The Bomb Party

Ecstacy and Her: On the potential military application of the player piano

2012-01-15T00:43:00.000Z

With celebrity shoplifters in the news this last week, it behoves us to look back for a moment at the life of Hedy Lamarr. The actress once known in Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in the world was arrested several times for leaving a shop without paying for her items. Interviewed for the documentary about her life, Secrets of a Hollywood Star (2006, Barbara Obermeier, Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini), Kenneth Anger memorably recalls an occasion when she was caught stealing laxatives for her constipation. "It was very pathetic," sighs Anger, who befriended the actress in New York in the 1970s.

On another occasion, when arrested again, several decades later, in Florida, Lamarr claimed that a transvestite of her acquaintance had framed her by stuffing the stolen goods in her handbag without her knowing. In 1966 Andy Warhol had made a short film, Hedy, in which Lamarr was herself played by transvestite Mario Montez and shown caught in the act of shoplifting by Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer (later bit part actor in Knight Rider and Babylon 5), Mary Woronov, and put on trial before a jury consisting of all five of her ex-husbands.

"And here is the best part," sings Montez vamping on Sinatra's 'Young at Heart' in a blonde wig, puffing on a cigarette holder, "You have a head start / If you are among the very - Kleptomaniac". The seventy minute film, which also stars Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar, is notable for its music, provided by a then little known group called The Velvet Underground.

Born Hedwig Keisler in Vienna, 1913, she started acting in her teens and scored one of her first starring roles in Czech director Gustav Machatý's (1933) Ekstase. Viewed today, this wild and dreamlike film seems years ahead of its time, recalling Jean Renoir at his very best, even anticipating some of the surrealism of Alain Resnais, the chiaroscuro of film noir.

Hedy herself is utterly bewitching. Years later, she would tell Kenneth Anger with a raised eyebrow that Hollywood taught her the easiest way to look sexy was to act dumb, but here she is headstrong and willful, possessed of a haunting melancholy, and fiercely independent. She would later claim she was paid nothing for the role and that she certainly wasn't told in advance about the nudity for which the picture soon gained notoriety.

In the same year, she married the Austrian arms manufacturer, Friedrich Mandl. A prominent fascist, Mandl sold weapons to both Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom were guests at Mandl's lavish soirées. Kept a virtual prisoner in his house, Hedy escaped with the help of a British diplomat and fled, first to Paris, and ultimately to Hollywood. Practically as soon as she stepped off the boat she had a contract with Louis B. Mayer and a new name, Hedy Lamarr.

While Hedwig Keisler was growing up in Vienna and making her first steps in the movie business, the American composer George Antheil, was mostly in Paris. He lived for ten years above Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, causing a series of minor riots in concert halls across Europe (one of which would become background action in a Marcel L'Herbier film) with his mechanical music for player pianos. "One day in the future," he once said, "we will make God in the heavens with electric lights."

He returned to America in 1933, the same year as Lamarr, and by 1936 both were living in Hollywood. He was writing film scores for Ben Hecht and Cecil B. DeMille and reporting on soundtracks for Modern Music magazine, with a sideline posing as an expert on female endocrinology, giving advice to the "questing male" in the pages of Esquire. The story goes that Lamarr and Antheil met a cocktail party, she sought him out for advice on enhancing her "upper torso" through the use of hormones and somehow the conversation turned to munitions.

By 1941, Antheil and Lamarr were in possession of a patented method for launching submarine torpedoes without getting their radio guidance systems jammed by the enemy. The technique, which they dubbed 'channel hopping', combined the familiarity with high-tech weaponry Lamarr had gained at her former husband's side, with Antheil's intimate acquaintance with the mechanics of the pianola.

She had the idea of sending out the tracking signal in rhythmic bursts, according to a coded sequence; he figured out you could use the mechanism from the inside of a player piano as the encoding device - the keyboard's eighty-eight keys allowing the torpedo guidance system to leap amongst eighty-eight different frequencies.

Though the military insists Lamarr and Antheil's invention was never put into wartime service and the pair never made a penny from their patent, today Lamarr and Antheil's "channel-hopping" method is all around us. Long after the term of their patent had elapsed, the technique was recognised as an enormously efficient means of data compression. Now known by the term "spread spectrum", it forms part of working infrastructure of GPS, mobile phones, and wireless internet networks - even if few of these devices seem quite big enough to fit the insides of a player piano inside them.

2012-01-03T15:38:00.000Z

So it seems that within a day of the city of Paris launching its AutoLib electric car hire scheme last month, a woman was knocked down by one because she didn't hear the thing coming. According to this, the US Senate passed a law back in 2009 requiring electric car drivers to make "a minimum level of sound to alert pedestrians" of their coming. All of which is somewhat reminiscent of a line in Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) about car owners playing the tapes of authentic 20th century car noises as they drive their vehicles with otherwise silent power sources.

Being a frequent Paris-London traveller, I was very pleased to have an article published about the AutoLib scheme in the December issue of Eurostar's onboard magazine, Metropolitan. As is so often the way with these things, most of my favourite bits of the piece cot cut out in the to-and-fro of the editing process so, now that a new issue is to be found in the seat-back pockets of the cross-channel express, I thought I might offer you a little remix of some of the off-cuts from the essay Metropolitan called 'Electric Avenue' . . .

In the first novel by Hugo Gernsback, the man who coined the phrase "science fiction" and published the first magazine devoted to the stuff, we learn that gasoline-driven automobiles have long been obsolete in the year 2660 thanks to the "electromobile". Each of these electrically-driven vehicles is equipped with a small mast to convey power to the motor and rubberised wheels to insulate the car from metallic roads.

Ever since the 1911 publication of this heroic fantasy, electric cars have been unable to shake off the association with science fiction. The Vanguard CitiCar turned up in George Lucas's (1971) film THX-1138; and only a couple of years ago, the swoosh-shaped, three-wheeled Aptera made an appearance in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot. This December, as the new fully-electric, noise-free, emission-free AutoLib system is rolled out across Paris, science fiction becomes quotidian reality - six and a half centuries ahead of Gernsback's prediction.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the history of the electric car, however, is that they were a fact of life long before they were the object of sci-fi speculation. There were miniature electric vehicles invented as early as 1828 (by a Hungarian priest, named Ányos Jedlik), and a full-size model drove into the International Exhibition of Electricity in Paris in 1881. By the end of the 1800s, there were nearly 34,000 electric cars on American roads, nearly double the number of petrol-driven motors. In fact, in the nineteenth century, it was the gas guzzler that was science fiction, as evinced by the "horseless carriages" of Jules Verne's (1863) fantasy of Paris in the Twentieth Century.

"A symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man."

2011-12-22T11:55:00.000Z

The most preposterous thing about Zack Snyder's bloated, flaccid big-screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen comic is that it posits a world in which the doomsday clock is at a minute to midnight, Nixon has served five terms, and real life superheroes walk the streets and the plains, fighting crime and winning wars, and this has had no effect whatsoever on contemporary pop music.

How Music Got Game (Or Game Got Music)

2011-12-15T13:54:00.000Z

" . . . Badges must be worn at all times . . . "

Read more about music apps, gamification and exploitationware in my "Wreath Lecture" for The Quietus here.

. . . have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown Venus today? Robyn Orlin reviewed. . .

2011-12-07T18:36:00.001Z

". . . The challenge for Robyn Orlin then becomes how to make a piece of theatre which re-tells the story of, and pays tribute to, Baartman, without in the process exacting the same work of spectacularisation of which the latter has historically been the victim. This she achieves through the deft manoeuvre of exhibiting instead the audience to themselves. . ."

Rock and Roll Vs. The American Federation of Musicians

2011-12-06T18:53:00.001Z

". . . Listening to rock & roll, then, is to cross a kind of sonic picket line. . . "

The Atari Video Music and the Music Video

2011-12-01T11:53:00.001Z

"... There is a kind of whig history of the music video in which early performance based clips, such as Jan & Dean’s ‘Surf City’ on the Pacific Coast Highway and the minimalist cool of The Animals’ sound-studio set for ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, give way to a burst of creativity which starts with The Beatles and explodes with MTV and Michael Jackson. It is a seductive narrative, and not uncoincidentally one that neatly dovetails with the rock heritage mag lists of the great classic albums . . ."

Read more at the ÉCU - European Independent Film Festival music blog here.

Black Rain - Music for the End of Time

2011-11-23T11:05:00.001Z

"Some three minutes of Shôhei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989) have elapsed before the first entrance of Toru Takemitsu’s original score. The credits have rolled, the principal characters and the setting of the first act – Hiroshima, August 1945 – have been introduced. Within only 30 seconds of the creeping entrance of the violins, the blinding flash of white heat has burst upon the frame. So it is perhaps appropriate that one of the chief influences on Takemitsu’s music here is Olivier Messiaen, the composer of the Quartet for the End of Time."

Three sketches of Metropolis; from the current exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française

2011-11-19T09:35:00.000Z

In 1924, Fritz Lang and his producer, Erich Pommer, traveled to America by boat. Whilst they were there they picked up two Mitchell cameras, both of which would later be used to film Metropolis. But on their way to the States, they shared passage with the architect, Erich Mendelsohn (later to be the designer of Bexhill-on-Sea's De-La-Warr Pavilion), in the same year that he would form the group known as Der Ring with Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.

It may be interesting to speculate upon what Lang and Mendelsohn might have talked about on that long sea voyage. Certainly there are family resemblances between Mendelsohn's vision of America - not to mention his own expressionist buildings - and Erich Kettelhut's designs for the city in Metropolis; likewise in his idea of the city as a kind of "organism," of "the city of the future" as "a system of focal points that is, in panorama, the very fabric of space." But also, in a letter to his wife from just a few months before setting sail for the US, Mendelsohn wrote of architecture task of "reconciliation" between "function" and the "sensual" in a manner which finds it echo in the Maria's line of dialogue that, "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

That they did talk seems practically assured given that, upon his return to Europe, Mendelsohn published a book of photography, Amerika, Bilderbuch eines Architekten which attributes one of its images, entitled 'Broadway by Night', to Lang himself. Lang's image of Broadway is woozy, delirious, somehow both glamourous and seedy, anticipating something of the Yoshiwara district of his Metropolis. The staggered pseudo-double exposure of the neon lights implies the moving camera of the cinema.

In a photograph towards the end of the Cinémathèque's exhibition we catch a glimpse of Lang relaxing during a break in shooting, alongside his wife (and the film's writer) Thea von Harbou, and the actress Brigitte Helm (who played Maria). They appear to have formed a little musical combo with Lang on drums, von Harbou on piano and Helm on saxophone. Harbou would later note that one of the "choicest materials" used to build the pyre upon which Maria was to be burnt in the film's climax was a piano.

We see many of Gottfried Huppertz's sketches and short scores for the film's music juxtaposed with von Harbou's original script pages. Glancing at these yellowed pages, it is immediately clear that the music for the machine room was immediately conceived as a forest of repeat marks. For Rotwang's laboratory we see crowds of hurried semi-quavers arpeggiating up and down through masses of sharps and flats.

Unusually, both for the time and for films in general, Huppertz was employed early on in the production process. He would bring his piano on set, writing his scores there and then during filming. So when it came to the recent work of reconstruction, the original musical score was an invaluable resource as a guide to editing scenes to the correct length and to the right rhythm, for which the conductor Frank Strobel was employed as an essential consultant.

One day during filming, after shooting the early scene in the "eternal garden," the production received a number of visitors from the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein, along with his cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and assistant director, Grigori Alexandrov, were visiting Germany after the completion of Battleship Potemkin.

Lang eagerly showed his visitors some of his rushes, declaring, "Now you go and do the same. But different!"

Tisse, impressed by the film's technical achievement but not by the "personal ends" to which it was put, would later write, "Our Battleship Potemkin had not yet appeared in Germany. But we had already decided that we would certainly not do the same."

Cage, Stravinsky, the Long Now

2011-11-12T23:30:00.000Z

"The sooner the world forgets Stravinsky the better," wrote the young John Cage to a friend, in 1935, "If he gave us the primordial, as you say, I swear it was a cheap imitation." Igor Stravinsky, for his part, was scarcely any kinder about Cage. Though the composer of the Sacre du Printemps would admit, in one of his many conversations with his friend, the conductor Robert Craft, to finding some of Cage's work "enjoyable" he admitted, finally, that "his performances are often, to me, the frustration of time itself."

Looking back over the music of the twentieth century, it seems in hindsight that, more than Schoenberg and Stravinsky or Cage and Boulez, the two magnetic poles in terms of style and temperament were indeed Cage and Stravinsky, two composers who could never see eye to eye and for whom there seems scarcely any point of engagement or rapprochement. And it may be, as Stravinsky hints, precisely over this question of time, and of one's mode of being with regard to time, that this fundamental incompatibility is most keenly felt.

So amongst the several concerts of late works by the late John Cage programmed in this year's Festival d'Automne in Paris, it is this pairing of Cage's Seventy-Four (for Orchestra) with Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles at the Cité de la Musique that proves the most fertile. How better, after all, to look back upon a century like the twentieth, by which we are all still so haunted, than to place side by side the means by which two of its musical titans chose to say goodbye to music?

Cage kept on composing until his final year, completing a number of significant works in the last few months before the second stroke that killed him while preparing tea on August 11th, 1992. Of these late 'number works' from his final months, Seventy-Four is on the largest scale and is perhaps the most obviously mournful, even while treading cautiously before applying such a direct psychobiographical correspondence with a composer like Cage. Stravinsky, on the other hand, wrote his setting of the Latin requiem mass some five years before his death in New York in 1971, and already, as his widow would later claim, he "knew he was writing it for himself."

It feels strange still to imagine the motorik sawing of the strings which open the first movement drifting up from the canals of Venice as Stravinsky's body was ferried to the cemetery island of San Michele to be buried near his old collaborator, Sergei Diaghilev. So brittle and crisply locomotive as played tonight by the Symphony Orchestra of the Südwestrundfunk of Baden-Baden and Freiburg, one can scarcely imagine it played in a city without cars.

Only with the sudden violence of the third movement's Dies Irae can we imagine ourselves in Venice - and even then it is the macabre and foreboding Venice of Don't Look Now and Aldo Lado's Chi l'ha vista morire? A Venice of uncanny shocks around mysterious dark alleyways. As we drift into the final three movements with the Lacrimosa, we could be amongst the damp fog of the sirocco, until the postlude brings on the eerie tolling of bells, to the final chords of, in the words of Robert Craft, "death alone".

Cage's Seventy-Four may kick off in an equally misty atmosphere, but it is a mist of a fundamentally different texture. The name of the work comes from the number of musicians: an orchestra of two pianos, two percussionists, one harp, plus strings divided into fourteen first violins, ten second violins, eight a piece of cellos and violas, and six double basses. These seventy-four musicians are further split in two - high and low - with each group being given, less a score, than a series of notes, to be played within a set of vague time-brackets, off the clock and without conductor. A performance note encourages players to exaggerate the "usual imperfection of tuning" between orchestral instruments to give the music imprecise degrees of microtonality.

The grand orchestras of major institutions often have a bit of a problem with Cage; tending either to treat his works with an excessive solemnity that veers on parody, or a kind of jocose levity that could seem like a flip dismissal of something, as Stravinsky hinted, best regarded as not really music. Tonight's musicians from the Sudwestrundfunk are not exempt - indeed, managing somehow to commit both sins at once. Nevertheless, almost despite themselves, they manage to conjure up some wonderfully languid textures, forming a heady oneiric concoction.

With age, Cage's opinion of Stravinsky evidently softened, for a concert of the latter's works conducted by the great man himself forms the backdrop to one of Cage's favourite stories. As Igor lays down his conductor's baton and nods his assent to the crowd's applause, a small boy turns to his mother: "That's not how it goes." This is Cage's "proof", as offered in Peter Greenaway's film, Four American Composers, that listening to recordings can only be a bad thing. The boy was wrong, Cage implies, because, almost by definition, that was precisely how it was supposed to go - because Stravinsky himself was conducting it.

A curious sentiment to hear from Cage, perhaps; the composer of indeterminacy, of the composer's diminished authority. By contrast, at least according to this anecdote, Stravinsky is the composer who knows how his works go; perhaps the last major composer for whom there is never any ambiguity in the score.

This is how we tend to imagine Cage and Stravinsky, it is their image in the popular imagination (think of Mads Mikkelsen's unsmiling mien in Coco & Igor), it is, if you like, Cage's Stravinsky and Stravinsky's Cage, and it is basically what the musicians from the Südwestrundfunk gave us tonight at Cité de la Musique: clipped, terse, precision engineering Stravinsky; and lax, care-free, anything goes Cage. But is this the whole story?

Think for a moment of the relaxed lightness, the moments of doubt and ambiguity revealed here and there in Stravinsky's Conversations with Robert Craft, or those passages - there is at least one in practically every piece he wrote - where the music just seems to get carried away with itself, the levee breaks and everything suddenly bursts free of its shackles for a moment. Think of the meticulous planning and measurement David Tudor - Cage's preferred interpreter - put into his performances of Cage's works, or the millimetre-precise measurements Cage himself left by way of prepared piano instructions.

I'd like to suggest another way of seeing this gap between Cage and Stravinsky, that returns to this question of time with which we opened in the light of another Cage composition: ORGAN2/ASLSP. This work from 1985, the second half of whose title stands for As SLow aS Possible, originally written for piano but soon changed for organ, contains a series of notes to be played, as the name suggests, "as slow as possible". The first organ performance lasted 29 minutes. Since September 5th, 2000 (which would have been Cage's 88th birthday had he not died in 1992), a performance has been ongoing at St. Burchardt's church in Halberstadt, which is due to last, in total, 639 years.

Stravinsky once said that "Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Herein lies a tacit acceptance - even a celebration - of art's power to impose an artificial before-and-after narrativity on the intangibility of duration. Even as the development of Stravinsky's career betrays a most un-Orphic tendency to look back over his own (and other people's) shoulder(s) from time to time, his is basically a music which goes from A to B, from the past to the future. With Cage we have something different.

I think ASLSP has more than a passing resemblance to Stewart Brand's 'Long Now' project, to build a clock and bury it, that would count ten thousand years. It is often argued that Brand's clock is a call to think seriously about the future. I would argue otherwise. Brand's clock is a bulwark against the future. Taken at absolute face value, the clock of the long now is designed to preserve just that - the long now, the neverending present.

2011-11-09T15:56:00.000Z

In case anyone were in any doubt of the regressive nature of current British policy, one of the more arresting images from today's protests in London. What better image of the desperate striving for an idealised past than the spectacle of some twenty policemen, riot shields strapped to their belts, all stationed to protect a clock which runs backwards? The backwards march of post-history must be protected from the dreams of rioting futurists!

(image via @DrStu2012 thanks to Oliver Basciano for bringing it to my attention)

Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

2011-11-05T20:26:00.014Z

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

Flying Sorcery

2011-11-03T23:20:00.006Z

Manned flight somehow never quite lost its sense of magic. Ever since Louis-Sebastian Mercier altered his second edition of L'An 2440 to accommodate the recent balloon flight of the Montgolfiers, in 1786; flying machines have provided a persistent trope for science fiction writers. Nearly a century later, Jules Verne would still find wonder in balloon journeys. And a half century after that H.G. Wells was still writing scientific romances about aeroplanes, decades after the Wright brothers had taken to the skies. When the futurists, Italian and Russian alike, wrote their operas, they chose aviators for their heroes.

This sense of wonder is reflected in our daily experience of commercial aviation. I have known confirmed atheists to cross themselves before take-off. The sigh of relief - even applause - frequently to be heard upon landing is a reaction to what is still perceived as a kind of modern miracle.

If we take the Eurostar, or any other kind of international train journey, and we experience extensive delays or cancellations, we expect - and generally receive - some form of apology and material compensation. Somehow we neither expect nor receive the same treatment from an airline. We stolidly accept hours of waiting at the flimsiest of excuses, gushing our gratitude when the winged beast finally deigns to take the air. This is related to the lingering sense of magic that hangs about planes. One does not ask for money back guarantees from the village shamen.

In his exhaustive history of the utopian impulse, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch finds in fairy tales of magic carpets some of the most primitive gestures toward the kind of technological utopian wish fulfillment pioneered by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Today, a recent paper in the journal Applied Physics Letters (reported by the BBC) unites several centuries of utopian dreaming with a description of a prototype "flying carpet", employing cybernetic feedback principles, which its designers hope could be suitable for the exploration of Mars.

The above image cribbed from Unsanctioned Speculation.

Beyond the Black Rainbow at L'Etrange Festival, Paris

2011-11-02T14:44:00.003Z

"[S]et in a health-resort-cum-religious community 'in a beautiful place in the country'. . . it could be said that with its coloristic compositions and repetitive scenic plan, the film’s structure is more musical than novelistic. . . What is perhaps most intriguing about the film is its apt demonstration that, today, in order to present a future that is genuinely ‘other’ one must set one’s narrative not in the world ‘of tomorrow’, but in the recent past."

Read the full report at Electric Sheep Magazine.

I've Got a Secret and Avant-Garde Music

2011-10-31T12:38:00.003Z

"It's September 16th, 1963 and John Cale is walking onto the stage of a television studio in New York City. "That was one repressed individual," recalls the older, less repressed John Cale over the phone from his studio in Los Angeles, nearly half a century later, "Very uptight." Back in 1963, Cale in a dark velour suit jacket and tie takes a seat next to the show's host, Garry Moore and whispers into his ear, "I performed in a concert that lasted eighteen hours." The point of the show was that the four panellists had to work out the guest's 'secret' from a series of yes and no questions.

"Does it have anything to do with endurance?" asks former Miss America, Bess Myerson."

The above is an extract from my recent interview with John Cale, for The Quietus. But three years later, on the 12th of December 1966, another episode of the same show featured Victor Borge, one time "clown prince of Denmark" withholding the secret, "I'm going to play a song by touching ten pretty girls". The electronic device utilised by Borge for this most extraordinary rendition of 'Dark Eyes' is called a Peopleodeon and was invented by none other than Bruce Haack, along with his friend Ted Pandel, both of whom make a brief appearance at the end of the episode.

Former pianist with The Swing Tones, Haack met Pandel at the Julliard school in the fifties. This episode from I've Got A Secret was broadcast somewhere between Haack's various electronic records for children, made in collaboration with dance teacher, Esther Nelson - Dance Sing & Listen and The Way Out Record for Children - and later (even) more psychedelic stuff like Electric Lucifer and Haackula.

Without any real training in electronics (his degree from the University of Alberta was in psychology), and showing disdain for such ncieties as circuit diagrams, Haack gamely hacked together his own electronic instruments out of guitar effects pedals, battery-powered radios and any other bits and bobs he could lay hands on. These oddments were then put to the service of instructional dance records for children.

The question is, what on earth was a man like this doing on I've Got a Secret, a mainstream American panel show, hosted by Steve Allen and created by comedy writers Allan Sherman and Howard Merrill as a sort of cheap knock-off sister show to What's My Line? How much of another world does the sixties seem when we discover that such a workaday network product, otherwise notable for its brief appearance in the 1959 Doris Day vehicle It Happened to Jane, would feature incursions from John Cale playing Erik Satie's Vexations and Bruce Haack's homemade electronic instruments? Can you imagine comparable guests being introduced in the midst of Ant & Dec's Push the Button?

Britain's Best Baritone: Roderick Williams on Castor and Pollux

2011-10-29T13:20:00.004+01:00

"It's 1977, the year punk broke into the mainstream and Maria Callas died of a heart attack in her home in Paris, and Roderick Williams is taking the stage in North London for perhaps the first time. It’s the junior school play, the text is forgotten, but Williams has taken the unusual role of an "exotic fortune teller" garbed in black wig and skirts. "I had to perform a belly dance – with my parents in the front row of the audience." Little did he know at that time how this performance would prepare him for his latest role, as one of two eponymous brothers, in the ENO's new production of the mid-18th century tragédie en musique by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castor and Pollux. . . "

Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street, 9th October 2011

2011-10-10T11:23:00.001+01:00

"In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream."

Bagrec - London

2011-07-25T20:19:00.005+01:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://rashrecords.co.uk/track/bagrec"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Bagrec by London&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Lovely remix from Mr Richard Sanderson, from this album by Lamb & Tyger, which describes itself as "William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set for Hammond Organ and voice then re-versioned by a commonwealth of audio-artists." Also features Jude Cowan, Cult of Wedge, The Big I Am, and the delightfully named Tinks and Fugal, amongst many others. The whole damn thing is available for free download via that link above, so, you know, you might as well.

KOSMOS

2011-07-13T19:13:00.005+01:00

Slag that I am, I currently have three different articles doing the rounds, each exploring a different facet of the BFI's current season of Soviet SF. There's this at The Quietus, about Aelita, Bogdanov and the 'first wave' post-revolutionary science fiction of the 1920s; there's this in Glass Magazine about Yefremov, Lem and the thaw-era second wave; and finally this, for Sound and Music, about Eduard Artemiev's soundtracks for Solaris, Stalker and Mechte Navstrechu (clip above). Enjoy!

"Structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse"

2011-07-07T13:03:00.005+01:00

In amongst the mounds of stuff at the - actually quite disappointing, all things considered - Kubrick exhibition at the Cinématheque Francaise, a letter from a fan. Shortly after the release of Dr Strangelove, Kubrick received an admiring letter from a Cornell art historian called LeGrace G. Benson, otherwise notable, it would seem, largely for an essay entitled 'The Washington Scene' about the evolution of the arts in D.C., for a 1969 issue of Art International.

Benson's letter, dated March 20th, 1964 compared Kubrick's film favourably to the then still fairly new Pop Art movement, "In both paintings and movie there is the competent use of a developed artistic vocabulary, and knowledge and undisguised use of commercial techniques and processes, the deliberate manipulation of those cliched images near and dear to the hearts of our countrymen, the apparent use of the ostensible subject matter concealing the actual meaning. It is interesting to see that the paintings and the movie have both been received by some critics as "attacks" on various aspects of "Columbia, Happy Land." Some of us see not an attack but a deliberately detached and sensitive description."

Benson goes on to quote Wittgenstein's, "What is done cannot be said" which he claims the film illustrates, and goes on to compliment the film for "having been structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse, which is entirely appropriate to the iconological content."

Kubrick, evidently flattered, replied on April 6th, thanking his correspondent for such an astute and well-thought out analysis, "Seriously, you are the first one who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to the last splash." And he promptly invites Benson out for a drink, during his forthcoming trip to New York.

It is not, apparently, known - or at least not made clear in the exhibition - whether messers Kubrick and Benson did in fact meet that spring in New York. But we do know why Kubrick was going. Not for that year's World's Fair, at which Raymond Scott's 'Futurama' and 'Space Mystery' will provide the soundtrack for a General Motors-sponsored vision of the future of urbanism. It was in New York that summer, just across town from the World's Fair, that Kubrick met up with Arthur C. Clarke for the first discussions towards what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at that time was still being called "How The Solar System Was Won".

". . . never exactly the same and never really different. . . " : Eliane Radigue's Naldjorlak

2011-06-22T23:13:00.009+01:00

[image: from Displaced Sounds blog]

It is difficult to imagine how one could experience Eliane Radigue's Naldjorlak except as some sort of consensual hallucination. In its first movement in particular, for solo cello, you find yourself staring at the body of the instrument, transfixed: you can see exactly what the instrument is doing, exactly how the sound is being produced - and yet, you are bamboozled. Sounds seem to be drifting, floating around the room, moving through space, coming at you from behind. Tones that are familiarly acoustic are behaving in ways one would expect only from electronics - with glacial, infinite sustain and purity of tone; then, tones distinctly electronic behave in ways unmistakably organic - ever shifting, fluctuating, ululating. All just from a cello, and one seemingly just playing one note. Tuned, as cellist Charles Curtis claims, to the instrument's 'wolf tone' - "the essential frequency of the cellos' resonating cavity." This is not, as the Deleuzians would say, a becoming-animal, a becoming-machine - but something bodily is happening. An exobiology. First contact. Music for creatures who exist on different time spans from us. Like a swallow hypnotised by the song of a whale.

The composer who, on a trip to the States in the early 70s, bought an ARP 2500 and left the keyboard part behind, uninterested, deals in stretches, distortions of perspective; a delicate yet highly disciplined exploration of the possible timbres to be teased out of very limited material, developed in very close collaboration with her instrument(alist)s, and with great sensitivity, infinite nuance. Music which is, like the quote from Paul Verlaine in the concert programme goes, "never exactly the same and never really different. . . "

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - and Zombies!

2011-06-19T23:38:00.004+01:00

A scene in George Romero's (1985) Day of the Dead in which we see the zombie affectionately nicknamed 'Bub' grasp his own reflection in a mirrored surface and mime the act of shaving offers both a symbol of Bub's dawning subjectivity and a hint that this third in the sextet is the most Lacanian entry in Romero's career-long attempt to rewrite Sigmund Freud's essay on 'Infantile Sexuality' (from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) for zombies.

A later moment in his awakening sees Bub listening, on headphones, to a tape of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He is clearly caught up short by the music, suddenly rapt, becoming visibly less hunched, less slavering - could we say more refined? Even more human?

Genre cinema, loosely defined, has had a curious relationship to the symphony that Wagner saw as the gateway to the future. The "glorious ninth" is an oft-repeated refrain in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Walter Carlos's day-glo rendition accompanying, and in some ways, in its different articulations, summing up, each stage of Alex's progress. In Dusan Makavayev's (1974) Sweet Movie, we see the Vienna Actionists delightedly singing the 'An Die Freude' as they engage in an orgy of coprophagia. It crops up also in the final scene of Tarkovsky's (1979) Stalker, masked by the noise of a running train, in which, according to Tobias Pontara, it functions simultaneously as the master signifier of rational scientific progress, and a satiric swipe at the very same.

The Ninth is used fairly rarely in cinema compared to the Fifth, or even the Sixth and Seventh - especially if you exclude documentaries and TV movies. And it may be because this quality is never quite absent - of a strident pomposity that can't quite help deflating itself. The Ninth has baggage which, like Alex after his treatment, inevitably makes us a little queasy. But does this self-parodic reflex mean the end of the era - and not just in music - inaugurated by it; or might it still be possible, like Bub, to hear the piece once more with fresh ears?

"Sounds like a woman. . . Or a monster!" : Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

2011-06-08T09:20:00.008+01:00

Midway through watching the Roger Corman produced space adventure, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965, dir. Curtis Harrington), one develops an increasingly odd sensation: the effects seem strangely dated for the year (even for a low budget film), the plot weirdly disconnected, like a series of events strung together with little sense of development - strands are built up, as though they are about to lead somewhere, and then just peter out. And why is the voice-dubbing so off? And is that Russian writing on the side of the spaceship?

Indeed, almost the only thing holding it all together is Ronald Stein's equally uncanny music. Stein was assistant musical director St. Louis Municipal Opera in the early fifties, and married the opera singer Harlene Hiken (who provided the singing voice of Audrey Dalton in a western of the same year, called The Bounty Killer). For several years, Stein served alongside Les Baxter as staff composer at American International Pictures, but though they share credits on numerous films, Baxter claims they never met. With its silken exotica and fleeting electronics, Stein's music for Prehistoric Planet could almost be mistaken for Baxter's at times.

It turns out, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet was almost entirely composed of footage from an earlier soviet film, Planeta Bur ('Planet of Storms') from 1962, with the story recomposed and scenes re-arranged with the help of a couple of extra scenes starring Basil Rathbone (who would star alongside Dennis Hopper in Harrington's vampires in space flick, Queen of Blood, released the following year). Planeta Bur was directed by Pavel Klushantsev, who shot to fame in Russia when his (1958) Doroga K zvezdam ('Road to the Stars') happened to coincide with the launch of Sputnik.

It doesn't end there though, for the same footage was used one further time, in 1968's debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich (under the alias Derek Thomas), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, with Rathbone now replaced with Howard Hughes's former squeeze, Mamie van Doren. Prehistoric Planet now reveals itself as the incoherent, "primordially repressed" middle part of a three-stage fantasy, as in Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' - caught between the hard SF of the original Soviet film, and the explicit sexual fantasy of the Bogdanovich version.

In this context, we can now begin to make sense of one of the most troubling aspects of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet: the suggestive, disembodied voice the astronauts keep hearing as they explore Venus, a tremulous electronic portamento which, as one of the men remarks, "Sounds like a woman. . . or a monster!" Throughout the story, this voice teases the astronauts and audience alike, one constantly expects it to lead somewhere - but it never does. We never really discover its source as the story just sort of peters out. Absent entirely from the original Russian film, and only finally embodied in the third version - here it remains a perfect example of one of Melanie Klein's disembodied partial objects, haunting the spectral soundtrack of the film, and somehow all the more alluring for it. Like a leitmotif from Tristan and Isolde, it constantly resists resolution - to the point of a sado-masochistic impulse that cannot fully annunciate itself, precisely as in the repressed middle term, "Father is beating me."

Martin Rushent, 3 January 1948 – 4 June 2011

2011-06-06T07:47:00.005+01:00

All the Right Kinds of Wrong: Oxbow Live in Parc de la Villette, Paris

2011-05-29T20:01:00.008+01:00

By the end of the first song, Eugene is already removing his waistcoat, loosening his tie, and unbuttoning the top of his shirt. And so it begins again, I thought to myself, recalling the very first time I saw Oxbow live, nearly a decade ago: Eugene screaming and growling with animal horror, roughly thrusting his barely concealed cock in the face of the tiny - and frankly terrified - audience at the Amersham Arms. Support act, Richard Sanderson, a morris dancer and London Musicians' Collective director who had opened with a flock of tender folk songs for accordion and laptop, blubbering to me that "the band behind are actually incredibly good musicians." Later, the whole group repaired to my old house by New Cross Gate. Over a morning mug of cornflakes it became clear that Eugene Robinson, author of the book, Fight (whose topic is fairly self-explanatory) was in fact, contrary to expectations, probably the most genteel and articulate house guest I had ever had.

They've just finished the fourth song of their set for the free Villette Sonique festival in Paris, and by now Eugene is down to his jockey shorts. "Suddenly, it's a whole different kind of Sunday afternoon in the park," he growls at the crowd, experimentally teasing his already half-tumescent member. "If you all weren't here, we'd get arrested right now." And then a battery of snare cracks launch us into the next ferocious assault of brutal avant-swamp rock, Dan Adams tearing fuzzy, slurring low-end chords from his fretless Fender bass. But amidst the chaos and the torment there lurk surprising moments of sweetness, recalling the mystical jazz of Duke Ellington's 'Moon Mist', or early 70s Herbie Hancock. In these moments, Eugene rips out a rich, throaty soul singer's voice that make every Brit vocalist from the last decade or so who has ever been called 'soulful' - be it David McAlmont or Adele or whoever - sound like the Mike Flowers Pops.

With a nod to the man the French call DSK, Eugene sidles up to the woman at the side of the stage filming the show, and puts his arm round her waist. "Good thing she's not a hotel maid," he winks to the audience. This gets a big laugh, but it's quickly cut short by a squall of wildly fluctuating feedback from Niko Wenner's guitar amp and the start of another four minutes of paranoia and revulsion. Listing reference points - Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Dr John, Tom Waits, The Birthday Party, The Jesus Lizard, Big Black, etc. - will never come close to the sometimes horrifically visceral experience of watching Oxbow live. Like watching one of the nastier exploitation films from the late 70s era, or a drunken wrestle with a piss-stained homeless psychotic in a back alley at four in the morning: thrilling, if liable to leave you feeling somewhat unclean.

[image courtesy of GoodNoisyCore]

Chris Watson at Présences Électronique 2011

2011-03-28T19:17:00.003+01:00

The lights dim, leaving two strings of fluorescent light to bisect the room across opposing diagonals. The only other luminance illuminates a quartet of bright red spherical speakers, hung from the ceiling on wires like flying saucers in an Eisenhower-era SF flick. In fact, we are surrounded by speakers of all shapes and sizes, and we, in turn, surround the artists, who perform 'in the round' - if perform is the appropriate word for standing hunched over a mixing board assiduously twitching knobs and faders.

Our first twitcher is Chris Watson, former Cabaret Voltaire man turned grand homme of UK acousmatics, and twitcher in a double sense for Watson is also a keen bird watcher. He immediately transports us to some hyper real train station 0f nightmares. Engines choke with reverb and locomotive squeals swell, while the judder of distant pistons loops into a thunderous beat. From out of the sussurant fog, the voice of a young woman announces the "Dernier appel pour le train fantôme."

Watson is a man more renowned for manipulating the sounds of - animal and insect - life. Tonight he is summoning the dead. This being an INA-GRM event, the spectre in question is Pierre Schaeffer who inaugurated the genre of musique concrète with his 'Étude aux chemins de fer' just a few years after announcing the liberation of Paris on French national radio, over half a century ago. This is the ninth edition of the Présences Électronique Festival, hosted annually by Radio France since the 55th aniversary of Schaeffer's Étude. Imagine if the BBC chose to commemorate the Radiophonic Workshop with a similar festival of experimental electronics every year, instead of desecrating its memory with the new sloppily saccharine orchestral arrangement of its most famous product, performed on kiddies' night at the Proms. . .

2011-01-19T14:50:00.004Z

"During one of our frequent impasses, we discussed the possibility of the Soviet Union collapsing and the West sending in robot tanks and androids to save what could be saved. . . After a day or two we retreated from the idea. But let us suppose we had thought events through, and had been able exactly to replicate the true events of 1989, only seven years in the future. . . And if we had put all this on the screen in 1982? No one would have believed it. Even SF is the art of the plausible."
- Brian Aldiss, 'Foreword: Attempting to Please,' on collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on Supertoys Last All Summer Long / AI

If it is true that, today, 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as the first chapter title in Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism would have it, it may be propitious to recall that, less than a decade before it did in fact end, much the same might have been said of communism.

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, science fiction was willing to imagine all manner of extraordinary futures. Rare though was the author willing to forecast the fall of the iron curtain without some extraordinary catastrophe or intergalactic intervention to effectuate it. Rare, but not quite nonexistent.

In his 1953 novel, Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a world society forcibly brought about by the instruction of peaceable alien invaders. Nine years later, in a work of non-fiction, Profiles of the Future, he implies that 'voices from the sky' of rather more terrestrial origin might be capable of bringing about the same result. In a chapter in which Clarke speculates about the possibilities of satellite broadcasting, he compares a still "parochial" radio network to a global television future in which "the great highway of the ether will be thrown open to the whole world,

and all men will become neighbours - whether they like it or not. Any form of censorship, political or otherwise, would be impossible; to jam signals coming down from the heavens is almost as difficult as blocking the light of the stars. The Russians could do nothing to stop their people seeing the American way of life. . . "

Now, I'm far from qualified to speculate about the possible role of satellite broadcasting in the collapse of the Soviet Union (and obviously the idea that every form of censorship is rendered impossible by it - or any particularly accurate picture of American life transmitted by it - must now seem absurd). But from a purely chronological perspective, the rise of one did seem to happen at about the same time as the fall of the other. . .

The Future For Sale; or, How Jules Verne Predicted the Browne Report

2011-01-17T12:02:00.004Z

“It must be confessed that the study of belles lettres and of ancient languages (including French) was at this time virtually obsolete; Latin and Greek were not only dead languages but buried as well; for form's sake, some classes in literature were still taught, though these were sparsely attended and inappreciable – indeed anything but appreciated.” So we read in a prophecy by Jules Verne of Paris in the Twentieth Century, discovered just a decade and a half ago, yet written a century and a half ago, since locked away in a vault for safe-keeping.

Amongst the ubiquitous electric lighting, horseless carriages, and other marvels anticipated in Verne's tales of the future, we are informed of the Academic Credit Union – a national education system operated according to the principles of the Crédit Mobilier and other national banking concerns run as joint stock operations, still relatively new to France at the time the book was written. Proportional to the collapse in literary studies the Academic Credit Union precipitates, we find a boom time for civil engineering, mechanics, physics, and finance; “whatever,” Verne tells us, “concerned the market tendencies of the day.”

In the 1860s it was an absurdist satire to suggest the conquest of education by the norms of the banking trade – today it seems increasingly to be accepted common sense. From the Browne Report's recommendation of stripping funding to the arts and humanities, to new plans from universities in Leicester, Durham and London to award students for their 'corporate skills', business is increasingly the paradigm for academia. And as Verne's nightmare becomes a reality, any qualification not immediately conducive to turning a profit seems destined to beg the question, from press and public alike, of why the state should be asked to foot the bill.

In its time, Jules Verne's dystopia was a rare voice of despair – rejected by his publisher as implausible - in a century characterised by the overwhelming optimism of its literary predictions. For the utopian writers of Victorian times, the nation's responsibility towards the life and culture of its citizens, quite apart from any considerations of profit or business sense, was pivotal. From Richard Wagner's demand for a state-financed opera theatre, free to all comers, to Edward Bellamy's promise of a citizen's credit allowance, corresponding to an equal share of the nation's annual product; the futurists of the industrial age would regard the modern belief in individualism as little short of barbarism.

“There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support,” insists Bellamy's man of the future. “Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support.” Looking Backward, written in 1887 but set in the year 2000, was enormously popular at the time, spawning dozens of sequels and responses, and even a number of intentional communities.

Though it may be tempting to scoff at yesterday's dreams of a bright future, it is worth recalling that it is precisely this utopian impulse that led to the establishment in Britain, not just of universal free education, but also - and at a time when the nation's finances were far worse off than they are now - a national health service and welfare system.

Since the twin nihilisms of punk's 'no future' and Thatcher's 'no such thing as society', utopian thought has been thin on the ground. Where we do find glints of optimism in the mainstream media, it is a faith, not in any national or international state, conceived as a community of common interest, but in private corporations and individuals to provide for us. This is the message both of David Cameron's 'Big Society' and Wired editor Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. What is new about Anderson's 'free' is not its gratuitousness, but the question of who is to foot the bill.

For the internet's techno-utopians, everything can be free, paid for not by a redistributive tax system but by advertising. The price we pay is that our most intimate discourse - chatting on Facebook or Gmail, making mixtapes for friends on Spotify - is thoroughly permeated by direct marketing, as though our mobile phone calls were constantly being interrupted by targeted radio ads. So yesterday's dystopia becomes today's supposed utopia, and hope for the future becomes a commodity to be sold at market price.

[image: Gilles Roman, from this website]

Fresh Hell, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

2011-01-07T11:17:00.010Z

There is a utopian thread running through Adam McEwen's Fresh Hell exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Is this to be understood in spite of its title, or in its spirit? After all, isn't Orpheus, in a sense, the first utopian? Orpheus who, by the power of his song, crossed to the underworld and raised hell, therein becomes the first artist to travel to undiscovered countries, the first for whom art is a demand for the impossible.

British-born, New York-based artist, McEwen has been given carte blanche by the Palais de Tokyo, the third in a series to do so, after Ugo Rondinone and Jeremy Deller. He has used the space to assemble a vast panoply of works, spanning centuries of aesthetics from medieval busts of the Kings of Judah to recent work by Sarah Lucas and David Hammons, to express a kind of scattered, associative cognitive map of his own influences and desires. McEwen, the former newspaper obituarist who entered the world of fine arts with a series of fake celebrity death notices (Macauley Culkin, Rod Stewart, Jeff Koons, &c.), has entered his own private underworld and brought back for us his prized Eurydices, refusing, all the while, to look back.

In the determined expressions of the runners in Bruce Nauman and Frank Owen's (1975) film, Pursuit, their bodies strangely eroticised, their gaze fixed passionately on some impenetrable point in advance both in space and in time; in the dogged dignity of Gino de Domenicos, as he pursues his impossible projects, to fly, or to make a pebble cause square ripples on water; in Jessica Diamond's insistence that the world is not enough, as she scrawls “Is that all there is?” above a line drawing of the continents. In all these works we find precisely that utopian striving, that leap into the impossible that Ernst Bloch defined nearly a century ago. “The category of utopia,” wrote Bloch, “possesses the other” into “overtaking the natural course of events.”

Works like Georg Herold's (1994-2010) Hängendes Labyrinth, which invites its audience in, offering a space “to meditate... a symbolic pilgrimage towards a holy place”; the obsessively detailed Indian ink maps of imaginary landscapes drawn by Henri Michaux under the influence of mescaline; produce other worlds and alternative spaces, while the pneumatic tubes that crown the exhibition's entrance evoke as much the literary utopias of the late nineteenth century as more recent dystopias in print and on film, such as 1984 and Brazil.

Just as prevalent, however, across the exhibition floor, is a certain aesthetics of failure. The empty stalls of Michael Landy's (1990) Market look forward to his later works, Break Down, in which he ceremoniously destroyed his own life and works, and the Art Bin (2010) he installed in the South London Gallery. Martin Kippenberger's The Good Old Time (1987) presents something resembling a great leather rubber dumpster, a body bag for some vast, obscene object.

Perhaps, then, McEwen's vision of hell relates to what is now presumed to be the inevitable failure of all utopias. Herold's labyrinth is, after all, just a maze which leads nowhere, and Nauman's runners sprint through blackness, without destination, their purpose but a charade. It is the great stone heads of the Kings of Judah which first greet us upon entering, intended perhaps as a warning, or cautionary tale. These thirteenth century statues, originally part of the décor of Notre Dame cathedral, were decapitated by Jacobin revolutionaries in 1793 in their systematic attempt to erase all traces of feudalism. With their crowned foreheads, the figures were presumed to represent French kings not Biblical figures, so McEwen resurrects them as victims of a desecration born of misguided fervour.

For all McEwen's cynicism towards the grand recits of modernity, he remains, nonetheless, a believer, one of the hopeful striving for the impossible. Is it not the case, after all, that the message of Jonathan Borofsky's (1984) Object of Magic, and of Walter de Maria's (1966-7) High Energy Bars, is that the art still can and must demand the impossible? Through this very demand – this magical status of art, object of a ritual fascination – it can transcend its lowly thing-like being and become something possessed of strange powers; move the underground and, like Orpheus, raise hell.

Killers From Space

2010-12-26T10:45:00.004Z

Frankly, the fact that the this low-budget atomic oddity from the fifties will turn up in lists of the worst science fiction films, while crap like Donnie Darko and The Matrix is regularly to be found disturbing All Time Top Tens is a crying shame. And one that I felt deserves some small redress, in this, the season of lists.

The Sound of Mondo London: Basil Kirchin

2010-12-24T12:56:00.006Z

I've written a little about Basil Kirchin before, in relation to The Abominable Dr Phibes and the weird library and experimental stuff he got up to in the 70s. But his very first film score - two years before the Arts Council grant that afforded him a Nagra tape machine with which he could begin his concrète experiments, but four years after his return from India where he spent five months studying in the Ramakrishna temple - was for this curious (1965) British documentary, Primitive London.

Arnold L. Miller and his regular cameraman Stanley Long offer up a homegrown response to the hugely successful Italian Mondo series, taking a peak at the dark, obscene underside of the happy clappy swinging London seen in A Hard Day's Night. As if to force the comparison, alongside the strange mix of industrialised sex, chicken farming and Jack the Ripper impersonators, we get an interview with Brian Epstein's other protege, Billy J. Kramer, who by this time was already somewhat past his best.

The first three tracks on the Trunk CD could be the missing link between the atmospheric Brit jazz Johnny Dankworth had been making for Joseph Losey, and Roy Budd's Get Carter score. With its skittering rhythms, blue note basslines and sleazy brass, a theme that immediately evokes a slow striptease in a rather tawdry venue, we are reminded that our composer was once half of the Kirchin Brothers, joint leaders of the Ivor and Basil Kirchin Orchestra. But already there's something weirder going on in the tremulous vibes, the bruised and melancholic chords, the eerie swoop of the Ondes Martenot.

It's on track four that we step into something altogether different, no longer swinging, far from Johnny and Roy territory. Out go the hi-hats and in come tape loops; electronics; uncanny, unplaceable noises; a vague percussive shimmer in the background; high-pitched drones and wails; time distortions, things playing backwards and exotica. I've not seen the film so I can't imagine what was happening on screen at this moment - but it certainly isn't former train driver, Billy J. Kramer and his jolly band of Dakotas, crooning, 'It's Gotta Last Forever'.

Don't Look Up: Impostor and the Future

2010-11-27T14:31:00.007Z

"There wasn't always a war with the Centauri, but in my lifetime it's all I've ever known. By the year 2050, six years after the first attack, we'd lost so many things. We'd lost the sky to electromagnetic domes, to shield the Earth from frequent air raids increasing in intensity. We'd lost the uncovered cities that the government forgot. We'd lost democracy to global leadership. We didn't expect peace anymore with the Centauri, because we came to see that peace wasn't their goal. Their goal was Earth. The ultimate land war, with no boundaries."

Gary Fleder's (2001) Philip K. Dick adaptation, Impostor, trots out merrily and seemingly without too much self-awareness all the old dystopian science fiction cliches: the violent, uncompromising homeland security agents with their baroque torture devices; the CGI-generated post-Metropolis, post-Blade Runner hypermodern city-scape; the scarred 'Zone' inhabited only by a brutalised underclass (including amongst their number, of course, one street-tough-but-still-scared cute little girl); on the bonus 'behind the scenes' documentary on the DVD the film-makers trot out the names of Kafka, Orwell, and so on, as though reciting an ecclesiastical litany; we even have the omnipresent propaganda posters with their Churchillian slogans - "Victory at Any Cost", "The Project is Your Future". But then, amongst the phrases familiar from 1984 and its imitators, we have one propaganda slogan familiar from another source, Thatcher's old mantra, increasingly also the motto of the Conservative-Liberal coalition: "There Is No Alternative."

Despite the association of the phrase with a PM deposed two decades ago, it is probably this one slogan, more than the smouldering iMacs and the ubiquitous iPads and the whizz-bang police technology, that makes this film (whose special effects, jerky camera moves and all over orange-and-teal-ness have otherwise aged very badly) feel like it still just might have something to say.

So, Spencer Olham and his wife (Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe) can still take a trip to the woode for a picnic and the national parks still look green and verdant just like they always did - until, that is, you look up and notice the vast electromagnetic dome which shields the sky from attack. And Olham can get in the shower and use his voice-activated music software system to play some tunes while he washes, but he can quickly get rid of that frenetic drum and bass which comes on first and replace it with John Lee Hooker with a simple voice command.

Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that at the end of the 1980s many of the communist leaders in Easter Europe resembled those Warner Brothers cartoon characters who had run off the edge of the cliff but not yet looked down. Today perhaps we are in the reverse position. It is not the past, down there, which has unexpectedly caught up with us, but maybe the future is here, already, up there in the sky, but we consistently refuse to look up and see it. And perhaps iTunes, iPods and all the other tools that are supposedly making music, in Gerd Leonhard's words, "like water," are not so much "the future of music" but in fact the very things that are blinding us to a future already present, and maintaining the safe cushion of the old familiar classics around our ears.

Rendezvous With Elia: Cronhammar at Herning

2010-11-26T17:01:00.005Z

Ingvar Cronhammar has implied that his life's work has been an attempt to get over the trauma of existential angst that struck him upon sneaking into a screening of Bergman's The Silence as an adolescent. There is a kind of opaque muteness to all his work, none more so, perhaps, than Elia, the enormous creation (60 metres in diameter, 32 metres high, weighing in at 380 tons) that dominates the far end of Birk Centerpark, just outside Herning, Denmark.

Cronhammar's work seems to have been becoming more and more inhuman, more and more inorganic ever since his earliest work from the late sixties to the early eighties. Most of the early stuff tended to involve the bodies of animals, whether living - as in the live chickens with flashing lights on their backs in Concert for Member of the Home Guard (1969) - or dead - as in the taxidermied pigs heads, mounted and tagged with the logos of prominent local institutions, of Those Pigs (1976), or the stuffed swan perched at the top of Time is On Our Side (1983).

The elliptically titled Time is On Our Side was followed by the even more mysterious The Gate (1988), the work which Cronhammar admits opened the door to artistic life for him, as well as pointing the way towards the monumentalism of his more recent work. The Gate resembled a great industrial machine, like something wrenched from the bowels of a ship. Only it would seem that the only conceivable purpose of this engine is the raising and lowering of a whale skull in a tank of water.

Since The Gate, Cronhammar's art has increasingly developed a kind of forbidding sheen, as though refusing to tell tales on its own manufacture. And, whether the scale has been domestic - Torben Weirup, in his book on Cronhammar, speaks of "memories of furniture... or furniture for other beings" - or landscape, they have never lacked a certain sublime, impenetrable mightiness, and metaphysical wonder. In fact, there may be less distance between his animal bodies and industrial edifices than you might at first think. He grew up in Kristianstad, Sweden - just next to a slaughterhouse.

I came across Elia (2001), earlier this month, when I was in Herning for the opening of the Socle du Monde Biennale at Herning Kunstmuseum. The day after the private view, we were given a brief tour of the Birk Centerpark area, the final stop of which was here. Immediately upon seeing it I was dumbstruck, confounded. It is common to compare Elia to the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to me it more resembles another Arthur C. Clarke creation from just a few years later.

In Rendezvous with Rama (1972), what is first mistaken for an asteroid turns out to be an enormous alien space craft, 20 kilometres in diameter and 54 kilometres long, that, whether by accident or design, has drifted into our solar system. When the crew of a the space ship Endeavour, go in to investigate the alien vessel, they discover it to be completely uninhabited, empty but for a few dormant machines, the size of cities.

Like Rama, Elia is built on a scale not quite human, but not so far off. You can climb the staircases that lead to its summit - but it's slightly uncomfortable, each step being just a bit too big. Similarly, Elia gives the distinct impression of being both brand spanking new (“everything looked absolutely new; there was no sign of wear and tear”), and a million years old. But what is perhaps most disturbing to the crew of the Endeavour upon exploring the insides of Rama is its silence, and much the same could be said of Elia.

“During the first 'nights' on Rama, it had not been easy to sleep. The darkness and the mysteries it concealed were oppressive, but even more unsettling was the silence. Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input.”

But like Rama, Elia is constantly threatening to 'wake up'. The tops of its towers contain red lights and lightning conductors, and the steel and concrete base has been designed for maximum resonance. Engineers have estimated that a clap of thunder would be returned and amplified for about forty seconds. Also, twice in every nineteen day period, providing weather conditions are favourable, the dome - which is connected to a natural gas pipeline - will shoot a nine metre high flame into the sky for half a minute.

“One might speculate endlessly, but the nature and purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown.”

On the day of its unveiling, on the 28th of September, 2001, a television journalist asked the artist what the monument was for. 'Nothing,' replied Cronhammer. Six months on site, 'scanning it in' to develop the idea, followed by twelve years to build the thing at a cost of twenty-three million Danish Kroner. The journalist repeated the question, what is it for? It is a place, Kronhammer replied testily, where people go to be quiet, to shut up!

Gaspar Noé read through Fredric Jameson: Enter the Void as Magic Realist Cinema

2010-11-18T09:37:00.012Z

Since 2002's gruesome rape-and-revenge tragedy, Irreversible, the films of Gaspar Noé have often been grouped together with what James Quandt baptised the 'New French Extremity'. This term, introduced in the February 2004 issue of Artforum magazine, uneasily aligned (then) recent works by directors as diverse as Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux, Alexandre Aja and Leos Carax under a rubric “determined to break every taboo.” With the release earlier this year of Noé's latest film, Enter the Void, however, it may make more sense to examine this work by the Argentine -born director in terms of Fredric Jameson's conception of 'magic realist cinema'.

Jameson begins his theory of magic realism with Alejo Carpentier's “prologo” to El Reino de este Mundo, in which he relates the combinatorial mischief of surrealists to that of magicians. Discussing André Masson's drawings in Martinique, he describes how the marvellous truth of the subject devours the artist - a truth that comes into being only through an unexpected alteration of reality, related to miracles. “The marvellous,” he writes, “implies a faith.” The real maravilloso is an aspect of everyday life, but one still imbued with the “invocatory power” of folklore. Jameson describes Carpentier's theory in terms of “a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself – not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived.” (177) Later, and particularly since the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Jameson relates, magic realism has become associated with a certain movement in Latin American literature concerned with a kind of anthropology of the fantastic.

Drawing on Lacan, and Freud's conceptualisation of the “uncanny,” Jameson seeks to transfer this notion of magic realism from the realm of painting and literature to that of film, seeking in doing so an alternative to the late capitalist logic of postmodernism. The essay, 'On Magic Realism in Film', teases out its programme through an analysis of three films from Poland, Venezuela, and Columbia. With each of these films, it is through their specific relation to a certain historical referent, the way in which these films engage with history as such, that they find themselves opposed to cinematic postmodernism. Such that, in spite of the undeniable visual pleasure of the films in question, it is far from the case, as in postmodern 'nostalgia' films (such as The Godfather, The Conformist, &c.), that the viewer's engagement with history is confined to the consumption of a “surface sheen of period fashion reality” in the manner of some “visual commodity” (179).

To consider Enter the Void as a magic realist text now appears doubly strange: a French film set in contemporary Japan, it seems pretty far from either a work of Latin American literary anthropology, or of cinematic historiography. Its concern is neither with any historical referent, nor, for that matter, with magic (at least, in the strict sense). And yet, in spite of these apparently insuperable differences, there appear certain aspects of both Jameson's conceptualisation, and those of older writers, that seem to describe precisely the contours of such a film. In a French context, the appellation may not seem to strange, of course; when I interviewed Gaspar Noé earlier this year for The Quietus, he immediately related the notion of magic realism to that older term, poetic realism, usually applied to French cinema from the 1930s, such as the films of Jean Vigo, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir (but for Noé, just as much a reference to Fellini). He described his film as “kind of a fairy tale” and yet at the same time insisted that it was “more realistic” than its brutal predecessor, Irreversible.

Of course, Noé himself can be understood in more than just a French context. He was born in Buenos Aires, the son of Argentine artist and writer, Luis Felipe Noé. Coming to prominence in the early 1960s, Noé Sr. can be seen as Marquez's contemporary in South America, and the aesthetics of the Otra Figuracion group, of which he was a key member, share with the latter a sense of reality transformed and surrealistically distorted. In the films Jameson considers, he describes a particular approach to the use of colour in terms of “a unique supplement, and the source of a peculiar source of pleasure, or fascination” (178) and the same could clearly be said of the bright, vivid hues of Luis Felipe Noé's paintings. It is in terms of colour that Noé Jr draws a link between his own work and that of his father, suggesting that the colourfulness of his latest film may be an attempt “to top [his father's] fluorescent colours.” A first-person perspective film about hallucinogenic drugs, seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Oscar, and set in the neon city of Tokyo, Enter the Void is characterised by a lysergic visual palette, and some of the more fantastic 'trip' sequences are comparable to the experimental films of Jordan Belson.

For what Jameson calls 'magic realist' cinema, it is not just a question of bright colours, of course. He speaks of an “awakening of fresh sight” (195) and here one thinks almost inescapably of the drug experience described in Noé's film, and of Aldous Huxley's reference to Blake's “doors of perception.” In a now famous anecdote, Noé has claimed the original idea for Enter the Void came to him whilst watching Robert Montgomery's (1947) first-person perspective Chandler adaptation, The Lady in the Lake, after consuming magic mushrooms. We hear of the disappointment of Noé's teenage self that the hallucinogenic drug experience had never been accurately rendered on film before. Enter the Void thus seeks in some way to redress this perceived imbalance. That a heightened, transfigured perception of colour forms a major part of this psychedelic experience - the “magic mirror” referred to by the character, Alex - should be self-evident, not least from the numerous aforementioned trip sequences in which colour quite literally detaches itself from being the property of some object to become a kind of free-floating – and “mesmerising” as Jameson (ibid.) puts it - quality in itself.

“I like showing the flesh of people,” Gaspar Noé told me. “Even the genitals or whatever. And when you shoot a car crash, of course you have to show that humans are made of flesh and that's how they come to this world and that's how they leave the world too.” Not just through colour then, but just as much in its relation to the body, Enter the Void enters itself within the orbit of Jameson's theory of magic realist cinema. Jameson speaks of a “reduction to the body” mobilising the “resources and potentialities of pornography and violence” (203) not just as constituent of this magic realism but part of a greater “de-narrativisation” of film (a term inspired by Stanley Cavell's “de-theatricalisation”). In Enter the Void, this focus on the body, and the body in its fleshiness, is taken to almost absurd heights, in for instance the long 'Love Hotel' sequence, denounced by so many critics as boring and pointless. It's very excess becomes its own rationale, its superfluity abstracting the flow of the narrative into something else – less like the telling of a story, more like the drug experience itself: lingering unnecessarily, gazing in rapture.

It is here, through the neutralisation of narrative into what Jameson calls “a seeing or a looking in the filmic present” (205) that we enter, finally, the film's relation to history. For though, Enter the Void is not set in any distinct temporal past – rather, in fact, following William Gibson's provocative remark in which “the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed,” we might call modern Tokyo a kind of spatial future – it nonetheless offers a kind of history of the individual subject, as seen through particular moments of bodily trauma (for example, the death of his parents in a car crash). And that history, experienced as it is fragmentarily, drifting through visions and memories in a psychedelic haze, is precisely Jameson's “history with holes, perforated history, which includes gaps not immediately visible to us, so close is our gaze to its objects of perception.” (179) Going further – think here of the cinematic fillip of using first-person perspective throughout: “a kind of bas-relief history in which only bodily manifestations are retained, such that we are ourselves inserted into it without even minimal distance.” (205)

It is here, through this manifestation of a scattered temporal history in the midst of a spatial future, that Enter the Void employs these tropes of magic realism in the service of a critique of a certain kind of ideology. For if the idea of magic realism implies a disjunction or overlap, between different historical temporalities, “precapitalist and nascent capitalist or technological” (190) this is precisely the dream of Tokyo as dreamt by Western tourists, which is what the central characters of the film, despite their somewhat dubious resident status, most clearly are. Towers of neon - but just around the corner, traditional wooden machiya; serene, ancient temples AND MacDonalds AND Starbucks AND nightclubs playing up to date techno music. Isn't this precisely the tourist fantasy of Japan? And right in the middle of this, the dubious presence of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, proffered approvingly by the stoned 'hippy' Alex, totem of the gaze of the Western “traveller” upon Eastern religious culture since, at least, the 1960s.

If the story seems at first to follow the spiritual passage of Oscar after his death at the hands of the Japanese police, leading up to his eventual reincarnation (and therefore confirming the narrative of the Tibetan Book of the Dead), this initial interpretation needs to be interrogated, if not rejected outright, on a second glance. In fact, everything in the mise-en-scène points towards, on the contrary, an extended hallucinatory fantasy from which Oscar may well wake up. “I'm an atheist,” insists Noé “So even if the movie portrays the dream of a guy who dreams that his soul can come out of his body, in reality you never know what happened. He gets shot. And at the end of the movie you don't know if he's dead, or if he's gonna wake up in a hospital, or if he's going to wake up in prison.” Enter the Void, then, uses these tropes of the magic realist cinema, to expose and deconstruct the Western imagination of Japan, and of Tokyo in particular.

The film thus seeks less to replicate the actual experience of taking drugs but rather to “reconquer that terrain by other, internally constructed means” (206). Hypnotic visuals, psychedelic music (Coil, Denis Smalley, Delia Derbyshire, Zbigiev Karkovsky, Toshiya Tsunoda, Alvin Lucier), are all marshalled to the service of generating a fantasy that can be perceived directly as such. The film alienates its audience even as it draws them deeper inside itself, through a kind of attraction/repulsion that is at the heart of Freud's theory of desire, and the Lacanian concept of the objet petit a. The peculiar orientalist fascination of Japan for the Western traveller is structurally equivalent to this Freudian 'Thing', offering itself as a “magic mirror” to the Western gaze, just like the DMT that Oscar takes at the start of the film. As Gaspar Noé says of film-making itself, “At the end, you are playing with a spectator who wants to play with you.” The very pellicular of the movie, its skin/surface, acts as a libidinal intensification of this unspoken content, and of the desiring gaze of the viewer – offering it back as disavowed fetishism, or “magic mirror.”

(all page references in brackets are to: Jameson, F. 'On Magic Realism in Film' in Signatures of the Visible, New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2007)

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company - Roaratorio, at the Theatre de la Ville, Paris; November 13th, 2010

2010-11-15T15:26:00.007Z

If dance is the pre-eminent art of the body, the body unalloyed in its beauty, and unadorned by technology; in the choreography of Merce Cunningham, we find the body transfigured and transcended, to the point where, as in the philosophy of Donna Haraway, the line between the human and its android doppelganger becomes blurry to the point of indistinguishability. Not just Olympia, the mechanical doll from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman (as filmed, perhaps, by Powell and Pressburger), but a whole stage full of dancing automatons have been released from their box. But never have these clockwork figures appeared so tender, so pliable. Choreographed by Danceforms software to programme bodies imaginable only through wetware, we find the human at its most subjective in its transcendence, its communion with objects.

Elements of classical ballet, the modern dance of Cunningham's mentor Martha Graham, and -this being a "circus" on Finnegan's Wake - Irish dancing of the Riverdance variety, converge in occult combinations; finding impossible correspondences and convergences, spinning gold from base metal. From this seeming unrelatedness, elements adrift on an even plain, the eye picks out details and attractions at its own pace. Accepting the inevitable partiality of its position in space (as the ear must equally, in listening to Cage's accompanying music), one regards the whole more as one views a vast canvas, and with scant reference to the standard narrative expectations of classical ballet.

Structure emerges as if by accident, with the beauty of DNA, ant farms, or fractals. From moments of the strictest discipline spills the most casual intimacy; machinic rigour thus become inseparable from the simplest, most human of gestures. Even the stools, their cushions in the same colours as the dancers' clothes, are arranged, as if to emphasise the very objectness of the human figures, in the same holds and wild combinations as the coryphées themselves. The world of Roaratorio - and a whole world it most certainly is - is one in which tension and release, the animate and inanimate, form four points of a highly unstable Greimasian semiotic square which are constantly changing places with each other. This is why the dance does not 'mean' anything. It is not a work whose 'deeper' hidden truth can be divined or interpreted. Everything is on the surface, teeming with life. This is the sense in which, with Cage and Cunningham, artworks move from the romantic position of imitating natural phenomenon to operating themselves according to nature's own way of working. Without purpose, unpredictable, yet strangely fascinating.

(Photo credit: Merce Cunningham Dance Company/Bernand)

"Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robes in my face!"

2010-11-14T16:55:00.008Z

Is there any more disgusting spectacle from last week's news than the sight of former Bullingdon vandals queuing up to denounce the looting of their London club house?

"Thuggish" cried Boris Johnson. "Unacceptable... violence and destruction" bellowed David Cameron. Both of whom spent their student days vandalising restaurants and scarpering before the arrival of the police.

While Zizek speaks of a "speculative identity" between those perpetrators of the "objective violence" - structural damage enacted upon on the people and state infrastructure through budget cuts to welfare and education - and the "subjective violence" of physical destruction directly enacted against persons and property; here there is no need for speculation. They really are the very same people. The same people who would hire out restaurants in order to smash them up, throwing money at the owners as they leave; the same people who now ransack higher education and benefits provisions in order to line the pockets of their friends in high finance.

What is so "unacceptable" to Cameron is clearly not the so-called "violence" and property damage - how can it be when he has as good as admitted to the thuggish behaviour of his own student days, all the while dismissing it lightly as mere drunken japery? No, what they object to is that this vandalism is not a mere jape, a prelude to flaunting one's wealth, all the while cravenly keeping one eye on any possible damage done to one's own future career; but direct action targeted towards a cause that transcends the people who fight for it, a cause for which those people are willing to sacrifice their own interests to defend.

There is perhaps only one more dismal voice in the week's news. The shrill voice of National Union of Students President Aaron Porter, leaping to denounce his own members before even the Bullingdon Boys had a chance to stick their oar in. Porter's denunciation shows unequivocally the same pusillanimity as Cameron and Johnson's hurried escape from the scene of the crime, the same craven eye towards a future career in politics (the list of former NUS presidents to have ended up in cabinet, screwing over the very constituent they once represented, is an extensive disgrace).

Those who, like Porter, praise the "good protestors" who obediently marched along the agreed route, sitting down when they were told to and standing back up again when they told to do that, but leap to condemn those "bad protestors" for whom such empty play-acting is not enough, want, in Robespierre's phrase, "revolution without the revolution."

In 2003, over a million marched obediently against the Iraq War and changed nothing. In France, this year, several times that figure marched and many also went on strike, achieving just as little. When the political parties show their contempt for the standard democratic procedure of making manifesto pledges, winning votes based on those pledges, and then sticking to those pledges when those votes bring them to power - it is time the public too accepted that normal democratic procedure has been suspended. Now, only direct action - and, yes, potentially violent struggle - has any chance of bringing about change.

There are other voices making themselves heard, less shrill, less contemptible, but equally curious. Those who say, 'What a pity! That the good intentions of 50,000 peaceful protestors were put to shame by the violent actions of a few!' And, 'Why must the media always focus on this hardcore minority instead of the overwhelming majority who did what they were told peacefully and dutifully?' - which latter is rather like saying, there are a million honest peace-loving citizens of Gotham City who feel no need to wear a mask or garish make-up - why must those mean old comics focus on the few who choose to spoil it for everyone else?

What emerges from these complaints, outwardly sympathetic to the aims of the protest, is the image of a subject supposed to vandalise. This subject is, inevitably, not a student, some sort of interloper, probably a member of the increasingly spectral 'black mask faction' of anarchists (the problem with the notion of anarchists protesting against the dismantling of the state clearly somewhat under-thought here). No matter that every report from anyone actually within spitting distance of millbank tower has found that at least the vast majority of the occupiers were, indeed, just 'ordinary students', swept up in the fervour of the moment. No matter that there is no evidence for the existence of this much phantasised 'black mask' faction (beyond the rather more prosaic reality of a few people spontaneously covering their faces in order to avoid identification by police photographers and cctv cameras). There is evidently a felt need for those protestors who occupied the building to be othered, for the speaking subject to distance him or herself from this supposedly dangerous and violent minority.

What appears to be lacking amidst all the hysteria, is any real question of why last week's protest erupted into this kind of conflagration. As with the riots in the Parisian banlieues in 2005, the answer seems to be a simple demand for visibility and recognition on the part of a constituent that has been shown by successive governments that its needs are simply not important to them. Even within the students own union, street protest has been largely suppressed for over twelve years now, twelve years in which first tuition fees, then top-up fees were introduced despite promises to the contrary, and student debt has escalated beyond all recognition. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have now broken their promises to students - and in what appears to be a kind of retrospective incitement after the fact, it emerged only days after the protests that, far from Nick Clegg's official line stating that he simply didn't realise how bad the economic situation was before the election, the Lib Dems had plans in place to abandon their promises on fees even before the election took place.

It should now be clear that if last week's protests achieved anything, then they achieved precisely this longed for visibility. At least one Lib Dem MP (in a stroke of typical Liberal opportunism) has now pledged to vote against education cuts, claiming inspiration from the "nostalgic" sight of student protestors. Trade union leaders have extended a welcoming hand to the students to form a coalition against cuts, with Nigel Stanley of the TUC claiming the protests have "given heart" to angry unionists. Manchester University has since been occupied in protest against the cuts. And the protest has been the focus of discussion across the media. To claim this would have been achieved without the occupation of millbank tower involves an extraordinary disavowal, a kind of willful blindness to the logic of spectacle.

There are those who will say that violence of any sort of unacceptable, those who will say that the Conservative Party Headquarters is the "wrong target". But a distinction must be drawn between violence against people and violence against property. The building's staff had long ben evacuated. These were acts of violence perpetrated against the building itself, and what it stood for. Like the Suffragettes, these protestors know how strong an argument is a broken pane of glass. As a symbolic target, what could be better than the new club house of the former Bullingdon boys and their running dogs? The only failure of the protest is that they did not stay longer, preventing in perpetuity the return of the usual occupants. And that they did not destroy more - computers, hard disks, filing systems, the very walls themselves. But this, of course, is only the beginning.

Street Sounds in the City of Music: HK Gruber

2010-11-11T11:44:00.005Z

The latest work from HK Gruber, the Austrian composer from whom the word "enthusiastic" is never far away, received its French premiere under the composer's baton at the Cité de la Musique, in Paris last night.

Wedged awkwardly between Kurt Weill's majestic Berliner Requiem, and Vom Tod im Wald (itself, formerly part of The Berliner Requiem), like a bicycle caught between two steam locomotives; the trumpet concerto, entitled 'Busking', got off to a rather rickety start. It's first section careening about a jaunty little melody, trying to squeeze as many blunt changes of tone colour as possible into as short a time as possible by the simple expedient of multiple mute swapping. But then, after this hectic and even rather daft beginning, which seemed at times like little more than a raspberry blown truculently in the face; a moment of repose.

It came so suddenly that it was more of a shock than any loud blast could have been. Like a sudden gust of cool air, a moment of near silence. A few plaintive notes plucked from a banjo over a deep low string drone, finally joined by very high harmonics from the first violin. After a while, the trumpet re-enters but without its former bluster, now bruised and crepuscular. The effect is cinema - recalling Angelo Badalamenti's music for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Marco Ferreri's Harem.

Gruber is probably the most prominent member of what became known, in the 1960s, as the Third Viennese School, a kind of playful, postmodern riposte to the rigour of Schoenberg and his students. Dubbed 'clowns' by the people he in turn derides as the "dictators of Darmstadt," Gruber has never been afraid to live up to the insult, whether scoring for children's toys and swannee whistle, quoting Johannes Strauss, or appending multiple exclamation marks (how very modern) to the title of his most famous music theatre work, Frankenstein!!!

'Busking' delivers all the seductive pleasures of tonal music without its queasy predictability, and still finds time to be just as caustic as Gruber's early twentieth century countrymen. More so, in a way, as those fleeting moments of strychnine are surrounded by sweet spots. But nothing in the piece is quite as beautiful as that deep breath it takes after the opening section. And though Gruber may have inherited Weill's taste for the cabaret and the carnival-esque, he ultimately lacks his hero's bite and his commitment. So the potency of cheap music is here used less to incite than to amuse.

Impossible Music

2010-11-08T10:54:00.004Z

We may be grateful that an intrepid team of Oxford musicologists have established once and for all that the above depicted sonata for flute - as played by the derrière - is, indeed, impossible. In fact, of all the instruments depicted in Heironymus Bosch's legendary tryptich, The Garden of Earthly Delights, only the flute and the drum were in any way playable (and neither of them, in quite the way they were intended). Of the painting's hurdy gurdy, Andy Lamb, manager of the Bate Collection, the museum behind the project, attests in The Guardian, "The design seems to be fundamentally flawed. When you turn the handle, you get a half-hearted buzzing noise, but you can't get any melodies out of it. It would be difficult to hold because its strings are in the wrong position – and there is even a superfluous string."

But if the infernal music of the painting's right hand side - the music of hell, of dystopia - is impossible; the imagined utopian music of the right hand side is unrepresentable. Bosch's contemporary, Thomas More, who claimed to have been told about Utopia by a man from Antwerp, where Bosch lived and worked for many years, offers the following in supplement to The Garden's silent left hand:

"Yet in one thing they very much exceed us: both vocal and instrumental, is adapted to imitate and express the passions, and is so happily suited to every occasion, that, whether the subject of the hymn be cheerful, or formed to soothe or trouble the mind, or to express grief or remorse, the music takes the impression of whatever is represented, affects and kindles the passions, and works the sentiments deep into the hearts of the hearers."

Remnants and Revenants of Prague

2010-11-04T08:57:00.016Z

When we stumbled across it, quite by accident, it could hardly have looked more different than than the merrily populated exhibition concourse captured in the above postcard. The whole area, on the south-east edge of Stromovka Park, seemed haunted in a way that completely escaped our own photos as much as the official portraits from over a century ago. Everything suffused with the greyness of the sky, everything slightly overgrown. The fact that, dotted amongst the trees and the domes, and the weird futurist pods, were still-functioning amusements, dodgems and shooting galleries, their lonely operators hopelessly desperate for the scattered trade of the lost, made it all the more eerie, evoking Herk Harvey's (1962) uncanny chiller, Carnival of Souls. What is perhaps most extraordinary is that, unlike its architectural cousin the Crystal Palace, and so many of the other great iron and glass exhibition halls of the nineteenth century (see this great post by Douglas Murphy), the palace of industry, leftover from the 1891 Prague Jubilee Exhibition, still stands, weather-beaten, decaying somewhat, but erect and in one piece.

The ghosts of Expos past are scattered all over Prague. From 1891, stands the Hanavský Pavillion in Letna Park. A stones throw from Vratislav Novak's great metronome, a monument to the passing of time, that replaced a fifty metre high marble of statue of Stalin that once towered over the city. The Petrin Tower, also built in 1891, a younger sister to Eiffel's tower which it mimics, since an expedition of Czechs were inspired by a visit to the Exposition Universelle in 1889.

Boycotted at the time by Prague's then-significant German population, the 1891 Expo was a proud declaration of nationhood on the part of a state-to-come, haunted by its own consumption within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a messianic desire for independence. As such, the event should be seen in the context of two other almost-simultaneous expressions of Czech nationhood: the building of the National Theatre, funded by collections from the mass of the people who apparently wanted a decent venue in which to watch the operas of Smetana; and the formation of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, a secessionist avant-garde art group, that would later include Josef Čapek, who coined the word 'Robot'.

In the enormous, functionalist Trade Fair Palace, home to the national modern and contemporary art collection, there is a room dedicated to the galvanising effect on art and design of Czechoslovakian success at the Brussels Expo in '58. The restaurant which once adjoined the Czech Pavilion at Brussels has been preserved, also in Letna Park, albeit sold off as office space to an advertising agency, like so many other ghosts from the great exhibitions.

An Audience with Terry Riley at Cafe Oto, November 1st 2010

2010-11-03T12:57:00.008Z

"I only have a favourite colour when it's next to another colour that I like - I'm contrapuntal."

"You have in the past been called a 'visionary' composer," I began, not without a certain pluck, "So how do you imagine the music of the future?"
Laughter, both from the stage and from the audience.
"You're trying to put me on the spot!" chuckles Riley. "All I can say, is that I hope that there is a future."

Terry Riley was in London earlier this week rounding of his 75th birthday tour of Europe, in celebration of Pandit Pran Nath's Californian legacy. The legendary composer and improviser, who, with his plaited rat's tail emerging from a fluffy white beard, resembles a cross between an off-duty Santa Claus and a Native American shaman, dropped into Cafe Oto's monthly Wire Salon to discuss his life and work - anything, that is, bar 'In C'.

If Riley was uncomfortable mulling over the piece for which he is most renowned (Tony Herrington, Riley's interviewer, claimed he had been informed in advance that "the last thing [Riley] wanted to talk about was 'In C'."), he was much happier discussing his history of collaborations. "I'm very relational," he claims. Indeed, LaMonte Young, claims Riley, called him, "the best harmonic musician - because he can't get along with anybody else!"

He recalls his first meeting with Young, back at Berkeley College in the late fifties, as "like, woah! Somebody left their spaceship behind." The two formed an "immediate bond," with Riley playing the "straight guy." At Berkeley, the pair would sit at a piano play "very primitive blues for hours on end." It was at this time that they developed between them the foundations for what would become known around the world as 'minimalist' music.

Though they would work together off and on into the seventies, Riley claims it wasn't long before they each started to develop their "own idea of what we wanted to do with stasis." For Riley, it was the experience of working with tape loops in France, while preparing the music for Ken Dewey's play, The Gift, that made him "aware of the value of stasis," the sense of motion even an (almost) unchanging loop.

"What fascinated me with tape was the degeneration of the sound... The grainy noise quality."

Herrington plays a sample of Riley's 'Bird of Paradise' over Oto's PA system ...

Created in 1965, 'Bird of Paradise' transforms a sample from 'Shotgun', Junior Walker and the All Stars' number one hit from the same year, into a pulsing, pummeling sonic weapon worthy of the Daleks, and equally terrifying.

At the end of the sixties (a time Riley refers to as "a kind of renaissance"), after 'In C' and 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' had rendered the boundary between classical composer and rock musician distinctly blurry, Riley felt he had "completed a cycle" and was looking for his next mode of music-making. Curiously, before meeting Pandit Pran Nath, he already had in his mind this image of a figure, both a mystic and a great singer, "living in a cave somewhere" in India. It wasn't long before Pran Nath appeared in his life, fitting just perfectly the preconcieved idea he had already formed.

Riley was immediately drawn to the power of the man's voice, "I'd never experienced such a powerful sound coming out of someone's body - not only powerful in volume, but also in effect." And soon set off to India to study under the Master, and become his apprentice. His first trip to New Delhi lasted six months, during which time, spent singing and training his body, he felt "like being psychoanalysed twenty-four hours a day."

Riley is keen to emphasise Pran Nath's eclecticism and openness, the way he always "encouraged you to do your own thing but use this tradition [of Indian classical music] for your musical growth." When LaMonte Young played a record of John Coltrane to Pran Nath, he replied, "This is like me." And Riley compares listening to Coltrane to "going to church." Riley quotes Pran Nath,"'What you worship that's you will become' - and he worshipped music." Pran Nath's intention was to literally become pure vibration.

In the middle of his first sojourn in India, Riley still contracted to CBS Masterworks, received a telegram instructing him to report to their studios forthwith. "I was ten or twelve years late with that record." He claims the principle effect of his studies in Indian music was to make his music more melodic. Throughout the seventies, Riley toured extensively, trying, as he says, "to develop through the keyboard a singing style."

The loud volumes of some of his concerts, along with the nature of some of his collaborations, only furthering to enhance this idea of Riley as a rock star composer. "The appeal of the loud frequencies used by rock groups," he says, "is that it approximates the sound of just intonation." But at the end of the decade, he found himself looking for ways to translate this language into something more "intimate."

It was at this time that Riley bought himself a piano and started playing piano again for the first time in as much as two decades, leading him to explore the similarities between piano strings and the strings of a tambour. The end of the seventies also marked the beginning of a series of collaborations with David Harrington's Kronos Quartet. Harrington apparently told Riley that he could already hear strings in his works for keyboard, so the first couple of string quartets he wrote for them were fairly straight transpositions of prior works.

Though Riley claims it took him a while to get used to putting notes on paper again "and making them feel alive," it wasn't long before his youthful obsession with Bartok's string quartets came back to him, and the collaboration began to flow more freely.

Despite his reluctance in the face of my (only slightly facetious) question about the future, Riley did respond to a member of the audience who asked if had an MP3 player by admitting to using iTunes ("Is that an MP3 player?" he asked nervously) on his laptop. "I don't think I'd be writing any orchestral music today if it wasn't for computers," he claims, comparing the use of notation software to sculpture, and the magnetic tape he used half a century ago.

One of the last questions from the floor asks about our changing sense of time, both between generations, and as one gets older, eliciting a noise form the crowd that implied shock at the suggestion that the septuagenarian before us could possibly associated with anything like age. "When you exist in the world of sound and music, I think that's a kind of equalizer for what you're talking about," he replies, "as the passage of time becomes irrelevant."

There's a curious mix of the avuncular and the innocent, even childlike in Riley, in everything from his distinctly Californian, soft-spoken voice to his wide-eyed enthusiasm and gentle requests, every time a piece of his music was played, to turn down the volume just a little bit. It's as though five decades in the "world of sound" had truly allowed him to "escape time bondage." Let's hope, for good.

"We've Learned Earth Language Through the World Wide Web" - Transformers: The Movie

2010-10-28T01:01:00.000+01:00

A friend once told me a story. It perfectly fits the structure of an urban myth - foaflore as they say - but I like to believe it is true nonetheless. It involves a friend of this friend whose sister somehow met and befriended Barbara Bush, twin daughter of Laura and George W. whilst at Yale. So this guy's sister and the Bush girl get quite close and one day, a few years ago now, my friend's friend finds out his whole family - mum, dad and sister - all went bowling. With the Bushes. Barbara, and her mum and dad, at that time the President and First Lady. Turns out Dubya had rather a habit back then of referring to himself in the third person. But not as George, but Potus - an acronym for President Of The United States. As in, Potus takes the ball, Potus bowls, Potus hits a strike!

I'd almost forgotten about this story until I watched Transformers, Michael Bay's (2007) toy-inspired high concept science fiction action movie. Quite near the beginning of the film (in which we only see the President as a pair of red [=Republican] socks asking for some Ding Dongs), a secret service guy refers to the computer system on Air Force One as the "Potus Mainframe." Transformers is big on NewSpeak and acronyms. The military, echoing minitrue and miniluv as much as comintern, refer to SecDef, and John Turturro's Agent Simmons coins his very own Three Letter Acronym - NBE, for Non-Biological Extra-terrestrial ("Try to keep up with the acronyms") - one of Intelligent Life's "quintessentially modern annoyances."

It was executive producer Steven Spielberg who suggested to the writers the idea that the central idea of the film should be, quite simply, "a boy and his car." It is no wonder that General Motors supplied over two hundred cars for the film-makers to destroy. Bobby B (!), the used car salesman, speaks of the "mystical bond between man and machine" before introducing us to a car that wants to be sold, hypermodern equivalent, perhaps, to Douglas Adams's canard concerning an animal - served at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe - that wants to be eaten. The mystical bond in question soon transpires to be the car's mysterious ability to translate directly the driver's desires and speak them through a language of 70s rock classics.

But Transformers is more than just an advert for cars. It is an advert for practically everything, from Apple computers and fashionably distressed Strokes t-shirts to weapons of mass destruction and Armageddon itself. More than glib abbreviations and initialisms, the film speaks the language of brands (Porsche, X-Box, Panasonic, Nokia, Hasbro), of products that have quite literally been taught to speak our language by the internet, so they say things like "Sorry! My bad." Transformers could be said to stage the perfect hypermodern myth: the final violent (albeit notably bloodless) battle between brand identity multinational corporations and nation-state governments - and the government are clearly the bad guys here. Even the government men know they are the bad guys. When the man from the mysterious Sector 7 refers to his "ridiculous government salary" he could be quoting Glenn Beck.

Of course, when that final confrontation between the nation-states and the brands they protect (but perhaps not quite enough - not in the eyes of the products) comes, not just the consumers, but the military - "Our Boys" - will be on the side of the products. The police are bad guys - "to punish and enslave" - but the military are on Our Side and need as much of our money as we can give them. "You're a soldier now!" Josh Duhamel says to Shia LeBeouf. Everyone's a soldier now, taking up arms to protect their consumer goods. The U.S. military and Ministry of Defense provided a great deal of support for the film's production, giving the film-makers real soldiers as extra, authentic uniforms for any other extras, free brand new F-22 aircraft. Michael Bay was given tank catalogues to browse, picking and choosing as he pleased. Some of this stuff was donated from the military's Future Force Warrior and Future Combat System programmes.

But what is Optimus Prime saying, when he says to the government men of Sector Seven, "Taking the children was a bad move" ? This isn't a case of Zizek's Hollywood anti-capitalism, capitalism containing its own critique. This is a direct rebuke from the products to the state. Children may die, and often have died, as a result of government decisions but the brand identity multi-national corporations will always look after the children, because when you're making profit growth predictions for the next ten or twenty years you better look after the children, no matter what you're selling. The state has been largely barred access to the language of the future lately. The only people who talk about the future are the brands and the military. Our future consumers and future force warriors, the future of motoring and future combat systems.

"Fate has yielded its reward - a new world to call home. We live among its people now, hiding in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting... Like us, there is more to them than meets the eye." For we too share the glimmer of commodity fetishism, having given up the Soul for the souls of products. They are watching over us now, the only ones looking out for the future. In the war against the machines, the people will take the side of the machines and gladly destroy their own civilization.

"If you think you can reason with him, then you're as mad as he is!" : The Abominable Dr Phibes

2010-10-27T12:09:00.012+01:00

Not quite the very first, Tunnes und Schaal's mechanical sousaphone and accordion duo are in fact anticipated by two sevenths of the house band in Robert Fuest's (1971) cult b-grade horror, The Abominable Dr Phibes. The film opens with Phibes (played by Vincent Price, mouth tightly shut throughout) rising out of the ground while playing Mendelssohn's "War March of the Priests" (from his incidental music to Racine's Athalie) on a vast hammond organ, before he gives the floor over to Dr Phibes' Clockwork Wizards - a jerky black-tie septet with Frank Spencer heads playing composer Basil Kirchin's own funked version of Mendelssohn's march.

Dotted throughout the film, Kirchin has arranged a number of lounge classics for the mechanoid virtuousi, including 'A Hundred Years From Today', 'All I Do Is Dream Of You', and 'One For My Baby (One Just For The Road)'. Kirchin, the man who once complained of being a "prisoner of rhythm" as a former big band drummer, wrote a number of film soundtracks around this time in order to finance his more experimental work extracting "little boulders of sound" from slowed down tapes of bird song. The first fruits of which were released the same year as Dr Phibes, under the title, World Within Worlds.

Phibes is not a medical doctor but, to quote Tom Baker, "a doctor of many things", principally music and theology. Despite losing his voice and his face in a car crash, Phibes has used his "knowledge of music and acoustics to recreate my voice" by plugging a jack lead from his throat to a gold-plated gramophone. Embittered by the death of his wife, he sets out to murder the eight doctors (and one nurse) who failed to save her lie in the operating theatre, choosing his modus operandi according to a series of ancient Hebraic curses. The deaths themselves (a golden unicorn catapulted through the heart, a plague of locusts passed through a tube in the ceiling of a hospital bed, &c.), always perversely elaborate and highly aestheticised, lie somewhere between Bond villain high camp and the baroque sadism of Dario Argento.

Thematically, the film is also enormously ambiguous. Ostensibly, a battle between archaic mythology (the theologist Phibes and his ancient plagues) and scientific reason (the doctors he hunts), there remains between them the mediation of the almost Clouseau-esque police inspectors. Besides which, the ending, without wishing to spoil it for you, can only really be called a kind of dead heat, with the mystic left satisfied that he had succeeded in his plan and the forces of reason left mystified, if, somehow, equally convinced that they had won the day. It is hard to tell, throughout the film, quite where one's sympathies are supposed to lie. Phibes claims the support of God ("Don't cry upon God, Dr Vesalius. He is on my side! He led me, showed me the way in my quest for vengeance."). The name Vesalius (the chief surgeon - played by Joseph Cotten) is taken from the sixteenth century Dutch anatomist, once thought to have been persecuted by the inquisition for performing an autopsy on a man whose heart was found to be still beating.

As a gothic murderous musician whose only wish is that the respective hearts of his wife and himself may once more beat "in single time", it is perhaps unsurprising that Phibes has proved an inspiration to generations of metal bands from The Misfits to the Black Dahlia Murders and Angel Witch. Featuring a frankly awesome cast (Vincent Price, Joseph Cotten, Terry Thomas and Lindsay Anderson regular, Peter Jeffrey), glorious art deco sets (art director, Bernard Reeves had previously worked on Hampstead cine-poem, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize) and a garishly rich Mario Bava-esque colour scheme, the film has been called "one of the '70s juiciest entries into the horror genre."

"Celebrities are Certain to be Accredited Miracles" : Remembering the Future

2010-10-26T11:55:00.005+01:00

It should be a cautionary experience for today's would-be-futurists to read those projections now a few decades old. Recently I have been reading a curious addition to this canon, named Futureprobe and written by Nigel Collins and Arthur Cotterell, a community worker and a lecturer in charge of adult education respectively, first published in 1974 by Heineman Educational Books (a "Teacher's Book," we are told, accompanies this volume, but alas Oxfam didn't have it). So much of Futureprobe is written in the language of inevitability - x or y, or at the very least some development in x or y, are always bound to happen.

To the credit of Messers Collins and Cotterell, they do at least frequently offer two or three opposing scenarios - one a "nightmare", the other a more optimistic "daylight scenario" (and occasionally "twilight" between them). More than can be said for many of today's futurists, especially those concerned with developments to do with the internet. Most of whom are so in thrall to Thatcher's TINA doctrine that any possible future outcome, aside from that featured in the latest Google press release, is literally inconceivable.

Despite, refusing to speculate beyond the distant horizon of 2000AD, however, it is notable how few of the predictions, or even anything like them, whether nightmare or bright daylight, have come true. Indeed, in the case of most of the salient points under discussion, things have remained rather static (though this is obviously not for a moment to suggest that nothing in the world has changed since 1974 - though, as Brian Aldiss has remarked, the idea, for instance, that the Soviet Union might collapse before the century's end would have been considered too far-fetched even for science fiction only a decade before it actually happened).

What is interesting, in the light of the thesis put forward in Hervé Juvin's The Coming of the Body, is that, for the authors of Futureprobe, such still-distant promises as Martian colonies and manned space flight beyond the solar system, a leisure society made possible by a robotic workforce, the end of pollution thanks to solar-powered cities and the death of the petrol-powered automobile; are evidently considered to be of an equal level of plausibility as a number of developments with which we are all now familiar, at least from the news if not from our own lives - the transplantation of any organ but the brain; the xenografting of tissue from other animals in surgical procedures; euthanasia centres; and the cloning of mammalian life forms. It may well be that in 1974 all these things really were equally possible, equally near and equally far, but that the mechanisms of politics and scientific research have seemingly progressed only with regard to the body.

Haunted Beer Hall

2010-10-25T09:25:00.006+01:00

One of the oddest places I have stumbled across on my travels must surely be Papa Joe's Biersalon in Cologne. Just a stone's throw from the cathedral, one might be tempted to avoid a place that so loudly screams 'tourist trap', but there are, I believe, a number of reasons why this would be a mistake. Firstly, it is almost always completely empty of any tourists (and practically anybody else); secondly, it plays host to a large collection of mechanical automata (and readers of this will already know that I am a fan of such things). But tucked amongst the pianolas and Victorian coin-operated peep shows, is evidently the pride of their collection, these two curious fellows ...

Tunnes und Schaal, for these are their names, are examples of "pneuphoniker", the world's first fully automated - and fully acoustic - accordion and sousaphone duo. Powered by a vacuum cleaner motor and ten MIDI microprocessor, the duo can play a wide repertoire of traditional polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes, plus such popular favourites as La Bamba, Billie Jean and Black Magic Woman. There is definitely something peculiarly uncanny about these two animated marionettes that seems to attract and repel in equal measures, part of which, I think, has to do with the way the one on the left seems to keep looking right at you, his eyes following you around the room like a painted portrait in a ghost story ...

Humans Imitating Robots Imitating Humans: Consequences of the Late Arrival of The Future

2010-10-16T09:01:00.011+01:00

Capital has a problem (one of many, you might add). The Future was supposed to have arrived by now. For a hundred years we've been promised a fully automated robot slave force by the millenium, but despite the fact that we can train a robot to play the violin (albeit, quite badly), we still haven't got them to replace all human drudgery. The software hasn't quite lived up to its promises, so we've been forced to fall back on the wetware (that's you and me). If, as this Guardian article somewhat apocalyptically suggest, we have all grown rather blasé about the horror of sweatshops, is it because we had rather grown accustomed to the idea that they were all staffed by machines by now?

In a sense, nothing has changed, except the language, and it is a language of lowered expectations. William Gibson waves goodbye to the "Big F Future", and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (and, if the implications of this article are to be taken seriously, proud owner of not one but two first edition copies of Mein Kampf), invents something he calls "Artificial Artificial Intelligence."

Behind the notion of AAI lies the admission that there are still a number of things, simple "processing tasks", that computers really aren't very good at - recognising patterns and faces, for instance - so why not outsource them to a hive of live humans, caged like monkeys and attached to a bio-mechanical matrix through a tube running directly into their brains? Actually, Bezos's company, dubbed Amazon Mechanical Turk, hasn't quite got round to the cages or the bio-mechanical matrix yet, but no doubt he's working on it.

The original "Turk" was a fairground wheeze which toured the palaces, museums, cafes and hotel lobbies of Europe and America from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. Apparently composed of nothing more than clockwork and mechanics, the device was nonetheless able to play chess - and win - against such luminaries as Napolean, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe, few of whom guessed the truth that, like Bezos's flesh-powered search engine, the machine concealed a rather nimble human operator.

This scenario of humans-replacing-machines-replacing-humans in recursively stacked hierarchies, recalls an old Richard Matheson story, called 'Steel', about an eponymously nicknamed ex-boxer, from back in the days when real human boxers would actually fight it out in the ring. Nowadays, our erstwhile pugilist owns and 'manages' a robot boxer, a clapped out old B2 called 'Battling Maxo'. Just before the big match Battling Maxo's circuits give out and the spring in its robot arm breaks, so Steel decides to go into the ring himself, imitating his defunct robot, and fight the new B7, 'Maynard Flash' with his bare hands. Hopelessly defeated by the robot boxer, Steel crawls out of the ring and demands his pay from the promoter. And therein lies the final insult - just like the Amazon Mechanical Turk and other AAI companies, not only is the labour punishing and dehumanising, but the pay is a pittance compared to what would be given to the operator of a real computer. Steel is only paid half what he would have got had his robot been up to the bout.

Opera Houses

2010-10-14T08:58:00.014+01:00

Driving out of Oslo, from its shiny glass and steel centre towards a country that still doesn't really have anything you could call a motorway and only 60 km of high speed rail (principally, from Oslo to Oslo Airport), one is offered a panoramic view of rapidly encroaching modernisation. From the soon-to-be-replaced E18 highway, overlooking the once-rundown dockland area of Bjørvika, you can see that the only thing separating the enormous 1960s container port from the "€500 million stone behemoth" (Icon) of the new opera house is a wasteland of cranes, half-built bridges, and projects in-development. Google "Bjørvika" today and you'll be offered an awful lot of hotel rooms and not much else.

A great deal of very interesting stuff has been written about container ports as vectors of contemporary capital, heralds of the hypermodern, in the wake of series two of The Wire. The curious thing about driving out of Oslo, however, is that it draws your attention to what might otherwise seem an absurd collocation: container ports and opera houses.

Baron Hatherley suggested to me, via email (well, Facebook actually...), that, "Opera and ornament do seem linked in some manner..." But although Oslo Opera House's architects, Snøhetta, may be most famous for the super-ornamental new Alexandria Library (dismissed by Charles Jencks here), this particular building doesn't really evoke either the swishy expressionism of Zaha Hadid, nor the "doily-tecture" pooh-poohed in Douglas Murphy's post on the Shanghai Expo. Actually, particularly from behind, the Operahuset has a rather South Bank-esque stark blockiness to it. It's an edifice, "a rogue iceberg" as the Icon piece linked above puts it, "crashed into the eastern edge of Oslo's harbour." It resembles in some ways a cracked open freight container - or a series of them, badly stacked, as if by some automated robotic crane gone haywire.

Markedly similar in its jutting frame - if somewhat more decorative in the detail of its surfaces - is Copenhagen Opera House. Completed three years earlier than Oslo's, in 2004, the Operaen occupies a similar space in the city's harbour, separated form the container port only by an expanse of empty polluted land that was, last year, the subject of a Reclaim the Streets-style action. Reffen, described as a "utopian building project," involved the temporary occupation of the land by "constructors" who built ad-hoc dwellings out of found materials. If anything, the link between the opera house and the port is made even more explicit in Copenhagen by the fact that the $500 million required to build it were donated by Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world.

How to make sense of this juxtaposition of the totally inhuman face of freight transportation with perhaps the quintessential humanist art? Of course, there is an issue of gentrification, which was the focus of the Reffen occupation. And of the attempt to paper over (and launder the proceeds of) "dirty" industry with supposedly elevated culture, which we might relate to the presence of the Cité de la Musique and Parc de la Villette in Paris at the site of the old (pre-containerisation) Port de la Villette, glimpsed in Jean Vigo's poetic realist masterpiece L'Atalante. I would by no means wish to diminish the force of such explanations with the perhaps more figurative exploration that follows.

An hour's walk, south of La Villette, will take you to the Opéra Bastille, a building which, as much as the Oslo Operahuset, seems to invite the public onto its great slopes and surfaces as much as it lurchingly imposes itself on its surroundings. A project initiated in 1968 by Pierre Boulez and inaugurated on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, it is significant that the very site of the violent surging forth of the modern world should be marked by an opera house.

Opera may be associated in public consciousness with fusty old-fashioned ideas, and of course it is true that the form became established in the baroque period and the first opera houses were built at this time - even many late-nineteenth century opera houses were built in a neo-baroque style (so the esteemed Mr Hatherley is, of course, right, as usual). But the rococo was really a period of opera's sedimentation and formalisation. As a genre, it emerged out of the Renaissance and arguably flowered into maturity in the revolutionary period from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, broadly between Gluck and Wagner. Revolutionary governments in France and Russia placed enormous stress on the importance of opera (to Lenin, it was second in importance, amongst the arts, only to cinema).

As Gary Tomlinson points out, "No artistic genre... has more often called for purgation," no genre has so frequently called for its own transformation and reformation, no genre has spoken so much and so consistently about its own future. One of the major vectors of this permanent revolution is its relation to the notion of the human - principally in terms of the voice as the medium of operatic truth. From the Florentine Camerata's development of monody to emphasise the solo melodic line of the individual subject, through the successive reforms of Gluck, Cherubini and Spontini in France, placing greater emphasis on the massed singing of the chorus and away from the virtuoso soloist, and on into the twentieth century.

Over the last century, from Berg's Wozzeck to Birtwistle's Minotaur, the operatic voice has become increasingly monstrous and inhuman. In the midst of which we find Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's musique concrète opera, Orphée 53. The only fragment of this last I have been able to find is Henry's Le Voile d'Orphée, which was later used standalone as the music to a Maurice Bejart ballet. In this fragment, the voice emerges only at the end, painfully rupturing the already fraught texture of Alan Splet-esque electronic ululations, barking the Greek Orphic hymn like Marinetti, only transfigured and distorted by concrète tape manipulation techniques. Orpheus, the emblematic figure of the opera, moves from voice as transcendence to voice as trauma.

The roots of the new anti- and/or post-humanism of twentieth century opera are to be found in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, where for the first time, the orchestra itself becomes a privileged vehicle of the truth, in competition with the voice. It may be no coincidence that, today, the most recognisable element of the Ring Cycle is the so-called Wurm-Motiv that accompanies Alberich's transformation into a dragon with slow menacing tritones. From Max Steiner's (1933) music for King Kong to the alien invasion cycles of the 50s and 60s, various subtle transformations of this Wurm-Motiv became the go-to riff for virtually all movie monsters.

Tivoli and Environs

2010-10-12T16:42:00.016+01:00

"Non-place," says Augé, "is the opposite of utopia." Yet sometimes the two are not so far away. Just over half an hour before checking in at Kastrup Airport, I was standing at the gates of Tivoli, the Danish pleasure garden, founded in 1843, that, a hundred years later, would inspire Uncle Walt's conception of his own Disneyland park.

Originally named "Vauxhall & Tivoli", the design of the park was evidently as much inspired by the faux-classicism of the fake ruins to be found at Paris's Jardins de Tivoli (whose third incarnation, founded by Phantasmagoria inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robert, had closed just a few years before), as by the orientalism of the 'Turkish Tent' and other chinoiseries at London's Vauxhall Gardens.

The gates to Tivoli proudly declare its dedication to the fourth muse, garlanded on each side with musician gargoyles playing lutes, lyres and various horns. From its opening until 1872, the gardens' musical director was the composer Hans Christian Lumbye. Lumbye, a popular composer of waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, was converted upon hearing a Viennese orchestra in 1839 into an immediate fan of the music of Johann Strauss (as was Disney, who would dedicate an episode of Disney's Wonderful World of Color to the "Waltz King").

Though often dubbed the "Strauss of the North," there is something about pieces like the Drømmebilleder ("Dream Pictures") and the Champagne Galop (which opens with a brass flurry followed by an actual popping champagne cork) which looks forward to the dreamily sophisticated programmatic lounge music of Frank Chacksfield.

Situated in the south of the city, there is a curious selection of buildings and businesses to be found in Tivoli's immediate vicinity, including a casino named after the Scala opera house in Milan; a Scientology recruiting office; the rather gaily coloured art deco Palads cinema; and the Tycho Brahe Planetarium.

The IMAX-fitted planetarium building is scarcely more than twenty years old, but its dedicatee was a sixteenth century astronomer and alchemist whose publication of De Nova Stella punctured the orthodoxy of Aristotlean celestial immutability at a time when the Copernican system was still controversial to the point of illegality.

Brahe's place in the history of science fiction is assured by his inclusion as a character in a work by one of his students, Johannes Kepler. Kepler had assisted Brahe in his observations of Mars, while resident in Prague towards the end of his life. His post-humously published, Somnium, a "dream" about a trip to the moon by a bridge of darkness, would later be characterised by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov as the first ever work of the genre.

Immediately opposite the planetarium, is a go-go dancing club called the Venue Bar. Its name exploiting a semiotic slippage already mined by the naming of the red light district in Total Recall ("Venusville"), and the lurid descriptions of the planet Venus, and the "fleshpots" of its capital, Venusberg, in Robert Heinlein's Podkayne on Mars.

In Brahe's time, the connection between music and "the spheres" would have been all too self-evident. Ironically, the father of Galileo, Vincenzo Galilei, as a composer and member of the Floretine Camerata, was amongst those chiefly responsible for bringing melody back down to earth, in the form of the more human-centred monody that would form the backbone of the operas of Peri and Monteverdi.

Kastrup

2010-10-11T12:52:00.012+01:00

"Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?"
"No. I'm fine, thanks." I was sat, reading a pulp science fiction novel in paperback, waiting for a plane that I had just found out had been delayed for forty-five minutes.
"This is a restaurant." He informed me curtly, the implication clear.
"No, this is an airport."
"This is not an airport," he insisted. "This is a restaurant."
"How odd, then," I mused. "To see all those aeroplanes just beyond the window, and why does that screen just above us list all those destinations, departure times ...?"
"The restaurant has nothing to do with the airport."

The problem with Copenhagen Kastrup Airport is that there are in fact no seats anywhere that are not connected to some sort of food vendor. Therefore the implication of the above conversation is that the passenger awaiting his flight must purchase some horrendously over-priced comestibles in order to earn the right to sit and read and wait.

Connecting these eateries are a number of very narrow walkways, in imitation perhaps of the winding, boutique-lined streets of parts of the town's medieval inner city. Due to the enormous crowds and vast profusion of signs, the glare of lights, the feeling, however, weighed downed by hand luggage, is of being hustled and assaulted by brands and bustling shoppers from all angles.

In contrast to the still relatively anonymous spaces of most southern European airports, the shops and food and drink vendors of Kastrup are almost all connected to well-known brand names: Starbucks Coffee, Domino's Pizza....

Airports remain the classic example of the non-places diagnosed in Marc Augé's book on the "anthropology of supermodernity", spaces "to be passed through ... measured in units of time." Augé's book (first published in 1992), with its line about "a person entering the space of non-place [being] relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver" seemed eerily prophetic on that morning in August, 2006, when the thwarting of an alleged terror attack in London led to pandemonium at Britain's airports, while passengers were stripped of all their possessions bar wallet and passport. "You can't un-invent the liquid bomb" we were told as bottles of water, that near ubiquitous modern accessory became, for the first time, a potential weapon of mass destruction.

What sticks in the mind from that time was the absolute comic book absurdity of the situation. The paperback book I kept in my jacket book was confiscated because, as the security official said, I might have concealed something amongst its pages, like in some Boy's Own adventure story.

"Due to security reasons, and the risk of theft, please do not leave your baggage unattended at any time."

Augé tells us that that the non-places of supermodernity are defined by their words and texts, their "instructions for use". What is astonishing about the above announcement is the curious reminder of how unusual the second clause is in this now oppressively over-familiar demand. I could even detect a slight lift to the tone of voice of the announcer at this reminder of the possibility of crime, as if to say, "Look on the bright side, you might not get blown to pieces by a dirty bomb or tortured into a false confession in some far-away prison - you might just be the victim of a simple theft!"

In a way, for an aiport totally colonised by the ethics of the shopping centre (just as shopping centres were long ago colonised by the aesthetics of airports), having your luggage stolen from you really is the greatest possible boon - offering you the chance to re-purchase all that you have just lost in an ecstatic Groundhog Day of consumerism.

"This town is too peaceful lately..." Puncturing the Silences of I Spit On Your Grave

2010-09-28T08:01:00.002+01:00

The eerie, unsettling potential of the harmonica had, by 1978, already been well established. It's slurred wail and reedy chords, its uncanny sound – so close in many respects to the human voice, but a human voice transfigured, become-cyborg – haunted the soundtracks of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and Luchino Visconti's Ossessione like a refrain of the damned. It is this mechanic squeal, drifting in and out like scant punctuation amidst the endless deafening silences, that adds so much to the palpable sense of terror built up in the long, slow build up to Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave.

From beginning to end, the story is untroubled by non-diegetic music, still something of a rarity in late 70s American films. Zarchi claims whatever music he tried to “impose” on the images he'd shot just made him want to “puke”. As a result, harmonica aside, the film contains only two short snatches of (diegetic) music: a soft church organ as the protagonist, Jennifer Hills, goes to ask for forgiveness before embarking on her vengeance; and, a little later, an aria from Puccini's opera Manon Lescault.

It is therefore tempting to impose upon these three very different musics a classical Freudian psychodrama, with the rapist's harmonica playing the part of the film's sonic id, the voice of inhuman machinic desire; the church organ, its superego – or perhaps more properly ego-ideal, the father to whom one must beg forgiveness; leaving the operatic aria to play the role of the film's ego.

Meir Zarchi is somewhat flip about his choice of music for the scene in question. He even admitted when interviewed that right up to the last minute he was undecided between it and some rather jolly uptempo honky tonk piano music. Having amputated the gang leader's manhood and left him bleeding to death in her bathroom, Jennifer (played by Camille Keaton), walks downstairs and puts on a record to block out the screams. She then sits impassively, waiting in an armchair, her gaunt features as deadpan as the father (Buster) she inherited them from.

Though Zarchi wouldn't give his reasons for the choice, the libretto to this particular aria, which comes from the fourth and final act of Puccini's opera, seems peculiarly appropriate:

Sola, perduta, abbandonata
in landa desolata!
Orror! Intorno a me s'oscura il ciel.
Ahime, son sola!
E nel profondo deserto io cado,
strazio crudel, ah, sola, abbandonata,
io la deserta donna!
Ah, non voglio morir!
Tutto e dunque finito.
Terra di pace mi sembrava questa
Ah, mia bella funesta
ire novelle accende
strappar da lui mi si volea; or tutto
il mio passato orribile risorge,
e vivo innanzi al guardo mio si posa.
Ah, di sangue s'e macchiato!
Ah, tutto e finito;
asil di pace ora la tomba invoco
No, non voglio morir. Amore, aita!

Clearly the cries of horror! ('orror!') I don't want to die! ('non voglio morir') the terror of being alone, lost and abandoned ('sola, perduta, abbandonata') in a desolate place ('landa desolata') thought to be a peaceful haven ('terra di pace'), are almost uncannily appropriate to the specific situation Jennifer Hills finds herself in at this moment in the plot.

What should be more unsettling to any hope of a feminist appropriation of I Spit On Your Grave is the implication in the latter half of the poem that all this may have been brought about by her own "fatal beauty" ('bella funesta'). It is, to say the least, disturbing to discover that, at the very moral, sympathetic core of the film's sonic subjectivity, such lyrics would seem to echo the plaint of the gang leader that Hills had brought the rape upon herself by the way she dressed.

Cancerous Growths : Technological Darwinisms

2010-09-27T11:48:00.007+01:00

For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the human race is conceived now as one of a directed evolution through technology, and in this respect the theorems of futurologists have themselves evolved somewhat less over the course of the capitalist period than has the peppered moth.

The term Techno-Darwinism has entered a certain vogue over the past few years thanks to the work of entrepreneur and 'angel' investor, Benjamin Joffe. For Joffe the term refers to what he calls a "survival of the fittest" amongst tech start-ups in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Nevermind, that the term "survival of the fittest" is Spencer's and not Darwin's, Joffe is hardly the first capitalist to stretch a scientistic metaphor in order to justify and naturalise his own profiteering.

Nor - though he may be credited with the hyphenation - is he the first to import purportedly Darwinist models and notions into the sphere of human technological 'progress' - in order, principally, to legitimise the use of the very word 'progress' and frame it as a kind of naturally occurring and practically inevitable process.

For Ray Kurzweil, evolution through technology represents an exponential growth in human advancement towards what he refers to as the Singularity, a point in the near future (2045) when the combination of advance in genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will allow an expansion in machine-human intelligence and technological development beyond our wildest imaginations.

Similarly, as Marina Banjamin has pointed out, the Space Age was full of evolutionary metaphors, with everyone from Werner von Braun to Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller referring to Apollo 11 as the natural sequel, equal in importance, to the moment primitive life first left the oceans for the land.

All of which amounts to little more than a stretched metaphor put in the service of valorising some favoured project. Consensus amongst developmental biologists and palaeontologists seems to be that human evolution has remained fairly static for a good hundred thousand years or so. That's not to say that we are not witnessing evolution - and rapid evolution at that- in the present day. Only it's an evolution to which we are but the hosts. To talk of the evolution through natural selection of metastasising cancer cells is not just a metaphor. Puts a somewhat less positive spin on Joffe's notion of capital as techno-Darwinism though....

Two Late Expressionist Utopias: Frau im Mond and Tabu

2010-09-26T16:28:00.012+01:00

At the turn of 1930s, two of German expressionist cinema's leading lights left the dark shadows of the catacombs and the back alleys in search of other worlds. Both Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau had featured utopian imagery in their films before: think of the fairground scene in Sunrise, or most famously, Lang's city of the future in Metropolis. But both of these films feature distinctly urban utopias, whereas Tabu (1931) and Frau im Mond (1929) each take flight from the modernist city. The former looks back to the traveller's tales of exotic lands that inspired early utopias such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, while the latter looks forward to the 'hard' science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke et al and the Apollo moon landings.

While the bare bones of Frau im Mond's plot, about a rocket trip to the moon and the happy couple that choose to stay there, may recall the late Victorian scientific romance of H.G. Wells, it is the little details that make it so prophetic – and the story behind the story that make it so historic. Advertised as “The first utopian film based on scientific fact,” Frau im Mond's rocket trip contain a number of features that put it closer to the Apollo landings of forty years later. Firstly, and most conspicuously, there is the countdown to lift-off, never before featured in fiction (let alone fact), and apparently invented by Lang on something of a whim for the purely dramatic reasons of building up tension (Alfred Hitchcock, who had only recently returned to England after a spell working at UFA studios in Berlin, may well have been taking notes).

Rather more profoundly – from a scientific point of view at least - Lang's film showed the world its first depiction of a liquid fuel rocket composed of two stages, jettisoning its first stage after take-off – just as the American space rockets of the sixties would. Such an extraordinary prophecy is made only slightly less incredible by certain details surrounding the film's production. The story, by Lang's wife and frequent collaborator, Thea von Harbou, was inspired by a small book written by Hermann Oberth, entitled 'By Rocket Into Planetary Space'. Originally intended to be Oberth's doctoral dissertation but rejected as too “utopian,” the book detailed the theories Oberth had been working on since a childhood exposure to Jules Verne. Oberth, along with his colleague, Willy Ley, from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, a German amateur rocket enthusiasts club, would ultimately serve as technical advisors on Lang's film.

Also, in Oberth and Ley's circle at the time, was a young man named Werner von Braun. In the 1930s, as a member of the SS, von Braun would design the V-2 rocket, which bore the insignia of the woman in the moon at its base. The Nazis apparently considered, Lang's film so close to the scientific truth of their weapon that they had the film suppressed and all its models destroyed. Despite the destruction wrought by von Braun's invention on Western cities, and the use of concentration camp inmates as slave labour (resulting in more deaths in the rocket's construction than as a result of its firepower), within just a few years of the World War Two ending, von Braun's name would turn up in the American mainstream, advocating space travel in the pages of Collier's magazine, and even designing (with Willy Ley and Disney imagineer John Hench), the TWA Moonliner, a rocket bearing a distinct similarity to the V-2 that stood as the tallest structure in Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

----------------------------------------------------------

Coming two years after the Jazz Singer, Frau im Mond was probably the last great silent science fiction film. In the year of its release, F.W. Murnau, dejected by the failure of his first talking picture, the now lost Four Devils, left his adopted Hollywood home for the South Pacific. Schooled in the romantic theatre of Max Reinhardt, it may have been the orientalist tendencies in so much nineteenth century music - from Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri to Bizet's les Pecheurs de Perles - that led Murnau to seek his own escapist exotica.

Murnau's Tabu is a film whose images teem with music. We see its characters singing, drumming, playing the guitar, and, frequently dancing. Despite Murnau's embeddedness in the film's habitat (he was by that time living on Bora Bora) and the realist intentions behind the choice of real locations and native actors, the dancing we see was in fact tightly choreographed by Murnau and his collaborator Walter Spies to fit into their conception of 'architectural cinema' (and the real locations and natural light certainly do not seemed to have stemmed Murnau's love for suggestive use of shadows). Likewise, the music composed to be performed in theatres alongside screenings of Tabu bares about as much relation to the authentic music of the South Seas as does The 101 Strings in a Hawaiian Paradise.

Composer Hugo Reisenfeld, whose first work on film was as a music arranger on film adaptations of the operas Carmen and Siegfried (for Raoul Walsh and Fritz Lang, respectively) initially proposed using themes by Bizet, Massenet, and Mendelssohn, and, although these were ultimately not to be used in the film it nonetheless gives you an indication of the way he was thinking. Though the music is often in sync to images of the islanders playing their own instruments, the soundtrack gives us, somewhat incongruously, a symphony orchestra throughout, frequently reprising themes from his earlier Murnau collaboration, Sunrise (along with a bit of Smetana's Má Vlast).

Tabu had begun life as a collaboration with the ethnographic film-maker Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), who had intended to make a political documentary about white exploitation of the islands' natural resources. Apparently the hard-drinking, heavy smoker Flaherty soon fell out with the ascetic Murnau over the latter's preciousness concerning the waxed floors of his yacht. As the story of Murnau's film moved further away from political critique towards exotic fantasy, celebrating the idyllic lifestyle and 'primitive' rituals of the islanders, Flaherty was ultimately banned from the film unit, left to stalk the production like a jealous lover.

One week before Tabu's American premier, Murnau was killed in a car accident, while work on the music was still underway. On a documentary featured on the Eureka Masters of Cinema DVD, his grand-daughter recalls him as a great lover of music who knew many operas by heart ("from Beethoven to Bach"). Shortly before his death, he had signed a contract with Paramount to produce five new sound pictures, all of which were to be shot on the South Sea Islands. Alas, we will never know whether the resources of sound film might have led Murnau to find more sonic sympathy with the islands where he had chosen to live out his final years.

Sounds Like Dystopia

2010-09-25T09:32:00.007+01:00

"It's the year 2010 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the video display in the mirror, and you watch a bit of personalized news while you get ready for the day. You step into the shower and your personalized music program is ready for you, cued up with a new live version of a track that you downloaded the other day. It is even better than the original recording, so while you dress, you tell your "Taste Mate" program to include the new track in your playlist rotation.
You put on your new eyeglasses, which contain a networked audio headset, letting tiny earbuds slip into your ears. You switch on the power, and the mix that your friend makes for you starts to play. Music pours into your consciousness. It becomes yours.
After breakfast with your family, you head off to work and the Personal Media Minder asks if you wish to finish the audiobook you started yesterday morning. You confirm and listen while you walk to the train that takes you to your job.
During the day, your headset and other wireless devices help you communicate across the network, with your friends, associates, network buddies, and "digital peers." The headset also keeps you connected to that hard rock collection that you really love to listen to. Meanwhile, a variety of new songs, new versions, and remixes of tracks that you truly dig, along with your old favorites, continues to come your way. Using TasteMate, you access and trade playlists, and recommend a couple of songs to your friend in Seattle, and they get added to his rotation. Music propels you through the day.
On the way home, you choose your usual dose of news, sports, weather, and the latest dirt on your favorite bands and movie stars. The headset syncs to the active 3D displays that project images just in front of your eyes, or onto the communal screens available on the train and at home. You decide what you hear and see, and who can share in the experience. The Media Minder blends and delivers the programming you select, along with whatever variety of new music you decide to explore. It also determines how that music is chosen, with the help of the TasteMate program.
Back at home, you cruise into the evening with the house system sending soft dinner jazz to various speaker systems in your house, as you serve up one of your culinary specialties, then pay your bills. One of these bills is your media and entertainment subscription, which includes your monthly music, video, network, and communications charges; it's always lower than your heating or water bill. Incoming calls from your friends blend into the programming that surrounds you, as you see fit. After dinner, you clean up, perhaps enjoy a couple of games with friends across your virtual network, and begin to wind down with some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions, which you discovered late one night while cruising through the music sharing channels. . . . "
- The Future of Music (2005)

For those of you to whom, like me, the above seems like a vision of hell to exceed Dante's darkest fantasies, it may come as something of a shock to discover that it's authors, David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, regard this is something to look forward to, something to eagerly anticipate and benignly encourage. Over some 190 pages, the authors expound their notion of "music as water: ubiquitous and free flowing" as the coming paradigm of all music consumption. No matter that almost every page displays their absolute stupidity with regard to music. They don't even understand water.

For when Leonhard and Kusek propose a model of music as water, they are evidently not talking about music as a publicly funded, state-run monopoly. No, their supposedly utopian vision of the future of the music industry involves the transformation of music into a privatized utility. "Do we feel that water companies have undue monopolistic powers, and do we consider water to be a "product"?" They ask rhetorically, as though the expected negative response was so obvious as to scarcely require thinking about.

But when three multinational corporations control the water supply of over one hundred nations; when water privatization in England and Wales has led to an increase in price, an erosion of working conditions, an increase in household disconnections, a deterioration in the service provided, and no increase in water quality; when the IMF-imposed sale of the water supply to the Cochabamba region in Bolivia led to the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco gaining legal ownership of all of Cochabamba's water supply - even its rainwater - and ultimately to the notorious Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000; perhaps we should start to question the "undue monopolistic powers" of the water companies, and perhaps we ought to question whether this is a model we want to follow for the provision of something as precious as music.

Before I am accused of taking a metaphor too literally, however, let's examine what Kusek and Leonhard actually have to say about music, about the kind of music we might be listening to in this bright future of theirs, and what it might sound like. Precious little, as it turns out. The sound of music seems to be of little concern to these self-styled futurists. In the above-quoted paragraph they offer us some "familiar tune playing softly", a little "hard rock", a touch of "soft dinner jazz," even "some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions," (I particularly like the way they had to point out that Mozart wrote "original compositions" - such a novelty will it be to actually compose in the coming era of endless re-versions, remixes, and derivatives).

They trumpet themselves repeatedly as champions of the "niche", the "emerging", "new music" and "indie labels". All the exciting new marketing tools of the digital age - from video game syncs to corporate sponsorships - are framed as opportunities to smash the prevailing hegemony. And yet, when it comes to providing examples, we are faced with an array of staggeringly familiar names: U2, Blink 182, Sting, Phish ... Hark! What refreshing new sounds be these coming up from the underground? The confluence of the names of all these rock dinosaurs with Leonhard and Kusek's shiny new tools is not merely contingent or coincidental. The fact is, far from breaking the hold of the major labels, opportunities like having your song in the latest EA Sports game are only available to artists already deeply embedded in major label structures.

The authors never tire of chanting how this brave new world will increase the "diversity" of music available to the listener, and yet almost every means they chart to do so will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. They may criticize the traditional radio DJ for following playlists, but at least live radio with live human presenters offers the possibility of a maverick emerging who will bring strange and unusual acts into a sort of mainstream - John Peel being the classic example. On the other hand, expecting diversity to emerge from the algorithms in a web store like Amazon which tells you "people who bought this may also like ..." can only be folly. There is no John Peel algorithm. Such automated software will never surprise you (unless it's broken), only ever offer you the same sounds under different proper nouns.

Futurists have form on this matter. Kusek and Leonhard are not the first to mistake more stuff for enlarged real choice. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, wrote of the "incomparably more diverse" wares to be found in the new supermarkets then fast becoming ubiquitous. Even as Toffler criticised the "architectural sameness" of the supermarkets, he boasted of their "gastronomic diversity" - and even architecturally, he was convinced that, given time, "Uniformity will give way to diversity." As the term "futurist" ceased to refer to a type of artist or political thinker and became a kind of profession in itself, from Toffler's course at The New School to net evangelists like Leonhard and nanotech prophets like Ray Kurzweil, it seems to have necessitated an almost total neglect towards precisely those disciplines in which the future was once most at home: aesthetics and politics.

Misception

2010-09-23T01:41:00.000+01:00

In my brief absence from the blogosphere, I seem to have missed the boat somewhat on Inception and meanwhile Mark K-Punk has gone and made almost exactly the point I wanted to make about it (though I think he makes it better than I would have). This is precisely what I was alluding to on Twitter when I said that the film was not as clever as it thought it was. There are basically two philosophical ideas in Inception, one of which is fairly boring, standard sixth form stuff (what if our reality is just a dream? etc.), the other is slightly more interesting (the strange loops stuff Mark talks about), unfortunately, at a certain point the writers clearly decided to 'go with' the former.

The thing is, I spent almost the whole film thinking that its whole structure was itself going to turn out to be a strange loop, like the paradoxical dream architecture talked about in the film - i.e., that the end, which had, necessarily to come after the middle, would turn out to be the beginning, which itself had necessarily to come before the middle. But it didn't do this, nearly but not quite - it just ended on the spinning top, in a vaguely Richard Herring-esque 'Ah! But what if all this is still just a dream? Eh? Eh??!' Well, more fool me, I suppose ...

Faith on Earth is a Thing of the Past : Le Vaisseau Fantôme at the Opéra Bastille

2010-09-22T10:44:00.005+01:00

As the Vorspiel draws to a close, the curtain rises on a vast pale room. Stage left stands a vastly proportioned door which will make dwarves of the protagonists (and giants of their shadows), stage right a kind of frame within which shimmers the image of a woman gazing dutifully up at a painting of a storm. The curious insubstantiality of this image, its coved frame, raise the question whether this image of an image is itself a filmed projection (for soon we see the woman within shift her posture slightly), or perhaps (as we soon discover to be the case) sheltered behind a scrim. Is this woman but a dream dreamt by the present scene, herself dreaming of a ship lost on stormy seas - a ship that we soon discover ourselves, as sailors bearing ropes come marching through the great door, to be aboard? Towards the end we will find ourselves questioning the reality status of this painting once more, as lighting effects expose the audience to a collectivised Stendhal Syndrome.

Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer (rendered in French as Le Vaisseau Fantôme), as performed last night at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, is an opera at the crossroads (meeting the devil, perhaps?), an opera of counterpoint and contradiction. Composed in the early 1840s after a tumultuous sea voyage across the Norwegian fjords, undertaken to escape his creditors, (but inspired just as much by a satirical tale by Heinrich Heine), Wagner no doubt sympathised with the sea captain Daland's willingness to offer up his daughter, Senta, to the Dutchman in exchange for his treasure.

Written, then, in something of a hurry, in the hope (vain, as it happened) of escaping penury, The Flying Dutchman lies midway between classical opera and Wagner's later mature style and contains elements of both. Performed last night (as it frequently is) absolutely continuously, without breaks between its three acts, and yet with clearly defined arias to disrupt the smooth flow of arioso. There is even at times, such as the early dialogue between Daland and the Dutchman, something approaching secco recitative, yet punctuated by chords far more caustic than anything you might find in Handel or Mozart. It is also contains some of Wagner's earliest uses of leitmotifs, and remains the earliest of his operas to have been performed at Bayreuth.

Generically, though based on a comedy, the story is a tragedy, yet its hero sings bass (with nothing of the buffo about him) with a ghostly tremolo, serving to emphasise the weak, effeminacy of his rival for Senta's affections, Erik (a tenor). A love story whose lovers scarcely touch, embracing only twice (both times within the same scene) and but fleetingly. They seem to spend most of their time divided by the vast blankness of the stage, looking away from each other, scarcely capable even of seeing each other. At one point they seem to almost pass through each other, both as ethereal, as insubstantial as each other. As Senta lays dying she clings not to the Dutchman's body but to his portrait, in love more with the myth than the man.

In stark contrast to the lush warmth of the orchestration, the mise-en-scene and lighting was all cool minimalism in blues and greys. Even as the lights brighten in the second act, it is the harsh winterlight of a Bergman film (fitting its Scandinavian setting). My companion and I found ourselves comparing the staging (by German theatre director, Willy Decker) several times to the cinema. Most conspicuously, with its obtusely projected stage, long shadows and acute forced perspective, to German expressionism. Before the Dutchman's first appearance on dry land, we see for a long time his shadow, projecting from the door jamb. The image recalls nothing so much as Dr Caligari's somnambulist, Cesare.

From its opening storm to its Hoffmann-esque themes of the uncanny intrusion of the supernatural into the quotidian domestic sphere, The Flying Dutchman may be the ultimate romantic opera, the very apogee of romantic art. But in pushing romantic illusionism and suspension of disbelief to its limits, it seems to leap out of its frame (like the jutting stage itself) and force a certain self-doubt, a radical questioning of its own artifice which looks to the future in more than one direction. Last night's performance may have offered us a dream within a dream, a dream that dreams itself in an endless strange loop, still, for all its spectral shimmer, it retained a certain crisp clarity. Like lucid dreaming, it offered the dreamer the chance to become aware of its own reverie, thus offering the utopian possibility of infinite transformation.

Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told.

2010-08-23T23:51:00.017+01:00

Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)

Come to think of it ...

Richard Wagner

Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)

and even ...

Ludwig van Beethoven

Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor)

This one is perhaps a little more tenuous ...

Pierre Schaeffer

Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)

Now I'm really scraping the barrel ...

Gustav Holst

Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)

Ferruccio Busoni

Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)

The Future: Not Worth Paying For, Apparently

2010-08-05T03:18:00.004+01:00

There's an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988, Russel Grant popularised the astrological phoneline, accepting only a modest fee from his publisher in exchange for the free advertising the column generated for his highly lucrative pay-per-minute chatlines. Before long, this became standard practice. All astrologers had to set up their own phone line. Unfortunately, without Grant's celebrity status, few made much actual money out of them.

By the late nineties, the bottom had rather dropped out of the chat line business, but by that time the low fees for astro-copy had become standard practice. Nowadays companies on the internet will generate horoscope columns for syndication for no more than £3, where once a star gazer could expect a hundred times that for their talents.

While we may snort and think good riddance to bad rubbish, it's worth remembering that horoscope columns remain as popular as ever with readers - it's just that the people who write them are no longer getting paid properly. Aside from the rather obvious parallels with the music industry, there's something broader at issue here, concerned with the question of who is authorised to write the future.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) the future was written by artists, and by speculative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller. At a certain point, artists seem to become embarrassed by the question of the future, epitomised perhaps by Gyorgy Ligeti's notorious (1961) unlecture entitled The Future of Music, in which he stood silent, impassively before the class, only responding to the calls and jeers from the audience by writing musical terms on the white board as 'directions' to the noise-makers.

Mostly, the people talking and writing about the future today work in marketing, or in computer software. That is, if they have anything positive to say about it. Of course, there are plenty of different artists and theorists prophesying some form of catastrophe or other on practically a daily basis. But the astrologists task of looking forward with hope, and with the kind of optimism that actually makes doing stuff a bit easier, is steadily proving itself to be as easy to generate automatically and artificially - with the right software - as a Chopin etude.

Resisting the Happy Ones: Children of the Stones

2010-08-04T14:29:00.005+01:00

There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV's (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai ("It's mine! I found it!"), which seems mysteriously to match another in the museum, found a hundred years ago beside a skeleton that had been dead for hundreds more; and Matt's painting ("He found it in an old junk shop") that seems to offer the key to the strange events taking place in Milbury. Co-written by former Dr Who script editor, Trevor Ray, the series is structured like an ouroboros, almost like one of Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops. The village is apparently trapped in a "psychic bubble" or "time circle" and the discovery of these objects seems to imply a kind of fault or slippage between different cycles, different levels of the moebius strip.

Several British films and TV programmes in the 60's and 70's transpose the classic dystopian theme of an individual or small group against the ominous and threatening community from its traditional future city to a more rural, or at least far from metropolitan, setting. Children of the Stones borrows liberally from all of them: the pagan themes, masks and morris dancing from The Wicker Man; its rituals and chanting and supernatural mystery from Nigel Kneale's film, The Witches, for Hammer; and the sinister newspeak greetings shared by the community insiders ("Happy day!") from The Prisoner ("Be seeing you!"). Children of the Stones, however, was made for children's television, anticipating the pre-tea time strangeness of The Tomorrow People.

Like The Tomorrow People, one of the most extraordinary things about Children of the Stones is its music, only in this case achieved without the aid of Delia Derbyshire's VCS-3 synthesizer. Producer, Peter Graham Scott recalls hearing a piece by Penderecki on the radio while driving to the show's location in Avebury and being so inspired to suggest to composer Sidney Sager that he try something similar. Sager agreed to the use of a choir, only insisting upon adding the solo soprano voice which completes the haunting opening theme. The theme was sung by The Ambrosian Singers, started by British early music specialist Denis Stevens and famed for their pop collaborations (including the intro to 'Inside' by Stiltskin) and light music collections. It is based around the acoustic (or Lydian dominant) scale, favoured by Bartok and Franz Liszt for its tonal uncertainty.

Based on the results, the piece by Penderecki may well have been his Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (1970-73). The music shares with Penderecki's great choral work more than just its unusual technical effects - whispering, groaning, murmuring, wailing - also its post-Second Viennese School melodic leaps and cross-wise motion. We hear shades of Berg and Berio, but also Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. It's sweeter than Penderecki, warmer and more repetitive. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the happy smiling faces of the supplicants and the eerie, strangely weightless dissonance of their chant makes up a large part of what is so uncanny about this most singular of programmes.

We Died and Never Knew

2010-08-01T02:55:00.004+01:00

Went the Day Well, Cavalcanti's first proper feature for Ealing Studios in 1942, is like an episode of Dad's Army directed by Michael Haneke. Scenes of brutal horror erupting in the midst of this quiet rural community, shot in stark high-contrast black and white, anticipate The White Ribbon, even down to the way both are presented very much as a told story. What makes Went the Day Well so shocking is that it seems to start off just like any other Ealing Comedy. The first twenty minutes or so could have been Passport to Pimlico, or The Titfield Thunderbolt. Suddenly minor comic characters are dying as heroes with more of your pain and sympathy than most leading men or women can draw. The film was based on a short story by Graham Greene, and the scene where the priest refuses to follow orders from "from those who are the enemies and oppressors of mankind" and is promptly shot could almost be taken for his signature (even if the BFI claims very little of Greene's story ended up in the film). William Walton's music is also very good - even his little Johann Strauss pastiche used as an early clue to the invaders true identity.

Spielberg on a Wii : Art, Cinema and Video Games (part one)

2010-07-26T14:43:00.013+01:00

Amidst all the brouhaha in recent months over Roger Ebert's denunciation of the possibility of video games being considered as art forms, few seem to have asked why the eminent Chicagoan film critic might wish to decry the aesthetic status of works he admits to having never engaged with. Most seem to be content with assuming that it is Mr Ebert's age that is the barrier, what Techland calls the "old man theory". I would argue, however, that were this case it should be seen as more of a problem for the possible acceptance of video games as art, than for Ebert.

The question remains why Ebert felt the need to wade into a zone he is obviously unfamiliar with. The answer, I suspect, comes from the subjective feeling that his own zone of expertise is being encroached upon by video games. Over the course of the last few decades, whether video games are becoming art or not, there have certainly been numerous instances of art - and perhaps particularly film - becoming video games.

The first time I felt particularly struck by this was in the cinema watching the second offering from the Lord of the Rings franchise (I hadn't bothered with the first, but I'd read the books as a child so the story, at least, was familiar). Between recoiling from the filthy looks I received from others in the audience every time I failed to stop myself from laughing out loud at all of Legolas's lines ("A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night" and so on), I developed the uncanny impression that I was watching someone else play a computer game. Someone else was having the fun here, and there seemed little point in even attempting to vicariously enjoy that. My presence, I felt, was unnecessary. Odd, perhaps, that the reminiscence of a more 'active' pass time in the midst of a supposedly 'passive' one should end up inducing a greater sense of passivity than ever before.

The first use of CGI in a feature film was neither in The Two Towers nor its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring, but in Westworld, from 1973 - the same year that the first ever coin-operated arcade game, Spacewar, designed by two MIT students, was featured in the film Soylent Green. However, after the relative commercial failure of Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984), the first films to make extensive use of Solid 3D CGI, its use was considerably restricted for another decade until Jurassic Park (1993) proved that computer-generated monsters were now capable of generating serious box office revenue.

It is only in the last decade that CGI has become the norm for all special effects in major Hollywood blockbusters. Ironically, though CGI allows complicated-looking effects to be created effectively on a home computer, the period, between 1995 and 2005, which saw its rise to dominance of the effects world, witnessed a leap in the average effects budget of a "wide-release" feature film from $5 million to $40 million. In the words of Hutch Parker, president of production at 20th Century Fox, the effects have grown to the stature of "a character in the movie" in their own right.

In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Parker's statement is realised quite literally, as several characters - from battle scene extras to major characters - are computer-generated and animated using, for the first time, artificial intelligence. The computer has quite literally become (several) character(s) and in the battle scenes we are literally repeating those demo animations from console games where the computer plays against itself. In the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, the first Final Fantasy feature film to be adapted from Hironobu Sakaguchi's successful games franchise was celebrated by some for its attempt to create photo-realistic CGI humans, while others were put off by these characters tendency to fall into the 'uncanny valley'. The film was not a success.

It is not just the characters in The Lord of the Rings that might provoke this sense of the uncanny, however, and nor does the film rely exclusively on CGI. Large numbers of old style miniature (and, due to the need for a lot of false perspective shots, even 'bigature') models were made, and vast numbers of extras, real life animals, and so forth. As much as it opened the gates to the fully CGI-oriented films of today, it was at the same time one of the last of the old-style Cecil B. DeMille type affairs of cinema as mass troop warfare. The way these were handled is key though.

Of the backdrops and landscapes, it is frequently nigh-on impossible to tell which have been computer-generated and which are but the glorious vistas of the New Zealand countryside - and yet this is not so much a victory for the machines as it might seem. The CGI still looks as ray-traced and colour-mapped as ever, but, due to the way cinematographer Andrew Lesnie used digital grading on all the images in post-production, it is more the case that now all of the backdrops - even those that were not in fact computer-generated - have the look and feel of CGI. Nature itself falls into its own uncanny valley.

Similarly, though several hundred horses were used to film the battle scenes, fear of the horses getting hurt led the producers to film each horse individually doing battle-type movements in a closed studio and then putting these together in a digitally created environment. What we have then in The Lord of the Rings is digitally created creatures and characters moving in a digitally created environment - or at least creatures, characters and environments for whom the very distinction between the real and the fake has collapsed on the side of the fake. Yet not, as in Toy Story, in the manner of a cartoon. Signatures of the real, little memento mori, crop up frequently in order to signify the realness of the image presented to us, though in fact belying the very same by interrupting the smooth weightlessness of the fake.

There is of course no problem with 'the fake' per se. I see no reason to demand that films - or any art - should slavishly attempt to imitate the real as Aristotle once demanded. And many would argue that CGI looks a lot more realistic than older methods such as actors in monster suits, flying saucers on strings, and even the kind of fairly sophisticated stop motion model animation of Ray Harryhausen and so on. What all of the latter have in common, however, even if for a brief flash you might see the thread or the actor's legs or whatever, is a certain sense of groundedness. They have weight, and make some kind of real impact on their surroundings. CGI on the other hand makes a kind of curious analogue for the self-presentation of 'weightless' postmodern capital; capable of doing anything, assuming any shape, without once touching the ground or making its impact felt upon the commodities it abstractly trades in - until the crisis, that is, which would be the equivalent, perhaps, of those little moments, such as in Minority Report, where for a split second Tom Cruise's head separates from his body, revealing the computer-generated nature of the image.

If it were just the appearance of computer games that were infecting the cinema, however, there would remain little cause for alarm. It may be no coincidence though that in the same year as Jurassic Park created effective jump scares with its CGI-dinosaurs, Super Mario Brothers kick-started a Hollywood trend for films adapted from video games which continues up to this year's Prince of Persia and Resident Evil: Afterlife. It has also become standard practice (albeit witnessing a slight decline in the last couple of years) for new films to spawn a tie-in video game. As a consequence of these trends, and increasing number of people from the games world getting involved in film production, the arcade is coming to influence far more than just the look of certain films.

Reviewing this year's Dreamworks family blockbuster, How To Train Your Dragon, for Screen Jabber, I was repeatedly struck by the way certain scenes seemed to have been written in order to facilitate a smooth transition to the console adaptation, "Every setpiece recalls its arcade double, from the training sequence in the ring, familiar from beat 'em ups like Mortal Kombat, to the final showdown with the big 'end of level' baddy." Sure enough, the release of HTTYD was accompanied by the release of a home computer game, packaged to cash in on the big marketing push allocated to the movie.

Of course, Hollywood's family blockbusters have for a long time depended on their merchandising opportunities, and since at least Return of the Jedi's Ewoks, have even catered elements of the film to suit in advance. But now even films that seem to have no plans for such tie-in opportunities seem to have been infected by video game fever. Even a relatively low budget, independent, adult film from Australia, such as Steven Kastrissios's (2008) The Horseman, lifts its entire structure from an arcade beat-em up, dispensing of its minimal plot (which, anyway, is largely lifted from Schrader's Hardcore) in a quick flashback early on, and then presents us with a series of fights that lead the protagonist inexorably from one to the other and finally towards the final boss of the title for an even bigger fight.

Under such circumstances we might begin to understand why Ebert, a critic who started out at a time when it was still sometimes necessary to defend the claim that cinema is itself an art form, might hesitate before embracing video games. And this need not be seen as the elitist pose of a supposedly established now-'high' art repudiating incursion from 'low' culture. The influence on cinema from video games today is comparable to the influence from the theatre after the introduction of sync sound in the 20's and 30's, and may be just as nefarious. Whether video games are 'art' or not, they are certainly not helping this 'art' to become more 'artistic', however we might wish to define art (something that seems generally to be done with extraordinary wooliness by those wishing to defend the artistic status of the video game).

"The world needs a wake up call, gentlemen. We're gonna phone it in."

2010-07-08T21:45:00.008+01:00

Watching They Live, I couldn't help but be reminded of William Gibson's recent remark on his blog about arriving in the "capital F-future" and discovering, invariably, nothing but the "lower-case now." They Live, of course, tantalisingly offers the reverse prospect: To discover all of a sudden that your humdrum quotidian lower-case now, is, and has been for some time, that big capital F-future from the sci-fi films. The film starts off in what appears to be ordinary everyday contemporary (for the late 80's) Los Angeles (actually, it looks much the same now), but when Nada (played by WWF wrestler Roddy Piper!) puts on his sunglasses, all of a sudden it's a Metropolis of towering skyscrapers, Orwellian slogans and little flying saucers buzzing about - and in black and white, no less.

What makes They Live so appealing, of course, is that the dystopian 'truth' revealed by the glasses resembles so closely what we in fact already know of our own present. The world's wealth really is controlled by an elite of "free-enterprisers" (as the aliens are referred to at one point) for whom "there are no countries anymore". This elite really are strip-mining the earth of its resource and really are backed up by the force of the police and the military. Many television programmes and magazines really do tell us nothing but to consume and go back to sleep. And the levels of methane and carbon dioxide in our air really are rising as if to prepare the atmosphere for some colonising alien species.

There is another way to read They Live, following the time-honoured and Zizek-approved method of reading science fiction by reconstructing the plot without any of its fantastic elements. In this version, the country is in the midst of a depression, heavy industry is collapsing and the workers are left broke, living in jerry-rigged shanty towns. A poor working class man, under the stress of his uncertain future, suffers a (possibly drug-induced) psychotic episode on Main Street and starts randomly shooting at strangers, after which he is taken in and manipulated by a paranoid militia intent on taking down the government. At one point, the ostensible leader of the group says that the ordinary police think they are communists, but in fact the group resembles more the kind of right wing conspiracy theorists, raving about Big Media and Big Government, that make up a large part of the right wing Tea Party movement in America. Some support for this reading is lent by Nada's line about the glasses being "like a drug", as well as the obvious fictionality of using black and white for the 'real' sequences.

I suspect, however, that Carpenter's sympathies lie with the conspirators and our first reading. The clue is in the music. There is very little diegetic music in They Live, but there is a short scene in the shanty town where we see one of its inhabitants kicking back and playing the harmonica. The plangeant tones, lilting rhythms, and pentatonic scales of this diegetic harmonica playing, clearly associated here with the poor inhabitants of the slums, are then taken up by the non-diegetic score, transferred to synthesizers and electronic drums. Following Richard Dyer's telling comparison of music in the films of Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, in which he contrasts the gulf between diegetic popular music and classical non-diegetic score in Rossellini to the close thematic connections between the two in Fellini's films, implying almost a certain aloof contempt on the part of Rossellini for the working class culture he is supposed to be celebrating; we might argue that this harmony between the musical 'voice' of the poor and the authorial voice of the score provides the key to Carpenter's intentions.

Might we venture still a third possible interpretation though - reading, perhaps, against Carpenter's intentions. And suggest that, far from the obvious leftist reading in which the glasses represent the power of Marxist science to cut through the false consciousness peddled by the media, it is the glasses themselves which represent ideology - rather like the old joke about the man smuggling bicycles. The very idea of a simple gizmo which will immediately enlighten you to the (capital T-) truth hidden behind appearances is the true ideological trick. We do not need magic glasses, presumably purchased with tokens from a comic, in order to see the aliens controlling our society. What we know already, and what Nada's friend, Frank know from the beginning of the film. "Steel mills were laying people off left, right and centre. They finally went under... Do you know what the bosses gave themselves? A raise." The effects of capitalist exploitation are everywhere to be seen - even, as the old Cinemascope posters used to say, without glasses.

Lies, Damned Lies and the Rude Health of Pubs and Records

2010-06-27T13:36:00.008+01:00

William Burroughs once claimed that the purpose of science was to make people aware of what they already know and the purpose of religion to stop people from being aware of what they already know. In recent times, this latter role may have been overtaken by statistics. Stats travel well on the web, they are small compact, aerodynamic, fit snugly into tweets and headlines and they have a certain punctive, so there force to them, that makes them seem convincing, even when they blatantly contradict what seems to be staring you in the face.

So, in this Observer article about the mooted extension of the smoking ban to cars and parks, the penultimate paragraph states what appears to be a paradox: the Office of National Statistics claims a a 3% in people going to pubs (incidentally, I had a look on the Office of National Statistics website and couldn't find this particular report - but I did find a report stating a 2.5% drop in the output of the hotel and restaurant trade, of which, "The largest contribution to the decrease was public houses and clubs."), yet Simon Clark of the lobby group Forest claims, "The evidence is staring people in the face. Thousands of pubs have closed since the ban was introduced." Now, Forest is a front group for the tobacco industry with little to no grassroots support, but his contention is not entirely without ground. As this Times Business article shows, with some 2,400 pubs closing between the summers of 2008 and 2009 alone, "local pubs serving small communities" have been the worst hit, while major chains like Greene King see their profits rise.

Is this not precisely analogous to the commonly repeated canard by members of the file-sharing lobby that piracy cannot possibly be bad for record sales when last year reported a rise in singles sales and the biggest selling single of all time? All around us we see record shops closing down, record labels folding, distributors collapsing, but we can merrily blind ourselves to this obvious reality because a small handful of major label mega-stars posted a record year (and the market - and its stats - is of course always the final guarantor of truth).

The Rest is Music, Ho!

2010-06-26T19:39:00.015+01:00

It was a curious thing to read simultaneously (one on the bus, one in the bath), both Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and Constant Lambert's Music Ho! recently. Ross's book won the Guardian First Book award a couple of years ago and since then it has become a sort of knee-jerk reference for anyone writing about the concert music of the twentieth century who doesn't really know very much about it. It is practically impossible to attend a pre-concert talk for any contemporary music these days without hearing a quote from it. Lambert's book, written in 1934 when the prodigious composer-critic was twenty-nine, is a rather more idiosyncratic work upon whom history has been less kind, and remains largely neglected these days.

Yet both books share a great deal in common. Both books present a kind of whither classical music, an occasionally troubled state of the art address, summarising recent developments in the field. Both begin by attempting to iron out or paper over Adorno's great opposition in The Philosophy of Modern Music, between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, by positing some third composer, supposedly prior to both (Ross is just as little convincing in his argument for Strauss's influence on Stravinsky as Lambert is in his contention of Schoenberg as a Debussyist). And both effectively conclude by positing one composer, popular at the time - if rarely exactly populist - though somewhat tame in comparison to many of their contemporaries, as the great white hope for the 'future of music' - for Lambert, it is Sibelius; for Ross, John Adams. Also, both books are as clearly stained by the prevailing prejudices of their day. In the case of Music Ho! it is the creeping racism that leaves him unable to refer to either "American negro music" or even Stravinsky without some word to their supposed "savagery". As for The Rest is Noise, the taint is liberal anti-communism.

One is apt to wonder at all the references to the Faust myth in the first part of Ross's mammoth text. By the second part, a sustained attack on politically motivated music and the political use of music, one need wonder no more. For Ross, any involvement of musicians in the dirty business of politics is a pact with the devil, whether it be the Soviet "art of fear" or the various projects and initiatives associated with the Popular Front ("a shut-in, fanatical world,") and the New Deal in America. So while the Federal Arts Project is patronised as "well-meaning", the Federal Theatre Project is demonised as "too clear about its goals" because its head, Hallie Flanagan, spoke out against "art as a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed by the rich" (p. 306).

Throughout this chapter on American music in the thirties and forties, like some sonic HUAC, scarcely a page passes without some loaded reference to a composer's politics. So Ruth Crawford and Charles Seegar "fell under the influence of Communist ideology" (p. 296), while the political commitments of Aaron Copland are referred to in terms of "make believe" (p. 300), "dabblings" (ibid.), and "flirtation" (p. 302), as though it were all just some adolescent phase he was going through before he could emerge as a truly mature artist. The only political gesture on the part of any composer Ross seems to approve of is Stravinsky's addition of a pulse to the final chord of Oedipus Rex on the day after "Little Boy" fell on Hiroshima, supposedly for the sake of "honoring the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a permanent citizen." (p. 327)

The liberal prejudice of Ross's book affects not just its content, but also its form. For The Rest is Noise presents us with scarcely more than a kind of Lives of the Great Composers of the Twentieth Century, with any real sense of scenes and movements, or of struggle and antipathy, largely papered over. The only struggle, for Ross, is that between the sovereign composer individual and the mass, either in the form of the public or the state. As economics and dialectics are quietly swept under the table, allow me to express the same "unease" at the thought of undergraduates relying on this expressly liberal history of modern music as Ross once expressed towards Susan McClary's Feminine Endings. This last from an article a few years ago where he really lays his conservative cards on the table, concluding that, "An explicitly political understanding of music will ... ultimately narrow music's appeal."

Perhaps the most glaring distinction between The Rest is Noise and Music Ho! is the absolute lack, in the former, of the wit so characteristic of the latter. Lambert ends, for instance, a discussion of the gramophone's "appalling popularity" by concluding that, "The loudspeaker is the streetwalker of music" (p. 173). And so I shall leave you today with a piece of Lambert's own music, albeit filtered through an even greater sonic slut: YouTube. This is from his music to Julien Duvivier's (1948) film of Anna Karenina. Lambert no doubt approached the subject with the same rather dubious exoticism in mind as animated Martin Denny's South Sea fantasies a decade later. The results are equally beguiling.

Santa Claus of the Subconscious: Strange Days

2010-06-24T00:24:00.004+01:00

Now that we all live in the future - the twenty-first century, setting for so many comics and sci-fi novels - it can be a curious experience to look back at the futures of the past, those predictions of a future that is now past, from a past that somehow seems slightly futuristic. Kathryn Bigelow's (1995) thriller Strange Days, an otherwise poor film propped up by too much awkward and unnecessary exposition, offers just such an opportunity. Set only a few years ahead on the last night of 1999, Bigelow doesn't have far to look and musically, of course, she has little choice but to pick and choose from her own present. And no doubt the indie-metal of Skunk Anansie and the trip-hop of early Portishead, both heard as Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) scans the dial on his car radio early on in the film, seemed bang up to the minute in 1995. Of course, by 1999 few musics were being looked upon quite so unkindly by such small history.

The plot revolves around the murder of hip hop artist Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) who raps about America the "boogeyman", saying "the drugs that I smoke and the guns that I tote all come from your boat." But by 1999 this kind of aggressively conscious rap was being decidedly displaced by the 'bling' celebration of money and status. Of course, Strange Days is really set less in 1999 than 1992, (writer, James Cameron admitted to being inspired by the murder of Rodney King) with the L.A. riots re-imagined as the "party of the century" and any hint of violence speedily quelled by the One Good Cop, floating gracefully through the crowd like a white Moses

Where the film correctly predicts the music of its near future (our recent past) is in its brief references to the endurance of the 'classic' - Bob Marley, and perhaps even more conspicuously, Rossini's aria "Contro Un Cor Che Accende Amore" from The Barber of Seville. Though I'll give them the music career of Juliette Lewis and the continuing hegemony of a rock "alternative" in name, but anything but in sound, these remain such pessimistic sonic predictions that they were almost bound to come true.

Where Strange Days might most excite a historian of sonic futures though is in its proposal of a true gesamtkunstwerk - the 'clips' that Lenny sells which allow you to experience a few seconds of another's life, recorded directly from their conscious brain. "This is not like TV only better," Lenny insists. "This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You're there, you're doing it, you're seeing it, you're hearing it, you're feeling it." Thus offering the ultimate fulfillment of Bazin's impossible promise of a "total cinema." And Juliette Lewis as (appropriately enough) Faith echoes Bazin in pining for the finitude of cinema as a limit to its reality effect. "Do you know why it is that movies are still better than playback? Because the music comes up, the credits roll, and you know when it's over."

Nonetheless, the promise of an art closer to everyday life has been central to much sonic utopianism, and the narcotically immersive 'playback' here is frequently discussed in aesthetic terms. "Skip the art criticism," Lenny says at one point, and at another we are told the killer, who 'records' himself in the act of murder, "needs an audience". We then have in this killer's tapes the return of everyone's favourite urban myth, the snuff film, only here taken a step further. These 'clips' in which you get to experience your own death or the murder of someone else are called 'blackjacks' - presumably as a reference to jacking in, or jacking up. A true art form for the end times. "Do you know how I know it's the end of the world?" asks Max. "Because everything's already been done: Every kind of music's been tried, and every government's been tried, every fucking hairstyle, fucking bubblegum flavours, every breakfast cereal, every type of fucking. What are we gonna do?"

So the artwork of the future becomes a metaphor for drug abuse and dependancy, with frequent shots of users 'strung out' or 'overdosed' on clips. While Lenny is cast sometimes as a kind of film director himself, at other times a depraved voyeur who, about to get beaten up, pleads, "Not my eyes!" But it is his surname, Nero, that rather unsubtly gives away the author's intentions. All this utopian talk of an artwork of the future is just so much fiddling while Rome burns. Hilariously, this artwork of the future is stored on a Sony MiniDisc, probably the shortest lived fad format of all time.

L'amour est un oiseau rebelle : Carmen in Trafalgar Square

2010-06-09T01:00:00.002+01:00

You know the traffic's bad when your bus driver advises you to get off and walk to the next stop. I blame the approximately four billion black cabs squatting in the road between Cannon Street and City Thameslink like fat rich old men in a public toilet cubicle. And so I missed the introductory sing-a-long of the Toreador song with self-described "animateur, presenter and populariser of choral singing" Gareth Malone. And I missed the rousing om-pom-pom overture with its crashing cymbals and its diddly-diddly-dee violins. But I did catch at least the vast majority of the 'summer screen' presentation of Georges Bizet's Carmen, broadcast live to Trafalgar Square from the Royal Opera House yesterday evening, even as it struggled to compete for the attention of my ears with the hubbub of post-rush hour congestion, the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the walkie-talkies of various event wardens, and the odd passing emergency services vehicle. No doubt it would have met with the approval of Christian Wolff, who liked to perform his piano pieces in his New York apartment with the windows open to the downtown traffic.

For my taste, Christina Rice was a little too broad and brassy in the title role. This is all very well of course, but to go all out with the guttural blousiness is to miss the contradictory nature of the character, the sweetness which honeys Carmen's, ahem, earthy sensuality into something genuinely seductive. The first act Habanera in particular sounded a little bit Mrs Mills, lacking the supple, lightness of touch which had so appealed to Nietzsche. It was a joy, nonetheless, to see so many people, of all ages, several thousand in London alone, watching with the same "tender devotion" that Nietzsche still felt after attending twenty performances.

"They could've got a big screen," went one old chap, struggling to read the subtitles from the side of the square. "Well, it is quite big, if you get close to it," averred his partner. He had a point though, large though the screen may have been before it was airlifted from yr local picture palace, it couldn't help but feel a bit dwarfed by the surroundings out in the broad daylight. But as the curtain came up for the final act, so the sun went down and the city and (so it seemed) its noises receded magically behind its inky cloak, and all the street lamps of WC2 were as so many Chinese lanterns, floating on a wave of thick romantic harmony. It was all, in the end, quite bewitching.

He's a Liquid: John Foxx at The Roundhouse

2010-06-06T00:08:00.010+01:00

There was a silence onstage after the DJ finished his set and Foxx's short introductory video had ended. "Come on John," and "Come on Foxxy!" came the cries from the crowd. Having never seen him before I wondered if he always needed to be so cajoled into making his appearance. But appear he did. My word, I thought, he looks rather like Robert Kilroy Silk. But when he sang he did not have the voice of Kilroy. It was a voice to make Davros sound like Jonathan Creek (then again, maybe the voice of Davros is the 'truth' of Kilroy ... ). Actually, the comparison is rather apposite. A great deal of the sounds in tonight's show - and particularly from its first third - would have been quite familiar to a fan of Dr Who in the 60s and 70s, and yet completely alien to anyone watching the BBC today (especially anyone watching Dr Who today). The scream of oscillators, the peal of arpeggiators, the juddering apocalypse of square wave distortion.

On the backdrop, projected images of utopian modernism: skyscrapers and Camel cigarette ads. Remnants of a time before tall buildings were considered high risk terror targets and cigarettes a faux pas in polite society. Remnants of a time that still dared to look forward. For all his - enormous and undeniable - influence on the music of today, he comes across somehow as just as much of an anachronism as the smiles and the cars on the screen. One new song, co-authored with Mira from Ladytron and keyboard wizard Benge (who is part of tonight's ensemble), sounds possibly even more technoprimitive than the oldies in the set. But many of the images (shots of the tube, council blocks, spaghetti junction, and so forth) highlight a peculiarly English modernism that we are so often asked to forget about. To treat the modern as something that happened overseas, while England will be forever Basingstoke, Blackpool and Tunbridge Wells. Foxx embodies as much another England as another time, an England that did go to the moon (if only via the EMS Synthi A).

They're birds, aren't they?

2010-06-03T16:57:00.008+01:00

There are so many things to love about this article, about a crow attacking female joggers in Eltham park, from the front page of South-East London's fine local gazette, The News Shopper (a title which conjures up the image of some Chris Morris-esque anchor, trawling the aisles of a supermarket, stacking up his trolley, and finally bringing to the check-out his bounty of news stories). There is the caption beneath the (above) photo which reads "menacing" in inverted commas, there is the official advice for runners to wear hard hats, there is the image of park wardens crowding round a tree making bird noises (a tactic yet to succeed), there is the sidebar entitled "When crows go bad". But best of all for Hitchcock fans is the little tease that the avian attacker has "an eye for blond females." Tim Webb from the RSPCA is brought in to explain that crows have a very long memory, suggesting that “At some point in the past this crow may have had a bad experience with a blonde female.” (Haven't we all, you might say.) So, like all good movie psychos, the bird had a damaged childhood, the attacks are merely the result of some barely repressed trauma ...

It's Always Lightest Just Before the Dark: Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me

2010-06-02T12:45:00.009+01:00

"How dare you?" shouted the woman at Sundance to a doubtless characteristically bemused Michael Winterbottom, thus setting the pattern for a string of festival screenings marked by boos, jeers, and walk outs. Now, it's coming out in the UK and the critics are lining up to accuse it - not of being too violent, of course not, that might suggest a certain weak-heartedness on the part of the critic. I'm no lily livered white bread Disney fan, they seem to be saying, but this film is Misogynist! There they said it. As Nina Power pointed out in her book One Dimensional Woman, the language of feminism is called forth to some peculiar causes these days - from the selling of shoes and chocolate to the hounding of Muslims. Since at least last year's Antichrist, 'feminists' are being rallied to a new cause - to express outrage at any film which deals with violence against women. Curious that a movement, part of whose historical mission has been to highlight and bring to attention the violence perpetrated by men towards women, the symbolic and the very real violence perpetrated by history, by society, by the law, by capitalism, against women, should now be called upon to sweep under the carpet any motion picture which deals with precisely this subject. No, we don't express our horror at cinematic violence anymore, we're not The Daily Mail screaming about video nasties corrupting our children, we're not Mary Whitehouse. The problem is that this violence is directed against women - and you just shouldn't hit girls, because girls are fair and weak and made of fairy dust.

Of course, the real problem with The Killer Inside Me, really so close to being a great film, is that it is simply not brutal enough. One way or another Jim Thompson's ferocious prose has been neutered time and again by the film industry. Kubrick gave writing credits to himself and his pals for scripts Thompson wrote alone; Peckinpah gave The Getaway a happy ending and changed its protagonist, Doc (played by Steve McQueen), from a vicious killer to a pensive pacifist who only kills once and in self-defence; Frears neutered The Grifters with a layer of ironic reflexivity that stops you getting suckered by its seductive con games.

The Killer Inside Me is an enormously strange book - a first person crime story narrated by a man who is clearly completely insane - but what is perhaps most disturbing about the book is just how nice, how charming this man, Lou Ford, is. Always ready with a quick line and an easy cliche, he's the nicest guy in town and everybody likes him. He's the good cop - the only one in the precinct who doesn't use violence to beat a confession out of his suspects. So when the bodies start piling up, no matter how much evidence there may be against him, no matter how implausible his story is, no-one would believe that Lou would do such a thing. Not good old Lou Ford. Everybody loves Lou - and so do you, the reader. And so you become complicit in his horrific acts of violence. You're right there with him, and pretty soon you're starting to feel pretty sick with yourself.

It's clear from interviews and press sheets that Michael Winterbottom regards Thompon as an essentially apolitical writer, a sort of tough guy nihilist like Dashiell Hammett. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In a way, Thompson was a kind of anti-Hammett, a member of the American Communist Party (the only political party at that time to support and fight for the rights of women and black people) who launched a tirade of abuse against the union-busting activities of Hammett's former employers, the Pinkerton Detective Agency (under the not so subtle codename of the Talkington Agency), in Pop. 1280. Likewise, The Killer Inside Me is not your standard psycho-on-the-loose story. Lou Ford is a high-ranking police detective, a pillar of the community - he practically is the community, a community that greets violence towards women and ethnic minorities with a broad smile. The cruelties and the contradictions of this small town - one much like the town Thompson himself grew up in - are writ large on every page.

So, the real problem with Winterbottom's film is precisely the one thing that all the haters have singled out for praise: Casey Affleck. From the very beginning of the movie, Affleck's Ford is clearly a nutcase with the cold dead eyes of a killer, merrily living up to every cinematic psycho cliche - he even listens to opera (Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, no less). As a result, the various twists and turn of the plot cannot help but seem wildly implausible. We are never seduced by Ford, we never catch a glimpse of how seductive he is, and so cannot fathom how anyone else would be. Likewise the violence remains just standard movie violence because it's what we expect of him from the very start. So it never feels like having your own face pummeled into hamburger meat by your best friend, it never feels like an anarchic scream against everything that is supposedly moral and upstanding in society, it just feels like another nasty movie in which boys get pleasure from watching girls get beaten up.

Cinematic violence can - and indeed must - be political and understood politically, not just as a thrill ride. For the Right this has always been understood, and the banning of violent films has always been used as a political weapon of normalisation and the protection of conservative values (the first film banned by the BBFC was of a boxing match - banned because it showed a black boxer triumphing over a white boxer). Now, increasingly, voices on the Left are stealing their thunder, trying to out-conservative the conservatives and neuter themselves in advance. In France, the last decade or so has seen the emergance of a hitherto unseen wave of bloody violence on cinema screens - but this wave has been accompanised by the emergence of a new filmic subject, the banlieues and their disenfranchised immigrant populations. In many recent French films, such as A L'Interieur, Trouble Every Day, or Frontier(s), the swathes of fake blood on screen are explcitly related to the upsurge in political violence from the banlieues over the same period. If we are to have a problem with Winterbottom's violence it should be precisely with its coyness, its insufficiency. Anything else is to hold your hands over your eyes in disavowal not just in the darkened cinema, but in our increasingly darkened world.

Yeh, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man ...

2010-05-27T14:19:00.005+01:00

Jesus christ, must I spell it out? Thought this was a no-brainer: MUSIC TASTE IS SUBJECTIVE = TRUE. NO ONE HAS THE AUTHORITY TO JUDGE OTHER PEOPLE’S OPINIONS = TRUE. BUT IS THAT EVER GOING TO STOP ANYONE = HELL NO.

Stumbled across the above on Tumblr a little while ago. Is there ever a more terroristic, totalitarian demand than this rabid insistence on the unassailable truth of artistic relativism? Though couched in the language of a libertarian anti-authoritarianism, this remains inevitably an argument to ram down someone's throat, to insist upon bluntly (in BLOCK CAPITALS no less) and then sit back smugly assured of one's own superiority. This is not an argument. There is no rhyme or reason behind this essentially religious belief in the impossibility of a judgement of value. It is a defence against all arguments, a refusal to engage in any sort of rational discussion. It is an "I am rubber, you are glue" for adults (chronologically defined).

Picking up a riff from a Poetix post of a few months back, the insistence that all opinions about music are purely subjective and critical authority is nonexistent at best, ultimately stems from the acceptance of the capitalist realist injunction to "live without ideas" - to live, essentially, without thinking. If someone tells you that the Mr Blobby song is just as worthy a piece of art music as The Art of the Fugue, then who are you to question them? If they claim 'Deutschland Uber Alle's is superior to Mahler's Third Symphony and the entire works of Mendelssohn, who are you to doubt the sanity of their judgement? Why stop and think, but, hang on, that's ridiculous isn't it?

And that is the point: from the mouths of its adherence, this injunction is always expressed in the tones of common sense necessity, so obvious as to require no justification, and yet the slightest examination will inevitably reveal the absurdity of the claim. So, if Michael Bolton's publicist says that Michael Bolton is the greatest composer of all time, this statement should be given the same weight in music-historical studies as the counter claim by a stack of esteemed musicologists that the honour belongs to Mozart? Now, don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that the aforementioned academics are necessarily right, and certainly not that they are right de facto by virtue of their status as academics. I am, however, saying that someone is right, that there is a right and a wrong, even if no divine angel will never descend to the earth and reveal to us the final glittering truth. We may never be externally assured of the truth of our judgements but that does not make them invalid or unnecessary. To demand that all taste is subjective is little more than the admission that one has no faith in one's own judgements, defensively applied to everyone else in a sort of well-if-I-can't-then-neither-can-anyone-else dog in the manger-ish sort of attitude. It is an inferiority complex disguised as a principled liberalism.

Apart from anything else it also displays a kind of proud ignorance of the way taste and judgement are actually formed, the implication always being that my taste is subjective precisely because it is unique to my personal being, formed in a vacuum without any outside influence. But like the atheist's lucky rabbit's foot, critical categories and discursive strategies work whether you believe in them or not. Your supposedly free and autonomous 'subjective' tastes are already thoroughly imbued with socialised assumptions, more or less uncritically absorbed, that render them anything but personal. There is no 'taste' in a vacuum. And nothing is ever just your opinion (man).

Just a slow slow slow slow suck

2010-05-25T23:51:00.005+01:00

I wasn't going to write a blog post in response to Steven Shaviro's post about 'slow cinema'. I felt too intimidated. I felt like, well, I've only seen a handful of the films he's talking about, and only a handful of the historical antecedents to which he refers - surely I'm not qualified to write a proper essay on the subject. I'll just moan about it on Twitter instead. That'll do, wont it? Well, apparently not. (Not for a certain bowel-damaged 'parasite on architecture' of my acquaintance anyway.) But then it struck me that, really, it wasn't necessary. The initial argument is sufficiently problematic that, in a way, it isn't necessary to have seen any of the films in question in order to critique it.

The argument goes something like: the slow contemplative nature of films by directors such as Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa and others has formed a kind of cultural hegemony, a "default international style" in modern arthouse cinema that is in some way obscuring or displacing the far more innovative work of other directors such as Claire Denis, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Takeshi Kitano, and Guy Maddin, and that anyway making slow films has already been done by Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Jancso and Akerman so this whole slow thing is just retrograde and pointless anyway.

To start off with, I'm not entirely comfortable with any generic category that includes three such different directors as Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Bela Tarr, least of all one that goes by the name of 'slow'. Sometimes things happen very quickly, alarmingly and confusingly quickly, in films by all three of these directors. Perhaps you could say that all three directors are interested in time, and the manipulation of cinematic tempo, but this is one of the fundamental aspects of cinema. There are very long, slow moments in Welles, in Hitchcock, is that slow covered then? To suggest we need make no more slow films because Antonioni has already done it is rather like saying - in fact almost precisely like saying - that we need no more slow music because Mozart - or Morton Feldman - has already written some very nice slow pieces.

If Mr Shaviro's horror story had come true, and the world's second run cinemas were filled with nothing but these very slow films in which nothing really happens, then undoubtedly we would have a problem on our hands. But this very possibility is negated by the enormous success of those directors in his second list, almost all of whom seem to me rather better exposed than those supposedly hegemonic slowcoaches. If any director is the acceptable face of contemporary arthouse auteur cinema then it is Claire Denis, if any director a popular byword for 'weird' cinema it is David Lynch. Yes, they make good films but I don't see why that should stop Dumont, Tarr and Weerasethakul from also making their own very good films. What light does saying that Takashi Miike makes very good films really shed on the issue at hand?

What is nice about those films in which sometimes thing happen very slowly and shots sometimes last a very long time, what is nice, at least, about that aspect of some films, is that you can tell that they have thought about it. Digital technology has done some wonderful things for cinema but it has also encouraged an attitude in some that one can just film anything, film as much stuff as possible, then sort it out later, in post-production. This, if anything, is becoming a sort of 'default international style' particularly amongst directors of adverts, pop videos, and television shows, many of whom might become the film makers of tomorrow. In the face of this, it is always gratifying to see a very long sequence that has clearly been very well thought out, of the sort that Tarr's seven and half hour epic, Satantango is absolutely full of.