delivered", "Uptight", "I Was Made To Love Her" and "For Once In My Life" behind him. And then - AND THEN! - aged 22 (aged 22!) he set about recording the extraordinary, other-worldly, visionary albums that confirmed his genius and made his name, producing such singles as "You Haven't Done Nothing", "I Wish", "Sir Duke", "Living For The City", "He's Misstra Know-It-All", "As" and "Superstition" - to name a few. It's quite incredible.

Anyone producing all those singles would be rightly feted. Yet so many other songs on his albums often blow my tiny mind away: "Please Don't Go", from Fulfillingness' First Finale, for instance, is a beautiful doo-wop love song with delicate piano, keyboards, nervy drumming and the most passionate singing believable - and then it shifts a key and starts building into gospel. Then he picks up his harmonica and improvises on the theme of the song - an astonishing bridge. Then he starts growling: you'd thought the singing couldn't get better - you're an idiot, because it just has. Then the gospel singers start getting louder, and you think you're going to go to heaven. It all closes out over a jazzy sort of work-out of harmonica, choirs, hand-claps and clippy drumming. I'll just emphasise one second again, here, that he wrote the song, sang it incredibly well, and plays all the keyboards, drums and harmonica himself, and is blind. All in a day's work.

On Innervisions - an album so perfect it makes my knees hurt - how about "Visions" with its plaintive guitar, the mid-tempo other-worldly Moog, and his astonishing lyrics about the visions in his mind; or the wonderful samba-inflected "Don't You Worry 'bout A Thing" with its bluesy piano, brilliant drumming, heavenly singing and hilarious intro in mock-Spanish? Or, on Songs In The Key of Life, the simply beautiful love song "Joy Inside My Tears", with its bold arrangement, or "Knocks Me Off My Feet", with its spiralling crescendo of vocals? I could name so many songs - all perfectly attuned to their specific album, forming a continuous, coherent sequence; all arranged beautifully and performed so well; and all with truly forward-looking music on the Arp and Moog synths which Stevie used to interpret the vision of music inside his teeming mind. Again, I can't emphasise enough how different it is to hear a black musician working away from the strictures of soul music: this music is soul, of course, but it moves so far beyond the call-and-response, Stax-Motown sound, and sounds like nothing else. Also: name a black singer these days who plays an instrument.

So: we've got albums; singles; album tracks. Let's factor in Stevie Wonder's extraordinary legacy - continually sampled and referenced in black music, he is probably the most influential musician around. Many people take their cue from Bob Dylan and the Smiths, of course, but Stevie is there in rap, R'n'B, pop, from the Fugees to Erykah Badu and Kanye West. His political legacy: he near single-handedly campaigned for Martin Luther King Day in the States.

I think a problem with him for modern audiences may be that he is not easily listened to: the sodding Supremes are easily digestible and have pretty hooks, but Stevie's songs are longer, more complicated. (And a further point, in relation to the Supremes: Stevie emancipated himself from Motown, like Marvin Gaye, in that he succeeded in getting them to let him produce his own, personal albums and take the reins of his career; the Supremes only ever were Motown puppets)

OK, so he's lost it now. But let's have a look at these videos, and see just how full of life, how daring, how thrilling he was. Ask yourself: can you think of any of your heroes who perform with that passion, with that ardour? And that technical skill?

Here he is singing For Once In My Life and If You Really Love Me. It's most worth looking at for the first of these. Incredible.

This is him setting fire to the 1975 Grammys and making everyone else look foolish, with his Nixon-killer "You Haven't Done Nothin'". Jonas Brothers my arse.

This is "Living For The City", which can never improve on his extroardinary album version. But still. HECK.

Here's him having another pop at Nixon on the beautiful "He's Misstra Know-It-All". I like it when he forgets the lyrics:

Skipping Towards Gomorrah

2009-02-12T10:42:00.002Z

For my birthday, Laura quite brilliantly gave me a book by our hero, Dan Savage: Skipping Towards Gomorrah is his riposte to Robert Bork's book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, which argues that the western world's current decline (questionable) is due to such ghastly things as the rise of liberalism.

I've just finished it and it's a very entertaining read. Despite being a little selective in his arguments, Savage argues his case well. Essentially, he goes about the business of indulging in all seven of the supposed deadly sins, in the process demonstrating how they are alive and well in the United States of today. In most cases, the conclusions he derives are that these purported sins are no such thing: for his chapter on Lust, for instance, he visits a couple of swingers called David and Bridget, and sees at first hand the healthy, liberal ways they go about their lives and bring up their children: merely, they have a particular sexual foible they indulge at the weekends. 'Pride' gives him an opportunity to shadow a gay couple as they embark on the eponymous gay march - and in the process he provides a potted history of homosexuality's embattled circumstances in the States, showing how important Gay Pride is as an act of affirmation.

I'm consistently delighted to see with what reason, with what openness Dan Savage treats life - and it saddens me greatly to think of the illiberal, angry bigots who condemn outright a life that they know nothing about. America's greatness, as Savage shows, is built on its understanding, on its compassion, on the notion of everyone's equality: an acceptance of other people and their lifestyles, which is what liberalism boils down to, is precisely not what is flushing the country - and the rest of the world in accordance - down the drain. Rather, it is the stifling attitudes of the right wing, imposing strenuous values on people (monogamy, heterosexuality, chastity, abstinence, etc), which create a climate of hatred.

I think Savage is still at his best in his wonderful sex and relationships advice column and podcast, since his gifts are empathy, decisiveness and an ability to think on his feet - in a sense, the greatest example of liberalism and its positive sides is the endearing relationship with his broad-minded, interesting readership. In Skipping, a little of his charm and waspiness is diluted in the process of constructing his case. Nevertheless, there is real heart and real spirit at work here, and my love and admiration for the man continue to know no bounds.

Listening to: Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars

Reading Michael Donaghy

2009-02-11T13:46:00.003Z

For a while now, I've been loving Michael Donaghy's poems, which Isaac so kindly gave me for a present this Christmas. What is so special about him is the delicacy and precision of his language; each word is so particular and useful, in meaning and in its sound and rhythm - there is something that sounds effortlessly smooth in his writing, like a clear, glistening pebble on the beach. And yet the work that has gone into these poems is obviously great: think of the work of millions of years that went into washing that pebble into its roundness. Finally, his poems thrive on their clarity and apparent transparency, because they often deal in nostalgia - and that effort to recover, to conjure memories (the collection I'm reading has the beautiful title of Conjure) benefits from this contemporary clear-sightedness, attempting to unfog the past. This is a poem from the collection, which I am reprinting in its entirety. (The book has been out of print for a while now, and Donaghy is dead; nevertheless if anyone owning the rights to this tremendous poem should somehow read this, I will gladly take it down.)

Our Life Stories

What did they call that ball in Citizen Kane?
That crystal blizzardball forecasting his past?
Surely I know the name. Your mum's souvenir
of Blackpool, underwater, in winter -
say we dropped it. What would we say we broke?
And see what it says when you turn it over...

I dreamt the little Christmas dome I owned
slipped my soapy fingers and exploded.
Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mother
twitching on the lino like dying guppies.
Let's shake this up and change the weather.

Catch! This marvellous drop, like its own tear,
has leaked for years. The tiny Ferris wheel has surfaced
in an oval bubble where it never snows
and little by little all is forgotten. Shhh!
Let's hold the sad toy storms in which we're held,
let's hold them gingerly above the bed,
bubbles gulping contentedly, as we rock them to sleep,
flurries aswim by our gentle skill,
their names on the tips of our tongues.

Listening to: Various Artists, Timeless: A Tribute To Hank Williams
Reading: Elizabeth Taylor, Angel

Attenborough on Darwin

2009-02-10T15:36:00.004Z

It's the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth - and, perhaps more crucially, the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species - and a few people are taking some time to appraise the great man's legacy.

I say a few people because, as the Guardian article I linked to above makes clear, a startlingly small amount of people give a shit about Darwin, and more to the point a sizable proportion of people reject his findings, in the face of overwhelming evidence. It's in this shameful context that celebrations of Darwin's life now take place, such as David Attenborough's beautiful, delicate film about him - still viewable on iPlayer at time of writing. Attenborough is clearly aware of the need not just to exalt Darwin, but to defend him, almost - and to explain just how right, prescient and important his discoveries were.

It's a wondrous piece of television because in digging out old footage of Attenborough's wildlife documentaries to support his arguments in favour of Darwin, it shows a remarkable and inspirational life, lived under the auspices of Darwin. What is wonderful is that Attenborough understands the value of kindness and simplicity: to watch him chuckling at this or that animal and its perfectly adapted physiology, and to hear his admirably plain account of the origins of life on Earth, is to see that the argument against religion and creationism need not be inflammatory. Everything he said rammed home the foolhardiness of the religion myth, yet it was all delivered without rancour. I'm no Attenborough though, and am still raging that religious fuckheads continue to neglect the beautiful, glorious discoveries of Science.

My favourite bit was when Attenborough breezily showed us the kinship between, say, elephants and seacows: it is undeniable that these cousins adapted to their environment in different ways, having derived from the same species, and it is truly wonderful to see the fantastical ways in which Darwin divined these things so many years before the discovery of DNA backed him up.

One last point: Attenborough's film punctured a liberal religious claim, that science takes the marvel out of our world. Where is the mystery in it, anymore?, they cry. Well, what msteries still exist, and they are many, are still there to be explained - and the process of understanding them, of feeling the hunger and passion to grasp them, is a sort of marvel in itself, far greater than any obscurantist delight in wilful close-mindedness.

Listening to: Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Matapedia

The Past is Your Future. Seize It.

2009-02-05T14:16:00.004Z

What's curious about the case of Benjamin Button is that for a person miraculously gifted with a body that ages backwards, he is entirely - and I mean entirely - devoid of character. I'd imagine that being born old and aging backwards, you'd be a pretty exciting sort of fellow: physically hampered from birth, but with intellectual curiosity, destined for a life of increasing youth along with experience; shunned by many as a monster. You'd probably be borderline psychotic, and always more hungry, building your character on improvement, and sexuality learnt and at once regained. My mistake. What you get is a near-silent, ceaselessly dull ghost-person. And what's curious about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I saw yesterday, is that it is so extraordinarily long and portentous, and never says anything interesting. How can such a tedious, shallow, stupid film have been made out of such a potentially intriguing premise? How can this insipid, preening, self-satisfied mess have been so feted by all and sundry?

The film is an odd amalgam of - and watch out, because I'm going to name three terrible films here - Meet Joe Black, Forrest Gump, and Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (or Amelie, to give it its international, and less mind-chewingly shit, title). Pitt himself was the main, characterless character in Meet Joe Black, and here he reprises his role as the doe-eyed, slurry-speeched, sweetly vapid naïf. It's a totally uninteresting persona, and one that makes you wonder why anyone would be drawn to such a being - I mean, in MJB, I suppose at least he looked young and desirable or whatever; but in Benjamin Button he spends most of the film looking like an elderly foetus. No matter: a dazzling array of odd and fantastical characters flocks to Button like moths to a flame.

Forrest Gump is, similarly, a cipher: through his stupidity, the film-makers turn him into a blank canvas that stuff - randomly, hilariously - just happens to. Likewise in Benjamin Button (also written by Gump hack Eric Roth), the character lives through interesting ages - there for WW2, James Dean-ishly riding a motorbike in the 50s, peacing out in a fuckpad with his girlf to a 60s music montage - but has no impact. What the stupid, boring character has to tell us about our era, lord only knows. Things occur, the character lives, characters die, more little things happen, the end. The lesson of the film seems to be 'live your life' or 'seize that moment' or 'time moves on, yeah?' These banal little findings are cloaked in self-important dialogue, and layer after layer of sheer budget, so that at times you're nearly fooled into thinking that the film is about something, that it is saying something, that anything of any interest is going on. To finish comparisons with Forrest Gump, finally, at no point do you give two figs for the on-off love story with the childhood sweetheart. How could you? These aren't people; they're a collection of weak traits bundled into a human-like shell.

Lastly, Amelie. The film borrows its lazy sepia hues to suggest a time of magic; an enchanting alternative world; a charming yesteryear. That sort of shit. I'm sick to the back teeth of these babyish substitutes for proper stories, where quirk and magic are considered acceptable alternatives to real situations, real feeling. If you're going to tell a story about some ninny girl who changes people's lives for the better, or a kooky young-old fella, then make the effort to have this invention say something; something that normality and reality can't do. Otherwise there can be no justification in employing these crap fairylike shortcuts, besides pandering to idiots' love of magic. Benjamin Button uses the same little tricks and effects - idiosyncratic secondary characters; corny voice-over; magic; a bullet-point backstory - that Amelie does, in an effort to inject charm into a story that has zero human interest, and no depth of sentiment. This isn't charm: it's smarm.

Listening to: Stevie Wonder, Talking Book

Drug Songs

2009-02-04T19:24:00.003Z

Here is my piece on my top ten drug songs, at Pajiba.

Listening to: Various Artists, Gospel Greats: Volume 1

Of Climate and National Moods

2009-02-04T01:15:00.007Z

Note: Kevin asked me to write this rant up for a zine he's going to produce, about Snow Day in London.

Walking through Crouch End in the snow, hands rammed deep in pockets, shoulders hunched, head down, it occurred to me – as it always does when British weather conspires to make a walking ghost of one – that national characteristics are always a symptom of weather.

In a country so regularly beaten by rain, or merely piss-whipped by mizzle, or buffeted by gales, or swamped with fogs and mists, you can often walk down a whole street without seeing the face of any of the passers-by; so intent are you all on beating the chill breeze by baring the top of your head towards it. These climes induce a character in you, which becomes ingrained: look at your feet, child; don’t speak until you’re spoken to; why are you staring like that; stop smiling.

I notice it also in Spring, when people suddenly start seeming more attractive: it’s not that they are more attractive, it’s that you’re suddenly seeing their faces, after two long seasons of staring at mulch; sludge; puddles. All these months of waddling past people, head down, eyes down, shoulders down – and suddenly the sun comes out and sunflower-like people stretch their faces and limbs to Helios.

Trudging in the snow – measuring my step for fear of slipping on ice; being ever careful, guarded – I think of the first British tourists; those lucky Victorians who set off for Italy, not knowing yet that there are warm lands where people do not have a hunch in their arsenal of mannerisms. Those Victorians: unprepared for the frank Greek fuck-stare that greeted them on arrival; eyes up and darting, there, constantly – ever ready for a sex-look, and for sex which, it so happens, is also feasible outdoors in warmer countries.

Snow begets distrust; sun stirs lust.

Listening to: Meg Baird, Dear Companion
Reading: Dan Savage, Skipping To Gomorrah

Di Caprio, Di Caprio, Wherefore Art Thou Di Caprio?

2009-02-02T01:30:00.005Z

Revolutionary Road: yeah, good film. Mostly because Winslet is on sto-o-o-o-ONking form in it - but also there is a crispness to it that is very refreshing; something clinical and quite fierce. I've been enjoying the reviews of it recently, that essentially say, "Yeah, but why should we care what happens to these characters?", as if for characters to be plausible or for a story to be involving, or for art to succeed, one should want to have the main character for a best friend. Daniel Plainview & Caspar 4 eva LOLZ!!!

Bunch of morons.

There are ostensibly no reasons to care for these characters, particularly. At their worst, they are self-involved, hostile, bitter and deluded - yet the film succeeds where the book does, in showing the undoing of ideals, and the way society bends individuals to its own ends. Which isn't to say that these aren't believable characters (Di Caprio's Frank Wheeler apart - of which more in a minute); on the contrary, they are vivid and teeming with detail. And I think you do root for them. Winslet's April in particular - though flinty, domineering, manipulative and difficult - is a creature of infinite hope, always crushed. More than The Hours, Revolutionary Road shows the constant misery of womanhood in the 50s, with all its ghastly set-pieces - sexuality, motherhood, house-keeping - and the way they contrive to subjugate women at every turn. That April resists all of this with all her might makes her a noble, brave character. I can't say how perfect Winslet is, especially when the story really gets going. It's the one film where she most completely lets go of her charm, and ease of mannerism, to portray someone constantly hemmed in, always simmering, always trapped. Her achievement is that she succeeds in conveying it silently, in her two best scenes - one at the seaside, one during drinks with the Givingses.

Di Caprio is the film's real, lethal weakness. He doesn't have the mettle, the manliness or even the charm to play the role; his character is only ever slick, pitiful or enraging. His body language is all wrong, too, I think: he is an ever-moving mass of flailing limbs and raging faces, whereas I think in the book the Wheelers face their tragedies in similar ways, with a grim, brittle demeanour. He doesn't look like an adult, either, which is very confusing - yet not a young man; he is stuck in a sort of baby-faced no man's land. I thought he was very miscast and comprehensively out-acted.

Cinematography could have been more bold at times; script occasionally heavy-handed (scrambled eggs as metaphor, anyone?); supporting performances very good, especially Kathryn Hahn as Milly Campbell, who was absolute perfection.

Listening to: Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers
Reading: Michael Donaghy, Conjure

The (fucking) Wire

2009-01-29T13:17:00.004Z

OK, so I've been watching a fair bit of The Wire recently. As a Guardian reader and a white person, I'm bothered by conforming to the stereotype so much, but really it is rather good. What excites me about it, I suppose, is how slow and boring it is. At points, I despair of cinema and TV for the profusion of images, allusions and quips that pile up at a frenetic rate in order to keep everyone's attention. The Wire does exactly the opposite, slowing things down to a level just a little faster than 'contemplative'; it hooks you by being true and honest. It - alongside films like There Will Be Blood, and books like The Rest Is Noise - gives me hope that steady, long things can still be appreciated.

Listening to: Grant McLennan, Horsebreaker Star

The Rest Is Noise

2009-01-29T00:36:00.003Z

I'm still loving The Rest Is Noise, by the unfeasibly knowledgeable Alex Ross, but I find it very difficult to understand. Ross knows more about 20th Century classical music than anyone else in the world, clearly - but I have such a paltry understanding of music that I get lost when he talks about a glissando minuet, or about a terce chord in fifth major, or whatever it is that he's saying. When I think and write about music, I suppose I think about the bog-standard melody, whereas he understands not only the piece of music as a whole, but the elementary details which compose it, and the ways it relates to other sorts of music that he incomprehensibly knows fuck-loads about. It's an absorbing read, and one that brings me hope that I may grow to love classical music in time.

Listening to: Amadou & Mariam, Welcome To Mali
Watching: The Wire, Season 1

Antony and the Johnsons

2009-01-29T00:34:00.002Z

Here's my review of The Crying Light on Pajiba.

I love you, Jim Carrey

2009-01-28T11:51:00.004Z

I'm strangely excited about the talk from the Sundance Film Festival about I Love You Philip Morris, which is a comedy about a con artist played by Jim Carrey (I know, I know) falling in love with Ewan McGregor (I know) in prison. It sounds like it would be terrible of course, but from the reviews of it in Variety and on Salon.com, it actually sounds very intriguing - a comedy where the gayness is an integral, unquestioned part of the story and which in Andrew O'Hehir's words "strives to be so trashy and hot". As O'Hehir does in Salon, the Variety review acknowledges the "sexual bluntness of Carrey and McGregor's on-screen romance", and seems to predict that audiences will be gobsmacked by the film.

Having seen Gus Van Sant's Milk (that sounds all wrong) on Monday, I'm thinking about ways in which homosexuality can be, or just plain is, presented to mainstream audiences. Van Sant tones down the sexuality in his film, which is also what I feel Brokeback Mountain did, its one tasteful sex scene notwithstanding. Where the short story dealt with the sexual passion between these two men, the film recast it more as a plain old love story. Likewise, Harvey Milk can't be shown as a fully sexual character and is played as a sort of fey saint by Sean Penn; though his sexual attraction to the two boyfriends on show is made clear, it is conspicuously downplayed. Which isn't to say that all homosexual films have to deal in fuck scenes - and certainly a mainstream audience won't be rushing to see Shortbus on DVD, more's the pity - but the difference in sex and in attitudes has to be translated into some sort of aesthetic subversion on screen of normal cinematic tropes. New Queer did this well, but then again was always going to be too insular. With regard to Milk and Brokeback Mountain, I'm also saddened that so much has to be made of all the actors' heterosexuality in order to exalt their brilliance at 'playing gay': it rams home the (I think false) notion that audiences won't watch gay actors, and certainly not gay actors playing gay.

This is where Milk does hit home, to a degree: the scenes where Milk talks about normal people having to come out surely must be taken as warning words to Hollywood, which remains so obviously closeted. And it feels wrong to preach to other people - I know how hard it is to make that statement - but actors must be encouraged to come out. More than that, studios must be lobbied to let them come out. But the one industry dealing in performance, dealing in art, with such huge reach, must be brought to its senses. Imagine the positive power that a gay actor of the stature of Clooney (for instance) could exert.

So: Philip Morris. Starring, again, two straight actors. It won't change the world - but the reports of a gay comedy with words like 'rawness', 'bluntness' and 'sweetness' sound quite encouraging, for now.

Listening to: Silver Jews, Bright Flight
Reading: Michael Donaghy, Dances Learned Last Night (Poems 1975-1995)

Rogered and out.

2009-01-28T03:11:00.008Z

Seeing Federer annihilate Juan Martin del Potro in the Australian Open today was both an experience of utter magnificence and beauty and a chastening horror show. Even as I saw and thrilled to the grace and swiftness of Federer - the way he moves through air that is different to the ugly sort that you and I breathe; his dancing footwork; the magic he operates on the physics of the tennis ball, plying it to his will, bending it here and there - my heart was breaking for his poor, miserable opponent.

Del Potro, who is ranked 9th in the world, won only 14 points from the two final sets - finally losing the match 6-3, 6-0, 6-0. I could lose by that sort of score. It was wretched. It was woeful. It reminded me of being in maths tests at school, and not understanding a single thing - knowing, just knowing that I'd end up getting 3/20 - and wanting the ground to swallow me up whole. Or for time to speed up. Something, anything to get out of the classroom and go and have a cry somewhere. Del Potro got kicked in the nuts over and over and over. In public. On TV. For his job. And then he had to give interviews on the subject of just how good Federer's nut-kicking is. My heart went out to the poor, silly human. In the meantime, here's hoping that Federer goes on to win the tournament. He still has two matches to win, and the possibility of mortals dragging him down to their level for a sad, sad win is still quite real. Fingers crossed.

Here's David Foster Wallace's great article about the great man.

Listening to: Aretha Franklin, Live At Fillmore West