Cat's Eyes, the eponymous album by The Horrors' Faris Badwan and singer Rachel Zeffira, is the latest record to dip back into the musical sounds of 60s girl-pop, following Comet Gain, Velocette, Lucky Soul, and the more mainstream acts like Duffy. The first track, Cat's Eyes, starts off with the two signifiers of early 60s pop: a single chord played on cheap piano that might have come from a whorehouse, and a few spoken words in a confident young female voice: "Let me tell you something", but then it falls away in favour of a slow build.
Early 60s girl-group pop - The Crystals, the Chiffones, the Shangri-Las was a slightly cynical, opportunistic, ironic, push-it-out-fast commercial sound. When Carole King heard her babysitter was being beaten up by her boyfriend she wrote a song about it - He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss - but no hard feelings because the same babysitter went on to have a massive hit as Little Eva with The Loco-Motion. It was that kind of time, when emotions don't really come in to music making.
But the later tracks on the album owe as much to a more sophisticated late-60s adult pop sound, an era of craftsmanship of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and vocal talent and artists like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, in their mode of melancholia and soft sadness. This is music of quiet resignation, already in the 60s hearkening back to past days of pre-rock-and-roll songwriting (Julie London, and before her Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and they heyday of the American songwriter for hire), a music of emotional expressiveness that finds fulfilment in classical form. The classic recording of that genre is Dionne Warwick's Walk On By, one of the few pop songs about a refusal to admit emotion.
Comet Gain tied this sound to a radical Marxism and it's music in the face of an all-encompassing system of spectacle - it's very small. The soft reverb, the feeling like it's being performed in a deep hole, only add to the sensation that it's the defeatism of someone who's already been buried and is just waiting for their own death. Fredric Jameson defined postmodern art as simultaneously superficial and x-ray-like, in other words, art that sees through things. The advantage of recalling a lost sound instead of creating your own is that your music becomes analysis from a position of certainty, rather than an open-ended synthesis of new forms.
The influences are various: it also relates to more modern takes on girl-pop like the electronica of Stereolab and particularly Ladytron, and the minimalism of James Blake; the brass and fierce restraint and repetition recalls the even more avant garde minimalism of These New Puritans, only without their hints of Levellers and Lollards and other puritan revolutionaries. Often with an obsessively repeated few notes, Cat's Eyes seems to say: this is all there is, I play it over again, and then I fall silent for a bit.
A few later tracks are much weirder though: Sooner or Later is Nick Cave-ish, with scraping sounds, odd percussion, drones, brass, stabbing strings, and slow male vocals. Faris Badwan has claimed the band are making pop music, but later tracks rather belie this. There's an aura of tension to tracks like Over You, a sense that it's being held back, that there's something wanting to escape, the restraining influence of the half-idea of 60s pop's smooth surface presenting an explosion.
Most of the songs are about comparison: "You're the best person I know" (The Best Person I Know), "I know I'm not the prettiest girl" and "she's better than me" (I'm Not Stupid), "Don't ever tell me you're the only one" (Face In The Crowd). Just as the singer's persona is trapped in competition with other people not the uniqueness of love, this is a record trapped in competition with the past. It's maybe not as claustrophobic as the lovingly pastoral retro sound of Fleet Foxes, which feels like a desperate wish that the last 40 years of popular music had never taken place - but it feels like a more desperate yearning for extinction even than that. Not an album for anyone who believes in the future; its utopias are all in the past.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Psychology of buildings: the tragedy of Heinrich Wölfflin
This is a story about one of the greatest intellectual figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or maybe it's a story about how people today view that time period, and how we choose our heroes. It's the story of a great academic who, caught up in a crazy bloodthirsty world, lost faith in his profession, and gave it all up. Or else it's the story of how intellectual engagement with ideas of the past has been replaced by emotional reactions and a search for people we can feel pity for.
Heinrich Wölfflin was perhaps the greatest art historian of the late 19th century. He sought to use the new science of psychology to explain how art works could encode moods and emotions, and in his dissertation Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture he applied this to the appearance of buildings. In Renaissance and Baroque and Classic Art he sought to explain how the culture of Europe in the Renaissance and early modern periods was manifested in its artistic styles. Wölfflin was instrumental in creating the central idea of art history: that an age has a spirit, and the art of that age manifests its spirit.
But by 1914, the spirit of the age was less comforting to Wölfflin. Germany was increasingly militaristic, Europe was moving towards war, and he was struggling to write another book: "It is hardly even possible for me to muster the minimum, the little bit of composure, scholarly composure, that one can expect. To talk about the influence of Italians on German art, when countless Italians with bayonets are advancing at the border."
Germany was gripped by a wave of patriotism, as much in the highest towers of academia as in popular sentiment. Wölfflin complained, "Why are all of the oldest artists and professors rallying to the flag? Apparently, only the very few feel comfortable with themselves. I can understand it as far as art historians go, but it's the same everywhere! And the speeches that scholars make in favor of the war! So this is the unity everyone's making such a big deal about - everyone losing his mind!" Intellectual debate was dead, and to argue against the popular view of art was tantamount to treason.
When the war started, Wölfflin devoted large sums to the Red Cross; apparently "he was prepared to forego half of his salary to that end". He summarised the declaration of war thus: "At the Marienplatz suddenly a race toward Sendlinger Street (where the newspaper Neuste Nachrichten was headquartered). One hears three short 'hurras.' The first who return cry: 'mobilization!' 'There's a mobilization!' Waited with the crowd for a while, until the printed telegrams are handed out. The people are very calm.- A father, who carries his little boy home on his arm, has tears in his eyes. Two young people: 'Business is ruined!"
In the first few months of the war Wölfflin overcame his writer's block to produce his last major work, the flawed masterpiece Principles of Art History. He now rejected all relations between culture and art; instead he imagined art as driven by its own internal logic, that turns the linearity and symmetry of Leonardo and Raphael into the restless, asymmetrical, impressionistic style of Baroque art. Rejecting the tradition of German art history, he denied that cultural change was behind change in artistic style. It was as if art had its own life, its own logic and movement, regardless of the society that was contemporaneous with it. The book is judged by almost everyone to be a failure. He could not justify the changes in art without reference to external causes. His theories lacked necessity.
When the war ended, Wölfflin found no relief. He was tired of the politics of academia, the competition to get into print, and increasingly came to feel that, as he put it, "works of art are not 'the greatest good'". Writing, "it's true that I ... don't know any more what else there is for me to do as a Professor of Art History", he tried to give public lectures on art to the workers of Munich, but found the audiences were full of middle-class ladies.
His friend Karl Vossler wrote to Benedetto Croce: "Strange case. At the height of his activities, with a full capacity to work, not yet sixty years of age, Wolfflin announces that scholarship no longer interests him and that it is time for him to leave the profession. ... All of his friends and I too have tried to change his mind and have encouraged him to stay and continue his extraordinary service as a professor and scholar, but to no avail."
Wölfflin gave up his job at the University of Munich in 1924. This was the same year and the same city where Hitler was convicted for treason after his failed 1923 putsch. Wölfflin moved back to his homeland of Switzerland; he set up home in Zurich, which until shortly before had been the home of Lenin, Tristan Tsara, and James Joyce, but now we suppose was back to the usual qualities of the Swiss. Before he left, he explained to his students: "I am thought of as a formalist, as cool. I'm not. I wrote the Principles of Art History not in order to mechanize history, but in order to render judgment exact. Arbitrariness, the sheer, uncontrollable eruption of emotion, has always disgusted me".
This story, and the interpretation I give it, comes from Martin Warnke in an article published in English in 19891. Despite admiring Wölfflin's sense of principle, Warnke chose not to defend Wölfflin's ideas.Warnke concluded: "Since Wölfflin hardly felt himself to be defensible, one hardly does him justice by defending him in the name of some 'culture of seeing' or ascribing to him some role as a forefather. One also hardly does him justice when one confirms, extends, or disproves his teachings. One does him the most justice through a rigorous relativization, perhaps in accordance with one of his favorite maxims: 'Not everything is possible at all times.' Not even Wölfflin".
Today, nobody believes Wölfflin's ideas in Principles of Art History, but they still study it. Wölfflin thought, at least in its earlier years, that when we look at a picture of a person (or even a building) our body unconsciously conforms to the position of the person in the picture, and thus we come to empathise with what the picture is expressing. Looking back in time, Warnke empathises, he feels a common pacifism, and yet he does not know what Wölfflin was thinking. This is a judgment made on sensibility not on logic. Looking at Wölfflin's later years, if not the earlier, perhaps logic is not to be hoped for.
1Martin Warnke, "On Heinrich Wölfflin", translated by David Levin, Representations, No. 27 (Summer, 1989), pp. 172-187.
Heinrich Wölfflin was perhaps the greatest art historian of the late 19th century. He sought to use the new science of psychology to explain how art works could encode moods and emotions, and in his dissertation Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture he applied this to the appearance of buildings. In Renaissance and Baroque and Classic Art he sought to explain how the culture of Europe in the Renaissance and early modern periods was manifested in its artistic styles. Wölfflin was instrumental in creating the central idea of art history: that an age has a spirit, and the art of that age manifests its spirit.
But by 1914, the spirit of the age was less comforting to Wölfflin. Germany was increasingly militaristic, Europe was moving towards war, and he was struggling to write another book: "It is hardly even possible for me to muster the minimum, the little bit of composure, scholarly composure, that one can expect. To talk about the influence of Italians on German art, when countless Italians with bayonets are advancing at the border."
Germany was gripped by a wave of patriotism, as much in the highest towers of academia as in popular sentiment. Wölfflin complained, "Why are all of the oldest artists and professors rallying to the flag? Apparently, only the very few feel comfortable with themselves. I can understand it as far as art historians go, but it's the same everywhere! And the speeches that scholars make in favor of the war! So this is the unity everyone's making such a big deal about - everyone losing his mind!" Intellectual debate was dead, and to argue against the popular view of art was tantamount to treason.
When the war started, Wölfflin devoted large sums to the Red Cross; apparently "he was prepared to forego half of his salary to that end". He summarised the declaration of war thus: "At the Marienplatz suddenly a race toward Sendlinger Street (where the newspaper Neuste Nachrichten was headquartered). One hears three short 'hurras.' The first who return cry: 'mobilization!' 'There's a mobilization!' Waited with the crowd for a while, until the printed telegrams are handed out. The people are very calm.- A father, who carries his little boy home on his arm, has tears in his eyes. Two young people: 'Business is ruined!"
In the first few months of the war Wölfflin overcame his writer's block to produce his last major work, the flawed masterpiece Principles of Art History. He now rejected all relations between culture and art; instead he imagined art as driven by its own internal logic, that turns the linearity and symmetry of Leonardo and Raphael into the restless, asymmetrical, impressionistic style of Baroque art. Rejecting the tradition of German art history, he denied that cultural change was behind change in artistic style. It was as if art had its own life, its own logic and movement, regardless of the society that was contemporaneous with it. The book is judged by almost everyone to be a failure. He could not justify the changes in art without reference to external causes. His theories lacked necessity.
When the war ended, Wölfflin found no relief. He was tired of the politics of academia, the competition to get into print, and increasingly came to feel that, as he put it, "works of art are not 'the greatest good'". Writing, "it's true that I ... don't know any more what else there is for me to do as a Professor of Art History", he tried to give public lectures on art to the workers of Munich, but found the audiences were full of middle-class ladies.
His friend Karl Vossler wrote to Benedetto Croce: "Strange case. At the height of his activities, with a full capacity to work, not yet sixty years of age, Wolfflin announces that scholarship no longer interests him and that it is time for him to leave the profession. ... All of his friends and I too have tried to change his mind and have encouraged him to stay and continue his extraordinary service as a professor and scholar, but to no avail."
Wölfflin gave up his job at the University of Munich in 1924. This was the same year and the same city where Hitler was convicted for treason after his failed 1923 putsch. Wölfflin moved back to his homeland of Switzerland; he set up home in Zurich, which until shortly before had been the home of Lenin, Tristan Tsara, and James Joyce, but now we suppose was back to the usual qualities of the Swiss. Before he left, he explained to his students: "I am thought of as a formalist, as cool. I'm not. I wrote the Principles of Art History not in order to mechanize history, but in order to render judgment exact. Arbitrariness, the sheer, uncontrollable eruption of emotion, has always disgusted me".
This story, and the interpretation I give it, comes from Martin Warnke in an article published in English in 19891. Despite admiring Wölfflin's sense of principle, Warnke chose not to defend Wölfflin's ideas.Warnke concluded: "Since Wölfflin hardly felt himself to be defensible, one hardly does him justice by defending him in the name of some 'culture of seeing' or ascribing to him some role as a forefather. One also hardly does him justice when one confirms, extends, or disproves his teachings. One does him the most justice through a rigorous relativization, perhaps in accordance with one of his favorite maxims: 'Not everything is possible at all times.' Not even Wölfflin".
Today, nobody believes Wölfflin's ideas in Principles of Art History, but they still study it. Wölfflin thought, at least in its earlier years, that when we look at a picture of a person (or even a building) our body unconsciously conforms to the position of the person in the picture, and thus we come to empathise with what the picture is expressing. Looking back in time, Warnke empathises, he feels a common pacifism, and yet he does not know what Wölfflin was thinking. This is a judgment made on sensibility not on logic. Looking at Wölfflin's later years, if not the earlier, perhaps logic is not to be hoped for.
1Martin Warnke, "On Heinrich Wölfflin", translated by David Levin, Representations, No. 27 (Summer, 1989), pp. 172-187.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
The death of Fluxus was the death of art: a perspective on the decadence of contemporary art
The world of art today is full of things that are silly, trivial, random, easy to do. An artist wanders round a gallery wearing an animal suit (Mark Wallinger). Richard Long walked through Scottish countryside, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art bought his snapshots. Michael Landy destroyed everything he owned (not easy psychologically, but not exactly requiring skill). Banksy stencils images onto the walls of buildings and people try and steal or sell the wall. Duchamp defaced postcards but the Chapman brothers defaced very expensive Goya etchings (earlier Robert Rauchenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, but he told de Kooning about it). More complex artworks are typically produced by the artist creating a list of instructions and passing them on to a fabricator. And yet the artist claims the product as something original to be sold for huge amounts of money.
Although this style of art, requiring minimal effort, goes back to the early 20th century, in the beginning it was the creation of skilled artist-theorist-provocateurs who had already established a reputation in other areas (e.g. Duchamp and Malevich begun as more conventional painters), and it did not become a mainstream activity until the early 1960s. The first art movement to really specialise in it was Fluxus, which had roots in the late 50s avant-garde music scene but flourished in the 60s.
Fluxus composers produced musical pieces involving one note, or silence, or the smashing of a violin, or nothing but the composer and orchestra wrapping baton and instruments in brown paper. They extended this to produce scores that could be applied in other areas of life. Ken Friedman instructed "Play baseball with a fruit" or "Someone sneezes. A year later, send a postcard reading, 'Gesundheit!'" Yoko Ono suggested, "Hit a wall with your head." Larry Miller said, "Chew a nice piece of notebook or drawing paper".
Many of these things would be unexceptional if done by a modern artist, perhaps on a film which they would be commissioned to produce or would sell to a gallery. But the key for Fluxus (and for related phenomena like Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) was not to create art works that had value and could be exhibited in themselves, but the opposite. They wanted to provide an artistic democracy, things that everyone could do, and which therefore could not be sold or exhibited, because why would you pay to buy or go to see something you could make or do yourself?
A Fluxus manifesto explained the contrast:
One of Mieko Shiomi's scores did say:
Despite the democratic ideals, Fluxus members went on to become stars. John Cage became an acclaimed composer and his works works became increasingly conventional. Joseph Beuys was a charismatic public speaker with a limitless skill for self-mythologising (turning a minor plane crash into heroic works in felt and lard). Yoko Ono married a Beatle and tried to use their celebrity to end war. George Maciunas ruled the movement like a little dictator, excommunicating those who disagreed with him.
Today we have a situation where "anything can be art". Many viewers feel "anyone can do it", but only a small number of people are allowed to do it in galleries and profit from it. Perhaps Fluxus only existed because of the publicity skills and celebrity status of its founders. Perhaps it is impossible to have a democratic art. But insofar as contemporary art draws on Fluxus's concepts of art works while redirecting them in entirely opposite directions of elitism and selfishness (the artist's greed), they have inverted the original ideas of Fluxus and created an art of dubious theoretical basis that naturally invokes resentment and contempt in audiences who know that not only could they create such works, they should be creating them. Fluxus dreamed of destroying the importance of art, but this only succeeded in the public mind, not in the auction house.
Although this style of art, requiring minimal effort, goes back to the early 20th century, in the beginning it was the creation of skilled artist-theorist-provocateurs who had already established a reputation in other areas (e.g. Duchamp and Malevich begun as more conventional painters), and it did not become a mainstream activity until the early 1960s. The first art movement to really specialise in it was Fluxus, which had roots in the late 50s avant-garde music scene but flourished in the 60s.
Fluxus composers produced musical pieces involving one note, or silence, or the smashing of a violin, or nothing but the composer and orchestra wrapping baton and instruments in brown paper. They extended this to produce scores that could be applied in other areas of life. Ken Friedman instructed "Play baseball with a fruit" or "Someone sneezes. A year later, send a postcard reading, 'Gesundheit!'" Yoko Ono suggested, "Hit a wall with your head." Larry Miller said, "Chew a nice piece of notebook or drawing paper".
Many of these things would be unexceptional if done by a modern artist, perhaps on a film which they would be commissioned to produce or would sell to a gallery. But the key for Fluxus (and for related phenomena like Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) was not to create art works that had value and could be exhibited in themselves, but the opposite. They wanted to provide an artistic democracy, things that everyone could do, and which therefore could not be sold or exhibited, because why would you pay to buy or go to see something you could make or do yourself?
A Fluxus manifesto explained the contrast:
ARTFluxus was intended to be art that would not be part of the art world (today you can pay a fair bit of money for one of their nice little boxes, but nothing like a Banksy.)
To justify artist's professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist's indispensability and exclusiveness, He must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him, He must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art.
Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillfull, significant, theatrical.
It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income.
To raise its value (artist's income and patron's profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.
FLUXUS ART-AMUSEMENT
To establish artist's non-professional status in society, he must demonstarte artist's dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the selfsufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it.
Therefore, art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.
The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.
Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of "one-upmanship" with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of a simple natural event, a game or gag. It is the fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.
One of Mieko Shiomi's scores did say:
Air EventBut it is unclear what prices were paid, if ever an auction occurred. The main criticism of Fluxus is that often one doubts that the actions were ever performed.
Inflate a small rubber balloon in one deep breath and sign your name on the surface of the balloon.
(this is your lung)
You can buy the lungs of other performers at an auction.
Despite the democratic ideals, Fluxus members went on to become stars. John Cage became an acclaimed composer and his works works became increasingly conventional. Joseph Beuys was a charismatic public speaker with a limitless skill for self-mythologising (turning a minor plane crash into heroic works in felt and lard). Yoko Ono married a Beatle and tried to use their celebrity to end war. George Maciunas ruled the movement like a little dictator, excommunicating those who disagreed with him.
Today we have a situation where "anything can be art". Many viewers feel "anyone can do it", but only a small number of people are allowed to do it in galleries and profit from it. Perhaps Fluxus only existed because of the publicity skills and celebrity status of its founders. Perhaps it is impossible to have a democratic art. But insofar as contemporary art draws on Fluxus's concepts of art works while redirecting them in entirely opposite directions of elitism and selfishness (the artist's greed), they have inverted the original ideas of Fluxus and created an art of dubious theoretical basis that naturally invokes resentment and contempt in audiences who know that not only could they create such works, they should be creating them. Fluxus dreamed of destroying the importance of art, but this only succeeded in the public mind, not in the auction house.
Friday, September 24, 2010
The art world's greatest printer's error
One of the most famous essays in the philosophy of art of the last 100 years was Arthur C Danto's The Artworld (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, [Oct. 15, 1964], pp 571-584.) He advanced the groundbreaking but now commonplace idea that we know something is art not by some innate property of an artwork, but because the art world (critics, academics, curators, artists, dealers) tells us it is art:
This has an entirely different meaning: Danto means to say there is something in art that makes it art which cannot be discerned just by looking at it; the quote seems to say there is something in an artwork that no eye can disparage. This error makes Danto appear to assert the supremacy of the visual, something he is in fact denying.
"Descry" may be a slightly obscure word, but it was beloved by the Romantics: we find in used repeatedly by Coleridge, in Christabel
In fact the gravest fault does not lie with the critics mentioned above: it was even misspelt in the original printing of the article in The Journal of Philosophy, and in reprints such as Joseph Margolis (ed), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, third ed, 1987, and Stephen David Ross, Art and its significance: an anthology of aesthetic theory, SUNY Press, 1994. (There is further discussion, not online, in Joseph Margolis, "Farewell to Danto and Goodman", British Journal of Aesthetics (1998) 38 (4): 353-374. doi: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.4.353 . Margolis had printed the incorrect version at least twice by this point.)
To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.This is a much-quoted passage. However, it appears that many people do not know the meaning of the word "descry" ("to catch sight of, find out, discover" - Merriam-Webster) or else it is not in their spell-checker, and time and time again in even the most scholarly publications the sentence is given as "something the eye cannot decry".
This has an entirely different meaning: Danto means to say there is something in art that makes it art which cannot be discerned just by looking at it; the quote seems to say there is something in an artwork that no eye can disparage. This error makes Danto appear to assert the supremacy of the visual, something he is in fact denying.
"Descry" may be a slightly obscure word, but it was beloved by the Romantics: we find in used repeatedly by Coleridge, in Christabel
I went and peered, and could descryThe Garden of Boccaccio
No cause for her distressful cry;
Thanks, gentle artist! now I can descryand elsewhere. Frank Kermode was able to quote it correctly in the 1960s, but many people up to the present day have propagated this error, suggesting a complete failure to understand Danto:
Thy fair creation with a mastering eye
- Gerald L. Bruns, Tragic thoughts at the end of philosophy, Northwestern UP, 1999
- Simon Frith, Performing rites: on the value of popular music, Harvard UP, 1998
- Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaedon, 1998
- Daniel Alan Herwitz and Michael Kelly (eds), Action, art, history: engagements with Arthur C. Danto, Columbia UP, 2007
- James W Manns, Aesthetics, ME Sharpe, 1998
- Joseph Margolis, Interpretation radical but not unruly: the new puzzle of the arts and history, University of California Press, 1995
- James O. Young, Aesthetics: critical concepts in philosophy, McGraw Hill, 2005
- The Critical review, Issue 41, University of Melbourne, 2001
In fact the gravest fault does not lie with the critics mentioned above: it was even misspelt in the original printing of the article in The Journal of Philosophy, and in reprints such as Joseph Margolis (ed), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, third ed, 1987, and Stephen David Ross, Art and its significance: an anthology of aesthetic theory, SUNY Press, 1994. (There is further discussion, not online, in Joseph Margolis, "Farewell to Danto and Goodman", British Journal of Aesthetics (1998) 38 (4): 353-374. doi: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.4.353 . Margolis had printed the incorrect version at least twice by this point.)
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Great Forgotten Albums 2: Mecca Normal's "The Observer" (Kill Rock Stars; 2006)
A concept album about online dating written by a feminist experimental semi-riot-grrl art-rock band with no drummer, this might sound a really bad idea or a really good one. Your judgement may be influenced by whether you're a deadbeat man or a cynical and single woman.
Mecca Normal was formed in 1984 in Vancouver by vocalist Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester. Smith has also had a few novels published by small presses, and both she and Lester are visual artists. Their early recordings had an influence both on riot grrl and on the Olympia, Washington twee scene centred around Calvin Johnson. They are frequently of low sonic quality, and make little attempt at writing songs - it's more like someone thinking aloud while someone else tunes up their guitar. This makes The Observer stand out with its mix of catchy pop songs and epic spoken word tracks.
The album starts as fairly conventional alt-rock. "I'm Not Into Being The Woman You're With While You're Looking For The Woman You Want" is self-explanatory, about a man who's looking for "a like-minded woman" but apparently hasn't succeeded. It's an upbeat and catchy opener, with constantly shifting guitars, by turns crunchy and melodic, and succinct summings up of the dating game like the title and: "He says he hasn't found what he's looking for yet. After he's met me."
And there are plenty more failures to meet like-minded people. In "Attraction Is Ephemeral" she describes her time with a seductive and wealthy man, a successful architect: "He says, I love a woman who adorns herself with jewellery. I like a woman who has variation in her wardrobe. ... He suggests I visit a website of Austrian designed underwear. It's expensive but it's beautiful, he says. I stand there by the stove in my slutty outfit the total of which probably cost me $15 including my $1 panties."
She contrasts his worldly sophistication with her own skill at finding discount vegetables: "I don't buy crackers and cheese and pickles and cookies because they're too expensive, and I know the prices of almost everything in the little shops, and if oranges are 50 cents a pound here and 49 cents a pound across the street I will cross the street to save whatever it is, a pound, on my oranges, and brag about it." "He says he'll bring his grand piano out of storage", and all the time she's wondering if they've really connected or if everything he says is "just another line".
"Attraction Is Ephemeral" also introduces sex. "I lie there under him. 230 lb. 'Am I crushing you?' he says. 'Sort of,' I say." Maybe that's why she seems so underwhelmed. "I'll Call You" starts "I want cold impersonal sex during which I'll pretend I'm with someone else." For all the cynicism of its what-people-are-really-thinking lyrics, it's one of the songs you could more easily imagine being played on the radio, along with "To Avoid Pain" with its "Hey hey" refrain.
Some of the later tracks are weaker and break the theme. "The Caribou and the Oil Pipeline" is worthy and dull environmentalism. "The Message" has the rawness and tunelessness of the band's earlier material.
"1922" isn't about dating but is much better: Smith is reflective, outwardly nostalgic but inwardly sad, with lyrical guitars from Lester. "Nothing's automatic, nothing's precise", she says, describing old pictures, thinking about the simple life: "The museums are for men. We know this. Men need history. We need it. We are men. We need to remind ourselves of this." It's funny but always with a harshness in her voice, sometimes barely hidden, sometimes out front, and that links it with the rest of the album.
The album's centrepiece is the twelve-and-three-quarter minute long "Fallen Skier". Over an endlessly repeating riff she describes a first date with a man who arouses both pity and contempt in her, though nothing like love. As you do on a first date, they swap life stories, and she offers a detailed biography of him, a life that never quite took off. He's a "fallen skier, waiter, party guy" - a man aged 47, who had dropped out of school to be a ski bum, later waiting tables at a Greek restaurant "where the staff were encouraged to drink half price on arriving for work", an addict, and is now at college, planning to backpack around Europe. "I don't think he realises it yet but his life has gotten away from him."
She also enumerates his reactions to her, and hers to him, in a series of quotable lines. "No one moves to skid row to get clean." "Will i be playing the part of the woman helping him get his life on track?" "He asks me about this music of mine, is it ever all-out punk? ... I stand a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket all the way from Japan, Hush Puppies, curly hair flowing in the wind, and this guy's fretting over the possibility that I'm actually Henry Rollins." All in her fantastic delivery, turning on a dime from dry and throwaway, to indignant or tragic.
Time and again she contrasts her own intellectual and creative life with the poverty of his existence: "Carefully I ask if he does anything he might call creative. ... He thinks for a minute and says he doesn't make music or paint if that's what I mean but he does watch TV. Free cable ... I can only half think about being so grey and dispassionate to call watching TV creative."
Although harsh, her lyricism does something to justify this. "Standing on the pier half-watching the sun go down. A cloud of mist is giving great definition to the trees which should have been flat and invisible. I'm thinking of saying something about how the mist is making things clear, but I decide to keep that thought to myself."
How listeners respond to the record will depend heavily on what they make of Smith. She is frequently condescending, particularly in "Fallen Skier", and when she discusses her own faults it is often to boast about them: meanness becomes frugality. But the intensity of her examinating gaze, the brilliance of her lyrics makes up for this. She comprehensively fails to be the observer; like everyone who is dating, sifting through the deadbeats to find a partner, she is the judge.
Mecca Normal was formed in 1984 in Vancouver by vocalist Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester. Smith has also had a few novels published by small presses, and both she and Lester are visual artists. Their early recordings had an influence both on riot grrl and on the Olympia, Washington twee scene centred around Calvin Johnson. They are frequently of low sonic quality, and make little attempt at writing songs - it's more like someone thinking aloud while someone else tunes up their guitar. This makes The Observer stand out with its mix of catchy pop songs and epic spoken word tracks.
The album starts as fairly conventional alt-rock. "I'm Not Into Being The Woman You're With While You're Looking For The Woman You Want" is self-explanatory, about a man who's looking for "a like-minded woman" but apparently hasn't succeeded. It's an upbeat and catchy opener, with constantly shifting guitars, by turns crunchy and melodic, and succinct summings up of the dating game like the title and: "He says he hasn't found what he's looking for yet. After he's met me."
And there are plenty more failures to meet like-minded people. In "Attraction Is Ephemeral" she describes her time with a seductive and wealthy man, a successful architect: "He says, I love a woman who adorns herself with jewellery. I like a woman who has variation in her wardrobe. ... He suggests I visit a website of Austrian designed underwear. It's expensive but it's beautiful, he says. I stand there by the stove in my slutty outfit the total of which probably cost me $15 including my $1 panties."
She contrasts his worldly sophistication with her own skill at finding discount vegetables: "I don't buy crackers and cheese and pickles and cookies because they're too expensive, and I know the prices of almost everything in the little shops, and if oranges are 50 cents a pound here and 49 cents a pound across the street I will cross the street to save whatever it is, a pound, on my oranges, and brag about it." "He says he'll bring his grand piano out of storage", and all the time she's wondering if they've really connected or if everything he says is "just another line".
"Attraction Is Ephemeral" also introduces sex. "I lie there under him. 230 lb. 'Am I crushing you?' he says. 'Sort of,' I say." Maybe that's why she seems so underwhelmed. "I'll Call You" starts "I want cold impersonal sex during which I'll pretend I'm with someone else." For all the cynicism of its what-people-are-really-thinking lyrics, it's one of the songs you could more easily imagine being played on the radio, along with "To Avoid Pain" with its "Hey hey" refrain.
Some of the later tracks are weaker and break the theme. "The Caribou and the Oil Pipeline" is worthy and dull environmentalism. "The Message" has the rawness and tunelessness of the band's earlier material.
"1922" isn't about dating but is much better: Smith is reflective, outwardly nostalgic but inwardly sad, with lyrical guitars from Lester. "Nothing's automatic, nothing's precise", she says, describing old pictures, thinking about the simple life: "The museums are for men. We know this. Men need history. We need it. We are men. We need to remind ourselves of this." It's funny but always with a harshness in her voice, sometimes barely hidden, sometimes out front, and that links it with the rest of the album.
The album's centrepiece is the twelve-and-three-quarter minute long "Fallen Skier". Over an endlessly repeating riff she describes a first date with a man who arouses both pity and contempt in her, though nothing like love. As you do on a first date, they swap life stories, and she offers a detailed biography of him, a life that never quite took off. He's a "fallen skier, waiter, party guy" - a man aged 47, who had dropped out of school to be a ski bum, later waiting tables at a Greek restaurant "where the staff were encouraged to drink half price on arriving for work", an addict, and is now at college, planning to backpack around Europe. "I don't think he realises it yet but his life has gotten away from him."
She also enumerates his reactions to her, and hers to him, in a series of quotable lines. "No one moves to skid row to get clean." "Will i be playing the part of the woman helping him get his life on track?" "He asks me about this music of mine, is it ever all-out punk? ... I stand a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket all the way from Japan, Hush Puppies, curly hair flowing in the wind, and this guy's fretting over the possibility that I'm actually Henry Rollins." All in her fantastic delivery, turning on a dime from dry and throwaway, to indignant or tragic.
Time and again she contrasts her own intellectual and creative life with the poverty of his existence: "Carefully I ask if he does anything he might call creative. ... He thinks for a minute and says he doesn't make music or paint if that's what I mean but he does watch TV. Free cable ... I can only half think about being so grey and dispassionate to call watching TV creative."
Although harsh, her lyricism does something to justify this. "Standing on the pier half-watching the sun go down. A cloud of mist is giving great definition to the trees which should have been flat and invisible. I'm thinking of saying something about how the mist is making things clear, but I decide to keep that thought to myself."
How listeners respond to the record will depend heavily on what they make of Smith. She is frequently condescending, particularly in "Fallen Skier", and when she discusses her own faults it is often to boast about them: meanness becomes frugality. But the intensity of her examinating gaze, the brilliance of her lyrics makes up for this. She comprehensively fails to be the observer; like everyone who is dating, sifting through the deadbeats to find a partner, she is the judge.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Great Forgotten Albums: The Mekons (aka Devils, Rats and Piggies) by The Mekons
A collection of songs about war, murder, child abuse, corporate crime, revolution, mining disaster, and the nastiness of suburbia, this is one of the strangest and most atmospheric albums ever released. But it is one that is easily missed and often dismissed by critics who find it lacks the Hank Williams cover versions and good-time spirit found on their later disks.
Its obscurity is not helped by the fact that people can't even agree on its title - it is sometimes called Devils, Rats and Piggies, and sometimes The Mekons or even Second Album. But we know that it was recorded and released in 1980 on Red Rhino in the UK, the follow to their debut The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen (whose strange title echoes monkeys typing Shakespeare).
The band came out of the late-70s punk scene in Leeds that also produced Gang of Four and Delta 5. But after early singles like Never Been In A Riot, the Mekons rapidly moved away from the guitar-based sound of punk, becoming by 1985 the proto-alt-country act which recorded the classic Fear and Whiskey.
This record might be the most interesting point on that strange journey. Mixing horns, synths, and violin with distorted guitars, it sounds cheap and muddy with frequently-incomprehensible vocals. Yet beneath that facade are compelling if half-mumbled messages about a world obsessed with propriety, high culture, and success, that hides dark secrets of destructiveness and lust.
It begins uncompromisingly with "Snow", a wintry account of some kind of revolution or failed revolution, a riot going on outside, a prisoner about to be executed, the singer hiding out of the way (echoing the situation of their debut single "Never Been in a Riot"). We are used to revolutions in hot countries; at least for a Briton the snow brings it home. Over a buzzing synthesiser and chugging upbeat rhythm, a mechanical voice intones lyrics like "The strong now have another hero" and "The burned-out homes of left-wing names tell us all where power remains". It sounds horrible yet compelling, much like revolution: it is a statement of intent that this will be an album that confuses, dismays, and sonically violates the listener.
"St Patrick's Day" is about "chamber music in a bungalow", the sociology of music, the lower middle-classes listening to high culture. It echoes the philosopher Roger L Taylor, author of "Art an Enemy of the People", that art exists to legitimate those in power, providing a facade of civilisation that hides their crimes. A tuneless voice chants "the third movement structures and orders a meaningless intelligence". The bleak, horrid sound of the Mekons begins to take on some sort of sense; there is no way to use the old cultural forms of the society that rules us: it is necessary to be oblique and half-repellent. "Refinement and taste - you're not even rich." Sonically, this track is based around blaring horns and rapid strings that build up a nervous tension; the strings of course echo the reference to chamber music, while existing to discomfit the listener, not to soothe.
"D. P. Miller" follows post-punk bands like Au Pairs, Gang of Four, and Raincoats in offering a critique of prostitution or the objectification of woman. The singer complains "standing in these high shoes is breaking my back" and moans "these illusions disillusion me", a strikingly Gang of Four-esque line. The female point of view is ironically countered by the very masculine, awkward, rough singing. The repeated phrase "not the rub" recalls both dialect and Shakespeare.
"Institution" looks forward to the Mekons' later country direction. It's a wilder song, far less controlled and more emotional, with tinkling piano and screeching violin, almost ready to fall into a rollicking jam. The key line is "They took me up to the top of the hill and we looked at the institution in the valley below" - this references both Moses viewing the promised land, and Satan taking Jesus on a mountaintop to tempt him.
"I'm So Happy" is particularly incomprehensible, shouted lyrics in which you can make out the odd phrase like "I feel so drunk". Despite the doomy bass it's first cousin of Ian Dury's raucous list songs, though equally like Joy Division. Again, drunkenness is a direction they would later pursue.
"Chopper Song" combines a detailed account of respectable domestic boredom with references to violent crime. "At least he can talk to his wife tonight. They can talk about that night down the club and what's become of Bryan and Susan and the kids". Many of the songs express a contempt for suburbia. In 1980 there was a strong sense that the middle classes all did essentially the same things, exemplified by mainstream sitcoms that portrayed its boredom and narrow horizons. Today there is less class cohesion with middle-class people more likely to act like the working-classes or like kids. The song concludes with the discovery of an axe - the "chopper". It should be remembered that the Mekons' home in West Yorkshire was the hunting ground of the Yorkshire Ripper, who wasn't arrested until 1981 and was killing girls around the time this was released. Despite this, it's musically one of the more pleasant tracks, with long synth chords and conversational vocals, and it welcomes the viewer by offering an easy target to hate.
"Business" is about the corruption of the international banking trade and its relation to violence and war. Musically it sounds close to the Associates with its melodic synths, despite the savageness of the lyrics (repeated phrases "attache case" "uzi machine gun" "powder burns"). It's probably one of the first pop songs to mention Uzis - the singer pronounces them in an English style, /juzi/ with the first vowel as in "use", rather than the now-more-common /uzi/. It's one of the most mainstream-sounding tracks on the record; you could almost imagine it on a crime film soundtrack.
"The Trimden Grange Explosion" is a cover version of a 19th century folk song about a mining disaster in County Durham in 1882 when 74 pit workers were killed. Musically, there are discordant guitars and high-pitched keyboards that stand out more than the vocals, meaning that the impact of this tale of death is lost.
"Karen" is about a 42 year old man (a schoolteacher, it is hinted) who develops a passion for an eight year old girl. Its linkage of violence and sex again recalls the Ripper and the tense atmosphere of the time, as captured in David Peace's Red Riding books, with the killer Peter Sutcliffe preying on innocent young women. Yet rather than condemn outright (as they do to the middle classes in multiple songs) it is told sympathetically from the point of view of the man "Now I'm sure I've found my wife, her name is Karen and she's very important to my life" - not quite mentioning her age yet. A high-pitched male voice saying "Hello I'm Karen" is comical. Perhaps his passion is less reprehensible than middle-class anhedonia.
"Corporal Chalkie" is more comic, about war past and future. "I know what happened before I was born. The Huns and the Nips got uppy with Blighty and Tommy went out to beat them all up" - a crudely populist description of German and Japanese aggression that trivialises the conflict (Tommy being the archetypal British soldier). "It's another war, we say." It's the most accessible track and one of the more well-known, being re-recorded by the Mekons' Sally Timms. It ends in mock-cockney, "There is no more to war than cor lummie, Sarge."
"John Barry" musically pays tribute to the film composer with its guitar riff and horns, showing the band's sonic inventiveness. Lyrically it is about someone watching the TV news, and not being affected by the horrors: "In the world an event occurs. [...] I never see the relevance." The reference to John Barry also suggests a soundtrack as something detached from the action, overlaid and false. It is more sympathetic to the tv viewer than some of the songs: "sitting down we take off our shoes, this was a very busy day" repeated over and over again hints that people have no ability to engage with current affairs because of the drudgery of their lives.
"Another One" concludes the album with a more commercial sound than the first couple of tracks - suggesting the tunelessness is deliberate. However despite its slightly dub rhythm, it is a less compelling song than many.
The reissue adds two new tracks. "Killer Ken" is disposable, but "Another Set of Teeth" is a lively piece of country music that again points towards Fear and Whiskey.
The album stands at a cusp in the band's history. Although parts mark it as a product of early 80s, it often sounds outside anything of its time. There are strong hints of the direction the band later took by repurposing country music as political text, this record combines folk and country with experimental new wave and synth sounds. Country was crucial to the band for offering a more deeper and complex idea of rebellion than punk, with country's interest in honour and sin, pessimism and romanticism, altered mental states (principally drunkenness), and sympathy with the underdog. Yet country is essentially a conservative style in a way that this album is not: nostalgia and sentimentality are things even the Mekons could not always avoid. But here, instead of the timeless tales of failure and apocalypse of Fear and Whiskey, the band has a dark timely paranoid feel that recalls Yorkshire in the 1980s, facing both Thatcher and Peter Sutcliffe.
Its obscurity is not helped by the fact that people can't even agree on its title - it is sometimes called Devils, Rats and Piggies, and sometimes The Mekons or even Second Album. But we know that it was recorded and released in 1980 on Red Rhino in the UK, the follow to their debut The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen (whose strange title echoes monkeys typing Shakespeare).
The band came out of the late-70s punk scene in Leeds that also produced Gang of Four and Delta 5. But after early singles like Never Been In A Riot, the Mekons rapidly moved away from the guitar-based sound of punk, becoming by 1985 the proto-alt-country act which recorded the classic Fear and Whiskey.
This record might be the most interesting point on that strange journey. Mixing horns, synths, and violin with distorted guitars, it sounds cheap and muddy with frequently-incomprehensible vocals. Yet beneath that facade are compelling if half-mumbled messages about a world obsessed with propriety, high culture, and success, that hides dark secrets of destructiveness and lust.
It begins uncompromisingly with "Snow", a wintry account of some kind of revolution or failed revolution, a riot going on outside, a prisoner about to be executed, the singer hiding out of the way (echoing the situation of their debut single "Never Been in a Riot"). We are used to revolutions in hot countries; at least for a Briton the snow brings it home. Over a buzzing synthesiser and chugging upbeat rhythm, a mechanical voice intones lyrics like "The strong now have another hero" and "The burned-out homes of left-wing names tell us all where power remains". It sounds horrible yet compelling, much like revolution: it is a statement of intent that this will be an album that confuses, dismays, and sonically violates the listener.
"St Patrick's Day" is about "chamber music in a bungalow", the sociology of music, the lower middle-classes listening to high culture. It echoes the philosopher Roger L Taylor, author of "Art an Enemy of the People", that art exists to legitimate those in power, providing a facade of civilisation that hides their crimes. A tuneless voice chants "the third movement structures and orders a meaningless intelligence". The bleak, horrid sound of the Mekons begins to take on some sort of sense; there is no way to use the old cultural forms of the society that rules us: it is necessary to be oblique and half-repellent. "Refinement and taste - you're not even rich." Sonically, this track is based around blaring horns and rapid strings that build up a nervous tension; the strings of course echo the reference to chamber music, while existing to discomfit the listener, not to soothe.
"D. P. Miller" follows post-punk bands like Au Pairs, Gang of Four, and Raincoats in offering a critique of prostitution or the objectification of woman. The singer complains "standing in these high shoes is breaking my back" and moans "these illusions disillusion me", a strikingly Gang of Four-esque line. The female point of view is ironically countered by the very masculine, awkward, rough singing. The repeated phrase "not the rub" recalls both dialect and Shakespeare.
"Institution" looks forward to the Mekons' later country direction. It's a wilder song, far less controlled and more emotional, with tinkling piano and screeching violin, almost ready to fall into a rollicking jam. The key line is "They took me up to the top of the hill and we looked at the institution in the valley below" - this references both Moses viewing the promised land, and Satan taking Jesus on a mountaintop to tempt him.
"I'm So Happy" is particularly incomprehensible, shouted lyrics in which you can make out the odd phrase like "I feel so drunk". Despite the doomy bass it's first cousin of Ian Dury's raucous list songs, though equally like Joy Division. Again, drunkenness is a direction they would later pursue.
"Chopper Song" combines a detailed account of respectable domestic boredom with references to violent crime. "At least he can talk to his wife tonight. They can talk about that night down the club and what's become of Bryan and Susan and the kids". Many of the songs express a contempt for suburbia. In 1980 there was a strong sense that the middle classes all did essentially the same things, exemplified by mainstream sitcoms that portrayed its boredom and narrow horizons. Today there is less class cohesion with middle-class people more likely to act like the working-classes or like kids. The song concludes with the discovery of an axe - the "chopper". It should be remembered that the Mekons' home in West Yorkshire was the hunting ground of the Yorkshire Ripper, who wasn't arrested until 1981 and was killing girls around the time this was released. Despite this, it's musically one of the more pleasant tracks, with long synth chords and conversational vocals, and it welcomes the viewer by offering an easy target to hate.
"Business" is about the corruption of the international banking trade and its relation to violence and war. Musically it sounds close to the Associates with its melodic synths, despite the savageness of the lyrics (repeated phrases "attache case" "uzi machine gun" "powder burns"). It's probably one of the first pop songs to mention Uzis - the singer pronounces them in an English style, /juzi/ with the first vowel as in "use", rather than the now-more-common /uzi/. It's one of the most mainstream-sounding tracks on the record; you could almost imagine it on a crime film soundtrack.
"The Trimden Grange Explosion" is a cover version of a 19th century folk song about a mining disaster in County Durham in 1882 when 74 pit workers were killed. Musically, there are discordant guitars and high-pitched keyboards that stand out more than the vocals, meaning that the impact of this tale of death is lost.
"Karen" is about a 42 year old man (a schoolteacher, it is hinted) who develops a passion for an eight year old girl. Its linkage of violence and sex again recalls the Ripper and the tense atmosphere of the time, as captured in David Peace's Red Riding books, with the killer Peter Sutcliffe preying on innocent young women. Yet rather than condemn outright (as they do to the middle classes in multiple songs) it is told sympathetically from the point of view of the man "Now I'm sure I've found my wife, her name is Karen and she's very important to my life" - not quite mentioning her age yet. A high-pitched male voice saying "Hello I'm Karen" is comical. Perhaps his passion is less reprehensible than middle-class anhedonia.
"Corporal Chalkie" is more comic, about war past and future. "I know what happened before I was born. The Huns and the Nips got uppy with Blighty and Tommy went out to beat them all up" - a crudely populist description of German and Japanese aggression that trivialises the conflict (Tommy being the archetypal British soldier). "It's another war, we say." It's the most accessible track and one of the more well-known, being re-recorded by the Mekons' Sally Timms. It ends in mock-cockney, "There is no more to war than cor lummie, Sarge."
"John Barry" musically pays tribute to the film composer with its guitar riff and horns, showing the band's sonic inventiveness. Lyrically it is about someone watching the TV news, and not being affected by the horrors: "In the world an event occurs. [...] I never see the relevance." The reference to John Barry also suggests a soundtrack as something detached from the action, overlaid and false. It is more sympathetic to the tv viewer than some of the songs: "sitting down we take off our shoes, this was a very busy day" repeated over and over again hints that people have no ability to engage with current affairs because of the drudgery of their lives.
"Another One" concludes the album with a more commercial sound than the first couple of tracks - suggesting the tunelessness is deliberate. However despite its slightly dub rhythm, it is a less compelling song than many.
The reissue adds two new tracks. "Killer Ken" is disposable, but "Another Set of Teeth" is a lively piece of country music that again points towards Fear and Whiskey.
The album stands at a cusp in the band's history. Although parts mark it as a product of early 80s, it often sounds outside anything of its time. There are strong hints of the direction the band later took by repurposing country music as political text, this record combines folk and country with experimental new wave and synth sounds. Country was crucial to the band for offering a more deeper and complex idea of rebellion than punk, with country's interest in honour and sin, pessimism and romanticism, altered mental states (principally drunkenness), and sympathy with the underdog. Yet country is essentially a conservative style in a way that this album is not: nostalgia and sentimentality are things even the Mekons could not always avoid. But here, instead of the timeless tales of failure and apocalypse of Fear and Whiskey, the band has a dark timely paranoid feel that recalls Yorkshire in the 1980s, facing both Thatcher and Peter Sutcliffe.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Something small: the Collected Works of Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton's posthumous Collected Poems contains 62 poems, which take up one page each, except "Larkinesque" which extends 7 lines onto the following side. Many of them have fewer than 10 lines; some fewer than 30 words. Hamilton died comparatively young by modern standards, aged 63 in 2001, but that is still an extraordinarily small body of work, even if you include the additional 20 pages of juvenilia and unpublishedalia at the back.
Hamilton's poetry was all about modesty. Rather than "I" his favourite pronoun was "you"; he sought to express not so much his own thoughts as the experience of those he loved:
He believed his poetry had a kind of magical power: "But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some way, yes, I think I did." (Preface to Fifty Poems.) This may seem surprising, but other down-to-earth figures like B S Johnson had equally mystical beliefs (Johnson followed Robert Graves's theory about the White Goddess). Without questioning the sincerity of Hamilton's claim, it was probably an idea that came to him only occasionally, like a Catholic who glimpses a cathedral spire in a faraway city, and decides on salvation. And there are many ways of bringing back the dead.
In the preface to his Fifty Poems, he tells how he "decided [...] to keep the whole business of 'my poetry' quite separate from the rest of my so-called literary life: a life of book reviews, biographies, anthologies and magazines." Hamilton was prolific, just not in poetry; only in prose.
Alan Jenkins quotes Hamilton's biography of Matthew Arnold: "It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself."
Arnold gave up his lyric poetry to pursue his other role, as an enormously influential educationalist. Hamilton wrote: "What the age didn't need were more poems of the kind that Arnold did have a real gift for, and had indeed already written: lyric poems of the self, that Arnold self which, as he came to believe, had or should have had better things to do than, well, write lyric poems."
The introduction to Fifty Poems describes a sense of failure, of embarrassment, of years wasted: "The raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty, and so on."
Did Hamilton in some sense give up on poetry, or did he simply find himself unable to write it, or was it a combination of the two? Did he believe in the unimportance of poetry, or at least of his own poetry, being a brilliant editor and critic of others? Was this a cover-up for his idleness and inebriation, or was he in some way a broken man?
In a 2007 interview with the Guardian the American novelist Thomas McGuane talked about the death of his sister from a heroin overdose more than 30 years before: "I think everyone, sooner or later in their lives, has something they never get over and in fact, I don't want to get over it."
McGuane added, "I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that."
McGuane's novels are very different from Hamilton's poetry; McGuane writes ironic tales of the failed dreams of the American west, comedies of manners, books that are never entirely serious even when celebrating the joys of nature, the wild, the ranch, horseriding, freedom, and escape from human society. Hamilton's poetry is utterly serious, even if sometimes blackly comic. But in both writers there is a sense that they do not wish to write epically; they would rather be small.
Hamilton's poetry was all about modesty. Rather than "I" his favourite pronoun was "you"; he sought to express not so much his own thoughts as the experience of those he loved:
Tight in your hands,He wrote of his approach: "It wouldn't be about me; rather, it would be about my inability, however intensely I felt, to do anything about the suffering" (quoted by Alan Jenkins). His father died, and his wife was institutionalised with mental illness. These were the subjects of his earlier adult verse.
Your Empire Exhibition shaving mug.
You keep it now
As a spittoon, its bloated doves,
Its 1938
Stained by the dropping of your blood.
(Birthday Poem)
He believed his poetry had a kind of magical power: "But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some way, yes, I think I did." (Preface to Fifty Poems.) This may seem surprising, but other down-to-earth figures like B S Johnson had equally mystical beliefs (Johnson followed Robert Graves's theory about the White Goddess). Without questioning the sincerity of Hamilton's claim, it was probably an idea that came to him only occasionally, like a Catholic who glimpses a cathedral spire in a faraway city, and decides on salvation. And there are many ways of bringing back the dead.
In the preface to his Fifty Poems, he tells how he "decided [...] to keep the whole business of 'my poetry' quite separate from the rest of my so-called literary life: a life of book reviews, biographies, anthologies and magazines." Hamilton was prolific, just not in poetry; only in prose.
Alan Jenkins quotes Hamilton's biography of Matthew Arnold: "It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself."
Arnold gave up his lyric poetry to pursue his other role, as an enormously influential educationalist. Hamilton wrote: "What the age didn't need were more poems of the kind that Arnold did have a real gift for, and had indeed already written: lyric poems of the self, that Arnold self which, as he came to believe, had or should have had better things to do than, well, write lyric poems."
The introduction to Fifty Poems describes a sense of failure, of embarrassment, of years wasted: "The raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty, and so on."
Did Hamilton in some sense give up on poetry, or did he simply find himself unable to write it, or was it a combination of the two? Did he believe in the unimportance of poetry, or at least of his own poetry, being a brilliant editor and critic of others? Was this a cover-up for his idleness and inebriation, or was he in some way a broken man?
In a 2007 interview with the Guardian the American novelist Thomas McGuane talked about the death of his sister from a heroin overdose more than 30 years before: "I think everyone, sooner or later in their lives, has something they never get over and in fact, I don't want to get over it."
McGuane added, "I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that."
McGuane's novels are very different from Hamilton's poetry; McGuane writes ironic tales of the failed dreams of the American west, comedies of manners, books that are never entirely serious even when celebrating the joys of nature, the wild, the ranch, horseriding, freedom, and escape from human society. Hamilton's poetry is utterly serious, even if sometimes blackly comic. But in both writers there is a sense that they do not wish to write epically; they would rather be small.
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