The Romantic Imagination in 21st century English culture

In the ever-wonderful Feuilleton blog, while doing some research on 70s album sleeve design, I came across this rather marvellous passage on the English disease of marginalising genre fiction/culture in this appraisal of the work of Roger Dean: a man who I once interviewed and liked immensely. I thought it was worth reposting. It says, extremely eloquently, what I've long felt to be true about the way that something that helped me shape my view of the real world constantly becomes marked as 'kitsch', and also underlines the importance right NOW for a more rigorous approach to what is still perceived to be the playground of adolescents and halfwits:

'Dean’s art has been out of critical favour for so long that it’s difficult to discuss it positively without sounding overly defensive. While many other shunned aspects of the pre-punk era have been rehabilitated—folk music, psychedelic drugs, flares—I’ve yet to see anyone mount a serious reappraisal of Dean’s artwork despite his furniture and architecture designs having been exhibited at the V&A. There’s a certain kind of critic, usually male and British, who finds the exercise of a Romantic imagination to be a suspect and unwholesome activity. That suspicion often sees a single “story” being told in art history which skips from Impressionism to Cubism and ignores the Symbolists and Decadents; it dismisses Dalí’s work after the 1930s and won’t even look at the paintings of HR Giger, Ernst Fuchs or Mati Klarwein; it’s a suspicion which marginalised Mervyn Peake almost to the year of his death in 1968, which scowls at genre fiction and ignored JG Ballard (always a proud science fiction writer) until his Booker Prize nomination in 1984. Minimalism and restraint is favoured over exuberant invention, and a blokey cynicism is favoured over any kind of visionary impulse which is seen as tasteless or kitsch, with “kitsch” in this context almost always meaning “whatever I dislike”. For every Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker or China Miéville who assert and promote the value of the imagination, you’ll find a vocal crowd who find the whole thing to be unpalatable and juvenile. It’s an older argument than punk versus hippy, going back at least to the nineteenth century debate between Realism and Romanticism. It’s also a peculiarly joyless English attitude; the French have shared the debate as far back as Zola but are generally a lot happier for serious intellectual dialogue to sit side-by-side with comics, movies, science fiction and fantasy.'

Low Light Mixes

I've tweeted about this several times, but in a period of your life where the inanity of contemporary popular music (not to mention its attendant pack of braying media whores) rubs rather grittily against your own attempts to reconcile city life and a sense of mindfulness, sometimes you just need a good ambient podcast to listen to.

Dave from Wisconsin (I have no surname for this man) puts together The Low Light Mixes over at his blog which are also available as podcasts through iTunes here.

Themed around such fabulous topics as Alien Architecture, Imaginary Soundtracks, Graceful Silence (feat. the ever wonderfiul World Standard - extra kudos for that) and even (gulp) The Mellow Side Of Prog.

As an accompaniment to a trip to the park, around your local Morrisons, or even as an added backdrop to a south London bus journey, these mixes are tasteful, well-curated and expertly chosen. I urge you to have a listen...

Returnin'

Yes, it's the return of Bloggin' With The MDQ. Enjoy the photoshoppin'...

GRICE - Propeller

An all too brief and all too delayed response to something rather splendid which came my way a few weeks back: Propeller is a new album by vocalist (and multi-instrumentalist) GRICE, teamed with producer and arranger Lee Fletcher, and out now on Hungersleep records. It's a bit of a corker, really.

What we have here is an example of what happens when artist and producer hit that sweet spot where ambition meets the creative space that's perfect for reaching the sounds in the artist's head. Propeller has the sound of an album that's had a lengthy gestation, at least conceptually - it has the effortlessness of something that has been born out of necessity and the intricacy that signifies people who KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING.

Vocally GRICE inhabits that space that could only be described as that of the modern post-prog milieu: mixing the intensity of Mark Hollis or Tim Bowness with a Beatle-esque sweetness. In fact the harmonies are the first thing to hit the ear, a kind of warm West Coast layering, bent to the service of perfect pop. Fans of everything from CSN&Y to Jellyfish will all feel at home here, right from the first number.

Grown up arrangements lift songs while eschewing too many obvious routes, allowing the listener to safely journey between, say, the avant string abstraction of Summer Screams to a more conventional (in a Crowded House kinda way) song like The Cage without feeling any bumps. But what really brings the whole thing alive is Fletcher's production. Glimmers of dusty electronica, found sound (including birdsong at one point) and filtered fragments haunt the cracks and snapshots between the songs, spiced up by the soundscapes of Markus Reuter.

In fact, overall the duo have managed to assemble a fairly impressive cast of musicians to add the requisite fairy dust. Pedal steel legend B J Cole appears on two tracks, while elsewhere you can feel the benefit of Luca Calabrese's Hassell-esque trumpet and not least the sax of Raphael 'Baker Street' Ravenscroft. In fact it's the inclusion of Ravenscroft along with the Fender Rhodes of Fred Ehresmann which gives tracks like Broken Arrow a wonderfully jazzy vibe, not unlike some lost Island album from the early 70s. This is a good thing.

It's not all plain sailing. Lyrically the album tends to veer between cliche and rather wilful obtuseness (is that a deliberate referencing of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows at the start of the rockier Highly Strung?), while on tracks such as Let It Go, vocal performances can over-egg the straining credibility. And this reviewer always feels slightly uncomfortable when Uillean pipes are whipped out (on the title track) to signify 'yearning'. Yet these are minor gripes. When GRICE's lyrics err on the side of bitter honesty as on Broken Arrow none of this matters. The power of the material wins you over.

As a piece Propeller stands proud as an example of what can be achieved by talented people who still believe in the old fashioned notion of good songwriting, especially when teamed with sonic adventurousness of Fletcher's ilk.

In short: this is highly recommended.

Teenage Wasteland

So, what with the good old coalition giving young people a break this week (whilst simultaneously stuffing pensioners) - it was an apposite time to see two films that represent two sides of the grim dystopian coin for what we used to call 'yoof': Hunger Games and Ill Manors.

The fount of all sort-of-knowledge defines dystopia as:' the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian.' Although I rather warm to the alternative word for such a state which is Cacotopia, and in both of these films teens had to put up with an awful lot of cac, and in both cases under a government that cares less for the future of a nation but more for maintaining a mythical status quo.

Hunger Games, based on the books of Suzanne Collins, features the somewhat amazing Jennifer Lawrence as Katness Everdeen - the heroine of District 12, the poorest of the rebel states that were punished following a war that delivered near-annihilation. She's tough and can hunt, but to triumph she quickly has to learn to charm, lie and basically do all that nasty grown-up stuff.

It's a mainly efficient piece of work which looks like it's spent its budget on good actors rather than CGI, which is exactly how bloody film makers should do it. Excellent turns by Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson (who's already on my list for performances of the year) and Stanley Tucci (in a wig that puts him about as far away from his fantastic appearance in Margin Call as you can get) add gravitas to a reworking of Battle Royale crossed with Logan's Run. Without the ultraviolence of the first and the lure of Agutter that redeemed the second. A post-apocalyptic world keeps citizens at heel by creating a reality TV show in which 24 teens are put in a Truman Show-style upturned fish bowl and are expected to slug it out to the death. Imagine the horrid peer pressure of your late school years and just crank it up a little.

What's clever about Hunger Games is the time it takes in focusing on the preparation for the games, including makeovers, training camps and live interviews to boost popularity and raise rich sponsors who can choose to aid their favourites (essentially a phone vote that actually counts). It manages to skewer our game show culture whilst also neatly shoehorning in issues such as inequality in a world that has more than enough to share, learning about the venal nature of adult politics, race, even drugs (albeit delivered by deadly mutant wasps).

Already a massive social media success, this one is set to be huge, and for once, rightly so. And this even despite the presence of Lenny Kravitz!

Ill Manors, the latest film by the urban renaissance whirlwind, Ben Drew - with a hip hop soundtrack from his Plan B alter-ego providing a good chunk of the narrative backstory (main theme/single video here) - is frankly amazing. In a bit of a rough week which has also seen me catching up with the raw beauty of Tyrannosaur, similarly this study of the intricate cause-and-effect that leads to killing, sexual violence, rioting and despair in South London (or just about any other grimy estate you care to visit) doesn't sugar any pills it cares to ram down your throat and certainly doesn't attempt anything but the greyest of concrete grey moral landscapes. The central 'hero', played brilliantly by ‪Riz Ahmed,‬ is like some kind of ethically confused tennis table ball in a baseball cap - bouncing between dilemmas, torn between childhood loyalties borne of a lifetime of marginalisation and what he innately senses to be the right thing to do.

No killer insects here: the drug issues are full-on grown up crack and charlie nightmares that casually invade lives, fuel the abuse of women and push the story from a whip smart edited prologue and through a night that sees no one spared, but equally no one outright blamed. We see anger and hopelessness seep through the web of mobile phone interconnectedness like a creeping bloodstain, and yet it leaves us with some small sense of redemption and hope.

Coming off the back of Plan B's recent well-timed words about our relationship with our society and its imbalances, this is a brave, brutal, darkly funny look at a side of ourselves we more often than not ignore or demonise. In other words, don't expect it to be on the oscar list for 2013…

Jean Giraud RIP

A few hastily penned words to express my feelings at the passing of another of my real heroes, Jean Giraud aka Moebius: the french graphic novelist and artist who, along with Philippe Drulliet and Pierre Dionnet founded Metal Hurlant, the magazine that single-handedly revolutionised the way that I looked at 'comics'.

I came to Giraud's work in the late seventies much like many others of my generation, via the American offshoot of Metal Hurlant - Heavy Metal. In amongst the more lurid and juvenile work of the US artists, the work of Moebius and Druillet (along with other European giants such as Enki Bilal) seemed like renaissance masterpieces. Only in time did I realise how right that impression was. For absorbing a far more radical and rarified diet of art cinema, leftist politics and countercultural science fiction, their typically Gallic mix that saw no distinction between this and the work of Jack Kirby or the westerns of John Ford, resulted in a giant evolutionary step in what the French call BD: bandes dessinées. Suddenly narrative wasn't the key, and taking a cue from the American underground heroes that founded Zap! comix, the journey became as important as the outcome.

Giraud himself had learned his chops as Gir, the author (with writer, Jean-Michel Charlier) of the Blueberry western comics. And he took that vision of Ford's Monument Valley landscape and transmuted it into the alien vernacular that we take for granted these days. Only yesterday I saw John Carter, a film which pays tribute to Giraud in many of its cityscapes and deserts.

It wasn't just the frank portrayal of adult themes, but the exquisite line work and hallucinatory worlds that effortlessly sprang from his pen that turned a teenage boy's head to mush. His work made a brilliant companion to the soundtrack of my youth. Poring over his epic Garage Hermetique or the dialogue-free Arzach whilst listening to Eno or Krautrock; it seemed like these worlds were made for each other. I was more than hooked, I idolised his ability to allow the escape and the dreams to pour forth. I even wrote my third year dissertation on Moebius, Druillet and Bilal - my triumvirate of graphic novel excellence.

His work on film is probably better known - the production design work which included Ridley Scott's Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, Willow and so many more had begun years before with his inclusion (along with H R Giger, another of Alien's key players) on Jodorowsky's aborted Dune project. His Incal series completed with Jodorowsky was his later, crowning achievement.

In many ways Giraud spoiled my enjoyment of comics for ever. No one really ever came close to equalling his work in my eyes. The detailed linework, the fabulous way he rendered the human form in strange circumstances, the ability to imagine whole civilisations complete with an architectural language fully-formed to boot: all of this and so much more are his legacy to me.

Stoé orkeo!

On Some Faraway Beach

It must be my age, but I've recently become equally entranced and appalled by Desert Island Discs. Colour me 70 years behind the times!

The estimable franchise - set up by godlike Roy Plomley all those years ago (29 January 1942!) - now comes equipped for 21st century nerdy trawling and curation via the internet. The website has a fully searchable database wherein you can stack and slice the stats according to guest name, music chosen and even by luxury items chosen (have a look at how many guests chose drugs or fags). This can lead to literally MINUTES of late night fun and discussion when exploring the peculiar tastes and choices of guests.

I admit to being drawn to the site following Brian Moore's recent turn. Moore is (apparently) a rugby player. Means nothing to me about my life, but how my aged ears pricked up as he chose (somewhat apologetically) a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis track (In The Cage) - from their weightiest double concept album, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Congnoscenti will know this as the tipping point point for the Charterhouse oiks, where hubris outweighed camaraderie, and the singer left them to their increasing search for chart success.

So when Mr Moore plumped for such a hoary old prog tune I thought some research was in order.

Let's look at the information from a very Jonesisdying perspective. How WAS the most reviled rock genre represented in the listings? How would 15 minute songs in 17/8 about the book of revelations fare on Roy's idyllic, conceptual isle? The answer was (predictably), not so well. Yet there were still some surprises…

Not one Yes track; one King Crimson track (Alice Cooper choosing 21st Century Schizoid Man); Genesis get 5 choices but only two of those are pre-Phil Collins as singer era (David Gower chooses I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) - what is it with sportsmen and tricky time signatures?), Jethro Tull get one (Jenny Agutter chose Bouree?!?); no ELP and there's predictably no Van Der Graaf Generator. Mind you (and this is amazing) there IS a Gentle Giant track in there: but it's unsurprisingly chosen by snooker-playing Magma fanboy Steve 'Interesting' Davies. In fact Steve's entire show is just plain weird. He goes for a Christian Vander solo track instead of one by Magma, AND he chooses TWO George Duke tracks. I bet Sue Lawley loved all that…

By extension, Peter Gabriel, the man who sparked off this futile nonsense, gets eight listings, mainly for his political 'masterpiece', Biko or sappy unemployment duet with Kate Bush, Don't Give Up, although uber bloke, Jeremy Clarkson, does go for Solsbury Hill (which, as you all know, chronicles his departure from Genesis). John Cale, in true miserabilist form takes the apocalyptic Here Come The Flood. Oh, and avuncular old Terry Wogan chooses That'll Do - from the soundtrack of Babe 2: Pig In The City. Well, the allegorical tale of a small pig, lost in an urban jungle doesn't sound a million miles from a prog rock concept, does it?

Proto-prog and art rock is, definitely better served. Ladies seem to love the Moody Blues, with both songstress Clodagh Rogers and football-loving chef Delia Smith going for the Brum-based mellotron-botherers. But only irksome Chris Tarrant chooses the predictable Nights In White Satin. Respect to the girls! Procol Harum get on the list five times (including Oswald Moseley's wife), but only 'crossword compiler' John Graham dares to choose something other than you-know-what. And it's Homburg, not something off Exotic Birds and Fruit. Pah…

With our legacy acts reaching (or outstripping) retirement age, these days it's not surprising that both the bassist and guitarist from Pink Floyd have been on the show by now. But as for the other guests choosing their work? It's all mainly DSOTM, Wish You Were Here or (urgh) Wall tracks in the 25 listed. Only Desmond Morris and explorer Christina Dodwell break ranks, with Morris taking Syd Barrett's masterful Interstellar Overdrive and Dodwell the eery One Of These Days. Meanwhile flautist James Galway gets bonus points for settling for the whole first side of Atom Heart Mother. Logic tells me that this is because he possibly played on it. I can't think of any other reason that anyone would choose that.

The Velvets? Six time choosees: one of those by the aforementioned Cale. Roxy Music? Eight choices with only George Michael choosing Eno-era stuff (Do The Strand), and Brian Eno (who guested himself in 2008) amazingly has only been chosen once (by Superman actor, Christopher Reeve).

Anyone hoping for a blast of Canterbury scene jazz prog will be sorely disappointed. With no Caravan, Soft Machine or even Henry Cow to leaven the stodge, it's left to Lenny Henry to choose Robert Wyatt's Shipbuilding. I'm not a fan of Henry, but his choices do seem to indicate that he knows and cares for music. Only his choice of Bob Marley seems dull alongside Bootsy, Funkadelic, Prince and Ry Cooder.

And going further - no, there's no krautrock, and let's not even touch on either experimental music or jazz, suffice it to say that there are far more Miles tracks picked than, say, Ornette Coleman.

Oh, and Ian MacMillan's John Cage choice is inspired.

But this is the point: any amount of slicing can be merely made to serve the researcher's own prejudices. Of course there's little of the stuff that moves ME, and of course the choices will seem predictable ie: everyone who chose Massive Attack only went for Unfinished Sympathy. In my geeky excitement I'd lost the point, that music was chosen not just for being GREAT but having significance for the individual. And most individuals have other, more important stuff to be doing with their lives.

In the past the show was primarily filled with classical choices. Go back into the archives before about 1973 and, naturally, the tracks and the castaways all seem to be far too worthy and staid. The establishment did not condone rock 'n' roll and pre-80s almost NO popular musician was a castaway, unless they had gained recognition via the honours list or hung out with aristocracy (which must be why Georgie Fame, of all people, appeared on the show in 1973). This still seems to be the case, hence Phil Collins, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney… although I'm perplexed as to why, from the Stones, only Charlie Watts has been a guest. Maybe because they knew he'd pick tasteful jazz.

But as I grow older the guests grow more contemporaneous and their choices reflect my own demographic (well, up to a point): and thus I turn into my parents…

But it was (and will remain) a fun game to play, and for this I thank Radio 4. Try it yourself.

Blue Collar Shame

'Early in the morning we'll be startin' out
Some honeys will be coming along
We're loading up our woody…'
(Surfin' Safari - The Beach Boys, 1964)

A tenuous quote, to be sure, but HOW loaded down is Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman's Rampart? However much it is, one thing's for sure: the boy's come a long way since being the butt of Ted Danson's jokes in Cheers.

Set two years after the infamous titular scandal which implicated 70+ LAPD police officers in widespread corruption charges and almost ruined their reputation forever, Rampart concerns itself with the (mis)deeds of Dave 'Date Rape' Brown, and his attempts to overcome his (mainly) self-created adversities and keep both an unconventional family and a lifelong career in the force together.

It's beautifully shot, with digital photography rendering the colours as glowing orange interiors and greenish exterior neon. And performances are consistently great - especially from Ben Foster as wheelchair bound vagrant. Harrelson himself (who apparently really suffered for his art) is possibly the most serious we've ever seen him: his gaunt frame (he looks like he lost several stone to effectively capture the martini-swilling, food-avoiding wired-ness needed for the part) oozing the kind of slow-dawning realisation of a man who's spent a lifetime lying to himself about how badly he behaves.

With James Ellroy as screenwriting co-pilot with Moverman, you can probably guess that this is NOT going to be America's answer to Hot Fuzz. In fact, if any parallel can be made with recent cinema, it's with Steve McQueen's Shame. Like the arbitrary divisions of USA hip hop, this is, if you like, the Westside equivalent to Michael Fassbender's Eastside descent into a fleshy hell.

Except that this time, as the narrative moves on, the singles bar indulgence in flesh declines - only to be replaced with pharmaceuticals, voyeurism, erratic behaviour… and cigarettes. God, how MANY cigarettes did Harrelson smoke in this film? Every scene comes with a Strand moment, even though by the denouement Woody is very much alone with his habit. And unlike Fassbender's blingy uptown broker lifestyle, here we're made all too aware of the importance (and lack) of money. A fact that made me like this film more.

Shown from the off to be a policeman for whom, 'illegal's just a sick bird', Brown is a lifer, bullying female rookies, using excessive force in pursuit of leads and with a moniker derived from a previous incident where he's alleged to have murdered a man for his history of violence to women. Ah, there you have it - the classic Ellroy trope - misguided tough guys who defend women for the wrong reasons. Remember Russell Crowe breaking that chair in L.A. Confidential? This is a world where despite the obvious wrongdoing going down, men can still justify their actions by recourse to some faded (mythical?) familial moral code, long since obliterated by shoddy circumstance.

This moral code has shoehorned Dave's two ex-wives (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) into being neighbours, each with one daughter apiece and (confusingly) sisters. It's here that the shit gets real for Dave. Divorced from both he still attempts to woo them (unsuccessfully). His couch dwelling days are numbered as what's perceived as a racist beating by him is captured on national TV and his past crimes start to revisit him with increasing intensity. In all senses, this is a study of a man who's fast wearing out his welcome.

The observation of his awkward relationship with a teenage daughter exploring her own crisis of sexuality mirrors his problematic relationship with his superiors. This is a man trading on his Vietnam and police service record: smart-mouthed and (another classic Ellroy trait) a failed lawyer, eloquent in legal terminology and unafraid to use it in his precocious and misguided defence.

if anything, Rampart is about self-delusion. Dave's a man who's eventually forced to admit his own culpability while still clinging to the notion that he's only doing what everyone else has. In a sense this is true, Rampart certainly doesn't overly simplify - the most surprising thing that happened in the screening I attended was the comic effect of the videoed beating: almost everyone laughed at that point.

And while his descent into rampant paranoia is tempered with a justifiable sense that, just maybe, there ARE darker motives at work here, plotting his downfall as a distraction from the greater storm ripping through the department, it doesn't stop you being appalled by his confusion. This tangle of morals and misdeeds, even leads to him, at one point, inappropriately coming on to the DA, played by Sigourney Weaver. Ouch...

But ultimately, as paternal family friend (and equally corrupt ex-cop) Ned Beatty points out: maybe it's just because no one likes a cop who, by his own admission, isn't racist but 'hates everyone equally'. Either way, like Shame, there's no tidy end to this very human drama - Dave drives off towards long dark night of the soul, cigarette glowing in the darkening night, and all we're left to comfort us with is the twinkling cityscape. Excellent stuff...

Sang Freud

What started a few months back with an afternoon's jaunt to the house/museum of Sigmund Freud at 19 Berg Gasse in Vienna appears to be now burgeoning into something approaching one of Carl Jung's famous 'non-coincidences': everything last week came with a Freudian connection in one way or the other. Firstly, and most importantly, I saw the new David Cronenberg movie, A Dangerous Method. based on the play by Christopher Hampton (which, in turn was based on John Kerr's book, A Very Dangerous Method).

Months before it had already garnered mixed reviews since the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September despite this concise, witty and unprepossessing film marking another high point in Cronenberg's journey from the king of body horror to elegant elder statesman of the darker side of human nature.

I think most of the mixed reviews probably come from those who yearn for a return to the excesses of Videodrome or Shivers. And to be sure, Dangerous... consists mainly of dialogue and interior shots, all tastefully captured in muted whites and with a distinct lack of suppurating wounds or penis substitutes. But the move towards more elegant and mature work which began all those years ago with the gynaecological shocker, Dead Ringers is now completed. Unlike, say, John Carpenter, Cronenberg has matured, eschewing his fabulous, but essentially genre-hamstrung juvenilia.

In A Dangerous Method he returns to his first love - the internal landscape of the psyche. And while critics may bemoan the lack of cheap thrills we still get the occasional spanking, references to female masturbation and even drug abuse (from free love advocating, proto-hippie Otto Gross, played by the estimable Vincent Cassel ). Yet in A Dangerous Method - as in his earlier underrated masterpiece of concision, Spider - the source material guides the structure. It's all about the performances, with man of the moment, Michael Fassbender, giving a beautifully uptight yet intense performance as Carl Jung; a man equally in thrall and appalled at the godlike status of his mentor, friend and father figure, Freud.

Viggo Mortensen, now a Cronenberg regular, gives exactly the top notch performance you'd expect: conveying wry world weariness with cigar-chomping gravitas. Only Keira Knightley strikes a slightly sour note; with her performance maybe drawing a little too much attention to the effort she has poured into her portrayal of mysterious patient, pupil and sexual misfit, Sabina Spielrein. In fact she's undercut by a stunning turn by Sarah Gadon as Jung's long-suffering, devoted wife.
The strange 'non-coincidence' here, for me was that only the weekend before I'd been in Copenhagen, looking at a major retrospective of painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Hammershøi's major work stems from the same period of Freud and Jung's breakthroughs, and his dreamlike interiors, often empty, but sometimes populated by the singular figure of his wife glimpsed from behind, seemed to literally mirror the viewpoint of the film, where Jung's explorations of Spielrein's 'hysteria' are conducted in the classic psychoanalysts position, from behind his patient. One wonders how much of Hammershøi's work also alludes to the same turn of the century anxiety that Hampton's screenplay focuses on: the political and philosophical tensions undercut by a society that's now at leisure to investigate what's under each of our psychological bonnets.
In the end, A Dangerous Method works equally well on all levels as a study of the dangers of lust in the workplace and the home, a fascinating investigation of the relationship between the two giants of 20th century psychoanalysis as well as an allegory for the sturm und drang a about to tear central Europe to shreds, this is a lovely little film that deserves better than a bunch of 80s film students moaning about a lack of gore. Go and see it.
If this wasn't enough couch-based soul-bearing, I've been also reading the new William Boyd novel, Waiting For Sunrise. Set in turn of the century Vienna (you're ahead of me, aren't you?) it concerns itself with a young man's adventures at the hands of the 'talking cure' set against a backdrop of Europe about to tear its... well, you get the picture. It's a meandering, slightly dissatisfying read - but it just goes to show that this stuff is mighty hip right now...

And in the next non-coincidence, the following day saw a visit to the National Portait Gallery's retrospective of the portraiture of grandson to the old man: Lucian. This is a collection that's comprehensive, well laid out and avoids too much of the biographical context. Freud hated labelling or naming, preferring to let the setting and the use of faces that had an inner life to provide a narrative.
Ignoring the background of lovers, tangled lives and excess, it's nonetheless a topsy-turvy history of a painter whose early work is possibly more challenging than his later, more famous stuff. To be fair, his final works do demonstrate the ceaseless search for new expression; using a gross impasto to make the canvas surface bubble and boil. Yet one comes away feeling a certain sense of loss for those early years of more brutal existentialism. Abandoning the precise, obsessive linear dissections and exaggerations of work such as the portraits of first wife, Kitty, you're left with the impression that, once he'd gone through the impressively seismic shift into painterly abandon in the early '60s - perfecting his paradoxically anti-realist fetish for overgrown extremities and butcher's window flesh depicted in voluminous oil - his work took on an almost chocolate box glibness. For this reason, my favourite work in the exhibition is his Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-Portrait) (1968 pictured above) where the linear abstraction in the gigantic aloe vera plant competes (and wins) with the background image of Freud himself, balancing both aspects of his development.

Maybe it's the opulent life (the same one which allowed him to make so free with his parentage - 14 known kids and counting...) that undercuts his credibility here. Pictures of him hugging Kate Moss in bed certainly don't help. For once in my life I find myself in agreement with Brian Sewell. Who'd have thought it?

Intense...

If you can make it all the way through, it may just change your life.
Words fail me...

Tyranny and Mutation

A weekend's viewing of both J Edgar - Clint Eastwood's biopic of the FBI's founder, and The Iron Lady - Phyllida Lloyd's look at Grantham's most famous daughter. The link? Two somewhat sympathetic films about notorious right-wingers made by left wing intellectuals.

Writing from the standpoint of someone whose first experience of voting in 1979 was spoiled by the milk snatcher herself taking control of the country, I was already grimly determined that this was not going to be an experience I could stomach. Is my generation doomed to end up as right wing as our parents seemed (well, mine did - they read the Telegraph, and my father, in a rare outburst of political candour, once admitted to an admiration of William Whitelaw - coincidentally the man who stood against Thatcher in the second round of the leadership battle for the Tories in 1978)? Like the tendency to complain about loud music in restaurants and to feel the cold increasingly - are we doomed to gradually go from Red Wedge-supporting yoof to something slightly to the right of Genghis Khan?

Luckily it's not that simple. Both films display a healthy enough grasp of the contradictions at the heart of each story. Politically, there's never a straight black and white divide in great figures' lives. Hoover, for instance, is portrayed as having a racist mother (Judy Dench) but is also known for eliminating the Ku Klux Klan, and his hatred of Martin Luther King seems to stem more from King's moral indiscretions than any colour issues. Thatcher's Darwinian capitalism was espoused by a woman who wholeheartedly supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality, although this isn't mentioned in the film. In fact, as a portrait of the UK's political landscape The Iron Lady is fairly hopeless. I mean, Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe? John Sessions as Edward Heath?!? Do me a favour…

But balancing this with the avowed intentions of screenwriter du jour, Abi Morgan, this is hardly surprising. Her approach is that of the most interesting form of feminist: one who prefers the macrocosmic to the overarching political landscape; the human over the historical. The most important speech of the film doesn't actually involve Meryl Streep's amazing turn, but features Alexandra Roach as the younger Maggie telling (a very good) Harry Lloyd as Denis that she won't 'die washing tea cups'. This jibe actually has the ring of truthfulness about it. And of course the idea of an Oxford chemistry graduate who then turned to law and politics while simultaneously raising a family is incredible. I have enough trouble making coffee in the morning.

The crux of Morgan's treatment lies in the relationship of daughter Carole (played brilliantly by Olivia Colman) with a mother who's losing it in her twilight years. As Morgan says, 'I have dementia in my own family so I recognised that as an experience and I’d observed it but I do think it’s more of a universal story. I don’t think it’s a political film. I think it’s about the study of power and the isolation of power, but that’s also set against the isolation of old age and in particular, the isolation of dementia, in a way.'

This is all very well, and as such the top and tail of the film are masterful. Yet, ultimately, The Iron Lady is really only half a movie. The portrayal of one woman's descent into dementia is utterly disarming, and ramped up to an incredible level by both La Streep's fabulous portrayal of a woman in her 80s and Jim Broadbent's ever-dependable affability as the hallucinatory conscience Denis, goading her for her weaknesses after a life of toughing it out at the highest levels of government. But when we get onto the typical episodic, biopic approach to the grocer's daughter climb up the greasy pole, things unravel.

As Liz Hoggard points out during her discussion with Peter Lilley, quite a few of the dramatic incidents (ie: poll tax rioters banging on her limo windows etc) never actually occurred. The portrayal of her first day in parliament shows her as a lone female in the House of Commons. While women were very much the minority in 1961 she was far from being alone of her sex. And I certainly found her transformation into some black clad S&M goddess while helping unite Europe (as her compadres plotted her downfall) slightly disturbing. The message seemingly being that her finest moment on the world stage equated to some kind of apotheosis as a sexy witch queen straight out of C S Lewis.

J Edgar on the other hand shows a far surer grasp of both genre and subtext. While Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is every inch the equal of Streep's (IMHO) he doesn't quite pull of the prosthetics so convincingly, although apparently his weight gain (amusingly referred to several times in the film a 'solid weight') was quite real. And Armie Hammer's turn as Hoover's closest ally, Clyde Tolson is plain silly - using a comic tremor and liver spots as shorthand for age. Yet the central premise of a demonised public figure finally brought low by the hands of time is identical. Still, J Edgar displays a far more even hand - balancing significant private facts (the dominance of his mother, his early insecurity which resulted in his (ha) machine gun delivery earning him the nickname 'Speedy', and of course his well-known closeness to Tolson combined with a confirmed batchelor life) with the same episodic approach.

And while, at times, the editing veers close to confusing there are enough clever touches to contextualise the narrative in our present time (cf: J Edgar's first date with Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy; where one can't help feeling that Hoover's display of library card indexing as a precursor to a national criminal database predicts the internet. And did anyone spot the fact that, by the end of the film, Hoover's biographer/confessor had transformed into an Obama lookalike?) But as Tolson tells J Edgar at the end of the movie - barely any of his confessions are true - his supposed presence at the takedown of all those gangsters was PR fluffery designed to net the Bureau a bigger budget, reminding us in canny Citizen Kane style that all reminiscence is untrustworthy.

The leftist principles of both writer and director never let Hoover off the hook: his power games, his confusion of personal drive for moral righteousness: all are dealt with capably and with due respect for a man who, if confused by the hypocrisy of power, also DID help establish modern investigative methods.

Ultimately - J Edgar succeeds not only from having a more experienced director at the helm, but by choosing its subject more cleverly. The film (if you believe the James Ellroy-style rumour mill) could easily have been a scurrilous hatchet job of a hated man's already-twisted reputation. By avoiding the obvious references to conspiracy theories behind JFK's assassination as well as not dwelling too long on his 'private files' (here used as an analogy for his paranoia as well as trust invested in one person - his PA, Ms Gandy), Eastwood manages to pin down the life of a man with few friends and a genuine drive to bring order to post communist USA, despite the odious ways in which he often did it. Also note that they cleverly bypass the legendary rumours of cross-dressing by having J Edgar merely try on his dead mother's dress in a moment of pure grief. There's respect but it's tempered by their unerring even-handedness.

The Iron Lady fails on the same criteria: Morgan's script is a more than competent look at dementia but stumbles when it's attached to a political landscape that's not only more than fresh in my generation's minds but also is attached to someone who is, lest we forget, still very much with us. One can't help but feel that the only reason that this wasn't presented as a analogous fiction (cf: Polanski's The Ghost) was because everyone at the studio knew that Meryl could pull of a brilliant (unnerving?) impersonation of Thatchbag. And for my money the subject of the effects of dementia on an enduring relationship were covered more effectively in Iris (which had... oh, Jim Broadbent as the dependable partner). The inevitable oscar is well-deserved but it doesn't excuse such a brutal subject's rather cavalier treatment. We owe a vast amount of our modern woes to MT's plucky home economics. It's far too early to forget this.