November 20, 2011

The Tragic Absurdism of British Boardinghouse Men

The Itinerant Lodger – by David Nobbs.

First published Methuen and Co. 1965. Reissued 2011. Harper Collins, London.

In March 2011 Harper Collins reissued David Nobb’s first three novels: The Itinerant Lodger (1965), Ostrich Country (1968) and A Piece of the Sky is Missing (1969). These were eagerly anticipated reprints for the notoriously fanatical admirers of this comic writer and creator of national treasure Reginald Perrin. Devotees could previously only pine over the two copies of The Itinerant Lodger floating on the cyber market for around £200. Now we can hold and treasure the physical object, covered in a rather quaint, 1960′s designed dust jacket: a collaged suitcase, constructed from newspaper accommodation classified ads.

The Itinerant Lodger is a beautifully bizarre tale of a lost soul, wandering between endless bland boarding houses, continuously shifting his name and identity, whilst searching for and failing to find: ‘The Universal Panacea For All Mankind’. The inept ‘hero’ aimlessly flounders in his vague existential mission, continually thwarted by Kafkaesque officialdom, or suffocating landlady mother figures. This first novel was penned in 1959, from a Sheffield bedsit. Two of the author’s classic quips, regarding the books reception and rejection, show why Harper Collins chose to reacquaint the British public with the seeds of his dry genius: “The book was rejected by at least six publishers, one of them, Macdonalds, saying that there was no market for detective fiction at the time.” “The Church Times said it was a moving study of schizophrenia. Sometimes an author needs to read the reviews to find out how clever he is.” (1)

Running more sympathetically with the schizophrenia themed interpretation, you could convincingly present this tale as a commentary on the psychosis of modern man, in the R. D. Laing sense. This controversial psychiatrist, most closely associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, outlined his approach to mental illness in his most famous work: The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960). Laing’s radicalism lay in the value he placed on the content or speech of psychotic behaviour, as valid expressions of distress. For Laing the language of madness may be cryptic, but it was a personal symbolism, whose code should be respected as meaningful, in its revelation of the unique contradictions and double-binds of an individual’s life. These binds were seen as more societal and familial constructions than biological ones. (2)

The opening half of the novel falls securely in the surrealist and absurdist tradition. The central character endures a long stint in prison, for an ill-defined, mysterious crime of passion. The transgression is deeply repressed, dream-like scenes from it burst back into sub, rather than full, consciousness, after a pub-crawl on Simpson’s release.

The situations that unfold in the second half of the novel turn it into a sympathetic allegory of ‘ordinary’ madness. The moment of our protagonists dogged second attempt to get work, prompts a spiralling descent into plot insanity. The job is paradoxically and absurdly selected in an utterly random way, yet is invested with a disproportionate sense of purpose. It’s a modest postman’s position. The lodger (now ‘Baker’) feels he has a way to address loneliness: by skewing the proportions of mail people receive with his new ‘system.’ At the interview however Baker gets ‘referred’ by the boss (after confessing his eccentric scheme idea). He is sent on a crash course in therapy, run by a bizarre crack team of mobile psychiatrists housed in temporary park buildings. This group eventually ‘break’ Baker’s defences and he confesses his confusion, lifelong lack of direction and yearning for the ‘panacea’. His shrink tells him this can only be found in a job that he will set up for him.

Baker then has to join a smaller trio of patients who have been labelled fellow paranoiacs whom he feels: “would have been quite happy were they not being got at by, respectively, the Greek Government, the Methodists and the Old Bovinghonians Small Bore Rifle Club” (p142). Baker begins to feel the doctors are conspiring to make him “believe someone was persecuting him, in order to avert suspicion from themselves.” (p142) Our pawn is then drugged in a form of regression therapy and recuperates, re-emerging as the inexplicably named ‘Cooper’, with no memories of his past.

The psychiatric group’s cure for Baker’s turmoil is a bitterly ironic pill. The “Ex-Lunatics Appointment Board” eventually find him a job, presented by them as a vocation. The role is ‘Commissionaire at the Royal Hotel’ (a post reminiscent of Karl Rossmann’s ‘lift-boy’ position at the ‘Hotel Occidental’, in Kafka’s America). In classic Nobb’s style the surreal is given a respectable and conformist aura here. Baker is predictably miserable in his new work and earns a pittance. Such set ups cut to the satirical core of fictional mediocre men generally. Baker embodies an extreme normality, an exaggerated version of the truth that reveals the world’s hidden workings. David Nobbs masters, throughout his writings, the presentation of an everyday lunacy. Like the best satirist or absurdist, Nobbs artfully distorts a literal truth, in order to allege broader, moral truths against society’s victims.

David Nobbs reflected on his blog, after re-reading his debut effort: “I was heavily influenced by the theatre of the absurd, by the work of men like Eugene Ionesco and above all N.F.Simpson, and by the novels of Samuel Beckett… I can also see David Nobbs popping his head over the absurdist parapet….It points the way.” He also hoped the story was “Kafka with laughs.”

There is a case for this slim novel being Kafkaesque ‘with laughs.’ The book is packed with Kafka’s matter-of-fact intimidation. In Chapter 12 there’s an arbitrary, exercise of authority, verging on the reluctant. A police constable performs a ‘summons’ and mysteriously addresses the protaganist, previously known as ‘Fletcher’, as ‘Simpson.’ At the close of the preceding chapter Fletcher had crashed onto his creaky lodger’s sofabed, exhausted and experiencing a shrinking, disappearing sensation. He begins the following chapter an empty vessel, a blank slate “sat in front of the mirror, realising his personality” which is abruptly defined by this police intruder: “Good morning, Mr Simpson.”

Then we have The Trial-like farce of polite small talk, whilst Simpson is mysteriously strip searched by an apologetic officer, withholding the criminal charge until “the search is complete” (p52). They casually cover the weather and their hometowns, as if neighbourly chit chat was all that was required to relieve the scenario of its tension.

Circular, maddening traps, like those set for Josef K, also abound: “Simpson, who had been given no chance of answering a series of questions which he had been forced to regard as rhetorical, did not reply.” (p57) Then there is the impossible interrogation from his lawyer. He is attempting to build a defence of insanity against a charge of surrealities. Simpson reflects in his prison cell on his ‘misdemeanours’, a cut and paste of bizarre transgressions of obscure historical by-laws. A dream-like collage of legalese depicts his crimes: “He had wilfully and with malice afterthought parked his wife, Esme Simpson, upon a bombed site, contrary to the Spouse Protection Act of 1623.” (p74) Initially Simpson has no recollection of committing this act. The only confession to be extracted from him is he wants “to be free again”  “Why?” “I want to discover the universal panacea for all mankind.” (p60)

For a surrealist comfort break from writing The Itinerant Lodger in 1965, David Nobb’s went to see the play One Way Pendulum by N.F. Simpson, running at his local theatre the Sheffield Playhouse.  N. F. Simpson died aged 92, in August 2011. The playwright’s unique brand of absurdism permeates the British comic sensibility. Simpson’s wild logical reversals twist and spin powerfully through Nobb’s melancholic debut and his trilogy, published a decade later: The Reginald Perrin Omnibus (1975). The Itinerant Lodger deploys the absurdist writer’s philosophical inversions of respectable decorum and displays what Kenneth Tynan described as Simpson’s: complete mistrust of authority, coupled with a ‘passionate respect for the sanctity of the individual.’

N. F. Simpson’s forte was playing with misplaced logic in language in particular. There are echoes of this in Reginald Perrin where ‘Parsley’ is inserted randomly within business conversation, for the hero’s perverse pleasure. Simpson also toyed with the function of what linguists term: phatic talk, essentially polite conversational ‘padding’. His audience is presented with perverse, rhythmic small talk, that turns suburban mores on their head. In plays like A Resounding Tinkle (1961) a grumpy, drab middle aged husband complains to his henpecking wife: ‘I hate this job’ referring to his nonsense ramblings and potterings. The sense of a transformation of domestic leisure into labour is a major source of angst for a host of post-war fictional mediocre men. Simpson’s tone of casual absurdity, where the everyday becomes farcical, is also the register of much British office fiction.

What marks Simpson’s brand of absurdity out as truly original is its remarkable satirical switches. In A Resounding Tinkle ‘Uncle Ted’ is a woman and serious culture is ‘delivered’ like a cup of tea: ‘ohh I’d love a book!’ This creates the disorientating, effect of art being utterly emptied of purpose, becoming just another empty ritual: ‘you’ll have some more prose.’ The Monty Python team used this comic device in their sketches where gossiping grannies would coo scandalously and mindlessly about “Oooh! Jean Paul Sartre!” Other Simpsonesque innovations are: presenting the mundane as a sacred entity to be worshipped. In A Resounding Tinkle the characters join in a radio broadcast prayer: ‘let us give thanks for judo, for people who compile dictionaries in large buildings.’ Simpson set up this and many other tropes used by comics like Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer or Peter Cook.

The Itinerant Lodger similarly undercuts its protaganist’s poetic gravitas, conflating his small talk with ‘serious’ cultural matters. Wilson’s landlady tries to chivvy him out of a bout of writer’s block, with a comically cloying, maternal encouragement: “Perhaps you’ll think of something later on,” said Mrs Pollard. “Some blank verse, or a nice hexameter. There’s no harm in keeping on trying.” (p15)

Wilson’s writers block is a permanent state of inspirational limbo, where the blank sheet of paper, or new seating arrangements, are called upon for spiritual awakening. This could be the result of our anti-hero’s claustrophobic digs or his overbearing landlady. I would argue though that our protagonist’s tragic stasis forms a new target for the satirical aim of absurdism. I would even suggest that Nobb’s is plunging the mocking scalpel into the corpse of crushed creativity and human ambition itself. This is a body rotted, not by grotty digs, but the stultifying and irrational division of labour under advanced capitalism itself.

As Marx proposed in Volume III of Capital: the realm of freedom:

begins only where labour, determined by necessity, ends. True freedom can only occur when associated producers rationally regulate their interchange with nature, bringing it under common control, instead of being ruled by it. A fuller form of freedom is attained when we produce, not simply to meet material needs, but produce as an end in itself. This is the truly free creation of art. (3)

Our metamorphosing hero (only in name), embodies this Marxist conception of the doomed creative impulse. The lodger’s trap is, on the one hand, a crisis of writer’s block, yet he never doubts he’s ‘destined’ for the job of writing poetry. But the character’s tragic absurdity lies in the extreme unwriterly, farcically mundane circumstances that he invests with such potential. He and his shabby rented room are “bursting with infinite possibilities.” The recurring comic tension is between his self-consciously romantic, poetic sense of the boundless possibilities of his imagination and his increasingly dead, dull surroundings, soul destroying job prospects and absolute lack of real ideas. In a double irony, his only inspirations relate to the sensations or concepts of being filled with great ideas and a sense of artistic destiny. Such daydreaming fills up any productive spaces, ultimately causing his actual zero creative output.

When our lodger applies himself to the task of socially or publicly recognised productivity, a darker absurdism begins to take shape. In imagery that later runs rampant in Reginald Perrin, he searches for spectacularly unfulfilling jobs, poring, in naive excitement, over their breathtakingly obscure descriptions. Both works painfully draw out the bizarre tragi-comedy of men being asked to fit into inhuman, alienating niches of the labour market:

“Are you an enthusiastic, ambitious and healthy university graduate, with an alert mind, a penchant for new gimmicks, a driving licence, and a solid grounding in the container production industry, who welcomes innovations, believes in expansion, can mix with industrial leaders, speaks Flemish, has advanced views on lid design and would be prepared to share bathroom with radiator mechanic?” (p25)

“It was not much use knowing that British Watkinson Dessert Spoons and Sons required spoon roughers and insiders, throstlers and large ingot men, unless you were a spoon rougher and insider, a throstler, or a large ingot man.” (p 26)

The other central feature of absurdist works is their abandonment of traditional narrative structure. Build up, climax and resolution are avoided in a myriad of inventive ways: through Paul Auster’s Chinese-box shaped, existential detective novels, or the circular mania of Samuel Beckett’s interior monologues; in Molloy for example. Avoiding the neat resolutions of the Victorian literature that preceded it, this genre embraced existentialist and nihilist trends in philosophy, and surreal and Dadaist turns in twentieth century art.

In constructing his Russian Formalist approach to narrative structure, Vladimir Propp broke down scores of Russian folk tales into their smallest units: ‘narratemes.’ Propp was able to arrive at a typology of storytelling which concluded narratives always have three or more of a sequence of 31 functions. These included:

  1. ABSENTATION: A member of a family leaves the security of the home. May be the hero or another figure the hero will later rescue. The hero and his ordinary nature may be introduced here.
  2. MEDIATION: Misfortune is made known, (hero hears call for help, discovers the act of villainy or lack).
  3. BEGINNING COUNTER-ACTION: Seeker decides on a counter-action. The hero decides to act to resolve the lack, for example finding a magical item, rescuing captured figures or defeating a villain. A defining moment for protagonist; they were previously ordinary but now become heroic.
  4. DEPARTURE: Hero leaves home.
  5. FIRST FUNCTION OF THE DONOR: Hero is tested, interrogated or attacked preparing the way for his/her receiving magical agent or helper.
  6. HERO’S REACTION: Hero reacts to actions of future donor, for example withstanding or failing a test, freeing a captive or reconciling disputants.
  7. RECEIPT OF A MAGICAL AGENT: Hero acquires use of a magical agent (directly transferred, located, purchased, eaten/drunk etc, offered by other characters).
  8. GUIDANCE: Hero is led to an object of the search.
  9. STRUGGLE: Hero and villain in direct combat.

It is in the complete absence of functions 7, 8 and 9 that the absurdist structural formula resides. For a plot to be absurdist, the narrative must take a cyclical not arc-like shape. There is no chance for confrontation with an enemy, because they are never explicitly established as the threat.

Such absurdist plotting forms the concluding chapters of The Itinerant Lodger. The newly christened Cooper has yet another renewed sense of purpose, a fresh confidence to go and find the universal panacea, through taking up new lodgings. We return to our hero’s feelings of epic destiny: “He thought only of the future, the great future that was before him.” (p159) Yet we come a full fatalistic, comic circle, severely doubting the fulfilment of our lost soul’s mission in the closing cameo figure, the new landlady “with a rather tight, prim face.” (p159) “You’ll be Mr Smith” (p160) Mrs Wills states flatly as she opens the door. Such non-endings are part of absurdism’s dream-like power, the labyrinthine journeys feel folkishly familiar, yet disturbingly alien and elusive.

At the centre of The Itinerant Lodger Simpson’s endures a mid-life crisis moment in prison. The predicament has a missionary quality, far more starkly spiritual than the usual painful physical stock-check:  “Here he was, some eleven and a half stone, with a second-class degree and receding hair, imprisoned in a tiny bare cell…Here he was, approaching his fortieth birthday, still searching for the purpose of existence… in this confinement.” (p72)

Nobb’s does his usual brilliantly daft about turn next however. There is a crashing bathos to Simpson’s soul searching, where the darkest fears he can conjure are that: “he was bad, utterly bad.” His only deep pang of shame is that his old scout leader (so proud of him donating a baked potato in bob-a-job-week) would be disappointed in him!

Other delightful false climaxes of excitement include the moment where the landlady and lodger throw caution to the wind, loosening up their inhibitions with some drinks. The evening crashes on a distinctly frumpy note, with an unsexy nightcap:

“All right then.”

“What will you have?”

“What is there?”

“Bovril” (p106)

The novels darkest farcical move is Chapter 19, where Baker first decides to make romantic advances towards his landlady. Mrs Pollard escorts Baker from the purgatory of his mid-floor room, to reveal her mystery man residing at the top: “Mr Veal” a skeleton in a bed. Absurd casual small talk ensues, as if a completely normal introduction is taking place: “Of course, you’re not seeing him at his best. You should have come when he was younger.” (p103). Baker has to break the news to Mrs Pollard that Veal (the skeleton) is dead.

The absurdist bathos continues apace in the improper domestic imagery of Mr Veal’s funeral eulogy:

“In every gas heater there is a pilot light.” “Veal had by his example shed just as sure and constant a light on the world as that which burnt in their own Ascot heaters at home.” (p112)

This is presented in a chapter with the typeset and layout of a local newspaper column. The subheadings pick out the most innocuous details of the reportage, reading: “CLEANER” “TRADITIONAL GLASS.” Undercutting the anticipated sensationalism or pathos of the funeral.

David Nobb’s argued the third book from his early trio of works; A Piece of the Sky is Missing, is the closest to a prototype of Reginald Perrin, “a dummy run for Reggie” in fact. I see The Itinerant Lodger as a far closer predecessor. For instance, in the Perrin trilogy, the extra ‘ordinariness’ of the world of work emerges with images of obscurely qualified groups of people flying over Britain on business trips, like the: “Belgian Licensed Victualler’s Association” or the offices of the “Amalgamated Asbestos crowd.” Such titles give a universal sense of absurd mundanity. In many daft lines the tragedy of wasted life is implied; “At the moment, while we sit here, some people are busy making extra-wet strength tissues…People who were born into a world full of sunlight and beautiful flowers….Aren’t you sorry for them?” (p377) In TIL this sense is conveyed in the obscure association and committee names like the: ‘Anti-Massage League,’ ‘The Friends of Fibrositis’ the ‘British Brine Baths Benevolent Association.’ (p118)

Then there is the fake get out clause and dummy welfare scheme: “share a cell Ltd”, an accommodation agency who offer their services to Simpson’s from within his comfortable prison (p75).  This is reminiscent of the false escape offered to Reggie Perrin in the distinctly work-like  Perrin’s retirement village commune.

Nabokov, in his lectures on Russian literature, reflected on the cruel quirks of a social and economic system driven by the irrational division of labour: “Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.”

Absurdism as a genre is uniquely equipped to tackle this subject, through its portrayal of the extraordinary and impossible as rational everyday events. David Nobb’s Reginald Perrin trilogy charts the familiar middling man’s fate, a breakdown induced by the deadening efficiency of suburbia and office life, which effectively turns its protagonist into an automaton, “Every day I get up, dress, go downstairs, have breakfast, walk down Coleridge Close….Is that success, Ponsonby?” (p 498) The architectural thinker Robert Fisham explains this ritualisation as “the paradox of suburbia….a direct expression of that middle-class life….Rationality and sentimentality co exist, but they are strictly separated into work and family realms.” This separation, which has gradually solidified, is traced right back to eighteenth century London where the family became “a specialised and intensified center of emotion with its own suitable environment” in contrast to the townhouse which was “wholly an office, now dedicated to intensified, unremitting work” (Fisham  61-71)

Post-war British fiction was already populated with some notable dejected lodgers before Fletcher took his ‘bed sitting-room’ or Reggie set up his suburban home. In his 1947 novel Of Love and Hunger, the British novelist Julian MacLaren-Ross depicts the drab and unfulfilling life of Richard Fanshawe, a vacuum salesman who lives in a dingy boarding house by night, and by day traipses the streets of Brighton and Worthing, failing to sell his wares. Ross documents 1940’s boarding house life and was in fact part of it, albeit in a decidedly more bohemian fashion than his creation Fanshawe.

The 1940’s lodger universe has been summed up as “the state one or two rungs above it [abject poverty]: the kind of life that was lived sixty years ago [1940] in seedy boarding houses by people who never quite possessed the drive or the money necessary to hold down a decent job or a proper relationship.” The author and critic D. J. Taylor also makes the case for Of Love and Hunger to rank alongside Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (1947) as “one of the great English boarding-house novels.” (pvii) The responsibility for suffering a mediocre existence in Of Love and Hunger is placed squarely on the protaganist’s slumped shoulders, ‘I haven’t the imagination to make anything up.’ This causes much vexation to his girlfriend: ‘You have imagination,’ Sukie said. ‘Why d’you pretend to be dull?’ (p31)

One boardinghouse character who rages against his forced submission, in the class war of 1950’s Britain, is Jo Lampton. This iconic lodger is the archetypal ‘angry young man’ (4) from John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957). The critic Colin Wilson believes that Room at the Top, and its defiant protagonist, represented the end of the ‘Age of Defeat’ and ‘defeated men’ in fiction, whose pervading philosophy was ‘you can’t win.’

Prior to Lampton you had more desolate lodgers like Mr Bleaney from Philip Larkin’s eponymous 1955 poem. The narrator contemplates the tragic, hollow and pointless life of his rented room’s previous inhabitant:

That how we live measures our own nature,

And at his age having no more to show

Than one hired box should make him pretty sure

He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Larkin, a Hull librarian, spent his career trying to capture the frustrations of the distinctly drab men of his era who, like himself, were suffering invisibly in their “attics-digs-lodging period” of life. (Amis 159).

Another significant lodger in the British mediocre man canon is Stanley Webber, from Harold Pinter’s 1958 play The Birthday Party (a work placed in the absurdist tradition). This thirty-something, former piano player, who lives in a run-down English seaside boarding house, was apparently inspired by a real-life lodger Pinter once met in a bed and breakfast. In answer to Pinter’s question: “Why do you stay here?” he replied: “There’s nowhere else to go is there.” This enigmatic comment sparked the inspiration for a play that, like so many of Pinter’s works, creates a powerful, yet never wholly defined or exposed sense of menace around banal, everyday  interactions. This is a world of lost, haunted protagonists, searching for a retreat from a threatening present.

Nobb’s Itinerant Lodger is lost in the sense he never finds a ‘vocation’ or ‘true’ purpose through work. He suffers a generalised angst and yearning “to discover the universal panacea.” (p60) Later 1970’s figures, like Reginald Perrin, are lost within the soul-less machinations of the labour market; the world of flowcharts and meetings on the sales targets of ‘Sunshine Desserts.’ Contemporary tragi-comic mediocrities however are flatsharers, rather than lonely lodgers, or respectable businessmen. They collude in an extended adolescence. Characters like the frumpy ‘desk monkey’ David Corrigan, from the Channel 4 sit-com Peepshow, or David Brent from The Office, also inhabit a more publicly shameful bachelordom than their hermit-like lodger predecessors. They seek solace away from their rented flats, in the compulsory organised fun of the work ‘do.’

Absurdism as a literary genre places protagonists in situations where they cannot find an inherent purpose, they are dogged by meaningless actions. Although there is not necessarily a nihilistic outlook, the bleak satirical force is in the incongruity, the collapse of reason. The irrationality exhibited is not a comic tic, but an exploration of human behaviour when it is directed to be purposeless. The circumstances range from a naturalistic, stifling conformity to a mechanical bureaucratic grotesque. There is deliberately no moral standpoint from which to judge the meaningless human spectacle. The more the tale ‘beggars belief’, the more penetrating the critical gaze on social ritual. At its best, absurdism exhibits what Doris Lessing found in Will Self’s short story collection Grey Area, and what I undoubtedly found in The Itinerant Lodger: “that unmistakable sign of the genuine comic writer: absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in – and wish we didn’t.”

References

(1) http://www.davidnobbs.com/blog.asp. First Three Books - 06/06/2011

(2) Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

(3)Marx, Karl 1971, Capital, Volume III, Moscow: Progress.

(4) Label for writers such as John Braine and John Osborne, and their new cynicism which, in the 1950’s and early 60’s, supposedly represented a form of rebellion against a petty and frustrating post-war Britain.

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October 29, 2011

Raise your Masts for the Masochistic Meta-rock of Wild Flag

Wild Flag by Wild Flag, Wichita Recordings, 2011

Wild Flag are comprised of members of previous bands you’ve most likely heard of if you’re bothering to read this. Why clog up the  introduction with obligatory rock CV’s or family trees? I would hope you’d read that with as much zeal as the warrantee leaflet for your new kettle. Needless to say the previous bands were great and you can hear elements of them all in Wild Flag’s debut. It will be paramount to discuss Sleater Kinney’s lyrical motifs and Carrie Brownstein’s vocal stylings however.

The flag of this all girl four piece is indeed wild, how can it anything but when it stakes the claim to the territory of romantic fate and the role of music in heightening it’s emotional potency? There are eight blistering songs – only two slight duds – really incredible hit rate that for a ten track album.

Opening gambit “Romance” is a stomping sonnett, thrusting rhetorical, joyful declarations to the love object in singular pronouns: “Hey, can you feel it?” Then there’s a clever, creepy power shift from “You’re all that I have,” to an all seeing, singing, dancing collective “we” in the chorus. These predators have “our eyes trained on you”  know “what we like” and it’s “Hands down.”

The album is one long masochistic courtship dance. Figures crawl, burn, shake and twitch with desire. The skipping heartbeat is Janet Weiss’s pummelling, thundering drumming. A startling counterpoint of gentle, juicy ‘la’, ‘la’ harmonies, ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ try to sooth away Carrie Brownstein’s hysterical exclamations. She does Patti Smith vowel sounds, but draws them out further, mangling them into uniquely beautiful, urgent, plaintive cries. The yearning anguish is all in the surprising metre, unexpected intonation and stretched assonance of  ”aroooound the flouure (floor)” or “arooound the roooom” (Boom).

I’m always happy for things to descend into a dry, technical poetry lecture. Just in case this is not your bag: I could also note how in the track “Boom” there are delightful little squalling guitar sketches tucked away, that emerge and evolve after repeating listening. There are pounding, military beats, woozy, swirling  Hammond organ climaxes and stadium echoey riff interludes, that are somehow danceable, on “Something Came Over Me“, for example.

Both Wild Flag and Sleater Kinney do a fantastic line in what I would call metarock; songs about songs, music about music. In Sleater Kinney this conceit was a metaphor for romantic union: “One Beat,”or a beckoning muse:  ”Words and Guitar.” Then they had the self-reflexive showbiz numbers: “Combat Rock,” “Entertain” and “Rock ‘n Roll Fun.” In Wild Flag this imagery evolves into a metaphysics of viseral sound worlds: the “Electric Band” is an “electric mind” “blowing in time.”  Or there are the corporeal images where: “Sound is the blood” (“Romance”) and the love object physically manifests: “coming through in stereo sound” (“Something Came Over Me”). There’s innocent, playful physicality too; a clean-cut, syrupy warmth, in truly catchy parting couplets like: “Run if you can, here comes the electric band!”

“Glass Tamborine” is the psych-nostalgic variant of their meta-rock symbolism. Oddly, we don’t hear a tamborine on it, just Janet’s pulverising  beat. Their extended instrument metaphor evokes fragility and a dark mysticism, an untrustworthy talisman that can be broken “on the scene.” This is no breezily optimistic percussion, like  The Lemon Pipers “Green Tamborine”, that “jingle jangle’s” “starts to shine, reflections of the music that is mine.”

Their most impressive command of sound nostalgia is Wild Flag’s deployment of guitar. The album is punctuated by a paradoxically disciplined use of ‘fried’ psychedelic flourishes. Rather than the usual bloated, lengthy cock rock signatures, they do a controlled squall version. The wig outs are melodic, miniature motifs. It’s reined in, kept in fun, poppy order by Janet’s thunderous time keeping.

“Endless Talk” is another reminder of Wild Flag’s bold lyrical register. They meld a classic romanticism with a Hey! Yeah! hectoring Ramones-ism. The backing vocals act as the taunting wind up here. We speed up, then slow down, in keeping with the power play of the loose-tongued, off hand spite of a lover’s tiff. This would seriously p*** you off on the dance floor.  But thinking on it, the tempo makes a crafty accidental symbol for the disorientating, passive aggressive dance of a lover’s quarrel.

“Future Crimes” sticks right out as the pulsating heart of the collection. This lusty fireball of a track, threatens to go “front to back”, promising the crime of producing a physical and spiritual limbo. Seductive, intimidating guitar lines soundtrack a libidinous wreckage of the blood and nerves. The singer vows to expose the love object if they are defeated, “crime” and “scream” are rhymed, you wouldn’t mess with them.

I’ll quickly brush over the two duds. “Short Version’s”  Sylvia Plath-y, Goth-y imagery never quite comes to life. The lines feel squeezed into the tune here, working at odds with it. The Devil/Witchey stuff is also too spelt out. There is however a cracking line, exhorting us to: “stop staring with your camera eye” “if you want to live”. I’m sure it wasn’t  meant to, but this puts me in mind of those twerps littering contemporary gigs, with phones suspended above the crowd. Presumably they prefer acquiring a shoddy record of something/an erstaz version to experiencing the first hand reality. Overall on “Short Version”, you don’t notice the music, so something’s gone wrong.

Then there’s the laboured “Racehorse”‘ song, a metaphor for the gamble of love. This fails at the starting post, breaking the fairly reliable rule of show don’t tell for strong storytelling. Insert various cliched betting puns here: I’m not backing this one/it’s an odds-on bet, the winnings are less than your stake in this track. This is the one album moment where the rock riffage is not reined in, doesn’t gallop off in an edgy Patti Smith “Horses” direction, just sustains a lame plod.

There’s a narrative neatness to “Black Tiles” as a parting shot. It pleads us to grab our chances in the face of mortality. It’s a final beg for us to submit to a mysterious “it” we mustn’t fight: “For all we know we’re just here for the length of this song.” It’s the most bouncy of their tracks. The “ooooo’s” chime along to the perky guitar snippets. “Black Tiles” uses a lyrical tic from Sleater Kinney, in the recurring commands to “look away” “Don’t look at me”. There is some Freudian digging to do here, but I don’t want my review to fall prey to the self-reflexive parting couplet: “For the length of the song. I never know when it’s done When it’s gone.”

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September 25, 2011

Enough of classics lite – the full fat version will do nicely

How inclusive and relativist art agendas are shrinking not just our books but our critical faculties

John Humprey’s last book, Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now(1), laments the contamination of our words with management speak and a loss of social formality. He cites the next to useless educational tool of condensed Shakespeare texts as prime evidence, but his analysis misses the real target in the dumbing down debacle.  ‘2b?Ntb?’ is a laughable attempt to make the Bard ‘street.’ But, it is the impoverished view of adult and child readerships and the retreat from moral and artistic value judgements that drive these depressing initiatives.

This private, cowardly retreat of establishment tastemakers is in curious contrast to the public scene. Book groups are flourishing in the pubs, lounges and libraries of Great Britain, with an attendant healthy appetite for canonical reading lists and top ten longevity polls. So why have publishers chosen now as the moment to spoon-feed us with a new series of butchered versions of the Western classics? Strange too that whilst art supplements are concerned on our behalf about ‘taxing’ lists and ‘arrogant’ declarations of masterpieces, people are consuming and ranking the ‘difficult’ stuff quite happily themselves.

Attitudes to real and imagined readerships have often provided interesting historical snapshots of crisis points for the cultural elite. The 1930’s mockery of the ‘middle-brow’ vulgarity of Boots’ lending libraries, and nineteenth century moral panics over a new hysterical, female readership of romantic fiction are interesting cases in point.

The current version of the ‘average’ reader and the crop of downsized doorstops exposes a spineless and uninspiring critical consensus that holds up its hands in defeat. The Enlightenment project of moral edification and intellectual enrichment through literature has been well and truly ditched. A recent lament on the state of the reading nation states this surrender emphatically, “Reading fiction is not a rationalistic act of enlightenment” and with relativistic glee adds, “ I abandoned reviews, critical consensus and the judgement of others long ago.” Contrast the contemporary scene with the bountiful age of nineteenth century literature, where: ‘print became indelibly linked in the public mind with progress.’ And ‘People seemed to be picking up beliefs from their reading like apples from a barrel.’ (1)

So is a ‘reader-friendly’ reworking of Tolstoy’s War and Peace simply another sigh of defeatism from the ivory tower chorus? On closer inspection, it’s worse than that. When cultural commentators shift their attention to the reading public, an ominous attitude surfaces, a vision of philistine hordes:

Professor Biggs sneers ‘someone’s taste for the “classics” can cover up no discernable individual or original taste of their own.’ This academic is ‘On a mission to enlighten the great zombie-read of Britain.’ (2) Hardly Gibbon’s Enlightenment declaration of faith in the mass audience: ‘I rejoice to concur with the common reader…The public is seldom wrong.’ (3)

The academics may have abandoned value judgements – just when a burgeoning fiction audience shows hunger for more. This inability to come up with the critical goods then, stems in part, from a dim view of the average consumer, ‘The guilty truth is’, according to one arts correspondent, ‘that imposing volumes of this size and significance tend to sit pristine on the bookshelf and are never read.’ (4) While we all may be guilty of the odd doorstop bulking out a designer shelf, the charges of cultural philistinism seem suspiciously disproportionate. Penguin after all are rebranding these cut and paste classics as ‘the most melodramatic of soap operas.’ What painfully apt blurb for our contemporary literati, that sees its audience as only fit for an epic narrative, when it’s been shrunken to the banal formula of thirty minute brain candy.

Not content with just paring things down, the chief translator of the new batch of lightweight classics is also intent on protecting us from a perceived sense of alienation and exclusion, induced by these challenging works. This hatchet job is apparently permissible if your editor or translator wears his everyman, inclusive credentials with pride.

‘When you read one of the older translations you feel as if you are being read to by the Queen or Lady Antonia Fraser…I am very different to previous translators…I am from a pragmatic, lower-class, Northern background, and I hope I have made it more readable for today.’ (5)

It’s not just the use of marketing’s new breed of absurd, vacuous non-plaudits like ‘readability’ (see also ‘watchable’ films and ‘drinkable’ wine), that’s offensive here, it’s the suggestion of our shrinking attention spans. New Labour’s dogmatic logic of accessibility has infected literary criticism. Publishers are priding themselves on the ‘fresh emphasis on accessibility and approachability’, or Professors bemoan ‘This corralling of literature is firmly to do with exclusion, with stemming and denying the vast… tide of world literature.’ In other words, to dare to put your neck on the line with some value judgements or agreements on some ‘greats’ should be abandoned, for an individualized, ideally multi-cultural, quest for ‘your’ classic.

Even when sales figures speak for themselves and hefty tomes stay high on the bestseller’s lists, such as Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Bloomsbury fears for an illusionary, untapped corner of the marker ‘out there who were put off by its size.’ So another epic gets the ‘approachability’ treatment. Optimistic observers have argued such editing is comparable to the Victorian serialization phenomena; the making of Dickens and his cliffhanging style. But there is a crucial difference between literary forms that evolved in response to a burgeoning magazine market, with all the rich modifications resulting from dialogues with your public, and a hatchet job on narratives that were designed, at their inception, to expand over four hundred plus pages.

But what do we lose from the original? Surely, the accessibility logic insists, any door that’s pushed open onto these ‘elitist’ and ‘intimidating’ tomes is a help? Not to the intricate art form of the novel. The most brutally ironic choice for editing in terms of its thematic resistance to streamlining is Proust’s six-volume modernist meditation on memory, In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s central motif, is time itself and how ‘every instant…is a pinprick of eternity.’ (6) A moment or fleeting thought will magically spin out into chapters and volumes of nostalgic reverie. A microscopic sense impression sparks a balletic, associative philosophical chain. Such a cavalier ‘downsizing’ approach to the imaginative subtleties in these works speaks volumes about the cultural establishment’s faith in their readership’s intellectual ambitions and abilities. Next for the chop includes Moby Dick, Clarissa, Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), Underworld (Don DeLillo), The Bible and A Brief History of Time (yes, even briefer). These reworkings show a telling disregard, not just of sales figures and future readers, but of the dazzling cultural legacy of the last two centuries.

(1) Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now. John Humphrys. Hodder & Stoughton. 2006

(2)Enlightenment – Britain and the Creation of the Modern World – Roy Porter, p94

Penguin. 2000

(3)The curse of the classics – Alan Warner. Sept 3, 2005, The Guardian

(4)Memoirs of My Life – Gibbon p162-162

(5)Why Hawking’s Brief History is about to get briefer. Vanessa Thorpe. Sept 11, 2005, The Observer

(6)The Golden Notebook – Marcus Aurelius

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September 12, 2011

The Sordid Cinema of Casual Suburban Sadism

What’s behind the one-dimensional abusive suburbia of the last decade of US independent movies?

As a casual consumer of American independent film, I’ve obviously taken to the cozy home cinema experience that the booming home mail DVD industry offers. Recently though, nights on the sofa have begun to feel decidedly more unsettling than this snug, modern setting would suggest. The fictional company stalking my small screen, appear, in the main, to be squalid, abusive predators. You might think I’ve just been picking too many formulaic horror flicks.

No, it’s simply that after a decade, and counting, of perusing hot new and established US directors, of indie dramas a serious quota of miserable, misanthropic, yet critically acclaimed independent films began to add up. Sordid, sexually predatory or preyed-upon teens and paedophiles were the baddie profiles of every other movie emerging from America’s art house circuit. So why are these cinematic ogres holding such a vice-like, sweaty grip on the contemporary indie director’s mind?

Paedophiles as sinister outsiders are obviously powerful, mythical figures for the cinematic imagination. The fairytale ogre of Fritz Laing’s M (1931) is the first notable version. The making of M, according to Anton Kaes, coincided with ‘the rapid disintegration of the political and social structures of the Weimar Republic.’ M , the original title of which was Morder unter uns (meaning either Murderers or Murderer among Us), captures the ominous atmosphere of Germany two years before Hitler’s rise to power, where ‘Lynch mobs and hit commandos engaged in open manhunts, intimidating political enemies and spreading terror among the population.’ (1)

So the symbolism of M; showing Berlin in the grip of terror, as an unknown psychopathic child molester and murderer is attacking little girls, functions as a powerful motif for deeper, broader social fears for directors like Lang. In M, the police produce no clues and neighbours begin to turn against, and inform on, each other. Significantly, it’s the serial killer who is the tragic victim because, according to Kim Newman, he ‘accuses all strata of society of a corruption deeper than his psychosis’ Lang achieves this by intercutting ‘the pathetic life of the murderer with the frenzy of the police investigation into the outrageous crimes, and pays attention to such side issues as press coverage of the killings’ (2)

Modern renditions of the paedophile morality tale, however, lack this ethical and metaphorical complexity. There is an amplified amoralism, where the only fearful questions American indies seem to pose are: who screwed you up? Or, why bother getting close to or trusting anyone? Where are the artistic voices (apart from Chris Morris  in that Brass Eye special) that accuse society of this deeper corruption of moral values, beyond the individual psychosis of the child molester?

Alienation and atomization make for poetic cinema; wistful glances into hostile urban streetscapes fill works like Lost in Translation or British films like Wonderland. But the visual elegies to contemporary city living are few and far between in recent American cinema; instead US directors are lured back, again and again, to a formulaic suburban morality tale, with flat, evil archetypes lurking in every scene. The story runs as follows: a lonely, hostile and sterile small town has its cosy and safe veneer shattered by casual and random acts of brutality, preferably in the form of a paedophile. Or: suburban  life is exposed as a breeding ground for a teenager’s depraved, pointless, brutal acts of sexuality, violence and hedonism.

A chronology of twenty, often critically acclaimed works of amoral art house (and some mainstream US films) over the past decade, demonstrates an appetite for variations within the genre, albeit with the same grim conclusions:

Kids (1995): Gang engages in meaningless sex, with whatever drugs or booze are available and the odd bit of mindless violence. Critics lament, ‘The tone is relentlessly sordid, the view of these pubescent hedonists so hermetic, that the film-makers ‘honesty’ seems exploitative and sensational. Sub-genre: amoral pre-teens.

Gummo (1997): Critics praise Harmony Korine’s ability to: ‘Grant physical form to childish ideas and emotions while simultaneously providing ironic distance.’ The child protagonists ‘lack moral compasses (the direct result of their poverty and a lack of parental supervision), and their definition of “interesting” is often lurid, sad and self-defeating.’ Levels of depravity in the ‘underclass’ household verge on the absurd, culminating in a director cameo as a drunk gay teenager, seducing an encephalitic black dwarf! Other highlights include ‘Idiotic and shockingly brutal incidents of teenaged criminality, pumped-up teenaged skinheads beat each other senseless. Retarded people’s difference is lingered on at great length.’ (3) Sub-genre: surreal suburbia/deeply amoral teens.

Happiness (1998): Humourous tone evaporates into one of despairing human sympathy, most noticeably for the paedophile father whose heart-to-hearts with his son come to form the film’s emotional backbone. Sub-genre: amoral teens/suburban family’s heart of darkness.

Bully (2001): Attempts to lay bare the emptiness of the character’s lives in a fashionably nihilistic, stern fashion. Director Larry Clark is fascinated by the bodies of his protagonists. Described by some as simultaneously ‘more than an old man’s wet dream’ yet a ‘relentlessly voyeuristic affair.’ Sub-genre: amoral teens.

The Pledge (2001): Nicholson is a cop who is dragged out of retirement by the news of the horrendous killing of an eight-year old girl. Sub-genre:Retired cop/serial killer/paedophile victim’s revenge. Demonstrates the subject can translate to the big screen, when blended with the long-running serial killer or mid-life crisis genre (see also The Woodsmen and The Weatherman).

Roger Dodger (2003): Roger, a man who believes he’s God’s gift to women, finds his nephew on his doorstep looking for lessons in how to lose his virginity. Roger resorts to prostitution and misogynistic rants after too many failed drunken seductions. Sub-genre: sexual corruption of ‘pure’ teen.

Mystic River (2003):Years after one of them was abducted and abused, three former friends (Tim Robbins, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon), from the predominantly working-class Irish neighbourhood of South Boston, find themselves caught up in an arena of distrust, hatred and betrayal after the murder of Penn’s teenage daughter. Sub-genre: past paedophile victim’s revenge on the next generation of paedophiles.

The Woodsmen (2004): After being imprisoned for twelve years, Walter takes a job at a local lumberyard, but is determined to keep his criminal past behind him. Walter is put to the test when he encounters a young girl in a park. Sub-genre: paedophile on parole thriller.

Palindromes (2004): A metamorphasising pre-teen’s desperation to have a child. She randomly meets a paedophile truck driver, has a sexual encounter with him and falls desperately in love. The predator turns out to be involved in a network of sinister, evangelical Christian children’s homes. Sub-genre: surreal suburbia/surrogate family’s heart of darkness.

Capturing the Friedmans (2004): One of the few to provide some ambiguity and raise interesting questions about the role of media hysteria in paedophile panics, like M in this respect. A seemingly typical, upper-middle-class Jewish family whose world is instantly transformed when the father and his youngest son are charged with shocking crimes. Sub-genre: documentary/suburban family’s heart of darkness.

Mysterious Skin (2005): Brian believes his blackouts are the result of alien abductions. As his memories become increasingly vivid, he’s convinced that Neil, the star player on his childhood Little League team, knows the truth. The boys were sexually abused by their League coach and Neil fills his emotional void with ‘servicing’ seedy older men. Sub-genre: amoral teens/suburbia’s heart of darkness.

Tarnation (2005): Raised by a schizophrenic mother and abusive foster parents in and around Houston, Texas, Jonathan Caouette escaped from his bleak surroundings by obsessively documenting himself in a stockpile of videotapes that appeared to have no certain purpose. Sub-genre: ‘reality’ documentary/confessional autobiography of amoral teen.

Transamerica (2005): ‘An emotional portrait of a highly dysfunctional family’. (3) A male-to-female transsexual is readying herself for the final snip. Bree’s life takes a sudden turn when she receives a phone call from her son, a gay hustler and aspiring porn star who has been jailed. The son is confronted with his stepdad and reveals that this man sexually abused him.

The Weatherman (2005): Nicolas Cage plays a wealthy bachelor in a post mid-life, suburban crisis. He feels he has failed as a husband and father. His 12-year-old daughter, Shelly is more glum than him and wears clothes too small for her age and size. His 15-year-old son, Mike is in drug rehab and about to be seduced by one of his male counselors.

Me And You And Everyone We Know (2006): Contains ‘contentious’ scenes where Robby, a six-year old in an internet chatroom, describes his fantasy of ‘pooping back and forth’, he is having a risqué Internet romance with a middle-aged stranger. Sub-genre: surreal suburbia/amoral pre-teens.

Hard Candy (2006): A lecherous photographer hooks up with a willing teenager he’s befriended online. A gory ‘feminist’ update of Little Red Riding Hood, where the big bad wolf gets his comeuppance. Sub-genre: sinister suburbia.

Thumbsucker (2006): Oregon family try to wean their troubled teen Justin off his thumb. A tough, emotionally stunted father and distant rehab nurse mother are of little use. Romantic teen betrayal comes in the form of marijuana addicted Rebecca who uses and disposes of Justin as her blindfolded sex toy. Sub-genre: surreal suburbia/amoral teens.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006): A mum and breadwinner of a dysfunctional family has just inherited her suicidal, gay brother on top of already having her sex mad, coke snorting father-in-law to contend with. Her teenage son has been inspired to take a vow of silence by Nietzsche and her youngest, geeky Olive, is the precocious young beauty queen of the title. She performs squeamishly adult routines for grotesque, Lolita-esque pageants. Sub-genre: surreal, charmingly dysfunctional suburbia.

Little Children (2005): Two suburban 30-somethings have early midlife crises brought on by breakdowns and infidelity. The situation worsens when a child molester moves into the neighborhood.

SherryBaby (2006): Sherry Swanson, ex con alcoholic and drug addict tries to keep custody of her young daughter. She succumbs to her addictions again in her battle with life on the outside and we discover an incestuous abusive relationship with her father lays behind her torment.

So how has the timeless predator archetype lost his social narrative scope? Looking at the richer legacy of suburban portrayals in British film/theatre and American fiction is instructive. According to the sociologist M.P. Baumgartner “Some people might find in the moral order of the suburbs a highly civilized pattern of life, while others might react to it as cold, repressed, or even cowardly.” (p13) Many have defended the British film director and playwright Mike Leigh against accusations of banality and a myopic focus on minor domestic incident in his suburban dramas. They have suggested that the supposedly ‘narrow’ band of working-class and lower middle-class society that he portrays actually includes “most people in this country” (Clements 59). Leigh’s characters tend to live modestly in suburban areas on new estates and endure a largely unspectacular existence. In this sense American ‘Dirty Realist’8 writers, such as Raymond Carver, or British playwrights and film-makers like Leigh, can heroically claim to represent the small disturbances that secretly shape the fabric of ‘regular’ peoples’ existence. You could add; the thwarted ambitions of characters like Lawrence and Tony from Abigail’s Party are by no means small disturbances or themes.

Suburbia, as presented in 1990’s American fiction in particular, offers no retreat from the tragic dejection of modern office life. Works such as Stephen Amidon’s Subdivision (1991) portray a self-contained, suffocating small town America, bubbling under with the boredom and contempt of middle-ranking executives and their families.

Such portrayals have a longer history too. A.N. Home’s novel Music for Torching (1999), alongside John Cheever’s Bullet Park (1969), Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) and Michael Haneke’s (1989) film The Seventh Continent, all constitute what I would describe as ‘suburban year zero’ stories. This is a macabre brand of almost exclusively American suburban fiction, where characters attempt to nihilistically eradicate all the trappingsof their bourgeois existence, either literally in a house fire in Music for Torching, an orgy of destruction and suicide in films like The Seventh Continent (1989) or The Edukators (2004), or with releasing their lethal ids in Something Happened and Bullet Park. Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! (2004) uses this style of nihilism in ‘faction’ set in suburban Vancouver, that draws from the Columbine High School shootings of 1999 for its bleak inspiration.

Music for Torching is the ‘suburban year zero’ novel for the 1990’s. At the time of its release it was lauded by critics for challenging “the facades of mundane and contemporary existence” and the mania of its protaganists was described as a “surreal study of suburban malaise.” (New Orleans Times, Picayunre). Some even felt Homes, in the darkness of her portrayal, broke from a “genteel tradition of suburban fiction – Cheever, Updike.” (Newsweek) But these novels represent a powerful, acutely observed portrayal of the implosion of a nuclear family unit.

In new American films however, under the guise of avant-garde aims like ‘impressionist sociological collage’ or serious journeys into a ‘modern purgatory’ (4), modern directors perceive their suburban predator oeuvre as gritty realism, or part of a brave project to expose social taboos. Miranda July claims for Me and You, for example, she ‘wanted to make it clear that this sexuality is his and he’s six’ (5). Gus Van Sant on Gummo is equally emboldened: ‘There are anti-influences like MTV, movie censorship, blockbuster movies, middle-class life.’ (6)

Yet is this emerging field the radical or liberated one its practitioners suggest, when it reinforces a consciousness of vulnerability and powerlessness so prevalent and restraining today? This cinema uses a casually sadistic and conformist artistic shorthand, a lazy stab at gritty ‘authenticity.’ It is an artistic sensibility that feeds off the rotten carcass of a deep distrust of others and little else.

If the philosophy of successful underground film-makers like Stephen Dwoskin is anything to go by, we should be concerned, ‘Cinema became the agent through which I explored a way to establish my own sense of humanity, and, of course, to find a voice to speak to others…my kind of film…has to look so far to be able to see not only the beautiful, but the terrible and apparently repulsive things, because those things that exist and are in common with all other beings, have value.’ (7) The darker aspects of the human psyche and society are absolutely part and parcel of strong, rounded storytelling. But US cinema’s obsessive recreations of abusive relationships, in particular has a uniquely contemporary, empty bleakness.

Ugly aesthetics are often presented as a valiant attempt to show life warts and all. Yet this doesn’t explain modern films contented wallow in the casual imagery of depravity, or its directional seep into general drama, from the horror tradition. For an answer we have to look to broader historical and political trends. In many ways this is a cinematic realization of a trend sociologist Frank Furedi articulated in Politics of Fear: ‘a morose fascination with human evil – the paedophile, the serial killer, the terrorist- threatens to overwhelm our capacity to imagine an individual’s potential for altruism, heroism or simply doing good.’ (8)

It is also the nature of contemporary America itself that provides such fertile territory for the cinema of suburban beasts. Recent reports of an American ‘predator panic’ depict ‘lawmakers and near-daily news reports, [suggesting that] sexual predators lurk everywhere: in parks, at schools, in the malls—even in children’s bedrooms, through the Internet. A few rare (but high-profile) incidents have spawned an unprecedented deluge of new laws enacted in response to the public’s fear.’(9) So these films symbolise a very real, perceived sense of risk.

Partly through the dictates of geography, the USA has also always been more individuated than Britain, particularly in the rural areas and the Midwest. Politically America’s economy has been successful in integrating different layers of people, whilst still being far more atomized society. The end of the Cold War robbed America of its certainty and confidence. In their ‘Culture Wars’ not only have institutions such as the family and religion come under scathing criticism, but ‘American’s traditional sense of robust individualism has been replaced with a mood of profound pessimism and despair.’ (10) So desperate and irrational characters stalk their small screens, casting their spells of futility and panic.

In unique ways America leads the way in Western self-loathing. As the leading hegemonic power, it projects these ideas faster and with greater impact than other countries like Britain or France. Despite a top layer of defiant, engaging and uplifting works of American fiction and drama above ground, the rot in the film underground does seem to be spreading. The reels of the big, and particularly little screen, are stuck on a disturbing loop, endlessly projecting misanthropic fantasies, framing a revolting shot of our closest human interactions as perverse, futile and incomprehensible. After this decade of sordid cinema, American directors need to recognize and move away from these seedy narrative clichés. A start might be to revisit their life-enhancing and embracing new-wave forefathers for some sorely required imagination and inspiration.

(1)   M. Anton Kaes, 2000. BFI Books

(2)   1001 Movies you must see before you die. Edit: Steven Jay Schneider, 2003. Quintet Publishing

(3)   http://www.lovefilm.com/view

(4)   Review – Gummo, Matt Seitz. Originally publ: New York Press

http://www.finelinefeatures.com/gummo/review02.htm

(5)   Hotter than July. Sanjiv Bhattacharya, The Observer, August 7, 2005

(6)    Forward. Gus Van Sant. http://www.finelinefeatures.com/gummo/about.html

(7)   Reflections: The Self, the World and Others, and How All These Things Melt Together in Film. Stephen Dwoskin, 2004, Rouge

(8)   The Politics of Fear – Beyond Left and Right. Frank Furedi, 2005, Continuum.

(9) Predator Panic: A Closer Look. Benjamin Radford. Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. Sept 2006

(10) Postmodernism: a conservative and nihilistic fashion? Neil Davenport, 2005

8 Term created by Bill Bulford, editor of Granta Magazine to describe a gritty aesthetic of mundane, blue-collar life in small-town, mainly mid- western America.

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September 4, 2011

Why the baby boomers have bombed

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/2774/

From: Michael Bywater [mailto:michael.bywater@gmail.com]
Sent: Thu 1/25/2007 1:58 AM
To: Spiked letters
Subject: letter: responding to Why the baby boomers have bombed by Anna Travis

country  UK
An interesting review and I think I agree with most of it. It’s a difficult
topic and to do more than take a single slice of it would require more words
than any publisher would publish. As always, I suspect, one would take a
different line given a second bite at the cherry; but — again, as always –
it’s good to have a well-argued and combative critique. (Mind you, I don’t
like being called “ultimately immature” but Ms Travis has probably got me
bang to rights on that, too. Performative texts and so forth… oh dear. Mea
culpa.)

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August 10, 2011

Stoking and indulging temper tantrums – UK youth disorder

A collection of what I have found to be the most insightful comments so far from UK press/blogs and Facebook conversation on UK youth disorder.

 Stoking and indulging temper tantrums

 Dennis Hayes

Listen to the ‘rioter’s voice’ – “We’re trashing things because you don’t treat us with respect” – smashing things in a temper tantrum because you don’t get enough therapeutic attention! It’s ‘rioting’ but not as we know it, Jim!

Guy Herbert And in this dialect “respect” actually means fawning submission. I think they are busy earning not the respect, but the contempt of people who previously did them the comparative honour of not thinking about them at all.

 Justin Kilcullen-Nichols It’s the logical conclusion to years of pandering and appeasement in school. Same reaction they used back in school applied to the real world.

Guy Herbert Not just appeasement but encouragement of self-esteem….What we need to return to is adults to accept a default position of trust in other adults rather than distrust to bolster authority.

 Education

 Guy Herbert Maybe if education was seen (outside the upper classes) as a status item that you have to pay for, then in London they’d want it enough to steal it.

No wonder these kids think stealing trainers is OK. Everyone makes excuses for them The Telegraph Katharine Birbalsingh

Many of these mindless thugs involved in the riots don’t think more than 10 minutes into the future. They think that stealing trainers is ‘fun’, not even considering that it might be wrong. Many of them are, quite literally, unable to read and write: 17 percent of 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate.
If you de-educate an entire generation. If you constantly make excuses for their behaviour, if you never teach them the difference between right and wrong, then chaos is what you reap.
 Nirpal Dhaliwal

In Delhi I see shoeless kids doing homework under street lamps because there’s no electricity at home. In London they liaise via Blackberry to loot sportswear. And people wonder why Asia is overtaking the West…

 Anna Travis
 Listening to a little thug today, who was leapt upon as a voice of the ‘yooth’ by a BBC reporter, he whined along the lines of: “we are doing it cos we ain’t being listened to innit”. It makes me think we need crack teams of English teachers to get these degenerates to try and string a sentence together. This is the first phase in dragging them off their arses and giving them a ‘stake’ in society. The only suggestion you ever get for youth club/youth engagement projects is to train them to be DJs, indulging their ‘own interests’, which are, in the main, half-formed vain nonsense and being a ‘real’ musician or DJ.
 Race and public sector

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/five-quick-points-about-the-riots/#more-2624
The riots are not about race.  Many on the left have seen them as a response to racist policing. Many on the right have been pouring out racist bile against ‘immigrants’. In fact race has played little role in the violence. This is not to deny that young black men continue to be the primary target of police stop and search (an issue that has been shamefully ignored in recent years). Nor is it to deny that there is a legacy of bitterness about, and resentment of, police tactics in many inner city communities.  But the riots were not in any way defined by racial divisions, antagonisms or resentments.

The polarisation between the claim that ‘the riots are a response to unemployment and wasted lives’ and the insistence ‘the violence constitutes mere criminality’ makes little sense. There is clearly more to the riots than simple random hooliganism. But that does not mean that the riots, as many have claimed, are protests against disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives. In fact, it’s precisely because of disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives that these are not ‘protests’ in any meaningful sense, but a mixture of incoherent rage, gang thuggery and teenage mayhem.  Disengaged not just from the political process (largely because politicians, especially those on the left, have disengaged from them), but also from a sense of the community or the collective, there is a generation (in fact more than a generation) with no focus for their anger and resentment, no sense that they can change society and no reason to feel responsible for the consequences of their actions. That is very different from suggesting that the riots were caused by, a response to, or a protest against, unemployment, austerity and the cuts.

Brendan O’Neil London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10970/

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.

The End of Adult Authority: Some Observations. Anna Travis (a thinkpeice produced  for a Brighton Salon discussion in June) http://www.annatravis.co.uk/?p=204

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August 5, 2011

Why don’t American youth take on ‘the man’?

Here’s the rub with Bruce E. Levine’s 8 causes of American youth’s a-political passivity.(http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don’t_fight_back:_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance)

 1) Student loan debt: Yes, free or cheaper education by all means, but let’s not forget the other more insidious cultures of fear, such as the perpetual health panics (trans fat hysteria in New York/ “epidemic of childhood obesity depression” – claimed in point 8 ) this goes unchallenged and is also inhibiting.

 2) Medicalising/psychopathologising defiance does factor in subduing a populace. However, Mr Levine is a clinical psychologist, so it may not have been in his interests to take this on more broadly. I would argue it is the huge expansion of behaviours deemed pathological that is part of the rot of therapy culture generally, rather than ‘rebellious’ behaviours that are medicalised in particular.

 The therapeutic turn is so absolute that the wanton prescription of Ritalin for ADHD and so on, is a minor worry.  What is truly paralysing for the ‘youth’ is a victim culture and narcissism that results from a retreat from social or political narratives into psychologised explanations for everything. What aspirations are offered up to fight for in an adult culture where emotional incontinence is valued above all else and authenticity or charisma is equated with emotional damage? This is not an easy swipe at Oprah Winfreycation either. The ‘healthy’ psychological script is what informs, pacifies and deadens any righteous anger or sense of rebellion from the get go.

 Anti-Vietnam or Civil Rights protests were enriched and empowered by university comrades to whom the ‘I am offended therefore I am’ puritans would be an anathema. ‘Hate speech’ codes and the confusion of speech and action, the refusal even to hear opposing views on campus stifles debate and therefore meaningful protest. (Some groups are interested in tackling this trend: http://thefire.org/)

 3, 4 & 5: Schooling: Agreed on the hijacking of the education system for instrumentalist political aims and the deadening production line of teaching to test. But rather than “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” I would say “ schools don’t really teach anything except fashionable government policy on the correct healthy lifestyle, therapeutic or environmentalist thinking, how to play in a rock group,  or other ‘well being’ policy fads, in fact anything other than reading, writing, arithmetic, basic science or history – (at least in the UK anyway). The parallels of US and UK educational beaurocratic/ideological rot were powerfully drawn out in The Wire I thought.

 6. The Normalization of Surveillance. Agreed. Also agreed that this is far more than state v the little man here. We have internalised this state fear, which now manifests in private sphere/intergenerational suspicion. I know of mothers who were going to secretly video their nannies ‘just in case’ for heavens sake.                                       

 7 Essentially ‘TV is bad’ & 8 ‘Fundamentalist consumerism.’ The most sketchy and troubling of all the points. Nowhere within the clumsy, unsubstantiated ‘audiences effects theory’ discussion (that point number 7 draws on) is there an acknowledgment that you can be a discerning, active, thinking TV viewer. This sounds like a 1960’s hippy bleat about fighting ‘the man.’ 8 “Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.” The red herring of the advertising/corporate bogeyman, detracts from the true sources of self-absorption (see point 2). The commodities themselves and the desire for them do not spiritually corrupt and I’ve yet to hear a convincing case for the creation of false desires thesis. The exploitative companies fallacy (anthropomorphising a companies banal, mechanistic profitising motion as a evil drive to play on people’s frailties) is surely the flipside of the ethical consumer fallacy (that the shopper can short cut/circumvent the international dynamics of capital/power balance of third world/first world countries by buying fair trade)?

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July 12, 2011

Aesthetics verses Athletics

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July 6, 2011

Felt Letters – bait for the new archive predators

 

You won’t of heard of them. No really. See I’ve got your backs up already. I’m the sixth-former in the ‘I’ve heard of bands who haven’t even formed yet t-shirt.’ If they are under your radar it’s because Felt Letters have You-Tube DNA. Since 2010 they have been quietly popping gifts into the virtual realm, in a series of hermetically sealed ‘singles’ posing as archival propositions. There has been one concrete, tangible 45 artefact, the debut metarock single 600,000 Bands (M’Lady’s Records, 2009).  Since then, all we’ve have to go on are those small squares with the magic triangle in the corner, that we trade in now. Some modest photographic stills from a vinyl junkie’s vaults are offered up usually as a visual accompliment. Each single is on a different label, many of which are symbolically fake. Felt Letters set you off on wikipedia trails, as the head of an ever diminishing pack or tribe of musical affiliation. You end up the ‘Lone Wolf’ of their debut single, one hollow click making you the ‘1’ of the ‘1 view’ on the bottom right of the screen within a screen.

 Ian Svenonius, the Felt Letters vocalist, has always excelled at a distinctive brand of semiotic shape shifting. This is now coming in very handy with this artistic moment to explore the everything-everywhere-all-the-time-portal that is shrinking and expanding the musical universe. In Felt Letters Ian Svenonius, Tom Bonnell and Brendan Canty are reversing the artist/fan transaction, the usual riot of visual signifiers have been frozen into these modest stills, beloved of band enthusiasts. The singles are offered up into the internet ether, that now overwhelming huge public music library, by this band based in Washington DC. Apparently Felt Letters go in for improvisation too, a nice juxtaposition to the frozen in time/You-Tube medium.  The name is perhaps a nod to tactile experiences that cannot be digitalized and the virtually dead epistolary universe.

 ‘Where do you get time to listen to all that lot?’ This is no longer a frumpy Dad-ism aimed at the music collector but the pressing question of this epoch’s mode of musical production. There are ‘fun’ and frivolous workplaces where, as I understand it, you can listen to music while you work (good god. No wonder Britain produces nothing)! But most of us squeeze our listening into commutes or other frantic pockets of leisure time. I’m pessimistic in a different way to David Keenan (in July’s Wire magazine), about the wiki-blog-download-a-sphere. I don’t think it encourages simply a “superficial engagement with culture” as much as a disoriented, atomised and frustrated one where the distracting depth is actually the problem. This is because the internet’s lure of knowledge acquisition, sets you off on tangental archival and encyclopedic trails which, before you know it, have sent you, your twitchy fingers and a whole evening into the clutches of a labyrinthe time- vampire. The sheer volume of material to navigate does actually in part mitigate against the democratic possibilities of punter/fandom shaping criticism. Only professional critics can buy the work/leisure time to get the new historical overview. (1). Nevertheless, if you stick to your instincts and thematic thread, you can now effortlessly mine a rich, deep and new cultural source of your own.

 But meanwhile there are the endless side projects to get through! How one is supposed to pick out all the shards of groups splintering off left right and centre, I’ll never know. It creates an itchy, pseudonymic rash, caused by a musician’s allergy to appear only consumate at one genre. This increasingly incestuous family tree of band members relentlessly co-collaborating has a cowardly feel too, hedging bets on another project.

Maybe I need to cheer up and keep up! This is no doubt yet more early digital epoch brow-beating, that will sort itself out once we’ve had some time to wade through and whittle down the offerings. For the time being, some recommend “re-engagement with the expressive possibilities of presentation, a new emphasis on mystery and difficulty.” (2) So, in the spirit of bucking context-lite trends (3) and re-fetishising the commodity that is a single, I will remark on each of Felt Letters 45’s in isolation and with disproportionate, Northrop Frye style intensity. They are dealt with in no particular order, as befits the lateral nature of their discovery. If these tunes are ever collated on an album, thus rudely spoiling my whole on-line singles satire construct, the one aural thread you’ll find is a pulsating paranoia and feverish intensity. Listen on!

 6000,000 Bands (debut single A-side) (Dystopian archetype) 600,000 bands

 Rumbling and thundering menace drums, cop thriller guitar, nailing that claustrophobic, famous-for-15-people feeling of the modern music fan. Spectral drum-machine tap echoes atomised mouse-clickers everywhere. Svenonius deploys his trademark affected, blasé dialogue to great effect here. This is the soundtrack to Part One, Chapter 2: “Total Recall” from Simon Reynold’s Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Faber and Faber (2011).

 Lone Wolf –No Club (debut single B-side) (Predator archetype)Lone Wolf

 In this lysergic lycanthropy territory it’s going to be hard to beat these two fellas:

But this sparse, gothic pulse of a number does evoke a predatory Ayn Rand type figure howling “individualistically.” You then root for them, in their 50’s teen invincibility: “No colour on my back, I’m in no club.” Then it goes all Harry Haller “the others try to challenge me, they found me deadly.” As in Steppenwolf, the tragedy of the protaganist lies not in his deadly surrender to conventional existence, but in his perceived, overly unique nature. This sets him outside of the world, cast out into lonely introspection and detached observation. From either side of this spiritual divide, both conventional and exceptional types appear miraculous and mysterious to the other.

Gonna Break Out (Predator archetype)  Gonna Break Out

The wolfish revenge suggested in this brooding narrative seems more a comradely call to arms for people who have been seen to “bow down their entire life.” The punitive motif deployed most wholeheartedly, in Svenonius and Canty’s previous outfit Chain in the Gang, resurfaces here in a strangely exhilarating manner. The teenism of the “Gonna do exactly what we want to. Yeah!” chorus puts one in mind of the mischievous simplicity of say Been Caught Stealing by Jane’s Addiction. A falsetto fragility/hysteria creeps in, ending on a fox wail of rebellion. No where near a real fox howl though, that is one ungodly noise, especially at 2am…

 Who U Lookin’ At (Like That)? (Hunted archetype)

Who U Lookin’ At (Like That)

The strangulated vocal hits its most distorted form here. An anti-auto tune singing disguise. The keyboards make this track. This is appropriate for a tale of dancefloor paranoia/courtship rituals: “How can you resist?” Plinky plonky, beautifully cheap Hong Kong Garden keyboards, evolve into a melodic and mournful wheezey organ.

 Civil Right – (Hunted archetype) Civil Right

We’ve got some familiar chic signifiers – a Godard/Anna Karina still. The protaganist vacilates throughout between disposessed/downtrodden mode: being “pushed out of the way” and “oppressed from the left and the right” to a defiant voice full of grumpy entitlement “you can all go and take a hike!” Don’t really notice the sound on this one (maybe because of the distraction of the painfully chic, pop-art-political photographic still on screen)

 2440 Lakeshore Reservoir Rd – (Utopian and Dystopian party archetype)

2440 Lakeshore Reservoir

Little Red Riding Hood ventures to an escapist, secret address. Sent by “The Colonel” there’s a code to get in. The unseen room and forbidden doorway fairytale motifs are a delight: “knock three times on the door” “you shouldn’t go.” This is extremely catchy and made more so by the warm gospel organ and perky drums. Fantastic use of enjambment in the chorus.

 Island Life (Utopian archetype) Island Life

Tremendously evocative, especially with the Arab Spring associations of the still. A percussive typewriter’s tap and warm dancey keyboard washes. Makes one think of Rave’s occasional pastoral utopianism, like Future Sound of London’s Papua New Guinea. Yet the calypso beat becomes distorted and a wobbly voice of desperation sells the dream a little too hard. This adds to the intrigue of this bacchanalian paradise of sensual unity however. Club Tropicana goes sinister.

 Gonna Get Serious (tragi-comic archetype) gonna get serious

Circular promise to finally be ‘real’. Apologies for doing “a lot of foolin’ around until now.” Catchy guitar and pulsating bass is great, but it’s as if this can only realise its full conceptual power performed live, where we would witness and judge the new purported seriousness.

 More Discriminating  more discriminating

This feels a bit throw away (or am I just getting more discriminating as this review goes on and on)!? Jaded with the trappings of going out, the protaganist wonders: “is it the scene or is it just my age?” “Rather read a book” I’m getting (totally self-inflicted) review fatigue, such that this single is having the inverse effect – I need to get out more!

 (Let’s All Dream A) Mystifying Dream – (Utopian archetype)(Let’s All Dream A) Mystifying Dream

Moving into more feline wailing territory on this Jungian, mass-mind experiment. Possibly a Marshall McCluhan esque attempt to harness the power of the collective unconscious of Felt Letters fans. Year zero again: “forget any pre-conceptions.” Dizzying psychedelic motifs of “eyes behind the door” and spooky numerology/pentagram wizardry. Possibly not an antidote to the audience’s individuated music listening experience, but I admire the audacity of the attempt. Let’s not knock it till we’ve tried it folks!

WARNING: Extra, intense bit for the philosophically inclined

 Call me a nostalgic old twat, but I for one am still reeling from the demise of that musical barometer Top of the Pops!

I fear this whole musical glut and cultural memory disorientation business is ultimately down to our squeamishness towards shared belief systems or a gathering of like minds. (Try not to let the DJ headlock distract you here)..We distrust the notion of human agency and therefore social transformation. In turn we lack a future orientation. This is partly down to the triumph of therapy culture,  which elevates emotion over reason, instinctive feeling over conscious thought. The other culprit is the intellectual allure of The Frankfurt School’s typecasting of enlightenment principles as the “regression” of reason, or a hyper-rational prelude to Fascistic thought. I will now skulk off back to the cyber-woods and implode with obscurity and self-importance.

 REFERENCES/Footnotes

600,000 Bands, Felt Letter’s only single- availabile while physical vinyl stock commodities last from: http://www.mladysrecords.com

 (1) As the impostume articulated so well recently: “There’s so much to contend with musically, so many scenes, artists and micro-genres that flare up sputter out and die, so much momentum both forward, backward and laterally that trying to be a reasonably conscientious listener circa the 00’s has been almost impossible. A full time job, which if it is your full-time job is just about manageable I imagine, but if you’re a mere punter, especially one for whom music is but one of your abiding obsessions, it’s almost impossible to absorb the sheer hyper-abundance of music new and old that’s regularly laid at your doorstep/ stumbled upon.” http://theimpostume.blogspot.com/

(2) The Wire – July 2011. Collateral Damage, David Keenan, p18

 (3)“people have listened to a hell of a lot, but thinly. They’ve skimmed through it, they’ve listened fast ..There is a huge accumulation of music to process, not just the canonical rock and soul and reggae greats, but all kinds of underground stuff that has a bigger reputation nowadays than it did at the time. And all the genres of non-Anglophone popular music that are being retroactively discovered, the West African and Ethiopian funk and guitar pop, Latin American psychedelia, etc etc… is now considered part of the basic curriculum for your discerning music fan!”

 “another problem is the distortions that affect history, partly through the way the web is structured, but also through fashion and trends in hipster taste. So for instance, you can find out a hell of a lot about a particular band, follow their trajectory right through rock history. But it’s much harder to recreate their context … It’s impossible to really understand glam rock, for instance, without a sense of just how drab and lacking style most of the other groups were at the time, how grey and dreary music papers looked in those pre-design days. Another distortion is the way that there is an industry of rediscovering obscure artists that means that for a lot of hipsters, they know about some fantastically obscure folk singer like Vashti Bunyan, but they don’t know about major figures.” 

Simon Reynolds. Half Baked. Blog. http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/2011/03/interview-from-2010-with-latin-american.html#links

(have yet to work out if this trend is necessarily worrying – AT)

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June 29, 2011

The Great Sanitising of Public House Philosophy Scandal.

A review of: Renegade The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith - (3 years too late)

Just polished off Mark E Smith’s autobiography in two glorious evenings. What an inspirational figure! The last time I was as preoccupied by some art was after glutting on The Wire. Advice to take on board: keep away from the aristocratic artist caste and their caricatures of the straight world of desk-monkeys. Avoid self-pity at all costs. A Protestant work ethic is transforming and instructive, particularly when you note who doesn’t live by one and why. Keep on distrusting liberal guff. Read more. Beware the cultural turn towards tittle tattle.

The Fall‘s legacy makes clear what I have long suspected, and written about at length (in Mediocre Man: The Lost Archetype of the 19th to the 21st Century – if I haven’t plugged it to you already), the richest artistic source is in the ordinary surreal; right under your noses. Reading Renegade makes me want to  give Smith’s poetic/musical/comedic legacy his due in my book, analysing him alongside figures such as N.F Simpson, Kafka, Gilbert and George, Frank Sidebottom and Kraftwerk. They all enhabit the absurdist genre in unique ways, all portraying the extraordinary or impossible as rational everyday events. Smith is an inversion of the archetype (perfect name for the role too). He’s driven not by the usual fear of mediocrity but a steadfast belief in his creative instincts. This also means he turns the mediocre man/bohemian opposition on its head. He becomes the beligerant, effortlessly artful everyman, calling the bohemian’s bluff through his beautifully startling loudhailer vocal.

 Smith’s book is peppered with juicy anthropological observations. A gem is his depiction of something that’s always disturbed and tickled me: that oft retired suburban man over-engineering domestic tasks, repainting perfectly painted doors etc. An old neighbour in Chorlton, Manchester would park, repark and repark his car ’just so’ and I still see such tics in my new neighbourhood. 

But Smith isn’t just sneering at the middle-classes (unless they’re musicians). Nor is he lording up the working-class, he knows a lumpen prole when he sees one . In fact one of his artistic epihanies, if you like, or certainly recurring internal conflicts, is over the early, disciplined life of aspirant clerkdom he could have embraced, verses the knee-jerk anti-materialist image of the corner of showbusiness he ended up in. The didactic tone of Renegade is timeless and universal. The sage-like musings on human weaknesses: loyalty, vanity, jealousy are at once both prosaic and profound; a pub grumble and yet a living soap-box in The Fall’s flux/stasis. Smith’s artistic statement is an anachronistic marvel, a defiantly decluttered, self-sacrifical existence for his band management enterprise.

This brings us to the other pertinent lessons of Renegade. Power/class relations are forever embedded in territory that becomes invisible, once acquiring common sense status. Smith is spot on for example, about various smug tribes within the music buisness and the sham construct of independence, within it’s self-consciously haphazard and romantic, cottage industry structure.  Mark’s stamina/work ethic is also impressive and refreshing. Regarding food, he starves for his art literally to fund projects and the whole hand-to-mouth thing is simply a stoical, darn nuisance, rather than a shabby genteel affectation, like the scruffy musician personas he detests.

You appreciate the totality of Smith’s literary mode of expression in the stunning prose poem chapters and his closing thoughts on Orson Welle’s storytelling compulsion and ‘finely honed’ narrative eye. I think he’s right that the casual Burroughs ‘cut ups’ comparision is misplaced. I would put both his lyrics and these chapters within an Imagist poetic tradition, or alongside modernist urban dystopians, such as T.S.Elliot. Either way, the results of Smith’s autodidactism and his dogged resistance to the endless attempts to meddle with the purity of his original ideas, puts me in mind of a quote on Jonathan Rose’s book: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes: “ardent in its reaffirmation of faith and what good books, splendid music and fine art may do to turn a people’s history into a long revolution on behalf of liberty, equality and truth.” (1) If we’re looking for antidotes to the celebrity philistine virus, or want to treat what philosopher Gáspár Miklos Tamás recently diagnosed as the modern malaise, the loss of our ‘ ability to abstract from the concrete particularity of experience, and to conceive of what is universal.’ Smith’s own self-disciplined trajectory points the way here. His tales of evenings spent, cig in hand, absorbed in law cases or psychiatric reports in Edinburgh’s public libraries, shows an old-fashioned desire that needs rekindling, ’to make this theoretical effort, to get at what mediates our diverse realities….If you read the continental popular papers [of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century] now, you’d find them sophisticated and serious. They may make boring reading today because they’re very circumstantial and lengthy. But nevertheless, they expected patience and concentration. And this was made possible because people were like that then. It’s not simply a matter of cultural decadence that attention spans are so short these days. People then used to be forced to enlarge their attention span, by school, by the workplace, by the army – endurance [that was] both intellectual and physical.’ (2) Smith has this endurance in spades and in many ways., his autobiography is an ode to reading itself.

 Everyday health zealotry is also in for a good kicking: ‘I really can’t stand it when blokes feel the need to comment on your drinking habits. It’s rampant, all that malarkey: New Labour trying to keep people alive for ever.’ Less and less of us are enjoying the lively cut and thrust of a pub atmosphere. Smoking bans and possibly the rise of on-line social networking have  hit pub attendance figures. Yet contemporary media coverage and government policy shows the casual manner in which we are all being cast as future troublesome drinkers. Everyday alcohol consumption is being slowly denormalised. The implication is that potential alcoholism is normal. We are all cast as an amorphous mass of binge drinkers, potential addicts in denial. Smith’s retort is worth dwelling on here: ‘what do they mean by bloody lifestyle anyway?’

Anti-alcohol….sorry.. health campaigns share the creepy and crude logic of today’s stranger danger mentality. A precautionary principle once espoused in the odd school assembly is now a moral dictum applied to all human relations: watch out, the abuser or addict could be your husband, or the bloke next door.  Trends such as the warped and wanton use of ID age checks in alcohol purchases, in response to ‘Think 25′ policies, are overtly Orwellian. But it’s the accumulated effect of these health initiatives that we really have to watch. The deludge of adverts, ‘documentaries’ or ‘science’ that speaks to our internal health spy. They encourage us to measure ourselves and friends against ‘concerning’ and downright sexed-up statistics. So, as Smith rightly points out, the self-styled bohemians and New-Labour-Lib-Cons have instituted a drug snobbery and health zealotry too. This is beginning to endanger the species of pub philosopher who so fires Smith’s imagination. Interesting how ‘Philosophy in Pubs’ is sweeping the nation, despite the shrinking base of swiggers. What was spontaneous, convivial ranting or socialising is now neutered into contained, organised fun. I want to send in a Mark E.Smith sized handgrenade into these procedings. This is how ‘Philosophy in Pubs’ goes. It seems we are all up for a bit of ‘debate’ after which, as I understand it, you compulsorily break off into tables and discuss the point in hand, in the mode of a support group. Organisers are to hand in case anyone’s too lively, goes over their recommended units, or is at risk of causing offense to anyone’s precious sensibilities: HAIL THE NEW PURITAN!

Oh, and of course The Fall’s music is exceptional too:New Puritan

(1) Fred Inglis, Independent.

(2) To be free is not to be myself http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/10127/

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