The Artist, another artist & Good Bait

It’s not that often I go to the cinema.  Blame that on a string of disappointments (film critics? – huh!) and other people (the shared experience?) as far back as the late ’70s; that and after feeling ennobled by the first one, coming out of the second Lord of the rings film feeling like I’d been beaten up.  But such was the buzz around Michael Hazanavicius’s The artist (2011) that I was tempted back for an afternoon screening and I was knocked out.  As any fule kno by now – though they were still warning everyone who bought a ticket at the tills – it’s a silent movie.  Set in late ’20s Hollywood, during the time of the changing of the guard with the introduction of talkies, it’s lovely stuff.  No clichéd dialogue for a start, and lots of neat visual gags in the background to supplement the basic good-natured hommage to the history of storytelling cinema.  Beautifully paced and played, with good old-fashioned male and female (I’m in love) leads, it’s an intellectually and emotionally satisfying cinematic experience, a joy in fact.  Go see if you’re at all tempted.

Interestingly enough, mid-way through The artist there is a dream – well, for the silent movie heart-throb awakening to the reality of the brave new talkie world – nightmare sequence when the music stops and all you get are silence and disproportionately loud domestic sound effects.  It’s a disorientation that takes us down the conceptual road to the new show at Milton Keynes Gallery. Artist Daria Martin‘s ‘survey exhibition’ consists of four short 16mm films, projected on screens in the dark.  I’ll quote from the exhibition guide notes:

These films combine elements of painting, sculpture, performance, dance and music [...] Martin’s work often raises questions about what it means to be ‘touched’ by cinema and alternates playfully between luring the viewer through rich sensuous images and pushing them back into an awareness of artifice.  This intentionally crafted ‘push and pull’ draws attention to the essential contradictions of the medium of film.

Maybe.  I wouldn’t vouch for it but I am being drawn into ‘getting’ – for want of a better term – video art (for want of a better term).  The artspiel in the guide goes on (as it invariably does), but I was riveted by Harpstrings and lava (2007); it was like walking into a surrealist painting – de Chirico maybe, or Max Ernst – with a formal harpist playing music I couldn’t quite place and wasn’t quite atonal and I was indeed strangely enchanted.  In Soft materials (2004) “two performers trained in body awareness and acutely sensitive to the nuances of movement” approach specially prepared robots ” as if they were sentient beings.”  Looked like a very odd fluttering dance routine to me, but it fascinated.  The newest film, the title piece, Sensorium tests (2012), revolving around the notion of ‘mirror touch synaesthesia‘, will probably be more interesting if I revisit it, which I probably will.

I always look forward to a new John Harvey novel.  I think he’s the best writer of the British crime big three (no surprises: take a bow Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson) showing an economy and subtle matt polish that owes, I guess, to his being a poet, too.  He can usually be relied upon to juggle parallel narratives skillfully, drawing you along at a pace, but I have to admit to a certain disappointment with Good bait (Heinemann, 2012).  On the police procedural level it works just fine, these mean streets and the Harvey compassion are in evidence as ever, but there is an artistically deliberate (I suspect) indeterminacy about the link between the two narrative strands – an East European crime boss who hardly actually appears – that doesn’t really gel into a satisfying crime novel; I think the point is that life’s like that, but then, so what?

There are two police operations in progress, two main protagonists. The first, in London, is Karen, a youngish black woman detective on the Met murder team working in the sharply drawn capital (with a side trip up the M1), while the second is Trevor, a career sidelined good Samaritan ‘tec in Cornwall who graduates to white knight status, spending time in rural France, via London and an ex-footballer private eye mate in Tufnell Park. I’m not sure Karen and Trevor ever actually meet, though they’d probably make a nice couple.

I will still look out for his next book, but apart from what I’ve already said, there are three problems, really.  The first relates to John Harvey, the second to Brit crime in general, while the third applies specifically to Good bait. Plus it must be said there is a big musical bonus.

• The Resnick problem. I hate to have to say this, and I understand why he had to go, but I miss him and his food stained ties. The people at the centre of subsequent books, even Frank Elder, all blur for me. A couple from Good bait may even have appeared earlier in the oeuvre …
• The rise of the East European organised crime gangs has become a blight, a dead hand, on crime fiction, a bit like child abuse was a decade or two back. I know, I know, it’s a real problem, but these days my lids start to droop at the first hint of people smuggling.
• In Good bait there is a climax to the French episode which brings together the resolution of a sexual tension narrative strand and the couple in hiding being found by the representatives of those they are hiding from, which culminates in Trevor getting knocked unconscious by intruders at the moment of … you guessed it. A big bang indeed. Is JH actually putting himself forward as a candidate for the Bad Sex Award? Sorry, disappointing.
• What was not disappointing was the steer to some music (link below). The title of Good bait comes from a jazz standard, an old Count Basie tune that’s been much recorded over the years. Trevor hears it or plays it at various points in his odyssey. It’s one of those jazz tunes – not a song – that is just out there and I couldn’t hum it for you even now. There are plenty of interesting takes on it to be found on Spotify, and I liked the long Dexter Gordon treatment. But the Nina Simone recording is magnificent.  As JH warns, it starts quietly and slowly, so give it time to build and just prepare to be stunned.  Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNtEUtdUA3Y

Damn.  I thought that should have embedded but seemingly not.  Oh well, the link’s there.  Enjoy.

The hare with amber eyes

I did my duty by this one.  Edmund de Waal‘s prizewinning The hare with amber eyes: a hidden inheritance (Chatto, 2010) was a book group book, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.  It’s all a bit rich and precious for me.  Should I be annoyed that Ed thinks I should know from the off what netsuke are?  Well I was.  They’re intricate Japanese miniatures carved in mainly ivory or hardwood.  I’ll grant they are fascinating objects, these stylish representations of living things, people included, and can fully understand what he means about touch, feeling them – de Waal is a potter – how they could get to you.  Netsuke were originally decorative toggles with a practical purpose (not that that purpose was described in the book); they got more and more intricate in the hands of their craftsmen, and in the japonisme craze of nineteenth century Europe they became collectible objets d’art.  Are we given any help in how to pronounce the word?  No.  Majority opinion on the web would appear to be netskay or netski, so for a long time I was reading it ‘wrong’.  Other words he pissed me off by expecting me to know without explanation are: bibelots, vitrine, fiacre, redingote, feuilleton.  Am I being unreasonable here?

No, sorry.  This book brought out the class warrior in me.  Talk about lifestyles of the rich and famous.  The netsuke collection is an heirloom and Edmund de Waal is now the custodian.  He is so attached to them (not unreasonable) that he wants to know and see the family places they rested in on their journey to him.  So … a century and a half, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, South London.  The family history actually starts in Odessa; the Ephrussi dynasty grows from a business cornering the corn market in the Ukraine to a super-rich banking empire on a continental scale.  Charles, who is one of the inspirations for Proust‘s Swann as per Swann’s Way, buys a job lot of Japanese stuff in beau monde Paris.  De Waal does an awful lot of research in obscure cultural journals of the day, but in commenting on the clan’s marital mores can only offer, “I only know about Parisian marriages from the novels of Nancy Mitford …”

When Charles tires of the netsuke in his well hung cultural salon and the Impressionists are making their mark (he’s a patron), he gives ‘em as a wedding gift to one of the Vienna branch of the family.  In Vienna the netsuke reside in young wife Emmy’s changing room: “She spent a great deal of time in it.  She changed three times a day – sometimes more.“  Another beau monde, buddies of – it’s that man again – Maria Rainer Rilke, among others.  (Rilke must be one of the most cited, though pretty much unread, poets of the early twentieth century, and I fully intend to read him one of the days).

Things go awry for the family with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and they don’t have a good war; the fortune pretty much disappears and Edward’s parents-to-be end up in Tunbridge Wells.  I’m not being facetious here; apart from the obvious, I was shocked at the specifics and individual rapaciousness of nazi art and wealth appropriation – my ignorance, hadn’t really given it too much thought.  But here’s the thing.  The netsuke are saved for the family by the brave subterfuge of Anna, the heroine of the tale – make no mistake – because without her actions this book could never have happened.  Anna was a long-serving Aryan but loyal servant in the Vienna household who stayed in the house after the family had fled.  While de Waal has spent weeks researching the minutiae of the beau monde:

I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her.  I never thought to ask, when I could have asked.  She was, simply, Anna.

But then hardly anyone but the super-rich or subsequently famous are deemed worthy of a mention thus far anyway.  The 264 strong collection of netsuke end up with a gay uncle in Japan who did actually have to work for a living – another story, with a certain amount of gloss – and now with the author in South London.

I can see how this narrative enchanted so many, but I cringed at stuff like “The lack of tactility makes me panic” and similar  self-dramatisation.

I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

How about mid-life crisis? -  I say, unkindly, no doubt.  “There are things I cannot know,” he says early on, but he imagines a fair amount, puts thoughts in people’s heads.  “Somehow I imagine …”; “I suppose Charles might go in a carriage, I worry, but I can’t time that.”  And he even criticises some of Charles’s writing on art: “His prose becomes a little much here, a little breathless …”  Surely not!

A few things I owe, though.  I am surprised and disappointed to hear that Cezanne, Renoir and Degas are all on the side of the baddies when it comes to the Dreyfus Affair, and absent themselves from the salons of the jewish houses; anti-semitic Impressionists sound so wrong.  I learnt a fair bit about  aspects of European social history I’d previously taken for granted.  And after this exposure, I shan’t be bothering with Proust; a long-held guilt of omission assuaged there, so thanks.

And thanks of a different kind to Danni Antagonist and Fay Roberts, our charming hosts at Poetry Kapow! (“Kapow!) on Friday night at Wolverton’s Madcap venue.  Given the theme was Into the enchanted wood maybe I should say, our enchanting hosts.  A fine night’s wide ranging poetic entertainment and a good natured and lively atmosphere.  Storming performance again from Ian Freemantle with Jessica spectacularly clogging, but plenty of other good stuff, not least the slightly quirky songs of Nicky & Naomi, which get better with each hearing.  And people continue to characterise Milton Keynes as a cultural desert.  Bring on the Stony Bardic trials!

Mat Coward is a comic genius of the written word

Let’s get the ethics of this post out the way.  Mat Coward is an old friend and comrade from way back when, even though I still think of him as a young man.  So I didn’t pay for You can jump; and other stories – I got a review e-copy for free – and anyway I couldn’t have borrowed it from a library, because the actual paper and card object you can drop in the bath edition isn’t out yet (though it is imminent).  Not that that would have made the slightest difference to what I’m going to write next.

 

Is this not one of the great opening sentences of all time?  Resistance is futile:

My grandfather, for instance, created an entire religion based on chips.

That’s from Persons reported, the second story in You can jump: and other stories (Alia Mondo, 2012), Mat’s new anthology of quirky crime short stories.  His grandfather is – in passing – an ‘anti-Faith healer.’  There are crimes – mostly murders or attempts therat – at the heart of each tale, and the denouement is never obvious (well, not to me , anyway).  But it’s the tone that really scores – conversational, confiding, drenched in a wry, relaxed wit – that and the observation.  And the one-liners.  That “for instance” above, for instance, is crucial.  We are never told what it’s an instance of; we’ve just been privileged to drop in on the never dull mind of Mat Coward.  It’s beautifully done.

The opening tale,  If all is dark, starts with something almost (seemingly) tangential that happened at school

“Yes,” I said.  “I did write a poem.  About depression.  Though, in mitigation, I should say I’ve never written one before or since.  A teenage aberration.”

and skips to a flirtatious job hunting interview (“I do insist on Luncheon Vouchers“) , which leads to an odd love triangle involving japes with a philosopher who favours deadpan downer sloganed t-shirts and badges.

Once, we all dressed up in dark suits and went from door to door in a respectable suburb, telling whoever opened the door that we brought good news about the Bible.  The good news was “It’s all a pack of lies, so you can do anything you want to do.”  The only snag with that one was that most people shut their doors so quickly that they missed the punch line.

Trust me, I’ve barely scratched the surface.  The story concludes years later with revelations at the funeral of one of said triangle and is a fine example of the basic Coward signature move:

Over the years, I’ve only rarely written what you might call “straight” short stories [...] but there is something about historical fiction which sometimes seems to inhibit my usual practice of “twisting” my stories (or at least filling them full of jokes).

There are 12 stories here, two of them historical.  What he say above holds for one of them.   And what can they show, or what reasons give? takes place on the eve of the big Peasants Revolt demo and is played relatively straight.  The Wodehousian Hope of the world is a country house mystery straight out of Michael Palin’s Ripping yarns, reflecting 1920s establishment paranoia of communism, complete with some wonderful twist and turns; indeed, if the Monty Python boys ever contemplated a return to the movies, here with The Bolshevist League of Urgency is a ready-made plot for them.  The politics of both these stories make for a wonderful springboard of socialist (but never hectoring) wit.

The other 10 stories draw on the last 30 years or so, often in the same piece.  Two of the stories are barmen’s tales, where the dialogue is delicious and the comic timing straight out of classic radio shows; when reading So where’ve you buried the missus then, Paddy  I would warn you especially against operating heavy machinery at the same time. In Jizz we get introduced to the concept of ‘special birding‘ – you see, you’re intrigued, I can tell.  Reason to believe lets loose some delicious banter doubling as the interrogation of the astrologer suspect.  There’s not a dud among ‘em and you get the bonus of Mat commenting on their  genesis afterwards.  You can jump, the title story, is as serious as it gets, reflecting its author’s thoughts on what the social movement that was punk meant, or should have meant, to the foot soldiers, how its empowering philosophy is still valid today.  That and melancholy too.

The only thing that disappointed about You can jump; and other stories is that not much was new to me.  I’d read most of the stories before.  All of them have appeared before in mainstream crime anthologies edited by major players in the genre like Martin Edwards, so don’t let the fact that this book comes out via a small publisher put you off; rather it’s a reflection of the moribund state of British publishing.  You can purchase the e-book in any format (including .pdf) for a measly $3.99 from the Smashwords site; the paperback will be available soon.

And while we’re at it, Mat’s novel of the near future, Acts of destruction (Alia Mondo Press, 2009) is full of ideas and more of the same.  It’s a crime novel – a gentle police procedural even – set 20 years hence in a London where society is adapting to the non-apocalyptic failure of capitalism and the climate change chickens having come home to roost.  It’ll make you think, remind you there are alternatives to the way we live.  You can read its first two chapters here.  Every library system should have at least one.  Not that they will have, so reserve it so they do.

I should mention January’s Scribal Gathering before its memory recedes, given I’ve mentioned all the others – and another goodie it was too. Danni Antagonist gave us some of her words, Naomi Rose sang some of her songs, both to good effect.  We also had another fine set from Ian Freemantle, the official Bard of Stony Stratford, now approaching the end of his year’s election, but I won’t mention Steve Hobbs & his human Powerpoint demonstration.  And I was dead chuffed to win a much-prized Scribal Gathering mug in the post-it note poetry competition by rhyming Gaddafi and library with Rastafari and tsunami.  

Reviewing the situation

Now here's a look into futures past. It's a car they might just have seen in the streets of Berlin in the second book discussed here. It's a 1938 Tatra, on display at the annual New Year's Day vintage and classic car event in Stony Stratford's Market Square.

End of year clearance

The autumn of the Egyptian Geese

In August we spotted what we first thought were a couple of obscure ducks.  It was at the weir close to Wolverton Mill, betwixt Stony Stratford and Wolverton, on one of our regular walks along the Ouse .  First sighting was actually the male seeing off the heron that had initially caught our eye, but they were obviously not your common or garden Anglo water bird.  Our books didn’t help; we were baffled, even with the rich brown of those eyes and the colours at the rear.  Next time we went back there were goslings.  Eight at first,we were later told, seven when we first saw them, and down to six the last time, but you have to say … result!

It became a regular jaunt for me, checking on the family’s progress, an important part of my autumn, and occasionally one met others who were doing the same.  It was from one such couple I learned that they were Egyptian geese, almost certainly strays from a collection of decorative exotics.  Under the protective eyes of their parents the goslings prospered and grew, even going native, picking up on the feeding habits of the local ducks and swans and readily showing an interest in potential bread benefactors.

At a certain stage I noticed the male had difficulty walking and though the next time I saw him he seemed a bit steadier on his legs, that was the last time I saw him.  Did he become a victim or – one asks with an element of wishful thinking – do the males just leave the mums to it at this stage in the breeding cycle?  It saddened me.  But the goslings continued to grow.  They even started coming up onto the river bank, by which time they were almost the same size as their mum; it was only the lack of marking around the eyes that gave them away.

I was surprised by the intensity I found in the relationship.  And then they were gone, migrating (presumably) to where?  I do hope they’ll be back next year.

And here’s a thing or two I’ve meant to mention
the past few months but somehow never quite got round to them. 

I love this photo, found on the web, and I’d like to be able to credit it (if indeed, there aren’t any objections to its being here).  It’s Jackie Leven, sitting somewhere entirely appropriate.  I still feel hollow at the thought that I’m not going to be able to see him sing and talk and play again, a unique experience.  A true troubadour, he was special in many ways, not least in his championing poetry, his confidence that enough of us would get it.   We’re fortunate that there is so much music out there to keep returning to.  Today I am floored by his setting of Robert Frost‘s Stopped by woods on a snowy evening, on the Creatures of light and darkness album.  Is there anything more lovely and at peace (though he knows he must move on) than that voice crooning, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

In a previous post I mentioned how Jackie eschewed encores, but I could only précis his words.  This is what he said performing at ‘A Cornish pub in Germany‘ in November, 2005, quoted from an official bootleg of the gig.

I think we’re coming towards the end of our time together. So we won’t be doing an encore; it’s a load of bullshit. I know that, you know that. What is the point of us going and standing through there, while you’ve got to go: “More! More! More! More!” and then we come back. It’s fucking ridiculous. We’re not going to go through that … So this is our last song, and we look forward to seeing you again next year.

A slight return to another JL gone too soon.  Tim Riley’s recent John Lennon bio, reviewed here earlier this year, contains a tale or two about his life with Yoko in the apartment in New York and her reliance on a “coterie of astrologists, psychics and numerologists” – leaving a rather obvious question, which I’ll let lie – up to and beyond choosing a label for the release of Double fantasy, their return to recording.   Label head David Geffen was invited over, after, Riley cites Geffen himself, “she ran “his numbers” (a combination of his birthday, address, phone number, and ‘who knows what’)“.  On the album they used a couple of musicians from the band Cheap Trick, and – I really like this story, which reassures me somewhat – Carlos, one of those musicians, reports of the sessions:

“Yoko’d be in the booth and say, ‘Does anyone want some granola?’ or whatever she had, and it looked like animal feed. And John would be like down the hall with the roadies, you know, sneaking a slice of pizza.”

After reading Riley’s book I hunted out a copy of Double fantasy from my local library and was underwhelmed; any more is best left unsaid, so I’ll leave it at that, I think.

And now for something completely different.  After some additions to the list of words that barely exist outside of a 15×15 crossword square, a few more faves from the Guardian cryptic.   When was the last time you saw or heard used in everyday speech or print the words ague, alack, tarry, litotes or stevedore?  Thought so.  And so to some clues that gave pleasure.  As you’ll see, I tend towards the simple life:

• from Tramp the awesome: Ulterior motive of Haagen-Dazs? (6,6)
• from Rufus the beautifully simple: It became you (4)
• and the classic: Lover of Bess in musical heading off for wild party (4)
• from anon Everyman in the Observer: A motoring offence in Shepperton (6-7)
• zen from Orlando: Al most (6,3)
• and the elegant: Effie is in Sheffield but he is in Manchester (4,6)
• a cringing pun from Araucaria: Don Quixote’s horse, say? (6)
• and a couple more from Rufus: More than one rock group (6)
• Metal detector (6)
• redeemed by: Treatment for refusal to play guitar (7)
• and the simplicity of:  A round game, perhaps (3.3)
• the sweet punning of Arachne gives us: Dames popular with sailors (6)
• but weep at the sheer majesty of Auracaria: Complaint that one could hear Forsyth greeting relative? (11) (which I would never have got without a Warren Zevon song)

Answers at the end of this post …
underneath evidence (well, you’ll have to take my word for it) of one of my great achievements in 2011.  You know how you say of something, That is just fucking im-poss-ible?  I speak of Advanced Heading in the Balance category of WiiFit exercises.  Never mind that it’s told me on occasion I’ve got the body of a 20-year-old and that my movements are full of grace, after months of doing Advanced Heading on WiiFit I managed to avoid all the boots and pandas it could throw at me and successfully made contact with all the footballs and racked up a Perfect Score.  More than once.  Hell of a buzz.

So after all that excitement I leave you with the Crossword answers:

• from Tramp the awesome: Ulterior motive of Haagen-Dazs? (6,6)
• from Rufus the beautifully simple: It became you (4) THOU
• and the classic: Lover of Bess in musical heading off for wild party (4) (P)ORGY
• from anon Everyman in the Observer: A motoring offence in Shepperton (6-7) Double parking
• zen from Orlando: Al most (6,3) Nearly all
• and the elegant: Effie is in Sheffield but he is in Manchester (4,6) City centre
• a cringing pun from Araucaria: Don Quixote’s horse, say? (6) DONKEY
• and a couple more from Rufus: More than one rock group (6) STONES
• Metal detector (6) COPPER
• redeemed by: Treatment for refusal to play guitar (7) NO-STRUM
• and the simplicity of:  A round game, perhaps (3.3) CUP TIE
• the sweet punning of Arachne gives us: Dames popular with sailors (6)  (Norfolk) BROADS
• but weep at the sheer majesty of Auracaria: Complaint that one could hear Forsyth greeting relative? (11)  BRUCE-(E)LLO-SIS !!! (it’s a lung disease of cattle, mentioned in Play it all night long, Warren Zevon’s paen to the farming life, his comment on the getting back to the land hippie fallout movement after the gold-rush, so to speak)

New Year’s wishes to each and all.

The social whirl

Feels like I’ve done more socialising in the last ten days than in the last hundred.  But first, a word from our sponsor.  Now it’s safe to have Herbal Essences branded product in the house again – now that those blatant Meg Ryan fake orgasm rip-off TV ads are history – we have just added to our extensive collection of shampoos one called ‘Fresh balance‘, which claims to be a ‘clarifying shampoo’. I am, ahem, unclear as to what exaclty this means.  The mirror gives no hint that anything new has happened (either that or the shampoo has simply failed) though the citrus blossom and green tea odour was pleasnt enough.  Mind, I know about shampoos.  In the mid-60s my mum worked on the shop floor at 4711 on Slough Trading Estate, where they produced some of the first specialist shampoos – Stablon (for blondes) and Brunatex for … you guessed.  Except it was the same stuff put into differently labelled plastic bottles of contrasting hue.  True story.

So … the last Scribal Gathering of the year saw a performance by Final Clearance  – and it worked well that the lead guitar/vocals looked like the politely bearded, be-tied and be-jacketed manager of an emporium advertising just that – who teasingly prefaced half their songs with slow ornate airs from Christmas songs before jumping off into some lively and very together, energetic yet controlled, ditties of their own, the presence of a violinist doing no harm at all.  No featured poet so mine host Richard Frost stepped up to the plate with among other pieces a splendiferous poetic performance of his prize winning bitter-sweet Weekend dads rant and rue.  I did a slot that wasn’t embarrassing and thus a relief.  I-wish-I-could-remeber-his-name did some of his Chemistry poems to great acclaim.  How can a man fail who starts his set, arms reaching out, chanting ‘Chem-ist-try-yee’ in the manner of Gary Glitter’s finest 3 minutes (Rock and roll).  Another good night’s culture.  Somewhat distracted at one stage at our table by not being able to remember Galliano‘s name (the acid jazz rappers), whose works I re-acquainted myself with later in the week; to just mention and say that Stoned again is one of the all-time great comedy records probably does them a dis-service, but wotthehell, Archy, wotthehell.

And from Scribal to Scrabble.  Helped the Scrabble Queen of Milton Keynes get her mojo back by losing by a couple of lengths in consecutive games.  Then the local Humanists solstice party included a Wooing Play (a Mummers variant) and Stewart did Jake the Peg complete with extra leg.  Oh, and a first public performance on ukulele by your resident blogger, backing the Quaylettes for the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream.  What a day.

More mummers at a musical solstice evening on the shortest day.  These were mainly proper musicians with proper voices who would say things like, “Let’s do number 13 in the Green Book,” so I recited Adelaide Ann Proctor‘s epic of good bad verse The lost chord of 1858 (“Seated one day at the organ / I was weary and ill at ease …“).  I was St Andrew in the Mummers play (one of Andy’s innovative insertions, like the Queen of the May) but my Scottish accent became problematic.  One of the songs that I could join in on was The Holly and the Ivy done to the rollicking pub version of the tune (as opposed to the usual hark-the-angels-sing melody).  I wish I knew what to call it – you know, there’s something like Crimond for a hymn with opposing tunes – but here the internet (and a ‘proper’ musical chum) has failed me.

Yet more mummers in a pub yesterday and full-on full-blooded and musical it was too.  The Stony Stratford Mummers (the bunch in the picture at the top of this post) in the Fox and Hounds in the full white-faced, morris beribboned, top hatted fashion parade of tradition, Bealzebub an effective foil for crowd control.  They finished with a rousing non-mainstream Holly and the ivy too.  How I relish the memory of  sixth-form wassailing for charity in the pubs of Burnham at Christmas – the Boar’s Head Carol the fave – ending up at the trad jazz bearded communist (so exotic) music teacher’s house where he plied us with drink (well, a glass thereof).

And after that entertainment,  home to catch up with the final two episodes of The Killing II.  Bloody hell.

And the birds pick up on the change, time to start singing again.

 

Endings on this shortest of days

As it happens I’ve just read two books featuring two suicides and in both the first death is a minor thematic precursor to the main act.  Two books, one published in the year I was born, the other just this year.

So – back to Greene-land, briefly (see my previous post).  Graham Greene‘s misery-fest The heart of the matter (1948) was the title of the month that coincided with the Book Group Christmas meal.  There it was agreed that the only characters with any joie-de-vivre were the corrupt Syrian merchants.  A certain sympathy with Scobie was volunteered by some – a good man full of good intent tying himself up in the knots of Catholicism, hoist ultimately with his own petard of pride and pity.  Ridiculous though this hand ringing is – at one stage he posits JC as a suicide up there on the cross (actually, now you think about it, not a bad shout) – the book does, as a couple of people at the meal said, stay with you.  Not least for that coda of a last chapter laying out what happened after his badly judged – he was fooling himself – demise.  Tremendous writer, of course; see how he reports from the depths of joylessness.  You have to agree with Orwell in querying what the point was – pity, Scobie claims – or whether the pleasure accrued was worth the eternal damnation when he can tell himself:

He thought sadly, as lust won the day, what a lot of trouble it was; the sadness of the aftertaste fell upon his spirits beforehand.

This from the man who had earlier warned (in probably the only half-way humourous line in the whole book):

Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson.  You read too much poetry.

The suicide at the heart of the narrative in Julian Barnes‘s prize winning The sense of an ending (Cape, 2011) happens quite early on and is Camus-ian.  You know, Albert Camus: “Il n’ya qu’un probleme philosophique vraiment serieux: c’est le suicide” (from The myth of Syyphus – 1942); notice how, in French, even that sounds un peu enticing – “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”.  As quoted by Adrian, the newly arrived charismatic sixth form clear thinking clever clogs who joins three other pretentious school chums, at the start of Barnes’s really rather good journey into the workings of memory, the meaning and making of histories and the shadings they give to the loves, the decisions and the responsibilities of living a life.  Happily it’s not the narrator who does himself in, but what happened in the ’60s and early ’70s is brought back into focus for him 40 years later when he is the benefactor of a puzzling bequest in a will which sets off a sequence of events that undermine his view of himself and the past and confound his imaginings.

Much was made of The sense of an ending‘s length – only 150 pages – and its eligibility for the Booker Prize.  In passing I have to admit I can no longer claim to be allergic to Booker winners, which was a good tag line but can no longer be justified (following on the Booker tail of Wolf Hall and The Finkler question) because I liked this beautifully paced book a lot.  It is much more than a novella; there is more going on here than in many so-called contenders coming in at at least twice the page count.  There are sections I won’t even mention, or mention again, like narrator Tony Webster’s marriage – an illuminating side issue as he asks her advice – that are rich in nuance on their own.  The core relationship is the problematic one with Veronica at university, his quirky maybe manipulative and/or damaged girl friend who ends up with Adrian.

There is no real ending – much remains un-revealed – and given the information to hand there’s not much of a sense of one to be had; things don’t turn out as Tony expects, didn’t occur as he’d surmised, and the narrative doesn’t take the expected path.  There’s a major twist I’ve given no hint of here.  The last words are – his  conclusion is – “There is great unrest“; the puzzlement and remorse when things present and past go awry is made all the more effective because Tony’s voice throughout is invariably good-natured and peppered with a whimsical wit.  How can we really know that Adrian “didn’t grandly refuse an existential gift” – the existential gift of life, that is, vide Camus – rather than it just being that “he was afraid of the pram in the hall“?  We end up in a strange place – “You just don’t get it. You never did and you never will,” Veronica tells him bracingly.  But despite all the drama, much that is observed applies simply to the passage of time.

And the period detail is pretty good.  Although Tony seems to have steered clear of the politics and drug scenes, these were recognizably my years too.  At school the wearing of one’s watch on the inner wrist bestowed … something, and

There was, apparently, some secret masculine code, handed down from suave twenty-year olds to tremulous eighteen-year olds, which, once mastered, enabled you to ‘pick up’ girls and, in certain circumstances, ‘get off’ with them.  But I never learnt or understood it, and probably still don’t.  My technique consisted of not having a technique [...]

Me too.  “I’d better explain what the concept of ‘going out’ with someone meant back then …” he explains.  So he’s got the university courtship rituals of the day down pat.  And this is probably how I danced:

Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms: the head-jerking and the foot-prancing, the shoulder-twisting and the pelvis-jabbing, with the bonus of ecstatically raised arms and occasional grunting noises.

Among other buttons pressed: Veronica is sniffy about his owning “a two-disc boxed set of Donovan called (in lower case) a gift from a garden to a flower” (too right) while his book shelves contain “orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction” that are “Functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into“.  Then there’s the dreaded visit to the girlfriend at uni’s parents – “I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated” – though here the mother warns him against her own daughter, which sets up uncomfortable resonances later.  “Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe.  Cars don’t have names like that anymore, do they?“  No, but back in the present day, there’s some very funny dialogue in a pub between Tony and a barman establishing that when you see ‘hand cut chips’ on a menu what it actually means is ‘fat chips’, and that thin is not an option, a dialogue taking place just before a significant moment as the action is played out.

This was one of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.

Blogger strokes chin …

Yet another post with no name

Managed to spend a morning in the Welsh National Museum of Art in Cardiff last week, would have lingered longer.  Didn’t have a clue what was in there but came away impressed with the building and the nicely presented Welsh and international collections, which ranged from Dutch and Italian work fom the 16th Century to video art of not that long ago.  I particularly liked the newly opened Contemporary galleries wherein I was delighted to find another frame-embracing painting from Howard Hodgkin, the radiant Bedtime (1999-2001).  There’e nothing like seeing them in the flesh.

Interesting to see people tentatively approaching the tv screen showing Peter Finnemore‘s good humoured set of 30-odd short video films, Base camp – basically him and his mates and family mucking about in the garden (gleefully smashing the greenhouse glass in one) and never mind the artist’s rubric about place and anarchy – then the casual watcher sitting down, engrossed.  A shame then, that when you click on a still from some samples of this work on the artist’s own website you get the message, “Sorry.  The creator of this video has not given you permission to embed it on this domain.”  Oh well.

I was particularly taken by the one where they’re all dancing as much as they can within the crowded limits of said greenhouse, the first time I’ve been able to make the imaginative link between the art on the walls and the video screen, seeing how a painting can capture the feeling of movement and the movement on the video can suggest, well, the same feeling, transcending its medium’s movement … I dunno … I felt some sort of revelation was at hand; pardon the pseudery.  I can’t really explain why, but the busy Stanley Spencer triptych Souvenir of Switzerland, also on display in another room, comes to mind as an example of the sort of bustling painting I’m talking about here.  Indeed, the breadth of the art on show allowed other synchronicities to come into play, the abstract Hodgkin suddenly seen as being not that far away on canvas from some of the expressionist and impressionist broad brush paintings on display elsewhere in the gallery.   There’s a decent and arresting – the colours – Max Ernst (The wood), a couple of nice Pipers, Heinz Koppel’s intriguing Merthyr blues (a big painting with a Bessie Smith figure hovering over cartoon-inflected scenes of Valley life) and Kevin Sinnott‘s wonderfully titled Running away with the hairdresser (1995), full of movement.  I could go on.

There’s a link here, in that Cardiff is where drummer Mick Avory of The Kinks wnt on the run after thinking he’d killed Dave Davies on stage with either his cymbal or hi-hat pedal (depending on your source) but nothing beyond that can I expand on.  Dave’s ‘new’ CD, Hidden treasures, brings together, with a few other tracks, the planned and subsequently abandoned by the record company ‘lost’ solo album of 1969.  And jolly good much of it is too, a decent portfolio of work that, when brought together in this lovingly remastered form (take a bow Andrew Sandoval for all his Kinks work), can only enhance the man’s reputation, independent of his big brother.  Of course the lyrics still leave a lot to be desired as far as actually making any sense go, but there are some real triumphs that it’s good to be reminded of here: the  loping bass and incisive then jangling guitar on the driving and airy Creeping Jean (“You don’t know what it means” … well no, but we’ll let it pass), the rousing Love me till the sun shines which sounds deserving of so much more than just the one night stand the title suggests, and the early alt-country of the swinging and splendid Lincoln County.

I went on a massive Graham Greene binge in the mid- to late 70s, fuelled by the centrality to his work of an examination of the individual’s struggle with conviction, of maintaining faith and commitment in the face of evidence to the contrary, of his being left meaningless and empty in the absence of such guiding principles, be it catholicism or communism.  I’ve not turned a page of his since The human factor (1978), the last full sized novel.  This month’s reading group title is his The heart of the matter (1948) and it was good to be reintroduced to the preciseness of the prose and his skill as a writer in portraying the human condition, albeit an acutely observed joyless, world weary and overwhelmingly miserable existence, which does indeed lead up to the suicide of Scobie, a white policeman, the novel’s central character, serving in a West African colony during the Second World War.  His big problem, bigger even than being a career policeman in an African colony, is the Catholic God and his relationship to said deity.

Far from this being the Catholic novel it is usually described as, I would suggest it is – post-Greene – in reality, an atheist text.  In a nutshell: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  Scobie ties himself in such knots.  If he loves two women – never mind for him love is pity – it’s a sin and he’ll end up in hell, but then he’s betrayed God and He suffers so he (Scobie) thinks to relieve God’s pain (and the women’s) by topping himself but, because he’s a Catholic that sends him straight to hell anyway … “This is what human love had done to him – it had robbed him of love for eternity.“  Yeah, yeah.

It’s not as if he hasn’t given himself the chance, even seen it clearly.  Just over half way through the book, at his wife’s behest, even before he’s met the other woman, he drags himself to confession.  He tells the priest:

“I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel – tired of my religion.  It seems to mean nothing to me.  I’ve tried to love God, but -” he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille.  “I’m not sure that I even believe.”

So that’s his first chance.  54 pages on, he’s with the other woman:

“But I simply don’t understand.  If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?”
How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one see more clearly than faith.

Exactly.  It’s a big distraction, but one shouldn’t allow it to take away from the book’s real merits, the illuminating and unpleasant portrait Greene paints of a life in colonial service (he was there, after all) and his more general, reasonable if unrelenting, take on life and life only, and an altogether too jaundiced – if exquisitely expressed – view of even love as something of a trial.  “It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love“, Scobie says, “with desperate pedantry“.  Then there’s the bracing: “He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that that is where we belong.” Earlier on, he had opined, “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery.“  Yes, but it can happen if you let the glimpses through, Graham, though no-one in The heart of the matter does.

Propeller’s ‘Henry V’

How good was the Propeller production of Shakespeare‘s Henry V at Milton Keynes Theatre this week?  What if I say there were moments when I wasn’t sure which way the battle at Agincourt was going to go?

From initially being a sceptic over modern dress (or just messing-about-with-the-period dress) drama productions I am now – despite that dubious Welsh National Opera outer space setting of Wagner‘s  Flying Dutchman – an enthusiast.  While last-minute theatre goers were getting into their stalls seats a grubby squaddie straight outta Afghanistan came and stood, watching, quietly menacing, in one of the side aisles.  That was the first sign we were in for an experience.  When the similarly garbed troupe gathered on the stage and started delivering the Prologue collectively, each actor taking a couple of lines in turn to give us the Chorus’s lines – “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention!” – from different positions while going about their business (something would continue to great effect all night), and the house lights were still up, was the second.  And the excellence just kept on coming.

“But pardon, gentles all, / The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d / On this unworthy scaffold …”  the Bard has them apologise.  Yeah, yeah.  This was a highly spirited, lusty, loud, energetic, thoughtful and inventive show delivered from a stage set that basically consisted of … scaffolding – brilliant! – augmented by a handful of constantly shifted wooden military trunks and cases (oh, and an occasional chair).  The costume design was all over place, but it worked.  First World War, Second World War, Middle East conflicts: the twentieth century universal soldier, no less (thanks for that insight, Andy).  So, was the play treated as a patriotic or an anti-war text?  For this Band of brothers, it has to be both – it’s the only way to do it justice.  Though it could be argued the Epilogue may be asking whether, for all the heroism and slaughter, it was worth it; the gains were lost again in the reign of Henry VI soon enough.

There was no shirking the violence, but there was a sly humour beyond the text too.  And contemporary relevance.  The scenes from Act 1, where Henry sought assurance from the bishops about the moral and historical justification of his claim for France, was pointedly and deliberately played.  At one point early on, as the army mustered, they burst into The Clash’s London calling – what a moment! – while a visit to the French camp was accompanied by Chanson d’amour on the accordion.  I’ve never seen violence portrayed to such chilling effect in a theatre before; I don’t know how original a technique it was, but the sight and sound of a soldier on each side of the stage laying into suspended punch bags with baseball bats while the victim of these dogs of war writhed around centre stage certainly had impact.

Propeller is, oh I’ll just quote their website, “an all-male Shakespeare company which seeks to find a more engaging way of expressing Shakespeare and to more completely explore the relationship between text and performance” – this they do, spectacularly well.  “Mixing a rigorous approach to the text with a modern physical aesthetic, they have been influenced by mask work, animation and classic and modern film and music from all ages.”  A few faces we recognised, but being cheapskates as far as buying a programme goes, I can’t give you any names; they all played many parts, save for Henry, who in his shifting moods and modes he played a blinder. Most (it might even have been all) of the cast even gave us a full-throated and lusty session in the atrium in the interval, singing – for charity, a bucket collection – a rousing Wild rover and an ecstatic Sloop John B; a band of brothers indeed.

A tremendous night.  For shame, the people of Milton Keynes and surrounds, for the Wood family were in evidence on the opening night. (I got that ‘Wood family’ from Angela Carter; in Wise children, that’s what the theatricals call empty seats).  If Propeller are anywhere near, go see.

 

Impossible, wise & dead

The impossible dead (Orion, 2011) is Ian Rankin‘s second outing for Malcolm Fox and his Complaints team – now renamed (a new cliche of crime fiction, all this reorganisation) Internal Affairs.  It’s not so much that I miss Rebus (I do, but never mind that) as his DS, Siobhan.  We’ve got Fox (divorced, sworn off the drink long term, quarrelling with his sister about their dad in an old people’s home) aided and abetted by Tony Kay (bawdy drinker) and young Joe Naysmith (keen, bit of a tekkie): it’s a boy’s club.  It’s still a decent enough ensemble Rankin has put together and, as you’d expect, morality – personal greed, public face, political ends and means – is at the story’s core.  A routine disciplinary investigation leads to the maverick Fox pursuing a successful businessman, brother to a minister in the Scottish parliament and married to a police chief, for a crime dating back to the time – how long ago it now seems – before Scottish nationalism figured as an electoral force.  The security forces were involved then and the action now takes place against the background of a terrorism alert.  The soundtrack that accompanied Rebus has gone – hardly a music mention, and I doubt Jackie Leven, if he were still with us, would have been writing any songs – as he did in his Jackie Leven said collaboration with Rankin – about the haunting of Malcolm Fox.  Won’t stop me reading the next one, though.

I here indulge a short, picky, grumbling addendum.  I get annoyed at some sentences, at unnecessary wordage.  So on page 89 we get,

When she gestured for him to sit, he did as he was told, brushing his hands across the knees of his trousers.

Why does he have to do anything with his trousers.  What does it signify?  Indeed, what is going on?  Across his knees – is he doing the hand jive?  In a similar vein we get (p172):

Having finished his coffee, he pushed the plastic lid into the crushed cup.

Can’t he have just finished his coffee?  Or shouldn’t he have pushed the lid in first, before crushing the cup.  Unfair, this, I know (and Peter James is guilty of far worse – see later) and, on the other hand, we do get (p274),”You’re the Complaints, not some fucking Simon Schama“; to which the riposte is, “History seems to have a funny way of repeating itself.”

More impossibility – but of the phantasmagorical kind – with Angela Carter‘s brilliant Wise children (1991).  As Dora Chance, the narrator says at one stage, “What larks“.  Delicious, delightful and oftentimes wonderfully absurd, it all leads up to a glorious set piece at a physically injury free family apocalypse of a party.

The Hazards are a theatrical dynasty, the impoverished Nora and Dora Chance, the by-blows of the patriarch; I had to look that up – they’re bastards.  Unacknowledged, by Sir Melchior Hazard, they worked the variety halls, aided through life by his brother, the magical Peregrine, who is both a literal prestidigitator and narrative conjuror (making love to Dora on his hundredth birthday is the least of it).  Twins abound and the bard of Stratford’s works are never far away in the glorious bawdy narrative, delivered by the life-embracing Dora at the age of 75.

There I go again! Can’t keep a story going in a straight line, can I? Drunk in charge of a narrative.

The language, the phrase making, is a sustained feast of invention; the action, taking in the sweep of the twentieth century, is energetic and engrossing, the twists of mood beautifully paced, while the satire is prescient and, in parts, horribly precise – Angela Carter saw it all coming.  The family names and the Shakespearean twins are the vehicles addressing identity, contingency, love, luck, confusion and injustice, and more pointedly, notions and perceptions of of paternity and maternity and their relation to the physical facts of the case.

Impossible not to quote liberally and with joy. How fixed for you now are the sights and sounds conjured up by, “Music from the days when men wore hats” or (Jane Austen adapters , take note) “little ladies in period cleavage“?  Fiction and reality are all in the mix.  John Osborne’s end of the pier comic creation Archie Rice briefly appears, while Dora’s romance with a Hollywood writer – ‘Irish’ put her through a literary education -  is more than a nod to Scott and Zelda.  They’re in Hollywood making a hilariously awful and doomed Midsummer night’s dream extravaganze:

You’ll find me in his famous Hollywood stories. The last flame of a burnt-out case, but, oh, it had a glorious light! I never rate more than a footnote in the biographies; they get my date of birth wrong, they mix me up with Nora, that sort of thing. And I’m bound to say my best friend wouldn’t recognise me in the far-from-loving portrait he’d penned after I’d gone.  […]  Such turned out to be the eternity the poet promised me, the bastard.

There’s no business like … Carter invents a game show, hosted by legitimate son of the Hazard line Tristram, so inane and utterly devoid of skill or knowledge that it can compete with Deal or no deal (remember she was writing 20 years agao), while his brother is a missionary:

Gareth and Tristram, the priest and the game-show presenter. Not so different, really, I suppose. Both of them in show business. Both, in their different ways, carrying on the great tradition of the Hazard family – the willing suspension of disbelief. Both of them promise a free gift if you play the game.

There is a serious side at play here – the consequences and responsibilities of fatherhood, maternity, their relation to environment, inheritance – and it is wonderfully forwarded and subverted by speculation about Mrs Lear (we know nothing of her – where did those daughters come from?).  The narrative hinge is an old music hall joke, the punchline of which is, “‘Don’t worry, darlin’, ‘e’s not your father!“:

What if Horatio had whispered that to Hamlet in Act 1, Scene I?

The book’s last words: “What a joy it is to dance and sing.”  What a joy it is to read.  The discovery that Wise children is an A-level text, to be studied and examined on - that there is a York Notes for it – fills me with all sorts of … despair.

Which is not far from the effect, I’m afraid, that Dead like you (Macmillan, 2010), the sixth in Peter James‘s series of crime novels set in Brighton featuring detective Roy Grace, also had on me.  I got about a quarter of the way through the 550 pages of it and, really, I should have trusted my instincts and parted company with it at that badly written first paragraph.  Look, I know, he’d written – no, had published – nearly a score of novels when this one appeared, and I haven’t got so much as a first draft festering in the bottom of a draw somewhere, but consider this:

We all make mistakes, all of the time.  Mostly trivial stuff, like forgetting to return a phone call, or to put money in a parking meter, or to pick up milk at the supermarket.  But sometimes – luckily, very rarely – we make the big one.

That’s his opening.  Is that not rotten, clumsy prose?  This hasn’t taken me long:

We can all make mistakes, at any time.  Mostly trivial stuff, like forgetting to return a phone call or put money in the parking meter, pick up milk at the supermarket.  But sometimes – if we’re really unlucky – we make the big one.

I’d say that was a vast improvement, but then I’m not winning awards and topping bestseller lists.  Which is why I had a go at Dead like you, to see if, given all this action, the big three of British crime – Harvey, Rankin, Robinson – had a new contender in the wings.

The narrative of Dead like you skips unnecessarily backwards and forwards between ’1997′ and ‘Now’.  Even with short chapters it’s hard to keep one’s bearings.  There’s a one-off (I think, remember I’ve given up a quarter through) labelled, rather confusingly, ’1979′, in which we see the genesis of the designer shoe fetishist rapist and murderer who features in both strands, though I suspect there are actually two shoe fetishists out there (remember I’ve only read …).  This shifting backwards and forwards is a pathetic attempt to rack up the tension and terror on the first victim’s fate (she’s taken, she’s in the back of a van, she escapes the van but not the lock-up, he comes back …) – look, we know something bad happened; just get on with it and spare us the nastiness, please?  Needless to say, there’s a cold case team to hand.  A specialist rape interview centre is described like a PR release.  And as well as all the shoe desigbers you have to put up with stuff like:

Roy Grace grinned and stared into her eyes.  When colleagues, off duty, got wrecked in the bar upstairs at Brighton nick or out in pubs, and talk turned, as it always did among men, to football – something in which he had little interest – or to birds, the girls got divided fifty-fifty into those that blokes fancied because of their tits or those that blokes fancied because of their legs.  But Roy Grace could honestly say that the first thing he had fancied about Sandy was her mesmerizing blue eyes.

Yeah, me too Roy – more the smile, actually – but, you know, sorry, but … pass.  Disappointing.