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February 22, 2004
Rogue Town Cryer, Cathedrals, FolkSong
A day out scouring charity shops (adding to my tower of unread but too-cheap-not-to-buy books) in Truro - voted into the 'top 50 worst towns in britain' but actually not all that bad, despite having a streetplan that seemingly doesn't conform to any concentric, grid, or other template. Everywhere we go we see a town cryer, in full regalia. I assume he's part of some Merrie England heritage scam, but the actual story turns out to be more interesting. After he reappears again, popping his head round the door as I'm having my hair cut, the barber explains that the town cryer lives in Threemilestone, a small hamlet-turned-retail park, which is just outside Truro. Apparently the city authorities, despite his being a world-class prizewinning shouty bloke, refuse to make him official town cryer because he lives outside city limits. Presumably town-crying in Threemilestone is a bad gig, he'd probably get kicked out of Matalan for ringing his bell.
But in the great tradition of The Equaliser, Jim Rockford and Columbo, this is one town cryer who will not let those penpushers at city hall call the shots.
Yeah...He's bought his own gown, he's bought his own bell, and the man is now a rogue unit, an unaffiliated outlaw declaimer. The enterprising cryer even makes his practice self-funding by bringing himself up to date with 21st century news media, and selling ad space: When we turn yet another corner to see him in front of us once more - weird time-travelling bugbear, evil jester, that particularly medieval combination of bawdy jollity and menace - he is stridently alerting the townsfolk to the opening of a new travel agent; 'oh yea, and for a limited time only all customers buying flights from Exeter airport get a week's free parking, oh yea...'. Seriously, wouldn't it make a great TV show - 'attention all units, we have a maverick town cryer situation.'
We took refuge in the cathedral. From outside this fine building is a compressed cluster of spikes; from inside a vertiginous gormenghasterpiece of Gothic verticalism. Extended clusters of stone piping ascending to the vaults prompt anachronistic flash-forwards to HR Geiger's alien baby factories. I start to wonder what Dunwich cathedral would have looked like now.
Pevsner is unfairly sniffy about both external and internal décor (though not so much as he is of St Mary's of Penzance, whose altar, he says, 'smacks of the wurlitzer'). Actually, though there are no imposing gargoyles, there are some nice carvings. But Pevsner is particularly disappointed about the resolutely brutal modernist extensions added in the late 60s - jutting flat slabs and Corbusier-derived 'fashionable motifs' totally out of character with the original highrise barbs. But it's only right isn't it - cathedrals, like pyramids, are an enduring rebuke to modernity. They show us what we can no longer, by any means, achieve, what we've sacrificed. (quote k-P mark: "capitalism's scandalous wastage of resources means that six levels of managerialst meddlers/ 'quality co-ordinators' would @!#$ things up before the finance for the first stone could be agreed.")
Verticality has been succeeded, made impossible, snuffed-out, by a smoothly dysfunctioning horizontality. Even the tower block is stacked horizontality in its social and technical essence. 'Cos there's nothing up there any more, any more than there's solid ground 'down there'. Only lateral, levelling, procedural connections between beleaguered flatlanders. There's something right about the quarreling 'L', the perpetual incompossibility between the resolute mediocrity of the grey boxes on their stumpy concrete pillars and the vaulted magnificence, the awful belittling altitude, of the original edifice.
We'd hardly stepped into the cathedral when suddenly Ruth gets a vicious nosebleed; she puts it down to some sort of automated exorcism (wireless theocracy, spiritual Bluetooth). I remember that - and appreciate why - nosebleeds, these unstoppable apparently unprompted flows, were traditionally regarded as terrible omens.
One of the most beautiful tragic British traditional songs, The Drowned Lovers;, tells a tale typical of these sorts of songs (or at least those that are remembered and documented). The songs are always brutal and matter-of-fact in recounting the most horrendous deaths, as well as being innocently rich in psychodrama.
William, doubting his lover's fidelity, plans to cross the Clyde to call on her, against the will of his mother. Despite her entreaties and curses ('in the deepest part of the Clyde Water, drowned you shall be'), he defies her and crosses the fierce river ('Oh roaring Clyde, you roar so loud, your stream is wondrous strong / Make me your wreck when I came back, But spare as I'm going')
Whilst his lover Margaret sleeps, William is turned away in turn by her mother, who impersonates her and tells him tales of her many other gentleman callers. As William crosses despondently back, and verse by verse, by slow stages, is pulled from his steed into the raging torrent, she awakes from dreaming, discovers the truth from her mother, and inevitably follows William into the wild night ('and the louder that this lady cried, the louder blew the wind'). In she wades, verse by verse deeper into the river in search of him. The song ends with the tragic couplet: 'for you have had a cruel mother, Willy, and I have had another / and now we'll sleep in Clyde water like sister and like brother'.
The connection with the foregoing is that when Nic Jones created the definitive modern interpretation of this song (Nic Jones is a tremendously underrated artist, at least the equal of Martin Carthy, and is - or should have been - in a wider sense, as important a musician as for example Nick Drake, Syd Barrett. Jones created a unique style of folk guitar and singing that blended the faithful rendition of carefully-researched historical songs with a contemporary, highly individual guitar style that owed something to the lute, something to contemporary blues/pop/rock, and something to the innovative tunings he favoured. Almost uniquely in the notoriously patchy history of folk/pop crossover (but isn't folk always already a crossover? Folk singers who don't think so are kidding themselves), Jones' sound generated its own depth, intensity and authenticity without relying on a supposed historical fidelity or the ghastly 'updating' of electric folk/rock. Sadly when Nic was at the height of his powers, he was incapacitated by a car accident, and although he eventually recovered, never played or recorded since. Even worse, the guy who owns the rights to his early records refuses to release them, contributing to his undeservedly languishing in obscurity and relative poverty). Anyway, this is all a digression within a digression...when Jones adapted the song from the text, which I presume he or someone else found by trawling through the collection of Cecil Sharp, he chose to alter the lines 'Willy sits at his stable door, and he's combing his coal black steed / and he's doubting on fair Margaret's love and his nose begins to bleed' to 'his heart began to bleed'. Somewhat uncharacteristic of his approach - although he was never reverent, he usually preserved the essential plainness of the songs. And, I think, a mistake, because how much more powerful, disturbing, and germane to the story, is the image of the sudden burst of crimson from the nose, foretelling William's doom, than the asinine metaphorical platitude of the 'bleeding heart'.
And this in essence is what's wrong with bad pop the whole space-time continuum over, and inversely what's great about some folk songs; they have real red blood instead of faded purple metaphor.
Posted by robin at 02:23 AM | Comments (3)
February 14, 2004
Faciality
I'm writing things quickly here that I wanted to write slowly....never mind, you get the idea...may revisit later.
Did some portraits the other day...I've never been interested in portraits; being basically misanthropic, I wrongly thought that to do portraits you had to be 'interested' in people in a sort of sentimental, humanistic way - which I've just never been. But really, there's nothing more inhuman than a portrait; sitting and looking at a contact-sheet of 36 pictures of someone you know, you suddenly realise what a weird concept 'the face' is, and how little your sense of that person actually has to do with their face as abstracted from the rest of them. And inversely, how much a visual image of the face is a total abstraction, a frozen mask; shorn of cultural expectations, a portrait in fact tells you one important thing about a person: that they don't exist.
One could say that such an observation signalled a 'failed' portrait: but I go with Baudrillard, repudiating the idea that one should be drawing out someone's 'inner self' or creating an expression of character: rather, a truly successful photographic portrait, says Baudrillard, is one that catches something alien to the person themselves - meaning perhaps, the physical process or thing that 'one' is, but whose exclusion from thought is constitutive of 'one's individuality/humanity. This after all is what photography excels in, this is its essential strength: capturing the gap between our well-worn ideas of how we like to believe the world is, and the brute fact of its contingency and imperfection.
It's like the inverse of Hirst's shark : Looking into the face, you see that life isn't there, just as looking at the shark you see that death isn't there. The impossibility of life in the lens of the camera. Failed motion capture.
Bacon, of course, painted from a combination of photographs and his own memory of a person, so maybe part of the uniqueness of his work is its success in reintegrating the failed soul-capture of photography with the living entities of memory.
The artifacts of photography, its creation of its own reality, are responsible for the phenomena that happens when you see a celebrity in real life - they never look like 'themselves', because for the first time you are experiencing the whole deal, the physical presence, the rhythms of their movement, the changing relations of their body to the environment.
It's the equally disorienting opposite with portraits: you see a different version of someone: a brutally stilled but somehow compelling alien presence. Or rather, looking at contacts, you see many versions; especially with someone older, you get the sense that you're looking at many different people, different ages, cohabiting, at war. Beneath your habitual synthesis of a person, you suddenly spy their essential multiplicity. And each single frame is a facinating failure to recreate that 'whole' that doesn't, in material reality, exist.
As a child I often used to play a game of staring into the mirror: a thrill of fear, testing myself against the uncanny, staring wide-eyed into the reflection staring back, until all familiarity suddenly drained into the void and I became a drawn, pale alien to myself, a thing of nightmares. Dread recognition of non-meaning.
A portrait can certainly articulate emotional and other qualities of a person, but what it most powerfully articulates, and what should be distilled and treasured in it, is this uncanny glimpse of something unrecognisable, the real nonexistence of people.
---
*Footnote on Deleuze and Guattari's 'Faciality' - this chapter always makes me laugh because I can't read the title without thinking of it being sung by Billy Bragg to the tune of 'Sexuality' (no.1 unsexiest song of all time)
Posted by robin at 09:00 PM | Comments (4)
February 01, 2004
Bacon II : Squalor, Alcohol and Creation
The Mews
Slow churning, metal on metal; dog-skull masticating tin cans.
During long inebriated nights, his words, together with this continuous grinding, soundtrack visions of craggy mountainscapes. Distant peaks with flame-red sunset tips blearily confabulated by glazed eyes and nodding heads. At their foot, bared, red rock.
A veneer-framed fire-mountain-scape occupies the top third of a cheap electric fire. Below, the flat illusory panorama blossoms into fully-sculptured coals, cast in translucent plastic and scumbled with soft red and black.
Cracking off this plastic shell as one might prise open an oyster would reveal the source of the interminable rasping; Spitlike there turns a metal rod, sprouting small paddles at regular intervals; their role being to interfere with the light from a bulb now dead and frosted-over with dust, imparting to the plastic rocks the illusion of an animated and wholesome blaze.
Further below, as justification for this decrepit artifice, nothing more than a two-bar electric fire: two bars meaning a total of four combinations:
No bars, and stay cold (the room loses heat swiftly and regains it slowly). Two bars, and 50p in the meter every evening. One or the other bar - multiple theories exist, yet untested, concerning their relative potency.
God knows where the ugly thing came from. Mind you, the whole fucking place is a dump. Strewn with images and things that might be parts of images: torn edges, fold-marks, stains, burnt-out circles, flashes and pools of pigment, slowly-solidifying emulsions. A butcher's block for signs. Can't spot the join between the images and their material environment, or between one image and another. Can't even see the floor, you just know it's there, like the canvas beneath the paint. Crucifixions, paralytic children, dogs walking [interrupted], open mouths. Cooked children of Thyestes trussed up in Harrod's food hall. Not sufficiently surreal!
The front bar, aglow, is afflicted by perfectly circular spots of char-gray where, bending low as if in promethean sacrament, George would light his cigarettes (Not another fucking fag!). As he did so, you would have noticed infernal reflections play on the chitinous hair, slicked over with a substance liable, were he to bend an inch closer, to combust a great deal more enthusiastically and with a more cordial warmth than that fire had ever provided. With his heavy determined grace, the Kray bearing, he would topple back on his polished Bond street brogues and, at the termination of a smoke-traced arc, set himself back in the chair. But no more, "George is no longer. George no more! Boo hoo!" he plays callous nursery-rhymes with the absence, taunts himself and appalls his audience, celebrating something tougher than death, more important than life. Love is the Devil.
'Idon'treallyknow,' he retorts dismissively to some imbecile inquiry, taking a further draught of the stuff whose influence imparts the abrupt inkiness to his cavernous gob, the same poison blackening the dank interior and bestowing its wine-dark fluency. In the dark cube of the room this yawing block of head-meat, apparently bereft of an owner, hovers and sways in the dim glow of the speckled bar, a cheshire cat with its teeth smashed in. Pope-robe-purple lips poised on the brink of black concepts. They tremble, they thin in contemplation, they tumesce in silent anticipation, but for a moment nothing tumbles out from the cave. The fire-stirring axle continues to crank. He fixes you with his wavering, milky eye, a crackle of cruelty anticipating the next revelation, the ultimate bon mot which will surely shock 'em: another superficial outrage, mere shadowplay of the obliteration, the utter psychic carnage that would descend...if they only knew.
*
Only a drinker;
'Only a drinker could really know that giddy feeling of a perception not quite staying still for long enough to become a thought, phasing in and out and in as something not exactly the same.'(Rob'o'Toole)
Only a drinker could so understand and utilise the power of vague visual suggestion. Staggering out of the Colony Rooms, veering like a breached longship. Vagabond navigation by means of uncertain forms smeared through the vapour of dipso nights. Functioning in below-ground shadow worlds, where men become monsters before your eyes, where smoke-filtered light turns and tricks, making shadows flesh, flesh meat. A world through the champagne glass - as in Maynard's biopic or 'study for a portrait' where glasses and bottles are improvised lenses distending the image into an approximation of its subject's vision.
But isn't his masterstroke the inversion of this principle, the deliberate reverse-engineering of reality from from a manufactured smear? A seer and a hunter/tracker as much as a painter. Reading spilt viscera. On the verge of surrendering himself to despair and death in the wilderness. Suddenly spots occult suggestion in a mess of colour ("...involuntary marks on the canvas which may suggest much deeper ways by which you can trap the fact you are obsessed by.") Continues the hunt. Borderline paths which may be 'mere' fabulations, imagined from the slightest differentiation. Followed, they become real. Recognizably patterned outcomes retrospectively prove the significance of ambiguous omens. Belief in the significance of accident, sincerely felt, will always corroborate itself.
Performing a pissed-up transcendental deduction, he posits the logical necessity of a fantastic reality, given the deliberately corrupted evidence of deranged senses. Kickstarted, the process can't be stopped. The mess suggests A, so B must be the case. Add B. Repeat until something becomes real.
The Gilded Gutter;
The shaman, an outcast no less vital for his existence outside the social framework. A queer aristocrat (never 'gay', he disdained the politics of identity, preferring to remain afflicted by his condition) who unacceptably scrambles hierarchies (when working as a "gentleman's gentleman", he turns his employer apoplectic and gets the sack immediately by appearing one day at the next table at the Ritz - and probably wearing a suit of superior cut too.) It 's not only in the artistic sense that he believes himself to be, of necessity, 'working outside any tradition'. This was the emerging postwar world of faltering delineations, of barriers melted in the heat of battle and no longer reparable. And in any case the interzones of Soho and Tangiers were prefigurations, futures arrived early, just as in urbanomic drift cities prefigure the future of outlying districts. Peculiarly, when the future arrives this generalised declassification is realised as an attractor-basin of affordable mediocrity rather than as a plane for extreme experimentation, a multitude of roles available for the enjoyment of their differences. This other future, however, persists as a perpetual possibility, a virtual zone.
Gambling also fosters a Heraclitean appreciation of the reversibility of all things, as in the following poignant anecdote:
"I remember once in the Ritz going up with a rich man who happened to be in the lift, and he'd been in Soho shopping to buy some peas and new potatioes, and the bag burst, and it all fell on the floor of the lift presumably taking him up to his room, where I imagine he had a little oil stove where he was able to cook the peas and potatoes. Well, that is luxury for a rich man."
It's entirely due to fortuitious circumstances of life - circumstances that perhaps would have destroyed or reduced to subsistent mediocrity another person - that he becomes able to address the question : What is left for the artist when all the certainties of class, place, hierarchy, and tradition are stripped away?
"[O]ne can only want to record one's own feelings about certain situations as closely to one's nervous system as one possibly can"
Ersatz orange fire illuminating the crags of his brow, glittering on his tongue as the spit turns relentlessly; in the midst of the most appalling morbid excogitations, the cheap, silly optimism of the nervous system imbues him with cheer, keeps him warm.
A purported ancestor booms out, laughing, in the half-darkness:
It is worthy the observing that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak but it mates and masters the fear of death ; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him.;
Next : causality and intoxication
Posted by robin at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)