Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy links to a new blog, Mentasms - only three posts so far, but it’s good stuff: brutalism and jungle, the bourgeois vacuity of Electric Picnic, Ricardo Villalobos and hyperconsciousness etc. The blogroll cites K-Punk and Blissblog, there’s been mention of Deleuze & Guattari and jouissance…I think you can join the dots for yourselves.
Over the past few years I have rarely gone to the cinema - the usual reasons: the vacuousness of Hollywood, the convenience and cheapness of dvd rentals, the irritating inability of the average movie-goer to follow a basic plotline without conducting an extended sotto voce conferral with everyone within three rows of him. The consequence is that I watch fewer films. Watching a film on the small screen is a stunted experience, with little of the potential for an absorbing, immersive experience that the big screen in the darkened room offers. The more I watch films on television, the less I feel motivated to watch any films, much less to walk into town and pay a tenner to see one. A vicious circle then, but one which could be broken by seeing a film that vividly expresses why the cinema is worthwhile.
A film, that is, such as the Conformist, which has been revived in a new print. It could technically be said to be showing at the IFI although it almost certainly won’t be by the time you read this post, or even by the time I finish writing it. Originally released in 1970, the Conformist was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci although it’s such a powerful film visually that much credit must go to his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. The shots are beautifully composed, with a dreamlike vividness that verges on the surreal, and the dense layers of symbolism add depth to a story that would otherwise be thin and unconvincing. Marcello Clerici is plagued by a profound sense of difference and exclusion, such that he is obsessed with attaining the invisibility of the unremarkable man. He marries a bourgeois woman of transcendental vapidity, he worms his way into work with the Fascist political police. He is devoid of moral compunction, seeking only to become one of the crowd. But of course he never can - Clerici fears and detests the crowd; he cannot stand the press of human flesh and even shies away from the hand of his closest friend, the blind radio announcer Italo who provides his entree to the Fascist apparat. (And one of the most striking images of the film is Italo in the studio, reading aloud a paean to the ruling party from a braille manuscript…the blind media as the unquestioning mouthpiece of the state.)
Clerici is sent to Paris to reactivate a relationship with (and ultimately to assassinate) his former philosophy professor, Quadri, now living in political exile in Paris. He has the convenient cover of his own honeymoon although this means bringing his new bride Giulia with him, which complicates matter further when he falls in love with Quadri’s wife, Anna. Anna in turn seems more interested in Giulia, though whether it’s genuine romantic interest or an attempt to attack Clerici whom she professes to despise. It could be a farce, but the recounting of the story through multiple levels of flashback while Clerici and his ox-like accomplice Manganiello drive through the snow-covered countryside to catch up with Quadri lends it the tone of a thriller. Which it is not quite, either - Quadri’s death by stabbing at the hands of a platoon of Fascists (echoing the murder of Julius Caesar) offers no climactic release. The film ends on a more sombre note, cutting forward to the night Mussolini’s abdication. Clerici and Italo, both thoroughly implicated in the fallen regime walk the streets. “I want to see how a dictatorship falls” he responds as Giulia begs him not to go outside. They are overtaken by a mob - Italo is swallowed up by it but Clerici somehow passes through it whole, and the film ends with his face seen through a barred gate in the flickering light of a fire, a mask of utmost despair.
The roots of Clerici’s difference are never fully explained. It is hinted that they reside in repressed homosexuality - Italo believes it, and the weight Clerici places on his childhood encounter with the chauffeur supports that. But then what to make of his powerful attraction to Anna? The difference seems to operate on a more existential level, a cinematic representation of the Sartre’s nausea. The panic on Clerici’s face as the dancers in the nightclub circle him ever more tightly speaks of a revulsion that is absolute. Seeing this film once is nowhere near enough to unpack everything contained in it, and new associations come to mind every time I think about it. It is a cavalcade of images that resonate at both conscious and subconscious levels. Today the shot that strikes me is that of Clerici’s father in the asylum, angrily flailing the untied sleeves of his straitjacket at his son before folding his arms and awaiting restraint at the hands of a burly nurse. Tomorrow it will be another, the day after that another still.
I spent Saturday evening listening to Hank Shocklee reminiscing over the early days of hip-hop in the New York boroughs while heavily made-up women plied me with beer and sushi…who dares say the new Dublin has nothing going for it?
Eventually his history reached the rise of the MC and his realisation that his soundsystem was dead on its feet if he couldn’t find a good MC to front it. In those days, he said, “Good Times” was the record, and a DJ couldn’t drop the needle on it without turning around to find a line of guys standing behind him waiting to get on the mic. One night he was playing a party at one of the colleges, dropped “Good Times”, and sure enough, every guy in the audience was up there trying out a couple of rhymes. Every one of them, he said, was just dismal, so when the tune ended he took a break and let a guy on to make an announcement about a fraternity party that was happening the following week. Just chatting about a frat party, this guy demolished everyone…it only took two years of constant begging from Hank Shocklee to get Chuck D to join what became Public Enemy.
Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beam-like spears
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
- Archilochus of Paros
The final chapter of JG Ballard’s recent memoir reveals that he has terminal cancer. I think this was already public knowledge, and I had heard that this was likely to be his last book, but I hadn’t previously known the details of his illness. I will miss him greatly. No writer has so incisively anatomised post-war western culture: the fascination of technology, the eroticisation of violence and consumerism, the cult of celebrity. If his aim was not as unerring in his later work, it remained proof that fiction was capable of more revealing insights into the human condition than anything offered by the literary herd that clogs the review pages and the 3 for 2 tables.
Miracles Of Life is in some respects a peculiar memoir, losing steam rapidly once Ballard’s career as a writer begins, and tailing off with a few fragmentary episodes from the last decades of his life, many of them already described in similar terms in past interviews. It could be that his failing health began to take more of a toll in the later stages of writing the book. More likely he recognised that the life of a professional writer, more particularly one who is also bringing up three children as a single parent, tends to the repetitive and the mundane. It’s clear that his childhood in Shanghai and experience of internment during the Second World War have been the dominant influnces on his writing. For a long time I was leery of reading Empire Of The Sun, assuming that as a Booker nominee it had to be a distinctly more conventional novel than Crash or High Rise. Now I would consider it the vital counterweight to those books, precisely delineating the buried incidents that gave rise to the key motifs and themes in Ballard’s books. This is where the visions of drained swimming pools and abandoned aircraft on runways originate, this is where he develops his convictions about the atavistic urges that motivate humans, and the precariousness of the veneer of civilisation that disguises them.
The same source material reappears in the memoir but, freed from the strictures of the novel, it has a clarity that seems almost distilled. This is some of Ballard’s best writing, as lucid and compact as ever, and every sentence is telling. It also has a personal and emotive quality that is often missing from his fiction. His novels pay little attention to character, the same types reappearing under similar names in book after book, with only a few blank and abstracted references to their feelings. It’s fascinating then to see him describing his relationship with his family, his regret at the distance that existed between him and his parents, and the obvious love and pride he has for his children and his partners.
I have come to think that human rationality is in many ways a chimaera, that the reasons we give for our actions are frequently post-hoc rationalisations for what we have done, rather than the motivation for those actions. We assume too great a gulf between ourselves and the rest of the animal world - even if (and I mean if) human intelligence is of another order than the rest of the mammals, we can’t have evolved so far from them as to be entirely free of instinctive behaviour, to be free of primitive impulses. Yet we like to think that we have freed ourselves of the drives that preserved our place in the process of natural selection because in the short period of our written history reason and technology have proven such effective tools. Ballard’s conviction that the atrocities he witnessed during the war are evidence that in large part humans have a taste for violence rings true. Civilisation survives because we can be trained like any other animal. We can imbue ourselves with responses that go against the grain, but any theory of human society that does not take into account the non-rational side of our being is doomed to failure.
Our experience of consciousness as being continuous is another rationalisation, the mind papering over the cracks and discontinuities of daily experience in the attempt to shoehorn it all into an explicable schema. Perhaps this is what is so often unsatisfying about conventional literary fiction - these microscopically parsed descriptions of personality, experience, psychology are descriptions of just such a rationalisation. In their focus on conscious experience they fail to put their finger on the unconscious urges that drive us, nor can they accommodate the jagged, allusive, irrational complexity of our immediate response to raw experience. The images of the surrealists have been co-opted by commerce and neutralised through familiarity but their attempt to drop stones into the well of the unconscious and see what rises to the surface must continue to be combed for insights. Likewise, the uncanny power of Francis Bacon’s best work must not be simply boxed-off, remarked upon yet essentially ignored. If literature and the visual arts have given up on this project, if psychoanalysis has not yet produced convincing understanding of the mind, we can still look at the empirical study of the unconscious that is advertising. We can read the writing on the wall in the shit that the advertising companies throw at it.
And we can’t ever forget about Ballard, and what the disconcerting power of his work implies about what we are. I would love to see this memoir followed up by some substantial critical work, taking in his entire oeuvre. Equally I’d like to see something synoptic on the whole cavalcade of experimental SF writers that centered around New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. Maybe these books already exist and I am simply unaware of them - I’d welcome any recommendations in the comments. In the meantime, the essential source for all material relating to Ballard on the web is the excellent Ballardian.
“I usually had a strong scotch and soda when I had driven the children to school and sat down to write soon after nine…A friendly microclimate unfurled itself from the bottle of Johnny Walker and encouraged my imagination….”
- JG Ballard, Miracles Of Life
Back in early November last year a friend emailed me a book review. The book in question wasn’t due for UK publication until March - I ordered a copy and then more or less forgot about it until it arrived a few weeks ago. I finished reading it yesterday, and I’m half-inclined to sit down and start it again immediately. The Rest Is Noise is New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ stab at a history of twentieth century classical music. Probably my scanty knowledge of classical (very scanty, as in, I probably own more cds by the Fall or the Ex alone than I do of classical in toto) increased the book’s impact. As with Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up & Start Again, the sheer wealth of knowledge new to me was revelatory. That same ignorance means I’m not in any position to comment on the fairness or thoroughness of Ross’ treatment, but with that caveat, I will say this is one of the best books on music I have ever read. The writing is incisive and evocative - even when his discussion of individual pieces moves into technical description, he manages to convey some measure of the impact and the sound of the music, and his evident love of the music inspires (as with any good music writer) the desire to listen to the music, and to hear what he hears in it.
Ross doesn’t confine himself to a narrow definition of history, situating musical developments in a broader artistic, social and political context. Indeed the central section of the book deals with the relationship between music and politics between the wars, in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s USA. I think Ross would like to be able to say that art is inevitably deformed by politicization and irreducibly crippled under totalitarian governments. There’s certainly an argument that the great works produced in this period are only evidence of impossibility of achieving a truly totalitarian state. The treatment of Shostakovich’s fraught relationship with the Soviet apparat is nuanced - the more explicit Nazi sympathies of Webern and Strauss are not glossed over. He demonstrates the political influences on the emergence of Darmstadt after the war, and notes the covert funding of avant-garde music by the CIA for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. (Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper is an excellent account of this somewhat surreal propaganda campaign - abstract expressionism to combat agit-prop).
The chapters are broadly thematic, avoiding strict chronology in the aim of a clearer account of the various directions of development pointing up continuities that could easily be obscured. Composers representing those who assiduously cultivated their own gardens (Sibelius and Britten) get stand-alone chapters, while Schoenberg and Stravinsky reappear throughout the book, the former setting the form for avant-garde tendencies across the century, the latter desperately striving to master the critically-acclaimed aesthetic of the day. If the book becomes more fragmented in the later chapters, it is because there are no such canonical figures as Schoenberg holding sway over an increasingly atomised tradition. The result is a fascinatingly rich, complex book, thick with character and incident. The riot at the premiere of The Rite Of Spring, he comments, was far from unique - the concert audiences at the time often divided into conservatives more than happy to give the bird to work they thought sub-par and aesthetes who were overjoyed at the opportunity to excoriate the philistine masses in response. The book is dotted with performances that end in riots - I think he nominates Steve Reich as the last major composer to receive this particular honour. Elsewhere, we see a young Morton Feldman being admonished to write music for the man in the street - looking out the window, the man passing in the street proved to be Jackson Pollock. Ross mercifully resists the temptation to shoehorn extraneous jazz and rock into the book, and generally displays decent if obvious taste when discussion spills into these areas.
The Rest Is Noise might not be a perfect book - I’ve seen some entirely reasonable criticisms elsewhere - but the scale of its’ ambition makes perfection unachievable. That it succeeds as much as it does is remarkable, and for me the measure of that success is the months and years I am going to spend listening to the music that Ross so evidently loves. That, presumably, is all the success he’s looking for.
[The man himself maintains a blog, also called The Rest Is Noise. Among other things, there is a section devoted to audio files of excerpts from pieces mentioned in the book.]
Apparently it’s only taken me ten months to forget the Wicklow 200 because I am sorely tempted to ride the Sean Kelly Challenge this August.
…doing the decent thing? It is extraordinary that it has taken Bertie Ahern this long to resign. His evidence before the Mahon Tribunal has been nothing more than the courtroom equivalent of a comb-over. It might be superficially convincing to the man himself but no onlooker can possibly have been fooled by it. The feeble pleas of lapses of memory and no wrongdoing are the shameful responses of a child caught in the act who will not own up. Would no-one draw him aside at any point and urge him to maintain some shred of self-respect? To spare his family, or his party? Naturally Brian Cowen had nothing to gain by forcing the issue - he could afford to let things take their course while sheltering under the dubious virtue of party loyalty - but what about the rest of Fianna Fail? This is a further and blatant indication of the contempt in which politicians hold the voting public. And they are correct to do so. Whether through complacency or partisanship, the voting public in this country does not punish Fianna Fail at the polls, no matter how mired in corruption the party leadership may be. The man who will emerge worst off from this undignified episode is surely John Gormley whose gutless failure to either demand Bertie’s resignation or to tender his own will destroy the Green Party’s ability to present themselves as anything other business as usual.
