the walrus

the importance of naps

Robertson Davies:

I've always insisted on having a nap after lunch, and I inherited this from my father. And one time I said to him, "You know, you've done awfully well in the world. What do you attribute it to?" And he said, "Well, what drove me on to be my own boss was that the thing that I wanted most was to be able to have a nap every day after lunch." And I thought, What an extraordinary impulse to drive a man on! But it did, and he always had a twenty-minute sleep after lunch. And I'm the same. I think it is very important. If you will not permit yourself to be driven and flogged through life, you'll probably enjoy it more.

Quoted in Creativity, Csikszentmihalyi.

unsayables

A fascinating list of the most untranslatable foreign words. In first place:

ilunga [Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire]

The same post includes a list of the most untranslatable English words. It includes two words that mean a load of old nonsense.

love as an art

Mark Vernon gives a lucid exposition of Erich Fromm's distinction between falling in love and standing in love:

When you stand in love, though, you want your partner to be faithful to you not because you cannot be alone but because it represents to you the faithfulness that must exist between all human beings who are to relate well to each other. In other words, it is not an exclusive possessiveness but an expression of an inclusive love for all humankind, potentially at least. Thus, the nicest people to know who are in love with each other are those who make you feel part of their love, whose love generates a welcoming home, brings out the best in you and so on. They have learnt the art of love with each other and it results in generating love that they have for others.

Another feature of this love as an art is that it makes it essentially an act of will, of decision to commit my life to that of one other person. Hence the faithfulness again. This feels completely the opposite of love when it is understood as spontaneous, emotional and sudden. Also, it suggests that to love someone is not just to have a strong feeling. You may often have no strong feelings at all some of the time when you stand in love. Rather, love is better understood as a judgment or a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for your promise to love someone. For a feeling comes and goes. You cannot promise that.

a definition of marriage

from steve earle (via glen campbell):

"every five years you find a woman that hates you, and buy her a house"

when adults were adults and children were children

The BBC has just released the recording of an interview conducted with Evelyn Waugh in 1953:

On his family, Waugh says: "Thank God they don't live with me, except on holidays. They're most of them at school ... I don't see a great deal of them except in the holidays." Asked "do you play much with your children when they're young?" Waugh replies: "Not when they're infantile. When they get to the age of clear speech and clearness of reason I associate with them, I wouldn't say play with them. I don't bounce balls with them or stand on my head or carry them about on my shoulders or anything."

the au pair problem

linda grant on going to see Tom Stoppard speak at a recent literary festival:

He brilliantly described the process of writing as going to bed at night thinking that your day's work was 'really okay' then waking the next morning, re-reading it, and discovering that 'the Polish au pair has re-written it in the night.

don't try this at home

secrets

nothing ennobles a human being so much as keeping a secret. It gives a man's whole life meaning, though one that it has only for him. It saves him from every vain regard for his environment; sufficient unto himself, he rests blessed in his secret - we can almost say that, even if his secret were the most sinister.

i found this quote, which is from Kierkegaard, on my friend's blog. It ought to be the epigraph to a novel. Perhaps her's.

watching badlands

i have joined a dvd club in order to start filling the many gaps in my cinematic database. Badlands arrived last week. It is a strange and mysterious and oddly beautiful film, about a young couple from Nebraska who go on a killing spree. Like Bonnie and Clyde, but nothing like it.

it was directed by terence malick, who, in a heroic act of self-editing, has made only three films in thirty-five years. At least two of them, including this one, are considered stone-cold classics. (imagine if everyone was forced to abide by the same talent-to-production ratio).   Malick has never done an interview, and makes no public appearances. There are no photographs of him.

The fascinating and surprisingly moving featurette that accompanies the film on DVD has interviews with the stars (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek), plus the editor and the cinematographer, but not Malick (it is titled 'The Absence Of Malick'). The film, Malick's first, was made for next-to-nothing, with all the participants working for a fraction of their usual rate. They did this because they loved the script, and because they believed in Malick.

The whole team knew they were on to something special. Sheen talks about how, the day after he'd been awarded the role, he was driving down a Californian highway listening to Dylan's Desolation Row when he started weeping for joy and had to pull over. He was absolutely certain this film was going to be a classic.

what makes the film special? It's not that easy to enjoy - though it is beautiful to look at. The imagery is consistently ravishing. What's most striking about the film is its mystery. It refuses to offer obvious psychological or sociological explanations for the actions of its characters, which makes it almost unique for Hollywood movies on similar subjects. We don't learn about Sheen's childhood. He is not obviously oppressed by society. He's just a guy. Quite a nice guy. Who starts shooting people. The copy on the poster captures the film's tone well. Malick - a wide reader in philosophy, including Wittgenstein and Heidegger - just isn't interested in explanations for extreme behaviour, or for anything, as this reviewer notes:

Malick's films are not interested in “how the world is,” or what happens to be true, but in “that it is,” the uncanny (and tragic and wondrous and humbling) fact of its very existence (which is to  say, they are not trying to say something at all).

which can be baffling. Until you start seeing things his way, and you start to admire the humility of his vision.

Malick appears in the film himself. Sheen and Spacek have taken over the mansion of a rich man, at gunpoint, and are using as a rest stop on their journey. A friend of the owner turns up on the doorstep. Sheen opens the door, and explains that the owner has flu. The man (Malick) is slightly bemused, accepts his explanation, toddles off. Now, we know from the featurette that Malick hadn't planned his own appearance. He thought he was standing in and that they'd reshoot later with an actor. But Sheen - much to Malick's displeasure - refused to shoot the scene with anyone but Malick. So, it was an accident, but it's a nice metaphor for Malick's approach. He doesn't attempt to get inside these people's heads. He's a curious, somewhat bemused, spectator.

One final thing. The movie's editor, in the featurette, says something wonderful about the film, something I hadn't noticed. He points out how Malick will often cut away from the central action in a scene to an object or person that is seemingly irrelevant. It is Malick's way, he said, of reminding us that even when extraordinary, terrible things are happening, life goes on elsewhere. In the final scene of the movie, a handcuffed Sheen is taken into an airplane in order to be flown to prison (and ultimately to his execution). As we we're watching the plane take off, with its already notorious mass-murderer inside, there is a brief shot of a postman with a bag of mail, walking dully along, oblivious to what's happening a few feet away.

three tablespoons of brown sugar

in a rather delicious coincidence of English cultural archetypes, it turns out this cake was baked by none other than delia smith

what ben told tom

"we hold these truths to be self-evident..." is the ringing phrase that opens the most famous sentence in the American Declaration of Independence. I have long loved the story behind it; it's the supreme example of good editing, and just a lesson in good writing. This is from Walter Isaacson's biography of Franklin:

on June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin...

Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

genius. By sweeping away those big, windy adjectives ('sacred and undeniable') and replacing them with the unadorned simplicity of 'self-evident', Franklin makes the phrase, and the sentence, a hundred times more powerful. But there's a deeper point, too, that I hadn't heard before. Isaacson tells us about the philosophical outlook underlying Franklin's modification:

the concept of "self-evident" truths came...from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ("The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.

via as

mamet on america

the good news is it’s a spectacular country. We’ve been around for 230 years in spite of human nature, because that’s what the Constitution is all about. It’s saying, of course everyone’s gonna try and take control. Of course they’re gonna subvert every law that’s supposed to keep them in line. Of course the president is gonna want to be imperial, of course Congress is gonna want to become obstructionist, of course the judges are gonna be activist. Duh. They figured this out in 1787 and drew up a few sheets of paper that have kept the country in line. It’s a great place to live.

a thanks-be-to-YouTube moment

whoever was lucky enough to catch this performance by a youngish Bruce Springsteen on the streets of Copenhagen (and how many people carried cine-cameras around in those days?)  has probably long cherished the film they made, and gathered around the TV with friends and family and steaming mugs of glogg to watch it on countless hushed occasions (that's if they're actually Danish. Or if they're not but they just have a thing for glogg). But now we can all see it:

and whilst we're doing spellbinding...

(i like her nervousness, knock knees and all...but watch out for the dark and Sykes-like ogre who sweeps her away at the end)

the advantages of being black

anne applebaum argues that Obama's blackness, far from being an insurmountable hurdle to being elected President, is actually an advantage. She makes the interesting point that Obama's colour is in intrinsic visual signifier of change in a year when everyone is looking for change. Hillary can make all the arguments she wants about experience being necessary to produce real change - but hey, there's a black guy on stage.

UPDATE: so it seems there are also advantages to being a woman. Like you can cry on TV and people say 'Aw, I think I'm gonna vote for that nice lady' instead of 'What a wuss'.

OK, Barack just called for some advice. Here's what I told him:

Barack, losing New Hampshire could be the making of you. I think you always suspected, somewhere in the back of your mind, that there was something ethereal about all this adulation, and that the heaviness of this year's politics had not melted away forever. Well, better that the bubble bursts now than on February 5th.

so now you're just a man again, which is just how you like it. Let the American people take a really good look at you, and compare you to your opponent, and make up their minds without an overheated media trying to push them in one direction or the other. Your message of change is still the right one. But now the man behind that message needs to be fleshed out. You should focus your efforts in the coming weeks on telling people about what you've done to create positive change in people's lives. Show them the man on Chicago's South Side who regained his self-respect thanks to the work you did as a community activist. Show them the mom who kept her kids as a result of your work as a civil rights lawyer. Show the people whose lives were transformed by the legislation you passed in the state and federal senates. The voters fall in love with your message when they hear it. Now they want to be convinced you're the man that can deliver on it.

absolut transgression

i stumbled across this familiar ad the other day, and it got me thinking about how the meaning of an image can change over time.

the original photograph, of course, was created by John and Yoko for the sleeve of the first album they recorded together. The album's full title was Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins. The idea was that John and Yoko would chronicle their lives together on a series of recordings, this being the first. Thankfully it  also turned out to be the last.

The 'music' - a collage of random sound effects and bodily noises - was always of less interest than the image. The photographs (the image above is one of a pair, the other being a full-frontal) were taken in Ringo's basement in Montague Square by John himself, using delayed a shutter-release. He was too embarrassed, somewhat ironically, to have anyone else take them.

the other Beatles took their time about approving the release of the album on their label, with Paul in particular being opposed to the proposed sleeve, although he ended up contributing a bizarre quote used on the album's cover: 'When two great saints meet it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a saint." The sardonic (Lennonesque?) tone is a surprise, coming from Paul (it might have been better without the second sentence, which sounds incomplete and makes the whole  quote look like something he scribbled down when stoned or drunk, which is not out of the question). That John used it might be interpreted as evidence of a residual if fast-fading ability to laugh at himself, or perhaps as an obscure 'fuck you' to McCartney. The album was eventually released, at the record company's insistence, in a brown paper bag.

the image, shocking at the time, has been rendered so innocuous by the passing of time that it is now judged fit for a mainstream booze brand to shift vodka with. Arguably, then, it achieved what it set out to do: it helped to liberate us from archaic taboos (though we might wonder, as we survey our pornified popular culture, whether or not we've merely swapped prudery for prurience).

but if the image is no longer transgressive in the way it was in 1968, it hasn't lost its power to shock. It just shocks in a different way - in a way that reflects a new taboo. Look at that pallid flesh, untanned and untoned. The pudgy folds, the nobbly legs. Normal bodies, in other words, willingly exposed to the world. It wouldn't be allowed today.

tidings of discomfort and joylessness

there are many things to savour in this exquisitely uncomfortable 1971 interview with Richard Nixon, who evidently felt the same way about Christmas I do. Among them:

- the grim determination with which he sets about describing Christmas as a 'rich and happy day', even though he can clearly feel the blood freezing in his veins as he does so.

- the way he leaps at the subject of 'trains', hoping it will whistle him away from the horror of the conversation at hand. His speech speeds up, he begins to babble, and you sense him clinging on to the topic for dear life (the editor cuts it short, so we'll never know how far this diversion took him).

- the relief with which he falls on his dogs, getting down to their level and obviously hoping he can stay there and never have to return to this conversation or any other human interaction ever again.

- the final moments, particularly the gloom with which Nixon intones his hope that 'it's a happy time out there for everybody', and the anguished sigh that meets his interviewer's wishes of good fortune. Dead air fills the studio. Even Mrs Nixon steps away from him, as if his misery might be toxic.

understanding all that

there can be few better ways to spend your time than reading James Wood on Leo Tolstoy.

War and Peace is some crazy shit. As Mr Wood reminds us, in this beautiful review of a new translation, it breaks every rule of good writing. Tolstoy started off trying to write a perfectly constructed domestic drama in the mode of Thackeray but ended up way, way off-piste. Whereas a 'good novelist' would create an opening scene that sets up the major characters and themes of the story in suitably dramatic fashion, War and Peace comes in through a side-door, at a fairly insignificant party, before proceeding to range and ramble across an insanely wide range of events and characters, interrupted by a ranting authorial voice lecturing us on his theory of history, and ending with what seems to be a trivial epilogue. Sentences are piled up in untidy heaps, adjectives are repeated three times in the space of a paragraph, and tautologies are thrown out with abandon (an old man is described as wearing  'old man's spectacles' and singing in an 'old man's voice'...another character has  a 'characteristic' head). But despite - or as Wood shows us, because of - all this, War and Peace is, hands down, the best novel ever written.

it has a lot to do with sentences like this one, describing young Natasha Rostov's smile at the man she will eventually become engaged to, Prince Andrei, as she is swept back on to the dance-floor by another man:

that smile said: "I'd be glad to rest and sit with you; I'm tired; but you see, I've been asked to dance, and I'm glad of it, and I'm happy, and I love everybody, and you and I understand all that," and much, much more.

less stuff, please

i'm going to see pj harvey perform songs from her new long player White Chalk this evening, at the Royal Festival Hall.

yesterday i read an interview with her in the guardian that forced her into the usual tedious dance around the relationship between her life and her art (why are interviewers so uniformly
unimaginative?). But it livened up at the end:

...she said her sense was that the quality of music, literature and film seems to be going "down and down and down, and I struggle so hard to get excited about anything".

characteristically, she wouldn't be drawn on exactly who or what she was railing against, but lurking in what she said, there was a kind of mission statement. "There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff."

that is almost exactly how I feel about the world's cultural production, including and especially everything that is critically acclaimed. It's usually 'just all right' when you get down to it. The only bit I don't agree with - at least, I'm uncertain of - is that standards are going down and down and down. I suspect it's more that, as you get older, you become more difficult to please, and you start to notice how so much of the stuff you would once get really excited about is in fact hardly worth bothering with, not when you could be exploring those artists who have already proved their greatness. When you're more aware that life is short, it becomes harder to justify buying the new Richard Hawley album when you could be getting to know the Van Morrison or Tom Waits albums you haven't heard yet (not that I've anything against Richard Hawley, who is an excellent songwriter, it's just...time is short). Critics exist, in part to create excessive excitement around things. But - as Mr Amis said on Newsnight the other night - the only critic with any real authority is time.

duda is the dude

gustavo dudamel is the hottest young conductor in the world. He's just been made Principal of the LA Philharmonic at the age of twelve, or whatever. This short video of him conducting the National Youth Orchestra of his home country (Venezuela), in an encore at this year's Proms, is just impossible to watch without grinning.

the blair years

reading Alastair Campbell's diaries. Here are some things I've noticed so far:

- there is brief entry on May 12: "TB and I discussed the need for a proper plan and strategy re the Bank Of England. He was sure independence was the answer." Its inclusion seems to designed to let people know that GB's post-election masterstroke wasn't all GB's work.

- it's written almost entirely in the past tense (eg the above..."he was" instead of "he is..."), which means you lose a little of the urgency you can get from diaries like this. But if that's the way he wrote it that's the way he wrote it.

- there's an extraordinary account of a fist fight between a very upset Peter Mandelson and Campbell, with Blair having to move in and break them up, on page 45.

- TB comes across as a much more intense, fretting, anxious and occasionally angry figure than he does in public.

- there is a timely reminder of how TB and co.'s focus in opposition was different from David Cameron's: "TB was pushing for the policy debate to be quickened...it was not enough to say the Tories were useless and TB was an attractive new leader."

carl nielsen

"if music were to assume human form and explain its essence, it may say something like this: '...I love the vast surface of silence, and it is my chief delight to break it.'"

(via Alex Ross)

the love that dare not wear its nametag

this made me laugh more than anything I've read in a long time

i have been called a voluptuary, a sybarite, a hedonist, a creep. I am all of these things. I cannot live without pleasure. It is my oxygen—though I must also have regular oxygen.

our existence is but an eyeblink. Why, then, should a man not chase down his passions, wrestle them to the dirt, and ride them like ostriches? He should, and I have.

speedboats have been a lifelong diversion. Scotch, a serious problem. Yet no vice bedevils me like my one desperate fixation, my shameful ravening itch: I simply must attend conferences.

how to build a website using everyday household appliances

i went to see a film called Me and You and Everyone We Know  a couple of years ago. it is an odd little movie about some odd people in a town somewhere in America. I liked it so much I tried to email the writer/director (who also starred in the movie) to tell her so, although the email bounced back stubbornly.

anyway, her name is miranda july, and she also makes art and performs on stage and writes books. This is the website she's created for her new book. It is genius.

john crace

john crace writes 'the digested read' for the guardian. He takes a book and reduces it down to a few paragraphs. In doing so he satirises the book, its readers, maybe even the idea of reading itself. The implication is, the book pretends to be all that, but really it's just this. People buy compilations of John Crace's digested reads. The Guardian are so proud of him they have turned him on their own writers: in the saturday magazine you can read Crace's digested versions of the features within the magazine. It seems like an oddly insulting way to treat your own content. I don't like anything about John Crace and his digested reads. In fact, here's my digested John Crace: c**t.

when wes met kael

this is from a brief and lovely memoir of a meeting with Pauline Kael, by the director Wes Anderson (yes, he can write well too, how galling):

her house is stone and shingle and very large, and I saw a deer duck into the trees at the corner of the yard as I came up the driveway. I knocked on the screen door and she looked out. She was sitting in a wooden chair. ''My God, you're just a kid,'' she said.

she told me to open the door. I tried it. I told her it was locked. She told me the lock had been stiff for 20 years, and that I should just fiddle with it. She said she knew it was 20 years because she'd just finished paying off her mortgage.

i fiddled with the lock for a minute and got the door open. We shook hands and I said: ''It's very nice to meet you. How are you?''

''Old,'' she said.

richard yates

i'm reading a collection of short stories by richard yates, called eleven kinds of loneliness.

I'm already a fan of Mr Yates: Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade are two of my favourite ever novels. RR, his first novel, from 1958, was an instant success from which he spent the rest of his life trying to recover. He used alcohol to help, which eventually killed him and no doubt staunched his output in quantity and quality in the meantime.  But even so he left a considerable body of work and after many years of relative obscurity his stock seems to be rising again. He's beginning to be recognised as belonging to that great post-war generation of American writers  - the Kings of the 20th Century -  Updike, Bellow, Roth - although the breadth and depth of his oeuvre falls short of theirs.

so there are greater writers, but there are hardly any who give me as much undiluted pleasure. I hadn't read any of his stuff for a while, and when I started the first story in this collection last night I shivered to read those bracing, ruthlessly lucid sentences again. Take this description of the new boy in class:

he arrived early and sat in the back row - his spine very straight, his ankles crossed precisely under the desk and his hands folded on the center of its top, as if symmetry might make him less conspicuous...

his style has the unsentimental clarity and directness of Hemingway or Carver, but he shares a kind of emotional intensity with Fitzgerald. He isn't a romantic like Scotty though, and he is pitiless in his dissection of self-delusion, which he seems to see as the human condition. But as the extract above shows, he is capable of great tenderness too.

Yates is a great writer of dialogue, and in the opening story he captures the voices of thirteen year old American kids from the 1950s, making you realize how some of the verbal tics of American and now British kids today have a long history...the use of 'like', and tendency to turn statements into questions. Here is a boy describing the film he's just seen - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde:

(it's) about a man who mixes up this chemical, like, that he drinks?...You see him drink this chemical, and then you see his hands start to get all scales all over them, like a reptile and everything, and then you see his face start to change into this real horrible-looking face - with fangs and all? Sticking out of his mouth?

can everyone in the world playing tennis stop now?

love roddick's reaction too...gobsmacked, bemused, admiring - and excited.

i heart mart

oh mart, you may have tested our faith in recent years: some very dodgy novels, a painfully bad book about Stalin, that oddly ineffectual performance on Question Time...but as long as you knock off interviews as brilliant as this one then I for one am still yours...

it's from The Independent's 'You Ask The Questions' feature and the questions are predictably snide. But they are batted out of the park. For examples:

Are you an Islamophobe? ALISDAIR GRAY, Edinburgh

No. What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist because a phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing someone who professedly wants to kill you.

The phrase "horrorism", which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more? JONATHAN BROOKS, by email

Yes, I have. Here's a good one (though I can hardly claim it as my own): the phrase is "fuck off".

Why are you such a snob? BEATRICE FRANKS, by email

A snob is "a person who has an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth and who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior". I have described the institution of the monarchy as "a wank" - a phrase, free, I think, of exaggerated respect. As for the so-called socially inferior, I have devoted many hundreds of pages to them, in fiction, and only the lousiest novelist can write with a sneer.

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn't been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

a tad over-defensive in that last answer, perhaps, but amusing nonetheless. It's not all strike and counter-strike, there are some beautifully articulated views on terrorism and so on. But I've read him on that subject quite a bit recently. What I'd (nearly) forgotten is how funny he can be:

Is it true that the Lorne Guyland character in Money was based on Kirk Douglas and, if so, did old Kirk really stand naked in front of you and ask 'Is this the body of a 65-year-old man?' JOHN NIVEN, by email

Lorne Guyland was, let us say, inspired by Kirk. He didn't go nude for me but, on the set, he was always ripping his clothes off. Movie stars are funny that way, or they used to be. During the same shoot I had dinner with Harvey Keitel in his room at Claridge's, and he was stripped to the waist throughout. It was a hot night, I admit. Kirk was very bright, and very sweet in his way. As he said to the director (who was soon to be fired), "The thing is, John, I'm unbelievably insecure." He was, again, naked at the time.

jb rip

two brilliant pieces of writing on jb. One, by Greg Tate in the Voice, damn near replicates jb's rhythm in its prose:

Bold, Black, and Beautiful things just happened faster in the world according to Brown. Tempos, terpsichore, tantrums, tangents, even jail time. They didn't call him Mr. Dynamite for nothing. Word is that when the Hardest Working Man in Showbiz did his three-year bid, he stayed industrious, organized a choir, ran the kitchen and laundry detail. Sit-down time for Black Caesar? Fuhgeddaboudit. And unlike so many of our fallen fighters whom dust and base cocaine dropped to the mat in the '80s and '90s, JB came back up as superbaaad as ever. Lest we forget, he transitioned to another world tour by straight stealing Jesus' thunder on Xmas Day. He wasn't ever a puny human to begin with anyway, so don't act surprised.

the other is from Simon Reynolds: it's an old review of his he's dug out for his blog. It reminds me of how I used to get drunk on the 1980s Melody Maker:

from 1966's 'Bring  It Up' onwards, Brown's music gets progressively more African and 'avant-garde': songs devolve into closed grooves, minimal, mantric, mind-exterminating and interminable. 'Cold Sweat' remains the definitive JB title, capturing the frigid feverishness of the sound. Tracks like 'I Can't Stand Myself' and 'Ain't It Funky Now' are coition-combustion engines, 'desiring machines', offering a stern, oppressive, exhausting brand of bliss.

UPDATE: have just come across this piece by Jonathan Lethem (via stevestate) and it is v
 funny. Excuse the length but I think you'll find it worth your time:

the James Brown Band takes the form, onstage, of an animated frieze or hieroglyphic, timeless in a very slightly seedy, showbiz way but happily so, rows of men in red tuxedos, jitterbugging in lock step even as they miraculously conjure from instruments a perfect hurricane of music: a rumbling, undulating-insinuating (underneath), shimmery-peppery (up on top) braided waveform of groove. Yes, it's made unmistakable, in case you forgot, that this is merely a prelude, a throat-clearing, though the band has already rollicked through three or four recognizable numbers in succession; we're waiting for something. The name of the something is James Brown. You indeed fear, despite all sense, that something is somehow wrong: Perhaps he's sick or reluctant, or perhaps there's been a mistake. There is no James Brown, it was merely a rumor. Thankfully, someone has told you what to do -- you chant, gladly: "James Brown! James Brown!" A natty little man with a pompadour comes onstage and with a booming, familiar voice asks you if you Are Ready for Star Time, and you find yourself confessing that you Are....

....Now he explains to the band that it's not going to bother with the track it recorded before he arrived. "Sounds good," James Brown says, "but it sounds canned. We got to get some James Brown in there." Here it is, the crux of the matter: He wasn't in the room; ipso facto, it isn't James Brown music. The problem is fundamentally one of ontology: In order for James Brown to occur, you need to be James Brown....

...Now that the gears are oiled, a constant stream of remarks and asides flows from James Brown's mouth. Many of these consist of basic statements of policy in regard to the matter of being James Brown, particularly in relationship to his band: "Be mean, but be the best." These statements mingle exhortations to excellence with justifications for his own treatment of the men he calls, alternately, "the cats" and "my family." Though discipline is his law, strife is not only likely but essential: "Any time a cat becomes a nuisance, that's the cat I'm gonna want." The matter of the rejected track is still on his mind: "Don't mean to degrade nobody. People do something they think is good. But you're gonna hear the difference. Get that hard sound." Frequently he dwells on the nature of the sound of which he is forever in pursuit: "Hard. Flat. Flat." One feels James Brown is forever chasing something, a pure hard-flat-jazz-funk he heard once in his dreams, and toward which all subsequent efforts have been pointed. This in turn leads to a reminiscence about Grover Washington Jr., who, apparently, recently presented James Brown with a track James Brown didn't wish to sing on. "He should go play smooth jazz. We got something else going. James Brown jazz. Nothing smooth about it. If it gets smooth, we gonna make it not smooth." Still musing on Grover Washington Jr.'s failings, he blurts, "Just jive." Then corrects himself, looking at me: "Just things. Instead of people. Understand?"

christmas comes but once a year, thank fuck

...it was at Thanksgiving this year that, making my way through an airport, I was confronted by the leering and antlered visage of what to my disordered senses appeared to be a bloody great moose. Only as reason regained her throne did I realize that the reindeer—that plague species—were back.

...what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy.

beautifully put, as ever. I have been listening to That Summer Feeling on repeat.

nevertheless, mxms.

before the crack-up

when F. Scott Fitzgerald was a student he kept a notebook of ideas, sketches, snippets of conversation, all of them carefully catalogued. They included 31 ideas for stories that he was never to write. I know this because McSweeney's have published the whole lot of them. McS is running a competition for people to realize their own stories from Fitzgerald's fragments. They've already commissioned their writers to do so for half of them (hence the names in italics next to some of the fragments). I'm not really interested in all that - i just love the fragments themselves. Some of my favourites:

the man who killed the idea of tanks in England - his afterlife

helpmate. Man running for Congress gets hurt in line of other duty and while he's unconscious his wife, on bad advice, plans to run in his stead. She makes a fool of herself. He saves her face.

girl whose ear is so sensitive she can hear radio. Man gets her out of insane asylum to use her.

Andrew Fulton, a facile character who can do anything, is married to a girl who can't express herself. She has a growing jealousy of his talents. The night of her musical show for the Junior League comes and is a great failure. He takes hold and saves the piece and can't understand why she hates him for it. She has interested a dealer secretly in her pictures (or designs or sculptures) and plans to make an independent living. But the dealer has only been sold on one specimen. When he sees the rest he shakes his head. Andrew in a few minutes turns out something in putty and the dealer perks up and says, "That's what we want." She is furious.

And my absolute favourite:

Girl and giraffe.
 

into the valley...

i love the uncanny valley. it's a theory of the future, created by scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. The thinking behind it is that as robots get more and more advanced and human-like, we will respond more and more positively to them. We will marvel at their motor skills, coo at their smiles, and be grateful for their ability to make us a ham and cheese sandwich any time we tell them to. But then there will come a point at which we suddenly realize that they are too damn like us for comfort, and we will become suffused with fear and loathing. Thus do we enter the uncanny valley. Eventually, (and this is the bit i'm not entirely convinced by) we will get used to these facsimiles, perhaps forget the difference between 'bot and human altogether, and climb out of the valley.

this is something that games developers worry about too apparently: the point at which their simulations of reality become so real that they freak us out and we reject them.

the term 'uncanny' is particularly apt. Freud wrote an essay on the uncanny, which translates in German as 'unheimlich' or 'un-homely'. Freud was interested in this etymology, because he believed that the stuff that really freaks us out (in literature, in dreams) is rarely what is dramatically alien to us. It is the absolutely familiar, suddenly made strange. So we feel at home with it, and not at home with it at the same time.

via beeker

heaven is a place where nothing ever happens

i will read anything by james wood. As a literary critic he is unrivalled. In a world of two-bit reviewers and bloodless academics, he stands alone as someone capable of responding to books in a way that is rigorously analytical and deeply felt at the same time. He writes beautifully - he's essentially a good old-fashioned essayist. The extract below is from his long review of a Sam Harris book called "Letter To A Christian Nation"  a full-frontal attack on Christianity in the States. (I've just finished Harris's 'The End Of Faith', another critique of religion, and was quite impressed by it though it goes a bit weird in the second half when he tries to convert you to Buddhism). I won't try and summarise the review-which-is-in-fact-an-essay, but it's a lovely walk around the subject of atheism and worth half an hour of anyone's time.

Wood is himself godless (a lapsed Christian) but he is suspicious of what has become a quite fashionable publishing genre of atheist polemics, made up of books by Harris, Dawkins and others:

the genre tends to proceed thus: the atheist must first remove all possible respect from religious belief. The tone is a little perky, and lively thought-experiments bloom. They go a bit like this: if I told you that President Bush prays every day to his vacuum cleaner, you would judge him insane. But why is there any evidence that the God he prays to exists? It is fun, knockabout...

the model is Bertrand Russell's "celestial teapot," gleefully quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. If, says Russell, I told you that a celestial teapot was orbiting the sun but that you could not see it, nobody would be able to disprove me; "but if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." God is like the teapot, we are supposed to infer.Dawkins uses Russell to argue that we cannot prove God's non-existence, but then we cannot prove anything's non-existence. "What matters," writes Dawkins, "is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things." 

I agree with Dawkins's conclusion, and consider God highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like belief in a teapot. The referent -- the content of the belief -- matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our approximations. There is a reason, after all, that no one has ever worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid of our incomprehension into it.

come a waltzing with me

my dad (my dad!) sent me this link to a wonderful youtube clip of tom waits on the old grey whistle test, in 1977, singing Tom Traubert's blues. He looks so young. But his voice is already that of a deranged centenarian...

i was SO glad to read this...

could i have remembered, as some men do, what i read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power i have never possessed. Something is always left - something dim and inaccurate - but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so for most readers.

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

(via Clive Davis)

the fetishisation of suicide bombing

norm picks up on an interview with martin amis in which he casually disposes of the myth, cherished by right-thinking lefties like ken livingstone, that suicide bombers are big-hearted martyrs:

In the story you describe jihad as the most charismatic idea of Atta's generation. Do you really believe this?
It's self-evidently true. You're always onto a winner if you can persuade people they can be righteous and violent at the same time. Nothing beats that. Officially sanctioned violence is unimprovable. And with this paradise which they've stirred into the mix - whereby with an act of mass murder, you gain the keys - you've got a very attractive idea. Also, it gives the "nobody" a chance to play a decisive role in world history, and there are lots of people who are going to be drooling at the thought of that.

So you think that's what motivates terrorists?
I'm sure. I say in the story [that Atta] was in it for the killing, and I think that's another underestimated consideration: killing people is obviously terrific fun. It's a crude expression of power to kill people, and it's arousing.

he's right of course, horrific though it is to accept that he is.

in reports from places like Islamabad and Kabul, you read of the under-the-counter DVDs and books available that celebrate and revel in acts of violence against the infidel: slayings and suicide bombings. It's all up there on the web, too. It's been aestheticised, this violence, consumerised, pornified.

the most terrifying powerpoint slide you'll ever see

ohhh shit...

maximalism

to the barbican last night to see the climax of a series of concerts celebrating the 70th birthday of steve reich, who is suddenly the grand old man of modern American classical music. The band were the Steve Reich Ensemble, created by Reich in the early 1970s as a means of getting his unconventional music performed.

the first half saw the UK premiere of a piece he wrote in 2003 for Daniel Pearl, the American journalist brutally killed in Pakistan by Islamic terrorists. But it was the second half I'd come to see: a performance of Music For 18 Musicians, probably his best known work and one of the defining works of the Minimalist movement.

all of which makes it sound terribly worthy. But when you're listening and watching it, as I discovered, the last thing you're thinking about is Reich's aesthetic philosophy or anything so high-minded. You're not thinking, wow, this is really minimalist. You're not really thinking at all. You're just feeling.

The piece maintains one, constant, driving rhythm throughout, with repetitive, shifting figures played over the top. The chord changes come infrequently but regularly. The marimba player will strike a note and the colour of the whole sound will suddenly change. The musicians, including the man himself - all of them dressed in white, several of whom having played with each other and with Reich for over thirty years - change places every so often, relieving each other of repetitive tasks. The choreography is a compelling part of the event. It evokes the camaraderie of this white-haired, good humoured group of men and women, and also, somehow, the glory of human co-operation itself.

Or that's what it felt like at the time.  It should be noted, however, that I was under the influence of a powerful narcotic. For that's what this music is. You don't savour the beauty of its melody lines (there aren't any) and you don't follow a musical argument. You are put into a quasi-hypnotic state. And it feels good. It reminded me of nineties house/dance music: repetitive beats that you get lost in, and varying figures played over the top that add sensual thrills.

The programme notes described this piece as a 'joy machine', which is pretty good. It does seem to tap into some primitive, happiness-producing part of the brain with mechanical determination and precision. I'll be playing it during some of the darker afternoons of the winter.

how it all went wrong etc

from a review of a new book about George Best (and Duncan Edwards):

Michael Parkinson, who hung out with Best far beyond his chat show, described meeting a married woman who told him the following story: 'He had the most marvellous eyes and a shy, boyish charm. I talked to him for a long time and entertained thoughts of seducing him. We talked for about half an hour and all the time I fantasised an affair with him. All of a sudden, a blonde girl came up to him. She said, "Hi, I'm Julie, would you like a quick fuck?" He said, "Certainly." He turned to me and said, "Excuse me", and went upstairs with her.'

lessons from the master

for all his flaws and failures, Bill Clinton is the most compelling political figure of modern times. His speech at the Labour Party conference today was relatively low-key, but still gripping (in fact there was a kind of insouciance about it - 'look, i'm barely trying and i'm still the greatest'). He has the ability to compress great political wisdom into short, pithy sentences that tell us more than a dozen  speeches by your average politician. Here he is on climate change:

We need to make climate change as politically sexy as putting a man on the moon.

And on how to win elections as the incumbent:

Mr Clinton pointed to a poll in The Guardian newspaper suggesting that 70% of people believed it was time for change.

"You should say: of course it is," said Mr Clinton. "It's always time for change in a great and dynamic nation."

He went on: "Do not let anyone ever present to your citizens any future choice...as change versus more of the same.

this septic isle

mainly because of Bush, there is more sneering in Britain about Americans these days than there has been for some time. And it's particularly cringeworthy when Americans themselves join in, compelled by a kind of cultural inferiority complex to self-flagellate. So here's an antidote: an American's excoriation of Britain. It's mainly about his take on the British Big Brother but it has some very funny passages about modern life in the UK:

but come spend some time in England, and you realize that England's reputation for high culture is, in their own words, crap. England may pretend to be the posh hotel, but once inside, you find it to be nothing more than a bilious brothel teeming with pop-star pervs, park-bench fiddlers, and frantic finger-sniffers. And that's just on my block.

england is a country as delusional as a 35-year-old stripper--everyone in the room but her sees that her powers of attraction have faded. Her life is a loose coalition of press-on nails, fake tan, hair extensions, and implants, all held together by the duct tape of delusion. Which is not at all unlike Lea, a star of my favourite UK show, Big Brother.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it MONEY"

the above is a great David Mamet line from the film Heist - dumb and profound at the same time - which has inspired Norm into an extended riff on Marx and money..

damn i wish i'd thought of that #253

tee-shirts that display your top five of anything...instant personality.

oral storytelling

dinner at el bulli involves a lot of hassle. The restaurant is only open for six months every year (the chef spends the rest of the year with his team of mad scientist-chefs in the lab, inventing new dishes), and would-be diners must prepare themselves for many rejections and a long wait before they get a reservation no matter how flexible they are. It took me several months - I think I was lucky. It also means a trip to Spain: the restaurant is a hundred miles or so from Barcelona. On the night of your dinner you have to stay in the nearest town, a godforsaken seaside resort called Roses, kind of like a Spanish Clacton-On-Sea but not as entertaining. You then get a taxi along the coast to the restaurant itself.

so, with all this expense of money and time, you really have to want to go. And when you get there, you really hope it will be good. I was perfectly prepared for it to be awful. It would make a good story, at least. But I can say without fear of exaggeration that it was by some way the best, and certainly the most exciting, meal I've ever had. There were twenty-eight courses. Each one was an adventure, each played a part in the overall story (forgive me if I slip into the most annoying restaurant-review hyperbole here: if writing about music is like dancing about architecture then writing about food is the same but with concrete boots on). A bowl of translucent, jelly-like strips that liquefied in the mouth and revealed themselves to be a beautiful ham and tomato soup. A dish of different seaweeds arranged in a spiral, with a foam of 'sea air' in the middle, the eating of which felt like playing in rock-pools before jumping into the sea itself. A big white ball they call a 'popcorn cloud' that looks too big to fit into your mouth but they tell you to swallow it in one mouthful and somehow you do. A dish composed entirely of different types of seed  - which sounds like the most unappetizing dish ever invented but which forced previously shy tastebuds to come out and announce their presence. The whole experience had something wonderfully Wonka-ish about it.

I say 'story' because it became clear that great care had been taken to the sequencing of the dishes, just as a great band will take meticulous care over the sequencing of songs on an album. We were taken from rich to light, from the land to the sea, from the West to the East, from sweet to sour, each dish making you reflect on the one before. There did seem to be an overall aesthetic design. You sensed that Snr. Adria, the guiding genius of El Bulli, wanted to make you newly conscious of all the things that food can be, by making it strange again (just as the Russian Formalists talked of literature's job being to 'defamiliarize' the workaday world). And make you conscious too of what the mouth can do - a dish like the seeds, full of small delicate things that the mouth had to roll around and focus on, followed by the popcorn cloud - open as big as you can.

when we arrived we were taken to see the kitchen, and to shake hands with Adria - a small, grey-haired man with tired eyes, surrounded by his young, fresh-faced team. He stood in front of a great heavy book of recipes, a Prospero-like figure, bearing the burden of being considered the best chef in the world and of meeting the overbrimming expectation of every diner that has made the trip. But meet it he does.

bulli bulli

this week I'm going to Spain to have dinner so I won't be posting here. Full report on my return.

snobbery of the left

peter wilby, writing about john reid in the grauniad:

he is more Scottish than Brown - and while Brown's manner suggests a dour Edinburgh solicitor or bank manager, Reid's, despite his flaunting of a doctorate, suggests a Glaswegian street thug, which is even less appealing to the English.

an exquisitely condescending sentence, this. Understandably, Wilby fails to specify exactly what it is about Reid that triggers the response 'street thug' in his sensitive mind. It seems that the Glaswegian accent is enough - because all Glaswegians are thugs, aren't they? And annoyingly, the man has the temerity to 'flaunt' his education. He really ought to know his place.

scritti forever

the recent scritti renaissance led me back to one of my favourite teenage albums: Cupid and Psyche 85. So often, you go back to a record or a book that you loved first time around and discover that it's disappointingly thin stuff. So it's particularly gratifying when find that one of your youthful loves is still worthy of adoration. Makes you want to salute your younger self across the years. What good taste you had, dear boy.

Cupid and Psyche 85 was the album that marked Scritti's radical break with the British indie scene and their (entryist) entree into the global pop market. The shiny, glittering production was very advanced for its time, and became a benchmark for subsequent dance and R&B recordings. Lyrically, Green Gartside (who, essentially, is Scritti Politti) was fusing his passion for post-structuralist philosophy with his fascination with the language of love (hence 'The Word Girl', the album's biggest UK hit). His voice is a unique instrument, and on this album it sounds deliciously inorganic, mysteriously inhuman, even as it sings of love and loss. None of which would necessarily make for a great album, were it not for all those achingly beautiful melodies, and lyrics that, for all their intellectual content, are rarely less than lovely:

holy girl, your lips of clay

will whisper words of yesterday

holy girl, my paramour

i know too much to be so sure

holy girl you kiss away

the meaning of the working day

for love

Swoon.

the time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things

very few book reviews are worth reading. This one is. It's a review of a book about the history of conversation, and it's written by albert manguel. Manguel begins by recalling the hours he spent as a witness to the extravagantly learned conversations of jorge luis borges and two of his oldest friends during the 1960s in argentina:

For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy’s vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with “the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman’s poems, Toulet’s contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles”.

i love this quote from a borges story, mentioned by manguel:

“(it was) one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon omit dialogue”

it does exactly what it says on the tin

i love this quote from Samuel Beckett

"words were my only love and not many"

when a man loves a woman

slate, one of the handful of websites I visit pretty much every day, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. It has reposted a few of its favourite articles, including this lovely short piece by Herbert Stein, an economist in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He died two years after the article was published, in 1997. The article is about that most overwritten of subjects - why a man needs a woman. He brings no new research, no new 'angle' to to the question - just his own observation and long experience. It's written so simply, so concisely, and so directly, that it's almost like a poem.