Apr 04 2012
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Music

Transcendental Youth: the Mountain Goats and Anonymous 4 at the Barbican, 02/04/2012

It’s a strange thing to be handed a printed programme on your way into an indie-rock gig; but when that gig is a collaboration between a respected literary singer-songwriter and a medieval vocal harmony quartet, it’s hard to know what to expect.

In the long term, the Mountain Goats teaming up with Anonymous 4 for their forthcoming 15th studio album, Transcendental Youth, can only be a good thing. There’s something paradoxically natural about the pure, ethereal melodies of four classically-trained female singers off-setting John Darnielle’s highwire voice and the taut narratives of sin and redemption he uses it to tell. It’s also amazing to contrast the bashed-out hiss-and-vinegar of his early work, skittishly recorded onto crackly cassettes, with the beauty and ambition of this project and the cultural platform provided for it by the 1500-seater Barbican theatre.

No one sensible is going to complain about Darnielle’s integration into the spaces of high culture – he’s earned it – but although I look forward avidly to the upcoming album on the basis of this gig, something about the night itself failed to gel for me, and I want to think about some questions it raised.

Anonymous 5

The tone was set with a performance from Anonymous 4 (really Anonymous 3, plus arranger Owen Pallett, personal circumstances necessitating the absence of the fourth member). I make no claim to familiarity with medieval ecclesiastical music, though if I spoke Latin I’m sure I’d have got more out of the first half of this set, curated by Darnielle and presumably tailored to his interests, Catholic with a big and a small ‘c’. Without denying the wonderful clarity of their voices, the second half, drawing more heavily on English folk and American gospel, was a bigger hit with the majority of the audience, although Darnielle pitching in with a surprising competent bass part can’t have done any harm.

A solo Mountain Goats set followed, featuring the first new material of the evening (unless Anonymous 4 have given up on being a covers band); there was a surprising absence of songs from last year’s storming All Eternals Deck, but a rousing rendition of the unreleased ‘Cut Off Your Thumbs’ – fantastically labelled ‘Year unknown’ on the accompanying hymn-sheet – saw Darnielle bathed in blood-red light, screaming ‘I’m gonna kill everybody in this room’ to a seated audience of polite Radio 4 types wearing glasses and jackets. Who lapped it up.

'Kill me first, John! I've got all your tapes!'

The evening was always going to stand or fall, however, on the final joint performance; which, to me, ended up feeling like something of a missed opportunity. For much of the set, it was like listening to two different gigs simultaneously, but that’s no bad thing. In fact, it’s sort of the point. The problem is that for contrast to work, you have be to able to appreciate both elements simultaneously, to recognise what’s being contrasted to what. The structure of the night, building up the two halves of the equation separately, was a great idea in this regard; but these were new songs, and from where I was sitting, you couldn’t always hear them. Or rather you could, but all you could hear was Anonymous 4.

The little details, tiny nuggets of psychological and circumstantial information, on which Darnielle’s lyrics and reputation are built, were swallowed up by the beautiful wall of sound – like listening to a tidal wave break on a home-made raft. And it’s a shame, because as the live recordings available on this site make clear (along with a good and fair review, from a different perspective), these are very good songs indeed. On record, they’ll probably rank among John Darnielle’s best work – but on first introduction, they were too overwhelmed to communicate clearly. You could either sit back and let it wash over you, uncomprehended, or lean in and try your hardest to pick it all out. Maybe I made the wrong choice; I just wish the mic levels in the Barbican had been sufficiently adjusted for this not to have been a problem.

Rock'n'roll

In fact, the venue itself might have been a problem – one which sheds light on a wider issue. Watching pop or rock music, no matter how literary and clever it is, operates in a certain way; sitting in a theatre creates a different set of expectations. Darnielle’s aim as I understand it is partly to bring classical elements into rock music, which if done well seems like a great idea. But this show seemed more like bringing rock music into a classical venue; as if wanting this kind of art to be treated as high culture means that we have to experience it in the same space and according to the same frameworks as other kinds of high culture.

And while it’s fantastic to see a venue like the Barbican taking an important contemporary artist seriously, I find there’s something weirdly neutered and gentrified about watching live (un)popular music in a theatre. There are traditional gig venues this size in London – and can you imagine how different an experience it would be to see the Mountain Goats play with Anonymous 4 in a dark basement to a capacity standing crowd, with the amps cranked up? To see something this creative and intellectually stimulating in an environment that’s truly democratic, sweatily communal?

Definitely sweaty, probably communal

So while I’m happy that there are people out there who want to view great lyric-writing as great art, I don’t think that means it has to be encountered in the way other art is; within the pantheon, behind the gates. I want to see John Darnielle and four classical vocal harmony singers in a cavernous shack after a month on the road, drunk and verbose, in assorted death metal T-shirts. Now that would be transcendental.

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Mar 25 2012
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TV

White Heat (BBC2)

Let’s start with the positive. There’s one character in White Heat who’s a perfect cipher for the period the BBC’s new long-form drama represents – Alan, played by Lee Ingleby and later Paul Copley. When we meet Alan, he’s a gauche computing student from the North-East, profiting from new social and technological opportunities, but with an unquestioning respect for the old order. The most interesting scene in the first episode sees him accompanying a Tory MP, in the place of his socialist son, the feckless Jack, to the state funeral of Winston Churchill. Interviewed for DigitalSpy, Ingleby notes that Alan ‘thinks there are certain rules you have to adhere to or you just won’t get on in life’. 

The face of a man who could probably be finding this situation more comfortable than he is

John Braine’s novels Room at the Top and Life at the Top show a character from a similar background following a similar track – for Joe Lampton, and for Alan, there’s real no senses of the masses against the classes. There’s just hard graft, working your way up through the system, new blood from different sources replacing the dead wood. Lampton winds up as a ‘big fat neuter’, sitting on the Town Council, lunching at the Conservative Club, the ‘green and buff country’ in which he fears being trapped for eternity. When we meet the older Alan, Copley is the only actor who looks like a man in his sixties; which should probably be no surprise.

We can already see Alan’s individualism, Alan’s stolid commitment to enterprise. He’s the sort of person who gets on his bike to look for work, even going to America in the third episode and coming back with a greater self-confidence and some pretty strong career prospects. Norman Tebbit would be proud of him, and as the fourth episode coincides with the rise of Thatcher, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Alan getting directly involved.

An astoundingly offensive and misrepresentative picture that I didn't make

I think I like Alan because he seems to be the only character visibly adjusting to the shifting morality of the period, rather than receiving it pre-chewed, as something they had always been promised. Occasionally I expect to see Charlotte (Claire Foy) and Jack (Sam Claflin) checking their watches: have they legalised abortion yet? Where’s Arthur Scargill? Why isn’t this thing digital?

It’s possible – probable – that the 60s and 70s were full of people spouting slogans about class and gender equality to alternatively bemused and condescending parents, across pub tables and in oppressive teak-lined hallways. Unfortunately, it’s quite tedious to watch someone making grand pronouncements about things we already know, as if they’ve thought of them for the first time. No one’s disputing the ideas were in the air (that might be the problem). But it might be nice to see Jack, Charlotte and their compatriots learning as they go along.

'This is new! This is good!' (1968 - tick tock...)

White Heat is excellent at showing us everything from the post-war years that we already think we know – the unstoppable march of progress (for white men; stoppable to varying degrees for everyone else), strikes and protests, the simultaneous discovery of masturbation and D H Lawrence. It kicks off in 1965 – two years after ‘sexual intercourse began’ in Larkin’s famous poem, and sexual intercourse seems to have caught up pretty quickly. Maybe the next three episodes will fill in some of the gaps, and look more closely at who’s really getting left behind; at the moment, like some of its characters, Paula Milne’s series is a little too sure of itself.

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Mar 24 2012
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TV

White Heat (BBC2)/Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture (BBC2)

The BBC’s new flagship ensemble drama, White Heat, and their recent documentary series, Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture have a lot in common. They might turn out to share a few problems, as well as their historical subjects.

'I've asked you nicely, Melvyn. Get out of my house. I've got a shotgun. I killed that tiger on the floor.'

Bragg, at a sprightly 72, is an ideal guide through a hundred years of negotiations between the notoriously slippery British class system and the art produced in its long shadow. Himself a product of the post-war system of grammar schools and university scholarships, he’s well aware of the issues of identity faced by young people offered the chance to transcend their working class origins in the 1950s and 60s. A clip in the second episode, from Dennis Potter’s TV play Stand Up Nigel Barton, captures the dilemma, not overly subtly; the eponymous character finds himself delivering an impassioned speech about his background to the Oxford Union, and to jeers. It’s what happens in novels from Larkin’s 40s debut Jill, to Lucky Jim and Room at the Top, through to Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle - the acquisition of education, or a higher social status, leaves characters torn between two cultures, unable to truly belong to either.

Nigel Barton reading something, presumably being told not to

There’s a great scene in Coe’s novel where Doug, a Birmingham shop steward’s son turned broadsheet culture editor, takes his visiting mother to Starbucks where he orders her a ‘tall latte’. Out of place and visibly perplexed, she asks: ‘Didn’t they have any coffee?’ On discovering the price, she wishes socialist May Day demonstrators will come and put a brick through the window.

This is the world Bragg is summarising, and when he’s on home turf, the post-war years, he does an admirable job; given his obvious familiarity, it’s a shame more of the series wasn’t about the literature of the period. The first episode seems thinner, more reliant on generalisations about dancing crazes and full of potentially interesting archive clips (Lord Montagu of Beaulieu who pioneered the donation of aristocratic family seats to the nation, singing ‘The Stately Homes of England’, for one example) that Bragg’s somewhat nervy narration cuts uncomfortably across.

'I'm not sure why you think I'm the most qualified candidate either, Melvyn'

The third starts well, drawing a familiar dividing line in 1979, at the advent of Margaret Thatcher, but after examining the dynamics of Brookside things get a little hazy. It’s clear Bragg is a little out of his depth with punk – not least when he describes as a working-class movement what many saw as the preserve of art-school wankers – and an interview which posits Tinchy Stryder as the embodiment of cross-class cultural achievement is a little embarrassing for all concerned.

Things also seem to stop short, with no examination of the Blair and Brown years – did Labour donor Lord Bragg get cold feet about their implications? – and a surprising lack of discussion of the current situation, with what we might politely call an anachronistic Cabinet and what Owen Hatherley describes as ‘a striking homogeneity of class as much as sound in British music’. Hatherley’s Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp says more than I ever could about the disappearance of questions of class from popular music, starting with a statistic that 60% of top 10 artists in October 2010 were privately-educated. Jarvis Cocker would surely have had something to say about that; in some ways, he was the missing link in Bragg’s analysis of a cultural era.

Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at what White Heat makes of some of these issues; and if it works as drama beyond the box-ticking of social history.

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Feb 23 2012
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TV

Jonathan Meades on France

This review first appeared in the Cherwell newspaper

A chubby, ageing man in thick glasses standing at an oblique angle in the middle distance, intoning ‘No checked tablecloths.’ A taxi driver offering ‘Dictatours’ through the Parisian boulevards most beloved of money-laundering African despots. A photograph of an aide of Charles de Gaulle, obsesssively and repeatedly magnified, as if snapped by the lens of a paparazzo or a private detective. Confused? So am I. This is not how we do documentaries.

‘Jonathan Meades on France’ is the veteran architectural and cultural critic’s most recent series on BBC4 and, for all its sidelong camera-work, it’s a full-frontal assault on what we’ve come to know as the gentle, soothing contours of the British tradition of factual filmmaking.

'You made this yourself? You're shitting me.'

We’re used to being led by the hand by benign, chummy presenters, young if possible and attractive if female, through a series of lingering close-ups of artefacts and manuscripts. In the absence of a suitable object, long shots of sweeping countryside offer space for a voiceover’s sweeping generalisations. The average documentarian devotes half of her time to making you forget she has a PhD in the subject in question. She wanders wide-eyed into smithies, mills and printing workshops, asks faux-naive questions, feigns surprise at the basic information proferred, and makes awkward banter with tangentially-relevant artisans.

If the mainstream documentary is a graceful, rounded cupola – all soft edges – Meades’s take on the format is like a Brutalist tower block. It’s shockingly angular and abrasively sharp, with sudden jump-cuts in image and subject matter, a narrative that’s more free-associative than linear, and a bullying intellectual quality that dismisses Francois Mitterand, the human rights movement, the Verdun memorial and French attempts at doo-wop music with an identical lip-curling arrogance. Cupolas themselves, to Meades’s eyes, are the architectural equivalent of a ‘bulbous glans’; don’t say I didn’t warn you.

There were a cupola things Meades found incongruous about French architectural historyThere were a cupola things Meades found incongruous about French architectural history

Gone is the presenter as audience surrogate – in her place is a figure whose knowledge is never in question, and who expects you to keep up or switch off. There’s no sense that Meades ever intends to clarify what connection, if any, he sees between a cabinet maker and the rise of nationalism, or that he cares if you disagree with his bullish secularism. The programme is shot through with a dry, absurdist wit – Meades dancing in circles with an umbrella outside a cathedral, Meades wearing a beehive wig – but if you don’t get the joke, he’s never going to explain the punchline.

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Feb 23 2012
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Music

Shearwater – Animal Joy

This review originally appeared in the  Cherwell newspaper.


Musically speaking, these are good times for birdwatchers. The pastoral is back in a big way – in some areas of the modern folksy indie landscape you can’t turn around without tripping over bands called Goose Archipelago and Chirpy and the Tweet-Tweets. Fronted by an ornithologist and named after a family of seabirds, it’s easy therefore to pigeonhole Shearwater with the opener of their new outing ‘Animal Joy’; lilting, incantatory vocals deliver a cryptic narrative that namechecks dogs and swallows like a child completing a Springwatch garden survey.

But Jonathan Meiburg’s outfit has been around for a long time – since 1999, starting life as a side-project of Okkervil River – and they’re no one trick flying pony. What’s most striking about their recent work is its prominent, forceful drumming, more integral to the production here than to any recent album since The National’s tautly percussive breakthrough, ‘Boxer’.

These people are going to burn

As many of Meiburg’s lyrics are suspiciously elusive, a metaphor might help. Imagine a secret Fleet Foxes gig, where young men gather around a fire in the woods to toast marshmallows and plait daisy-crowns for local maidens. Now imagine someone turning up to that event with a massive drum, and beating it vigorously until someone sets fire to his artfully-tangled beard.

Shearwater at their best sit in the middle of this false polarity – ‘Animal Life’ is an enthralling blend of ancient and modern, rural and urban, and ‘You As You Were’ sounds like LCD Soundsystem begging for their supper when their tour bus has broken down in the Texas Hill country. But somewhere in the middle of unnecessarily extended rock epic ‘Insolence’, the album itself gets a little lost. It’s been a while since Shearwater flew the nest; I’m just not sure if they’ve quite succeeded in building a place of their own.

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Jan 29 2012
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Music

Old Ideas – Leonard Cohen

A version of this review appeared in the Cherwell music section, 27/01/12

If anyone’s entitled to have old ideas, it’s Leonard Cohen. His first book of poetry was published in 1956; his first album eleven years later. At seventy-seven, the Methuselah of Montreal could be forgiven for hanging up his trademark fedora; but his humour and humility remain intact.

You can leave your hat on

Attendees at the listening party for this, his twelfth album, are greeted with typical self-deprecation – ‘I won’t be facing you during the playback, so you don’t need to guard your expressions’ – and its lead-off single is a hymn of self-abasement. ‘Show me the place where you want your slave to go’, Cohen begins over gentle piano, speaking more than singing these days. Redolent with the Biblical imagery of stones and suffering, it has the complete exhaustion of a weary supplicant at the end of a long pilgrimage, laying an offering at an altar.

'I've been meaning to get this chair for ages'

Many of the songs here are concerned with the imagery of conclusion, from the slow shuffle of ‘Going Home’ to the bluesy ‘Darkness’, its insistent three-note riff advancing like the footsteps of a monster in a horror movie. Cohen has always sounded like he’s writing his own epitaph; these days, he could use his voice as the chisel. What’s most striking here is its intimate centrality; it’s lacquered mahogany, and the production lets you see every grain. At the launch, his interviewer Jarvis Cocker comments on the feeling that the singer could be in the room with every single person listening. ‘I intend to,’ Cohen responds.

JC’s opening line to LC: ‘Would you like some popcorn?’

It’s this wit that rescues the work from morbidity, that allows it to be what it’s always been: ‘a manual for living with defeat’. Bathetic turns of phrase undermine grand conceits: ‘I dreamed about you baby/You were wearing half your dress/I know you hate me/Could you hate me less?’ The sacred and the profane rub shoulders, and rather more besides.

‘Old Ideas’ is exactly the album you’d expect it to be; it’s not a title that promises novelty. ‘How old exactly are the ideas?’, one journalist asks its author. ‘About 2614 years,’ he deadpans back. Like most of Cohen’s work, it’s funny because it’s true.

 

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Jan 07 2012
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Exhibitions, Theatre

Grayson Perry’s The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman/Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem

The New Year is traditionally a time for looking to the past as well as the future, and for the first post of 2012 I’d like to cast an eye over two of the last year’s cultural big hitters, both of which do exactly what the season encourages. Three days before the end of 2011, I made it to Grayson Perry’s British Museum exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, and Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre, in what’s billed as the final incarnation of the original production of Jez Butterworth’s 2009 play on the London stage. The two work together well, because both focus on the interplay between the modern and the ancient; between history and timelessness.

Knock knock

A point made by Perry in his copious exhibition notes is that we are more inclined to admire, even venerate, an artefact that has the ‘patina of age’ over a noticeably contemporary production. It’s in this spirit that The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman contains historical relics side by side with replicas, and asks us to consider the difference in value between an ‘authentic’ object and a convincing fake. Many of Perry’s own objects are deliberately convincing fakes: one of the first to meet the visitor’s eye is a piece entitled Early English Motorcycle Helmet, covered in a copper rust that tricks the eye into associating it with items found in an Anglo-Saxon tomb hoard, a la Sutton Hoo. Throughout the exhibition objects that appear contemporary turn out to be historical, and vice versa – by removing the items from their usual interpretive context, Perry allows us to see them with fresh eyes, temporarily rolling back the shutters of our own cultural assumptions.

Go figure

It seems odd to talk about defamiliarisation when what you’re looking at is a Malian power figure – I rarely come across them in rural Lincolnshire – but by its very isolation, each item gains a sense of individual purpose and character that is easy to lose when confronted with twenty exhibits in a glass case marked ‘Western Africa’. By presenting all of these pieces under the rubric of the Unknown Craftsman, Perry steers the spectator towards questions too often forgotten in an academic museum display: who made this, and why? What were they thinking, and how did they do it, and what did it mean when they did? I looked at these objects wanting to know the things I would usually consider when looking at contemporary art, and it’s fascinating that it took the curatorial guidance of a contemporary artist to restore the urgency of the past.

If you want to see this properly, don't look at it here

Most of Perry’s own works in the collection have been discussed at length elsewhere, not least by the artist, so I won’t dwell on the details – my personal favourite might have been the Map of Truths and Beliefs, a deliriously crammed post-modern kaleidoscope of image, text and idea. But what caught my attention was something much smaller: the deservedly-lauded Rosetta Vase, similarly loaded with words and beliefs, is hard to see from all angles, but if you edge around to the back of the display case you can just make out the word ‘Authenticity’. The application of the paint is somewhat blurred, as if the artist messed up the initial spelling or design of the word and had to go over it twice. Is this an authentic mistake, left in to show the spontaneity and flawed humanity of the craftsmanship? Or is it another joke – a deliberate error by design, put there specifically to cock a snook at the hunt for authenticity itself? As far as I know, Perry isn’t saying.

Another post would be needed to do Jerusalem justice, but its purpose and method, repeatedly iterated in its programme and reviews, is to explore a deep connection between a sense of local, rooted Englishness, and an invigorating tradition of folk mythology that can’t or won’t stay buried. As with Perry, the effect was a temporary change of perspective; for a couple of days, the ground beneath my feet looked different. Friends have seen in the play and its concerns a small-mindedness, a curmudgeonly anti-modernity. But is the banner proclaiming ‘Fuck the New Estate’ above Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron’s caravan a toothless complaint about local authority housing, or an angry, anarchic riposte to the urbanisation of the countryside by people who are at odds with its values? The play makes you ask what those values are, and whether there is any meaning to words like ‘British’ and ‘belonging’ – or at least, any meaning that can be reclaimed from the likes of the BNP.

Simon Sebag Montefiore not pictured

I think there’s a progressive patriotism at the heart of the play which it’s hard to articulate, though it might be worth noting that its ‘English folk hero’ is a Romany traveller, and clearly self-identifies with more than one cultural tradition. Unless Rooster isn’t a hero at all – there’s a darkness and a tragedy to the character, which the best lead characters have. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the play will be a victim of the production’s success; the iconic, blistering nature of Mark Rylance’s performance has probably shot the part in the foot for any actor in the next, say, twenty years, but until we get to see a Rooster who isn’t a mere imitation, it will be harder to see how complex and plural the role might actually be. Perhaps it isn’t, and Jerusalem has simply captured its moment exceedingly well – but my suspicion is that, in its active ambition to forge a link between the present and the past, the play has secured its own timelessness. It’s an artefact like Rooster’s caravan – weather-beaten, ugly, and potentially unhealthy, but sturdy, and built to last.

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Dec 24 2011
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TV

Black Mirror (C4)

It’s a bold move for a TV critic to put his money where his mouth is by producing his own series – especially a critic as ferociously unforgiving as Charlie Brooker. So Channel 4′s Black Mirror was always going to be in a precarious position; luckily, for Brooker and his collaborators, this is one mirror that isn’t cracked. Or if it is, it’s in the most appropriate way possible; living up to its name, the three-part mini-series, modelled on The Twilight Zone (and not, as one newspaper TV guide suggested, Twilight), offered three disturbingly plausible reflections of the dark and fractured places to which modern technology and media saturation might one day take us.

This photo is not merely ridiculous, but irrelevant

 ’The National Anthem’ kicked things off with a new definition of ‘hogging the spotlight’, as a popular princess was held hostage until Rory Kinnear’s British PM satisfied the shadowy kidnapper’s obscene demand by fucking a pig on national television. For long-time followers of Brooker, the underlying concerns were familiar; at times it felt like a sketch from NewsWipe given an hour’s naturalistic development, picking up on the same themes of hysterical narrative escalation and the slippery slope of populist, user-generated news reporting which concern him as a critic as well as a satirist. Elsewhere, the seriousness of the treatment and the focus on the mechanics of government were reminiscent of an episode of 24, albeit somewhat more believable. This was perhaps the episode that stuck closest to my prior expectations – but needless to say, it brought home the bacon.

Pork

 ’15 Million Merits’ was co-written by Kanaq Huq, better-known to viewers of a certain age as Blue Peter’s Konnie, although it’s hard to imagine what Katie Hill and the studio tortoise would have made of the repeated advertisements for violent internet pornography which populated this dystopian parable on reality television and the media as a tool of public control. As soon as the word ‘dystopian’ comes up, references to George Orwell’s 1984 are sure to follow doubleplusquickly, but in this case I think the specific comparison is justified: protagonist Bing and his fellow exercise bike-riding drones live in an oppressive, work-driven system, the set-up of which is never questioned or explained, and all potential avenues of escape seem to end up in co-option to that system. Although this was the slowest (and the longest) episode, there were some great supporting performances from Bing’s expertly-sketched co-workers, and the ambiguous ending was, at least the way I read it, deliciously dark.

 The involvement of one of my favourite writers – Peep Show‘s Jesse Armstrong – in final episode ‘The Entire History of You’ set the bar pretty high. Working without his usual collaborator, Sam Bain, seems to have led Armstrong towards more straight, serious dialogue and narrative than his usual fare, but perhaps this was due more to the demands of the commission. Despite focusing on the implications of a world where almost every human being has a ‘grain’ enabling full visual recall implanted behind their ears, this story seemed to me to be by far the closest to reality. ‘Almost’ is the key word – the incredulous responses of a group of well-off twenty-somethings to a friend who goes ‘grainless’ perfectly captured the way each new piece of modern technology settles into our lives to the point of seeming integral; to the extent, indeed, that life is inconceivable without it. And despite being set in the near-future, it chimed exactly with the preoccupations of 2011 – in the year of the deaths of Gaddafi and bin Laden, more than ever people seem to be demanding conclusive visual proof, even in situations where we secretly know it would better not to see, not to be able to see.

He might be a jealous, sexually obsessive psychopath, but at least his contacts fit

Armstrong’s story dealt with the minute operation of the grain gadget on a romantic relationship – other critics have suggested this might have been too narrow a scope, too safe a topic, with which to look as such potentially explosive technology. But ‘The Entire History of You’ was about how such devices impact on our every-day lives – on the decisions that exposure to these means and resources would force the average person, in a familiar situation, to make. As a piece of speculative psychology, it made a simple point well. Let’s hope a second series can do the same, and that Channel 4′s commitment to the format will allow it to explore the issues it raises with greater scope and complexity.

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Dec 19 2011
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Film

Give Paris One More Chance

I can’t claim, like Juliet Lapidos of Slate, to have seen every Woody Allen movie; but I’ve watched enough of the 70s big hitters over the last two years to know that there was something familiar about the opening sequence of Midnight in Paris. The first few minutes, in which the particular allure of the French capital is lovingly established through a series of shots of its own past critical successes – Tour Eiffel, Pantheon, Moulin Rouge – over evocative jazz music, strongly recall the way Manhattan places us in its eponymous urban space. It’s entirely appropriate for a film about revisiting the past; about what we can learn from the turning points in our own histories, and from history itself.

Owen Wilson - absolute flaneur

And it works by letting us, along with protagonist Owen Wilson (a slightly more likeable update of the archetypal snarky-writer Allen protagonist) travel to that past, through a time-bending trick that owes more to romantic fantasy than sci-fi. Picked up in the witching hour by a 1920s Peugeot, Gill’s personal Cinderella story offers him the chance to shoot the shit with the best American literary expats that the Jazz Age can muster, along with a handful of Europe’s finest artists; the leading lights of French culture are themselves, oddly perhaps, noticeable by their absence. A number of these cameos allow for scene-stealing performances – Corey Stoll’s Hemingway is all deadpan, po-faced machismo, and Adrien Brody shines as a rhinoceros-obsessed Salvador Dali. Much of the humour comes from these moments of collision between past and present, ideal and reality, and in Gill’s present, from dramatic irony, as his suddenly privileged position affords him knowledge which his frustrated fiancée is utterly incapable of understanding.

Surely a meme in waiting

What’s really interesting is how Gill relates to this gallery of personal idols, as the plot finds him negotiating at least two women – in perfect continuity with the classic Allen anti-hero, behaving like a selfish prick appears to be de rigueur – and the relationship between his fantasy of the era and what these people are actually like to be around. The film manages to a certain extent to have its cake and eat it, functioning both as beautifully-lit wish-fulfilment and a satire on the possibility of that very fulfilment. If Gill’s character is grappling with the anxiety of influence, the past masters he comes to know are no different; everyone is looking back, nostalgically, to a Golden Age of art and living; Fitzgerald and Picasso are no less concerned than he is with comparing themselves, obsessively, negatively to the models of the past (but still managing to juggle stealing glances at Hemingway at the urinals and never being called an asshole, respectively).

Jeffrey Lewis, in ‘Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror’, summarises a similar sense of historical inadequacy, as the singer-narrator finally corners what he takes to be his own artistic hero in a desperate rant:

Steamboat Willie Bonnie Prince of all this shit, you’re like the king of a certain genre
But even you must want to quit like if you hear a record by Bob Dylan or Neil Young or whatever
You must start thinkin’ “People like me, but I won’t be that good ever”
And I’m sure the thing is probably Dylan himself too stayed up some nights
Wishing he was as good as Ginsberg or Camus
And he was like “Dude, I’m such a faker, I’m just a clown who entertains
and these fools who pay for my crap, they just have pathetic puny brains
and Camus probably wished he was Milton too or whatever, you know what I’m sayin’?!”
So Will, will you be straight with me now that it’s just us two on this train?
Just as Gill and his opposite number, fusty academic Paul (Michael Sheen) each have their own personal versions of famous writers and artists, so every character has their own Paris, their own vision of when it was best. Allen doesn’t exactly declare any period, any form of the city superior to any other – the overriding message is that the present, while always seeming imperfect, is the time to celebrate as it’s the time in which we have to live. Nonetheless, the contemporary era – the present present – is invested, by the end of the film, with a special significance which extends to and draws from the city itself; the modern city is an accretion, an accumulation, of its own past, of every era, from the Versailles monarchy, to the Belle Epoque, to the Jazz Age, to 2011, each of them present in and haunting the present, like reels of film overlaid. Gill, the film suggests, can only act meaningfully in his own slice of history, knowing as he does already everything that has combined to lead up to it; his actions are only worthwhile when there is still a future to be discovered, as people discover their future, through accidents, choices, mistakes.

'Why would I read a biography of Rodin?'

The importance of the past is realised, celebrated, and reworked, but what matters is here and now.  Nathan Jurgenson writes here about the cult of the faux-vintage photograph, how it’s used to turn the present into a nostalgically-documented past; I’ve steam-rolled his actual argument, and it’s well worth reading in full, because it might be worth thinking about how this relates to the nostalgia-fetish of the characters in this movie, and perhaps what this movie itself represents, operating as it does on the level of both period drama fantasy and contemporary carpe diem. Luckily, we don’t need to rely on nostalgic memories of Woody Allen as a film-maker, when he’s still capable of crafting something as touching, as enjoyable and as resonant as Midnight in Paris.
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Dec 17 2011
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TV

What Rev is doing right

It’s very rare for Rev to make me laugh out loud – which might seem an unusual admission for what I’ve already described as one of my favourite  comedies currently on British TV. This in itself suggests it’s worth looking more closely at how it works, and why it works so well, despite its fairly low rate of chuckles per minute; it might also suggest that when we like a TV comedy that isn’t always funny, we might want to think more about what comedy is.

Specifically, it's about these people

To begin with the banal; Rev is about people. It devotes a large proportion of time in each episode of its second series, which finished last night, to giving us a good sense of who its characters are, what they think of those around them, what they want, and what they think they want. Knowing what someone is supposed to be like makes it more interesting, and curiously, more plausible, when they do unexpected things: when Colin experiments with alternative forms of spirituality, for instance, or when Mick (admittedly not a developed character, but a well-established comic turn) kicks drugs and shares his secrets, or when Archdeacon Robert openly discusses his sexuality along with his spirituality, both of which have up to this point been kept firmly in the background. All of these moments have emotional weight because, rather than rushing for the comic jugular, writers Tom Hollander and James Wood have taken the time to craft, through subtle detail, a sense of psychological expectation which is solid enough for viewers to accommodate new information, the kind that doesn’t vanish by the time of the next thirty-minute episode. We finish Series Two feeling we know more about these people than we did at the start of it; that the problems and questions it raises will continue to matter at the start of Series Three.

Specifically, this God

But Rev is also about God – in a serious, not a frivolous way. I don’t know, and nor do I particularly want to, if Wood and Hollander are paid-up believers; but as the credits make clear, a lot of ecumenical advice has gone into the show’s creation. It tells, because rather than reducing religion to a series of paedophile priest quips (cf episode 5 of Life’s Too Short), or the brilliant, but perhaps slightly kitsch surrealism of Father Ted, the show gives voice to the debates and doubts about mercy, morality and the treatment of others which have always driven genuine religious reflection. It’s true that the show generally supports Adam’s ministry, though it also shows him as a selfish bastard with very human failings – but by engaging with religion’s role in the world in a serious way, it elevates the inquiries of the Church to a position where they can be endorsed or dismissed from genuine understanding and criticism rather than ignorance.

This is something the best atheist comedians – Stewart Lee being the most obvious example – have also always understood, to the extent that Lee’s Catholic wife Bridget Christie challenges him for it in her own show. She expresses incomprehension at his need to have a deeper knowledge of the Bible than she does, likening it to someone with a hatred of Jeremy Clarkson watching every single episode of Top Gear. But some of Rev’s funniest, and most dramatic, moments come out of this engagement; I’m thinking of the football match in which Adam screams out a pep-talk about the difference between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of God, quoting which might make my point more clearly: ‘But most of all let’s do it for our kind, liberal God, who loves women and gays, and not their vain, tasteless, demanding God who loves gold and supported the Nazis!’

Anglicans: totally fine with men holding balls

Although Rev has been well-received by critics, it doesn’t neatly fit the comedy genre, and I think this is because we’ve come to expect every moment of a comedy show to be in itself comic. It might be more helpful to consider the genre more as an indicator of tone than a contract to deliver a certain type of content; some of the best drama, after all, is full of moments of uproarious laughter (This Is England ’88, of which more next time), but wouldn’t get packaged as dramatic comedy in the same way something like Rev might end up filed under comedy-drama. The obvious point here is that genres aren’t an adequate, or a particularly useful, way to subdivide works of art; but given the criteria that develop around an art-form which we expect primarily to make us laugh, it’s worth remembering that what makes a comedy good or great might not always just be what makes it comic.

 

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