Popjustice have got hold of the seating plans for this year's Brit Awards, the UK record industry jolly held on February 16 this year. There were platinum tables rated A to E and mere gold tables from F to J. As PopJustice points out, the seating assignments say a lot about the state of the British music and media industries.
There were many top-class A tables for Sony (18, plus 2 Sony/ATV publishers and 2 Sony Ericsson) and Universal/UMTV (17) and fewer for Polydor (6), with 6 Warner Bros/Music/Chapell tables scattered around from A to C, and 7 EMI tables in B. Mastercard/Barclays (chief sponsors) and BPI/Brits (organisers) filled out much of B and C. ITV who broadcast the ceremony had 12 good tables (A and B) - 5 for Brand and Commercial, 2 for ITV Entertainment, and the rest spread across Commissioning, Corporate Comms, Productions, Public Affairs, and ITV2; the BBC had just 2 (one for Radio 1 and the other for Talents and Rights Negotiation) and Sky and Channel 4 one each.
Here are some of the other attendees, divided by class of table (A is right up in front of the stage, B behind, C and D in a semicircle behind that, right up to J and K at the very back):
A: 3 tables for Island; 2 for Atlantic; 2 for Mercury music group, 1 each for CAA (talent agency), Classic FM, Def Jam, iTunes, Live Nation (promoters), Music Week (magazine), Ticketmaster (promoters), XL Recordings (record label), All Around The World (record label), All The Worlds (events company)
B: 3 for AEG (concert promoters)
C: 2 for Myspace; 1 each for HMV, LTB TV, MTV, Pet Shop Boys partnership, Primary Talent International, The Sun, Virgin Media, William Morris, Official Chart Company
D: 2 for ASDA stores, 2 Fremantle (producers of X Factor, X's Got Talent, X Idol, etc); 1 each for BSkyB (Sky television), Freud communications, Guardian Media Group radio
E: Orion Security Print, BMI (music licensing agency), Black and Blonde (music management behind The Soldiers and various pop acts)
F: Heart (radio)
G: Bauer media (Heat, Kerrang, FHM, Kiss radio, and many more)
H: Dragonstorm Records, Olswang (media lawyers), ITV2 press, Just 4 Linen (linen hire service)
J: 2 for Comet Group (electrical retailer)
Many of the lesser tables were also set aside for Brits staff, Mastercard, and miscellaneous suppliers.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Brand new you're retro
The Citroën DS3 is according to Wikipedia a "luxury supermini", a small car being produced by French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën. It is being advertised with the slogan "anti retro" and a variety of advertisements promoting the idea that the car is a dramatic new innovation on a par with The Beatles or punk: the antithesis of the backward look. This assertion of novelty includes a TV ad with footage of John Lennon (who died 29 years before the car was launched) speaking of newness and modernity and destroying all that came before, and an online project in which bands such as Editors take a break from producing 1980s-influenced indie rock to nominate a selection of ground-breaking epochal tracks. Other bands participating include new wave-influence power-pop group Ash, aging stadium dance act Faithless, soundtrack favourites Zero 7, up-and-coming indie band Temper Trap, and traditionalist rockers Stereophonics.
There is nothing new in artistic movements rejecting the past: punk, Lettrism, Dada, Futurism, and many other movements did exactly this thing, whether by declaring a hatred of Pink Floyd or promising "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" (Futurist manifesto, 1909). But just as the Sex Pistols recycled Rolling Stones riffs and a long tradition of rock 'n' roll rebellion, the DS3 takes its name from one of the most iconic cars in Citroën's history, the DS, launched in 1955 and still coming very high in polls of the most beautiful and well-designed cars of all time. The DS3 costs from GBP 11 700 in the UK, looking brutal and bottom-heavy with bulky squarish front, low sides, big air intakes, and streamlined top. According to Autocar it is intended to compete with another design classic, the BMW-owned Mini: perhaps the DS3's rejection of the past has one particular legend in mind.
There is nothing new in artistic movements rejecting the past: punk, Lettrism, Dada, Futurism, and many other movements did exactly this thing, whether by declaring a hatred of Pink Floyd or promising "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" (Futurist manifesto, 1909). But just as the Sex Pistols recycled Rolling Stones riffs and a long tradition of rock 'n' roll rebellion, the DS3 takes its name from one of the most iconic cars in Citroën's history, the DS, launched in 1955 and still coming very high in polls of the most beautiful and well-designed cars of all time. The DS3 costs from GBP 11 700 in the UK, looking brutal and bottom-heavy with bulky squarish front, low sides, big air intakes, and streamlined top. According to Autocar it is intended to compete with another design classic, the BMW-owned Mini: perhaps the DS3's rejection of the past has one particular legend in mind.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Naturalism as a radical act
The previous entry explained how realism is not a central feature of fiction when the history of the novel is considered. However, the other side of this is that realism, or naturalism, when it appears in literature can actually be radical and avant-garde. By naturalism, I mean the representation of the everyday lives of ordinary people: not kings, heroes, saints, millionaires, or murderers, but people doing the quotidian tasks of growing or acquiring food and money, working, cooking, cleaning, relating to their family, colleagues, and complete strangers.
As mentioned in the previous entry, the novel began as a highly non-realist form. Early proto-novels such as Utopia (1516), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and Don Quixote (1605-15) were of a fantastical or mock-heroic quality, although all three works referred to contemporary society in different ways. Later, writers like Richardson and Austen embourgeoised the novel, although their upper-middle-class heroes and heroines were far from the median income or average life expectancy of the time.
While the social problem novel became a genre of the mid-19th century (North and South, etc), such works are little read today; the next big change was the development of French naturalism. This focussed on the lives of the urban poor, describing factory workers and miners, but finding a surer market with tales of prostitutes, pimps, and other petty criminals. Thus a genre which could have been unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday instead became sensationalist. French naturalism influenced American writers like Theodore Dreiser, who focussed on tragedy and a doctrine of social Darwinism, and Alfred Doeblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz treated the material of the French naturalist novel (pimps, whores, and drunks) in a highly unnaturalistic fashion.
With modernism, the search for a new form to portray everyday life meant that an increasing interest in the mundane was combined with greater formal experimentation. Novels such as Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and later BS Johnson's The Unfortunates portrayed a single day in the life of one or two characters, interspersed with flashbacks. Notwithstanding the difficulty of Ulysses, a novel covering a day brings reading time close to real time (it only takes a few hours to read Mrs Dalloway). This reduction of the novel's timespan reached perhaps its peak with Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, which covers three minutes of a man hovering between life and death, but despite its minute focus and deep interest in both science and human experience, can hardly be called naturalistic.
Beckett, a sort of follower of Joyce, sought to approach the essence of human existence from another angle: while he focused on disease, decay, and death, he stripped his novels of extraneous naturalistic detail in pursuit of a universality - his characters wandered through a timeless rural Ireland or were trapped in semi-abstract prisons. The French new novel emerged in the 1950s as one of the last threads of modernism, seeking to describe the world without recourse to plot or character. This never entirely caught on in the English-speaking world, although it influenced writers such as the already-mentioned Johnson and Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin. Quin's Three describes a not entirely happily married middle-aged middle-class couple picking through the papers of a dead young woman while going about their own lives in a quiet country cottage, the stillness and isolation of the location reflecting the lack of action.
Outside literature, the Mass Observation movement in Britain of the 1930s sought to record and measure every detail of British life; it later fed into the growing market research industry. Through the 20th century, genre literature increasingly engaged with the underclass, particularly in crime fiction which moved from the parlours of Agatha Christie to the streets of Iceberg Slim. The rebirth of naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s had a political context: identity politics and a growing interest in the socially marginalised, combined with systems of public education that extended university study to the working class, led both sociologists and fiction writers to focus on the poor, abused, women, gay, racial minorities, etc.
In this context, I would single out James Kelman's The Busconductor Hines. This is the story of a few months in the life of a bus conductor in the Glasgow area (Kelman wrote far away from the Scottish literary centre of Edinburgh). This novel includes not only lengthy descriptions of life on the buses and the staff canteen, but also detailed accounts of the preparation of mince and many scenes of childcare. Kelman has produced other, perhaps greater works (like A Disaffection in which a sullen schoolteacher reflects on Scottish culture and the futility of his job in a more political way) but Hines is the novel that will tell you how to make mashed potatoes.
As mentioned in the previous entry, the novel began as a highly non-realist form. Early proto-novels such as Utopia (1516), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and Don Quixote (1605-15) were of a fantastical or mock-heroic quality, although all three works referred to contemporary society in different ways. Later, writers like Richardson and Austen embourgeoised the novel, although their upper-middle-class heroes and heroines were far from the median income or average life expectancy of the time.
While the social problem novel became a genre of the mid-19th century (North and South, etc), such works are little read today; the next big change was the development of French naturalism. This focussed on the lives of the urban poor, describing factory workers and miners, but finding a surer market with tales of prostitutes, pimps, and other petty criminals. Thus a genre which could have been unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday instead became sensationalist. French naturalism influenced American writers like Theodore Dreiser, who focussed on tragedy and a doctrine of social Darwinism, and Alfred Doeblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz treated the material of the French naturalist novel (pimps, whores, and drunks) in a highly unnaturalistic fashion.
With modernism, the search for a new form to portray everyday life meant that an increasing interest in the mundane was combined with greater formal experimentation. Novels such as Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and later BS Johnson's The Unfortunates portrayed a single day in the life of one or two characters, interspersed with flashbacks. Notwithstanding the difficulty of Ulysses, a novel covering a day brings reading time close to real time (it only takes a few hours to read Mrs Dalloway). This reduction of the novel's timespan reached perhaps its peak with Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, which covers three minutes of a man hovering between life and death, but despite its minute focus and deep interest in both science and human experience, can hardly be called naturalistic.
Beckett, a sort of follower of Joyce, sought to approach the essence of human existence from another angle: while he focused on disease, decay, and death, he stripped his novels of extraneous naturalistic detail in pursuit of a universality - his characters wandered through a timeless rural Ireland or were trapped in semi-abstract prisons. The French new novel emerged in the 1950s as one of the last threads of modernism, seeking to describe the world without recourse to plot or character. This never entirely caught on in the English-speaking world, although it influenced writers such as the already-mentioned Johnson and Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin. Quin's Three describes a not entirely happily married middle-aged middle-class couple picking through the papers of a dead young woman while going about their own lives in a quiet country cottage, the stillness and isolation of the location reflecting the lack of action.
Outside literature, the Mass Observation movement in Britain of the 1930s sought to record and measure every detail of British life; it later fed into the growing market research industry. Through the 20th century, genre literature increasingly engaged with the underclass, particularly in crime fiction which moved from the parlours of Agatha Christie to the streets of Iceberg Slim. The rebirth of naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s had a political context: identity politics and a growing interest in the socially marginalised, combined with systems of public education that extended university study to the working class, led both sociologists and fiction writers to focus on the poor, abused, women, gay, racial minorities, etc.
In this context, I would single out James Kelman's The Busconductor Hines. This is the story of a few months in the life of a bus conductor in the Glasgow area (Kelman wrote far away from the Scottish literary centre of Edinburgh). This novel includes not only lengthy descriptions of life on the buses and the staff canteen, but also detailed accounts of the preparation of mince and many scenes of childcare. Kelman has produced other, perhaps greater works (like A Disaffection in which a sullen schoolteacher reflects on Scottish culture and the futility of his job in a more political way) but Hines is the novel that will tell you how to make mashed potatoes.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Fiction and realism
Fiction has always had a problematic relationship with the truth. The reader with only a loose conception of literature may believe the story that from the first days of the novel, fiction has been essentially realist and naturalist and neutral, only waylaid into experimentalism and reader-bamboozlement in the early 20th century by a few foreigners: an alien influence that can easily be driven out (by agencies such as the Betty Trask Prize, awarded each year to work of "a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style").
However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.
Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.
Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.
Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.
For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.
Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.
After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.
Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.
However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.
Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.
Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.
Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.
For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.
Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.
After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.
Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Buddy Wakefield: travelling preacher
Buddy Wakefield is one of the leading figures in slam poetry, a form of performance poetry or spoken word performance. A combination of troubadour, writer, and motivational guru, he travels the countryside bedazzling appreciative audiences his inventive symbols and uplifting message. He won the individual World Poetry Slam Championships in 2004 and 2005, and has had success in team events. Wakefield is an entrancing performer, jerkily full of energy, casually dressed with a shaven head, jumping up and down in rhythm, contorting his face, and using his arms held out down in front of him for punctuation. He has recorded for Strange Famous Records, founded by rapper and poetry slam performer Sage Francis, and for folk singer Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label.
Wakefield was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1974, and worked as an executive assistant in Gig Harbor, Washington. Then in 2001, according to legend, he sold all his possessions except for a Honda Civic and began to travel the USA performing poetry and meeting people, sleeping on couches or in his car. This mode of life goes back in myth to the Provencal minstrels of the middle ages, but more recently is associated with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Willy Mason.
Convenience Stores (YouTube) is one of his simpler pieces, about a conversation with a woman in a store at an isolated truck stop, in which he speculates about her loneliness before she reveals her dream of escape. There's a certain quality of tourism to much of his work, as he travels the world encountering sad people, and moralises a bit. His work is also full of exhortations to live life and experience reality; coupled with frequent religious references, his work has an oddly upbeat, self-help, chicken-soup quality that is suited to the emotional atmosphere of a live show but resembles an evangelical church.
His didacticism is shown in another tale of the road, Information Man (YouTube), which describes an encounter between the narrator and someone staffing an information booth at a rest area. There are some customarily great Wakefield images: "I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day somebody will pick me to make things better". But soon it becomes clear this is a poem with a message:
Flockprinter (YouTube; text) is about flock wallpaper and God, and shows his ability to wrest a metaphor out of the most ordinary sight:
Wakefield was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1974, and worked as an executive assistant in Gig Harbor, Washington. Then in 2001, according to legend, he sold all his possessions except for a Honda Civic and began to travel the USA performing poetry and meeting people, sleeping on couches or in his car. This mode of life goes back in myth to the Provencal minstrels of the middle ages, but more recently is associated with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Willy Mason.
Convenience Stores (YouTube) is one of his simpler pieces, about a conversation with a woman in a store at an isolated truck stop, in which he speculates about her loneliness before she reveals her dream of escape. There's a certain quality of tourism to much of his work, as he travels the world encountering sad people, and moralises a bit. His work is also full of exhortations to live life and experience reality; coupled with frequent religious references, his work has an oddly upbeat, self-help, chicken-soup quality that is suited to the emotional atmosphere of a live show but resembles an evangelical church.
His didacticism is shown in another tale of the road, Information Man (YouTube), which describes an encounter between the narrator and someone staffing an information booth at a rest area. There are some customarily great Wakefield images: "I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day somebody will pick me to make things better". But soon it becomes clear this is a poem with a message:
If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purposeIt continues to explain:
this poem is too soon for you
return to your mediocrity
plug it into an amplifier
and rethink yourself
some of us are on fire for the answer
I talk a whole bunch but I really only know a few things...Jean Heath (YouTube) is about a funeral, in the genre of moralising tale that condemns the shallowness and insincerity of those who encounter suffering or death (Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich rules this tradition). It gets the audience onside by letting them share in the condemnation of people who - shockingly - eat and talk about themselves at funerals.
I know our shoes were stitched from songs about highways
The best songs are the ones about Georgia even though I've never been there
Cause it's the only place that still believes in Jesus
I know whatever it is you believe in you've got to spare yourself the futility of making fun of God
Because that guy hasn't even talked in like - ever.
...
You are the centre of the universe
If you weren't you wouldn't be here.
Flockprinter (YouTube; text) is about flock wallpaper and God, and shows his ability to wrest a metaphor out of the most ordinary sight:
Flockprinting is an aggressive electrostatic actionThere is a tension between observation and moralising, because the one requires an openness and the other a firm point of view. Similarly, there is a paradox in travelling the world to learn about it, because all your encounters will be in a certain sense trivial, at convenience stores and rest areas, and much of life will remain behind closed doors. But his imagery is inventive, his messages underlaid with wit, and to watch him perform is astonishing.
using severe heat to force finely chopped fibers
onto patterns of fabric
ultimately resulting in
soft touch.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Nadir's Big Chance
The approximate playlist for John Lydon's legendary 16 June 1977 Capital Radio appearance with DJ Tommy Vance.
Tim Buckley - Sweet Surrender
Creation - Life Is Just Beginning
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
possibly East of Eden - Jig A Jig
Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
Gary Glitter - Doin' Alright With The Boys
Fred Locks - Walls
Vivian Jackson and the Prophets - Fire in a Kingston
Culture - I'm Not Ashamed
Dr Alimantado - Born For A Purpose
Bobby Byrd - Back From The Dead
Neil Young - Revolution Blues
Lou Reed - Men Of Good Fortune
Kevin Coyne - Eastbourne Ladies
Peter Hammill - Institute Of Mental Health, Burning
Peter Hammill - Nobody's Business
Makka Bees - Nation Fiddler/Fire!
Capt Beefheart - The Blimp
Nico - Janitor Of Lunacy
Ken Boothe - Is It Because I'm Black
John Cale - Legs Larry At Television Centre
Third Ear Band - Fleance
Can - Halleluwah
Peter Tosh - Legalise It
(Whoever they are fodderstompf have more info; there is some debate over the exact listing, with nobody sure who did Jig A Jig; I've also seen the Third Eye Band song named as Merciles Beaute, and a suggestion he played the Sex Pistols' Did You No Wrong.)
Tim Buckley - Sweet Surrender
Creation - Life Is Just Beginning
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
possibly East of Eden - Jig A Jig
Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
Gary Glitter - Doin' Alright With The Boys
Fred Locks - Walls
Vivian Jackson and the Prophets - Fire in a Kingston
Culture - I'm Not Ashamed
Dr Alimantado - Born For A Purpose
Bobby Byrd - Back From The Dead
Neil Young - Revolution Blues
Lou Reed - Men Of Good Fortune
Kevin Coyne - Eastbourne Ladies
Peter Hammill - Institute Of Mental Health, Burning
Peter Hammill - Nobody's Business
Makka Bees - Nation Fiddler/Fire!
Capt Beefheart - The Blimp
Nico - Janitor Of Lunacy
Ken Boothe - Is It Because I'm Black
John Cale - Legs Larry At Television Centre
Third Ear Band - Fleance
Can - Halleluwah
Peter Tosh - Legalise It
(Whoever they are fodderstompf have more info; there is some debate over the exact listing, with nobody sure who did Jig A Jig; I've also seen the Third Eye Band song named as Merciles Beaute, and a suggestion he played the Sex Pistols' Did You No Wrong.)
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Other planets
David Thomson has written an angry, passionate polemic calling for cinema about ordinary life. In particular, he defends Yasujiro Ozu against modern interpretations of the director as being essentially a formalist, and he attacks James Cameron's spectacular 3D science fiction movie Avatar. Thomson starts with a powerful but probably untrue statement:
He is sharply dismissive of Avatar - a spectacular film that has been occasionally lauded for its political theme (by George Monbiot and by opponents of the Chinese government) while being attacked by others for its simplistic storytelling, numerous plot holes, and resemblances to FernGully: The Last Rainforest or Dances With Wolves. Thomson insists on the importance of Ozu's domestic subject matter and plain style in opposition to the 3D extragavance of James Cameron's film, and points to the basic flaw of all computer graphics movies:
Thomson's final version of his point is fairer, focussing not on theme (he concedes Avatar addresses many themes) but referring perhaps to the texture or surface of film rather than its depths:
Readers' comments on the article included many accusing Thomson of snobbery and saying ordinary people want escapist nonsense or alcoholic inebriation after a day at work; those saying that many people enjoy depressing small-scale family drama on TV, e.g. Eastenders; and someone pointed out that far from being an honest depiction of modern family life, Ozu's films were right-wing propaganda encouraging women to remain in the family and defending the traditional Japanese order after the turmoil of 1945.
Family is where we learn everything, including the sweeping urge to be done with family. Family is a basis of every narrative art, even if it offers us the humbling insight that our lives are all so ordinary and alike as to be worthless or without lofty significance. For most of us, family determines who will be at our funeral, and with what mixed feelings. Family asserts that we are higher than animals, and is the undertone and the consideration that leaves every one of us, if not afraid, then stilled, as we go to bed at night.(For an opposing viewpoint, recall the Gen X/slacker emphasis on friends as a new family, which reached its apotheosis on the incestuous TV show Friends, or Tim's remarks from the final episode of Ricky Gervais's The Office: "The people you work with are people you were just throw together with. You know, you don't know them, it wasn't your choice, and yet you spend more time with them then you do your friends or your family. But probably all you've got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hours a day.")
He is sharply dismissive of Avatar - a spectacular film that has been occasionally lauded for its political theme (by George Monbiot and by opponents of the Chinese government) while being attacked by others for its simplistic storytelling, numerous plot holes, and resemblances to FernGully: The Last Rainforest or Dances With Wolves. Thomson insists on the importance of Ozu's domestic subject matter and plain style in opposition to the 3D extragavance of James Cameron's film, and points to the basic flaw of all computer graphics movies:
I will not dispute the level of spectacle in Avatar. And I am nostalgic enough about the engineering of prolonged battle scenes to concede that James Cameron has not lost the touch with armed struggle that he displayed in Aliens and the Terminator films. But Avatar is garbage, too, and that can only be pinpointed by stressing its abject subject matter and its inability to see that the most spectacular thing the movies ever had to offer (see Renoir, Ophüls, Ozu, Bresson ... well, just keep seeing) is the human face as its mind alters or saddens.In defending the centrality of family, he launches a rather unfair attack on Paul Schrader: a double failure as a sensationalistic filmmaker who can't even get funding these days - nobody would deny that Schrader's filmography as writer or director is variable, but anybody whose credits include Taxi Driver, Mishima, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Light Sleeper, and Affliction stands not only as a talented film artist but someone who has pinpointed many of the obsessions of his age while dealing with timeless themes of redemption, art, sacrifice, and even occasionally family. There is no reason why a sensationalist film cannot deal with real themes - just as Elizabethan and Jacobean drama did despite the murders and swordfights - though it is true that many filmmakers put in far less effort than Schrader into articulating a personal vision and following it to extremes (perhaps Thomson thinks film should be less personal and more social - although curiously he has in the past championed James Toback, a second-class Schrader if ever there was one).
You may say, don't be so solemn, don't pose the history of the movies as that blunt choice – Ozu or Avatar – when clearly there is room for so much more. But I think the cultural dilemma is as acute as this awkward choice suggests, and I fear that a culture – especially a culture of the young – will forget the existence of Ozu, and those whose films were always the fullest engagement of movies with this awkward but irresistible subject matter.
Thomson's final version of his point is fairer, focussing not on theme (he concedes Avatar addresses many themes) but referring perhaps to the texture or surface of film rather than its depths:
More and more of our movies – I am thinking of mainstream, English-speaking cinema – bear very little reference to life as lived.Science fiction or realist drama can equally well explore many of the same themes, and surely even Thomson would agree that not all art should be realist (there is surely space in film for Michael Powell or Robert Bresson). But representing life as it is lived, as it is experienced by individuals, looking at family, work, the day-to-day quotidian basis of getting out of bed and keeping going till you can sleep at night, is not a priority for British or American cinema. The recent mumblecore movement seemed to be an attempt, but one which made no attempt to represent lives other than those of its filmmakers, and thus failed to say anything about most people's life. There are filmmakers capable of making this work, but few people seem to go see their movies, and fewer give them money to make new films.
Readers' comments on the article included many accusing Thomson of snobbery and saying ordinary people want escapist nonsense or alcoholic inebriation after a day at work; those saying that many people enjoy depressing small-scale family drama on TV, e.g. Eastenders; and someone pointed out that far from being an honest depiction of modern family life, Ozu's films were right-wing propaganda encouraging women to remain in the family and defending the traditional Japanese order after the turmoil of 1945.
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