Pioneer of the Stars: The Bad Angel’s Early Career

 

The above song, a hit for the Ohio-born Wilson in 1968, was written by a then 55 year-old Frank Stanton with a much younger man going by the name of Andy Badale.

At the same time, this Badale was also working with ondioline maestro Jean-Jacques Perrey, co-writing and producing large chunks of Perrey’s two solo albums for Vanguard, The Amazing New Electronic Pop Sound and Moog Indigo. Earlier, Badale was credited as co-composer on two Perrey & Kingsley tracks, ‘Visa to the Stars’ (from The In Sound From Way Out) and ‘Pioneers of the Stars’ (on Kaleidoscopic Vibrations).



After that, however, Badale’s trail starts to go a little cold. He wrote a few songs for Shirley Bassey, and for the Ossie Davis movie Howard’s War, and even wrote all the backing music for this children’s story.



But that was not the end of Badale’s career. Far from it. For you can see Badale playing the piano 7 minutes and 53 seconds into the following clip, having been offered the part by the film’s director after being hired as a vocal coach to the film’s Italian star.


By this time, Badale had started using the name he was born with, Angelo Badalamenti, and with that name, of course, he went on to work on many more films, notably with David Lynch.

The Name's Bond: Skyfall as Surrealist Allegory

‘Allegedly, the story goes like this.  

Billy Wilder runs into Louis Malle.  This was in the late 60s, early 70s.  

And Louis Malle had just made his most expensive film, which had cost two million dollars.  

And Billy Wilder asks him what the film is about.  

And Louis Malle says, “It's sort of a dream within a dream.”  

And Billy Wilder says, “You just lost two million dollars.”’
                                                   - Steven Soderbergh, in Waking Life

How are we to make sense of the new James Bond film, Skyfall? With its numerous diegetic discontinuities and narrative lacunae, the film seems almost to deliberately resist reasonable exposition. Numerous commenters – on Twitter, IMDB, etc.  – have gleefully pointed out the various continuity "errors" so-called: characters' shoes change colour mid-scene, time distorts and accelerates in strange ways (the final confrontation, for instance, begins and ends at daytime with a whole night passing somewhere in the middle), gloves and scarves and coats disappear and then reappear like ghosts in the night. 

Leaving aside for the time being the fact that Bond comes back from the dead enough times to speaks of "resurrection" as a hobby; the most grievous error seems to me to be the apparent revelation that James Bond's real name is none other than James Bond, son of Andrew Bond. I couldn't care less that this is established by Ian Fleming himself in the late novel, You Only Live Twice; in the context of this film it makes no sense. It is made clear that the name Silva, given to Bond's adversary is a nom de guerre, and the whole menace that Silva poses is his ability to reveal the real names hiding behind the professional aliases of other secret agents in the field. So how can the agent who, in the course of his work, introduces himself repeatedly as James Bond, possibly bear that name on his actual birth certificate except by some preposterous double bluff?

I would like to propose, then, that the most productive way of understanding Skyfall is as the pre-death dream of an agent so absorbed by his own cover that he has entirely forgotten his own identity. In this respect the film resembles the usual understanding of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, with which it shares a number of themes: doubles and double identities, betrayal and bitter obsession, the need to protect oneself through roleplaying. Skyfall is full of classic dream tropes: old houses, secret tunnels, watching one's place of work burn down, saving mummy. Characters frequently tell Bond that he is tired and needs a rest, recalling Freud's reminder in the Interpretation of Dreams (in the section on the dream of the burning child) that one of the functions of the dream is to prolong the dreamful sleep. There are numerous references to psychoanalysis in the film – the word association game, the all-too-obvious Oedipal triangle – as if to nudge the audience towards such an explanation. Even the way data is visualised (in various scenes involving Q) resembles a middle-aged man's fantasy from the 80s of what the net would one day look like. 

So, to reconstruct the story's fabula from the beginning: we see the agent known as James Bond die, falling from a bridge in Istanbul. The credit sequence featuring Adele and Paul Epworth's song then appears as a kind of hypnagogic hallucination, a confused fantasy of erotic fulfillment and a return to the womb. The rest of the story then arises as a kind of substitute formation to ward off the traumatic possibility of ‘James Bond’ recalling his own real identity. This precisely is the threat represented by Javier Bardem's character Silva (whose name is an anagram not just for the YouTube account "Vials" revealing agents' true names online, but also of "Valis", the intergalactic AI system that Philip K. Dick believed was communicating with him through dreams in the early 70s). 

Silva's threat is then double – both to undermine 007's self-identity as a virile heterosexual man (in the notorious seduction scene on Hashima Island) and also that he might reveal Bond's true name as he has of the other agents. The 'return' to the old Scottish mansion in the last act of the picture only really makes sense as the confabulation of a spurious back story on the part of Bond's subconscious in order to shore up his fragile sense of self by 'proving' that he 'really is' James Bond. Doesn't this rural manor in the end resemble the house in Louis Malle's infamous dream-within-a-dream, Black Moon, in which Cathryn Harrison's Lily escapes from a real war of the sexes to a strange cottage (in fact, Malle's own family estate) full of talking unicorns and naked children singing Tristan und Isolde?

The only true narrative inconsistency still requiring explanation, then, would finally be the unresolved question that must surely have hung in every viewer's mind at the end of the film [and I warn you, from here on there be spoilers]:  why doesn't Albert Finney's bizarrely inserted father substitute, Kincade, die in the end? Everything points towards the logical conclusion that he should die – both from the realistic stand point that, without any combat training, he somehow survives the assault of a small army – even surprising the murderous Silva at one point, who mysteriously declines from shooting him; and, from our own oneiric angle, that Bond's subconscious should require Kincade's death in order to resolve his Oedipal conflict. 

The only logical explanation is that, finally, the whole point of Skyfall is the protection of old patriarchies (represented by the name of the father, Bond – as in Andrew Bond). For what has actually changed at the end of the film – when, realistically assessed, every mission has been failed, what has been achieved? Only this: that Judi Dench's female M has been replaced and MI6 has a new male boss, while the feisty gun-toting female field agent, Eve (played by Naomie Harris), has settled down to a life as his secretary.

No hay banda: Jesca Hoop at Silencio

So I finally made it to Club Silencio, the much-hyped, David Lynch-branded, private members club in Paris's second arrondissement. The occasion was a concert by Tom Waits-approved Californian singer-songwriter, Jesca Hoop (about whom more later). Styled as equal parts cabaret artistique, boutique hotel, and bad dream, the venue proved, upon my initial wide-eyed exploration, curiously underwhelming; like a night club chill-out room that never ends. Maybe I had simply built up too high an expectation after six or so months of anticipation, but I found myself wondering whether I could actually imagine a scene from one of Lynch's films taking place here. Perhaps, I concluded; but not ineluctably.

It had its low-ceilinged stage flanked by thick red drapes: check. A plunging stairwell decorated with glossy photos of a black-suited man doing strange things underwater: check. Absurdly over-priced cocktails with convoluted descriptions and oblique names: check. A smoking room holding a forest of plastic trees adorned with fairy lights: check. A maze-like layout coupled with a sense of hidden rooms behind concealed doors: check. Cast iron Eiffel-esque quasi-industrial fittings jutting incongruously out of sleek wood-paneled surfaces, walls lined with mirrors arranged at jaunty angles, and black - yes, black - porcelain urinals in the gents' loo: check, check, check. All of which, if not exactly standard fare, felt nonetheless somehow par for the course in a venue supposedly designed by the creator of Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

Shortly after ten thirty, the red drapes parted to reveal Jesca Hoop and her band, greeted by a seated audience in a polite horseshoe circling away from the stage. The band performed brilliantly. Hoop writes intelligent, thoughtful and articulate songs, full of interesting quirks and infectious hooks. Her voice is powerful and vivid, able to draw from a seemingly bewildering diversity of influences, be it the classic American songbook or the choral music of Bulgaria. Former Fingathing turntablist Dan Baxter (aka Peter Parker) looked every bit the gas station owner turned hip hop convert as he jerked to the rhythms he tapped out of a little drum machine / sampler console. Ex-Pipette, Rebecca Stephens complemented, thickened, and enriched Hoop's voice with her own harmonies and counter melodies in a voice at once bruised and bright.

All was going well, and I feel fairly sure everyone in the audience would've agreed with that assessment. But as things progressed I became less and less sure that everyone on stage would. Principally, Hoop herself was, towards the latter half of the show, beginning to look distinctly uncomfortable. Not so much while singing, but between songs, certain little signs started to tell me - a man who has performed more bad gigs than most - that this was, as far as the principle performer was concerned, a bad gig.

It was an accumulation of little things, each one insignificant on their own: an awkward joke, a sudden urge to stop and have a drink of water, the way she responded to a brief burst of laughter from an audience member, a slight fidgety look about her. Whatever. I was captivated in the way one gets captivated by car accidents while driving past. Except, of course, that musically nothing had gone wrong, and probably to most people there, watching and listening, nothing would have seemed amiss.

And then it happened. Scarcely more than thirty-two bars into her last song, 'Deeper Devastation' from the most recent album, The House That Jack Built, probably the most Julee-Cruise-singing-in-the-Roadhouse song of the night, she stopped. Seemingly for no reason. Apologised, fiddled with the tuning on her guitar a bit, then signaled the band to start up again. Around the same point in the song, same thing happened again. Stopped dead. This time there's a palpable tension. Hoop looks nervous. Starts name-dropping. "I was in the Jay-Z video! What was that song called? I think it was 'In Paris' - is that right?" She turns to her band - she's actually urging her own band members to drop an N-bomb onstage in a foreign country. For a moment, everyone looks distinctly uncomfortable. Finally they get going again, and this time the song reaches its end, but there's more shifty looks between band members as though trying to fathom quite what just happened.

Quite what did happen, I am not sure. This is a woman who has been performing for over ten years, has toured with Eels, Mark Knopfler, and Elbow, shared a stage with Peter Gabriel, released three albums and a string of EPs. The crowd were attentive, respectful, hanging on her every word and applauding rapturously her every song. Yet somehow I suspect Hoop wasn't aware of this. Like the love from the audience wasn't quite reaching the stage. Or it may have been simply that something to do with the architecture, the geometry of the room, in some weird H.P. Lovecraft way, was abnormal, unsettling, "redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." 

The more I dwelt on this matter, the more I became convinced that, for all my earlier stated reservations, there remained something somehow not relaxing, not chilled out, about this place; something uncanny or perverse, that had somehow managed to creep insidiously onto the stage and subtly disturb and unhinge the act of this seasoned performer. No-one dropped dead, a giant did not appear on stage bathed in a sourceless pool of light, but perhaps a little hint of Lynchian discordance had nonetheless manifested itself here before us at Silencio.

Chaos Reigns: Lars von Trier - Antichrist

Twenty-five years after the video nasties act, Lars von Trier's latest film, Antichrist, has shown conclusively that, now at least, the British Board of Film Classification (responsible for drawing up the notorious 1983 list of over 70 banned horror films) is now a more liberal and enlightened judge than the entire critical and juridical establishment of the Cannes film festival. While the BBFC sees Antichrist's more explicit images as "exceptionally justified, in this context, by the manner in which they illustrate the film's themes and the nature of the couple's relationship," the critics and jurors at Cannes found themselves frothing at the mouth in the style of the hapless victims of Lamberto Bava's Demoni, "The film must be stopped!" It may be instructive, in this context, to compare the film to another film by a Danish director from eighty-five years earlier, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (occasionally subtitled "Witchcraft Through the Ages"). Häxan traverses very similar territory, comparing the treatment of women during the witch trials of early modern Europe to the modern day treatment of women in the psychiatric clinic, and asking, have we really come so far? Like von Trier's film, Häxan is split into chapters and a prologue and freely mixes fantasy and 'reality' (even calling itself a "documentary") without clearly distinguishing between the two. Perhaps von Trier's most astonishing acheivement with Antichrist is to have effectively replayed a scene from Häxan, in which a convent of nuns are seen in the grip of a wild collective hysteria, not in the film itself, but at the Cannes festival, swapping impressionable young nuns for supposedly mature and respectable elder statesmen of the film industry. More recently, I have seen reports on the web of critics who, having booed and jeered with the pack at Cannes, have now seen the film again, and found themselves forced to admit that it really is quite a brilliant film, and wondering quite what came over them at that initial screening. Also, like Häxan, in which the part of the devil is played by Christensen himself, one should be in no doubt as to who the 'antichrist' of the title is - as the sequence of credits makes almost comically clear it is von Trier (perhaps we could even compare the now notorious interview in which von Trier repeatedly attempts to insert the words "is the greatest director in the world" into Willem Dafoe's answers, to a scene in Häxan in which young witches are seen kissing the devil's backside).

Since seeing the film in Paris a few weeks ago, I have become strangely obsessed with reading critical reports on the film, if only because so many of them seem to thoroughly misguided. Christopher Hart's Daily Mail piece, in which he repeatedly calls for the films censorship despite admitting he hasn't seen it, is almost too true to form for the Mail, scarcely even a newspaper, more a comic for Nazis. Even stranger in some ways, was Sean O'Hagan's assertion in The Guardian that the film contains a "critique of psychoanalysis." presumably because at one point Gainsbourg's character says, "Modern psychology has no place for dreams. Freud is dead, right?" Can such an experienced journalist really be so stupid to confuse a line spoken by one of a film's characters with the controlling idea of the film? Especially when everything we see directly contradicts the line? The assertion that "Freud is dead," in a film so full of resurrections and disinterments, is clearly meant to be ironic, and if "modern psychology has no place for dreams" then that is, no doubt, modern psychology's problem, for this film is totally suffused with dream images, and Dafoe's character's complaint of bad dreams is an omen the couple ignore most foolishly. In fact, this film is an attack on the phallogocentrism of 'modern' cognitive behavioural therapy (such is the occupation of Dafoe's character) and psychoanalytic theory is its chief weapon in this attack.

There seems to be a real desire to strike out at von Trier, the arch-provocateur, in a fashion somewhat akin to the tendency of the thick kid in the class to beating up their most openly verbose and intellectually precocious classmates. The insistence on the part of Ads Without Products that the film represents an idealised, Europeanised vision of America because 'real' Americans don't have log cabins in the woods, far from the road, is particularly odd. For if this log cabin reminds us of anything it is nothing in European culture but, of course, Jacques Renault's log cabin (also in the woods of the Pacific Northwest) in Twin Peaks (I also seem to remember that a certain Henry David Thoreau had a little log cabin, far from the road, out by Walden Pond, and James M. Cain inserts just such a cabin into the middle third of Mildred Pierce - but no doubt Cain, Thoreau and Lynch aren't really real Americans either). This is far from the only Lynchian touch in Antichrist (the precise use of close-ups to render familiar objects and body parts strange and uncanny being the most obvious) and no doubt the reference is not accidental. And then there is the gallimaufry of accusations of misogyny, almost entirely from male critics (the one exception - at least as far as I'm aware - being Julie Bindel, who curses the film for the apparent absence of rationale and logos, the very object of the film's critique). Calling this intense and patiently researched analysis of anti-feminism (what other film have you ever heard of feature a credit for "research on misogyny") a misogynist film is of a kind to the recent accusation that comic Richard Herring's current show about racism (entitled "Hitler Moustache") is in fact racist. Is it racist for a white comic to to tackle racism in his show? No, I don't think so. Victims, as Alain Badiou says in his book on St. Paul, have no privileged access to the truth. As Rifa Bhunoo points out, dismissing Herring's show as racist is a means of sidestepping debate, acting as though the issue is no longer relevant or unworthy of serious attention. There is a kind of Boris Johnson logic at work here - cancelling an anti-racism free festival in London on the grounds that London does not have a racism problem and therefore to have such a festival is only inciting racial tension. The horror of these male critics at Antichrist is the horror of castration - the very fear that, according to psychoanalysis, animates man's fear of women. It is for this reason, I believe, that the BBFC had no issues with the film's more graphic moments. The British censor understood that the theme of the film, its subject (but certainly not its intent) was misogyny, and an intensive and in depth exploration of a long history of violence towards women, like Häxan, from the witch trials to the therapautic clinic, and as such to skip or gloss over the fear of castration and the reality of cliterodectomy (emphasized by their structural mirror image: the healthy, thrusting organs of the opening scene) would be almost more offensive than their inclusion.