People have asked me why I am doing my World War 1 live blog. One inquirer in particular wondered whether I have been caught up in the commemoration frenzy and found myself stuck with a desire to mark the "brave sacrifice" of the men who fell in battle.
The question is an interesting one. As is often the case with matters of human motivation, I have I have no ready answer to it. I think it was the neatness of the 100 year anniversary that seduced me. I have been deriving great enjoyment from @RealTimeWWII on Twitter (which tweets real time stuff from the Second World War) and that influenced my decision to try something similar (but not as good) for the First.
One of the big things I am trying to do with the First World War blog is counter the nationally specific nature of so much of the way the event is remembered. I live in Ireland and exposure to the British media means that it is easy to slip into a very narrow view of how and where the war was fought and who took part in it. Irish media largely reinforces that; the war was fought before my own country became independent, meaning that Irish soldiers fought in the British army. So it seems that for many the war was fought entirely by Britain and Germany at the Somme and in Flanders (apart from a jaunt off to Gallipoli featuring some Australian guest stars, while later Lawrence of Arabia does something in Arabia). I want to try and counter that and bring forth that the war was fought in many places and by people from many countries, some of which no longer exist.
I am enjoying learning more about the conflict as I prepare the posts on it. The discipline of keeping the posts coming is a useful one. Readership of the World War 1 blog is not what it could perhaps be, but I am finding the process sufficiently rewarding that I will continue with it for the foreseeable future.
My account of this trip of last November to London ends rather anticlimactically with a brief account of a trip to the British Museum. I saw the following exhibits:
1. The one on Egyptian mummies that uses exciting new techniques to look inside mummies; it was interesting but having been to Egypt myself I feel like I have probably seen all the mummies I will ever need to in my life.
2. The one on the apogee of Ming Dynasty China. I particularly liked the picture of the chubby fun-loving emperor being carried on a palanquin by some over-worked servants.
3. The one on Germany through the ages that largely ignored the most famous bit of German history. I particularly liked the portraits of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora; while I have seen these pictures before in reproduction, in the flesh they exhibited a carnality you do not normally expect from religious leaders.
4. An exhibition on depictions of witchcraft in printed materials in early modern Europe. This reinforced my sense that witch hunts were not a routine feature of the mediaeval past but rather something that flourished as society began to transform into something like our own. Pandas
The Sun Ra Arkestra played in the afternoon, leaving time for a contemplative drink before dinner. We visited a charming Dalston hostelry with signs everywhere informing patrons that "POLICE CARRY OUT FREQUENT AND UNANNOUNCED INSPECTIONS OF THIS PREMISES". One of my associates made friends at the bar with a London Irish guy from Central Casting. He took issue with (i) my insufficiently Irish accent and (ii) my asking for an orange juice.
We found seats at a table but then an older woman came in an although she found a seat at another table she seemed to keep looking over towards us disapprovingly. Maybe she was wondering what those ponces were doing in her pub, but I also feared that we might be sitting at her usual table. Or maybe she thought we were undercover cops carrying out a frequent and unannounced inspection.
In any case, we soon left Dalston and made our way to Brick Lane, where we had a frank exchange of views with a restaurant tout. I should perhaps have brought our party to the Bangla Café, my late uncle's favourite place and the home of the Princess Diana painting and some bizarre fantasy lady art. But I went with the flow and we ended up somewhere else and had a pleasant meal at which things were said.
After walking one of our group back to his hotel, where his pipe and slippers were calling him, the night really began for the rest of us as we hit the bunga bunga bars of East London; my lawyer has suggested that I make no further comment on certain events that are alleged to have taken place. Actually no, we went for one last drink in a nice enough bar that seemed to be the kind of place that was popular with the young folk.
And then we went our separate ways. The night being yet young I decided to walk back to my hotel, even though it was quite a bit away. This provided me with another opportunity to photograph Christchurch Spitalfields on Commercial Road.
Passing through Liverpool Street Station, I tried to recreate my great photograph, without much success.
Walking through the City, I espied what used to be the Nat West Tower reaching to the sky.
I also passed a building in which I was once stuck in a lift.
The round building I think stands on the site of a sandwich bar in which Sylvester Stallone's more rotund twin worked.
The illuminated St. Paul's against the night sky created a strange luminous dissidence.
The bridge at High Holborn featured a winged lion holding an orb.
After that I saw nothing worth photographing. I made my way back to my hotel and went to bed, but not before I looked out over Russell Square to Centre Point.
I was having such fun indulging my depraved lusts at the British Library that when I made it out to Cafe Oto in Dalston the Sun Ra Arkestra had started playing. You know these fellows, they are the continuation of the band who played with famous jazzer Sun Ra,who descended to Earth from Saturn at some point in the early 20th century before returning home in the early 1990s. Some of the Arkestra musicians played with Sun Ra himself (notably Marshall Allen, their leader). They play jazz which manages to be both forward-thinking and the kind of good-time music that older people could dance to if there was a dance floor. And they wear spangly capes. It was great seeing them somewhere other than a music festival. And although I was standing I was able to get close enough to see them properly and I was not *tired* like the last time I was standing at a concert in Cafe Oto. Top buzz.
image source (Sun Ra Arkestra in Cafe Oto, 2010, from a review by John Sharpe on the All About Jazz website, far more interesting than my brief comments above)
I allowed myself a non-musical interlude the next day, popping up to the British Library for an exhibition they were having on the gothic. This went roughly chronologically from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto up to the present day, taking in various aspects and detours along the way.
The short Jan Švankmajer animated version of Otranto they had at the exhibition's beginning was fascinating. Apparently this is the only attempt thus far to adapt that classic novel for the screen. Švankmajer is most famous for weird puppetry (e.g. see his Dr Faustus), but this was a combination of Terry Gilliam-style animation and filmed interview with a researcher who had discovered that Walpole's novel is in fact based on a true story that occurred not in Italy but late-mediaeval Bohemia. The blatant fibbery of the framing device was a nice evocation of the original novel's claim to be translated from an original Italian account of actual historical events.
Later on I was amused by some material on The Monk, by Matthew Lewis. This book caused a sensation with its tale of a once-pious monk who is led by a female demon into a life of depraved vice. The exhibition had a printed copy of the first edition that Lewis was proposing to edit into a less shocking second edition, with a page shown in which he was proposing to cut an entire page of perving at the naked breast of a young lady.
While most famous now for The Monk, Lewis was more than a one-book author. The exhibition had material on The Castle Spectre, a play Lewis wrote after the success of that novel. The play also caused a sensation, not through depictions of depravity and vice but because one of the characters has African servants who denounce the institution of slavery. It was felt that this kind of crazy talk would undermine the economic foundations of Great Britain. I do not know whether Lewis threw this abolitionist talk in to shock, out of genuine conviction or for less thought-through reasons. Lewis himself had inherited significant wealth from Britain's sugar-gulags in the Caribbean.
Later on I was taken with a discussion of Victorian sensation novels (e.g. The Woman in White) and then other books that were even more sensational. Novels in which the villain or villainess was revealed as a bigamist proved to be particularly popular in this period, giving away to inevitable parodies like Quintilia the Quadrigamist. The exhibition then linked the sensation novels to the media sensation that surrounded the Jack the Ripper killings in the late 19th century. The original "Dear Boss" letter was on display. This letter was signed "Jack the Ripper", giving the killer the name he is remembered by. The exhibition was gamely suggesting that it might be genuine though I understand that it is generally considered to be a hoax.
One jarring note appeared when they brought the exhibition into 20th century gothic. There is a lot of 20th century gothic, but I was surprised that they foregrounded popular film The Wicker Man so much. That film arguably has some gothic elements (e.g. a sinister aristocrat), but overall it owes far more to folk horror than the gothic and was out of place here.
It was also noticeable that the exhibition had a very British focus. This meant there was a fairly minimal coverage of non-anglophone gothic literature. While Edgar Allan Poe was mentioned, there was no great exploration of the wider American gothic. In some ways this was a bit limiting, but it is the British Library after all, and not everything could be included. One particularly notable omission was the lack of any mention of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, particularly striking given that Hogg was a British writer.
Overall though, this exhibition was less about information than atmosphere. I may be deluding myself but I think I could more or less have curated this myself, at least with regard to the informational material. But the atmosphere was great, with the whole place in a gloomy darkness (though bright enough even for duff-eyed types like me to read the material), drapes and faux cobwebs abounding and suitably gothic images projected on the walls. There was also a nice finish linking the gothic literature of yore to the current gothic scene.
Would you like to know more? Check you the British Library's fascinating collection of articles on the Gothic.
The event that drew me to London was taking place in the Barbican. This was the Henry Cow and Friends Salute the Magic of Lindsay Cooper concert. My knowledge of the music of Henry Cow and Lindsay Cooper is limited, mainly based on a piece one Mr Dave Berry wrote about them in the pages of Frank's APA and a compilation of music featuring Dagmar Krause put together by Emily K., a star of the Internet. With that limited initial exposure you would think that I would not really be the target audience for this event, yet there I was in the audience. I think it must be Fear of Missing Out that made me not miss this memorable occasion: in my old age have I finally become an Event Person?
Some background for readers who know even less about Lindsay Cooper than I do. Ms Cooper was a composer and musician who played bassoon and oboe with Henry Cow and other acts in the 1970s and thereafter. She also composed music for film and television and so on. She appears to have straddled the worlds of composed and improvised music, being also involved in the Feminist Improvising Group (who sound like the best thing ever). She died in 2013 after suffering for many years from multiple sclerosis.
In format this concert was divided up into segments representing different aspects of Cooper's career, but with more or less the same musicians playing on everything. The musicians included such star names as Chris Cutler on drums and Fred Frith on guitar (the others are probably also star names too but I live under a stone and so did not recognise them), while vocalists included Dagmar Krause, Sally Potter and Phil Minton. The overall musical lineup was like a meld of standard rock formatting with more outré instruments, so you got various keyboards as well as brass and wind instruments.
The concert began with a run of pieces Cooper had composed for Henry Cow, mostly instrumental. Right at the beginning of this there was a bit of false start, where a tune began and then had to be halted because someone had not come in properly or something. Depending on your perspective, this was either a disturbing suggestion that things can go very wrong with live music or an indication that this was going to be an evening of exciting edginess in which things were going to be kept real. Either way the Henry Cow material was a bit rough around the edges, but I liked it.
It is hard for me to produce reference points for the Henry Cow segment, because the instrumentation and the style of music made it sound rather different to most things I am familiar with. One thing that did come to mind was Peaches en Regalia, the orchestral jazz album by Frank Zappa. The kind of soundtracks Michael Nyman used to do for Peter Greenaway also sprang to mind.
The following segments were a performance of music written for a group called News From Babel that Cooper had formed with Chris Cutler, a series of film music she had made with a group called Music For Films and then as a closer music she had composed for a song cycle called Oh Moscow, about the Cold War. The different segments largely blurred into each other, with the music in broad terms being of a roughly similar type. There was more in the way of vocals after the Henry Cow section. Dagmar Krause's contribution was relatively limited. As she was the main draw for me this could have been a major disappointment except that the other vocalists were most excellent and the music generally of a very high standard.
If I was to start handing out prizes to the musicians then it would probably be Frith and Cutler who would be receiving medals from me, though again it might just be prior awareness that had me noticing their work more (and also latent rockism, perhaps, that would cause me to favour them over any of the people on non-rock instruments). The musical highlights were probably the songs from Oh Moscow. The Cold War lyrics went over my head but the music stuck in it, perhaps because it was a bit different to that of the rest of the evening (more piano driven and less rock). Vocals here were by Phil Minton (who is apparently an interesting player in the world of improvised music etc.) and Sally Potter, who had written the lyrics. I was surprised to discover that she is the same Sally Potter who directed Orlando.
I think maybe the Oh Moscow music was the hit of the evening and the segment that was the least familiar to attendees. Certainly the merch stand ran out of copies of that album afterwards. If you are interested in Oh Moscow, there is great footage on YouTube of a piece from it being played in 1991 in Volgograd (with scenes filmed on the streets of that town more famous to the world as the site of the memorable Battle of Stalingrad).
Aside from the members of Frank's APA and our loved ones, there were loads of famous people knocking around at this concert. I saw Thurston Moore queuing for coffee at the interval while there were reports of popular comedian Stewart Lee also being present. And when, after the show, one of my friends said "Oh look, there's Steve Davis", it took me a while to register that he was not talking about some mate of his called Steve Davis but the star of snooker; apparently Mr Davis is a big fan of progressive and forward thinking music, hosting a radio programme on this very subject.
And then eventually we made our way into the night. Getting out of the Barbican proved surprisingly difficult, as the place is huge and maze-like (two of my friends got lost and are still there to this day) but in the end we emerged into the darkness of a foggy London night.
Back in November I paid a visit to London, mainly to attend a concert in the Barbican celebrating the life of the musician Lindsay Cooper. I had time for a small number of other things.
After checking into my hotel, I paid a trip to Pudding Lane, where the famous Great Fire of London began. I then strolled on to Tower Hill to have a look at what was left of that poppy exhibit they had in the moat of the Tower of London. This was a First World War commemorative event by artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper. The exhibit filled the Tower's moat filled with artificial poppies, one for every British soldier killed in the conflict (not sure if that was just soldiers from Britain or if it included also Irish soldiers and ones from the Empire). I am interested in the First World War (as anyone following my amazing First World War live blog will already know) and in monumental public art, so this touched all my bases.
By the time I got there they had mostly dismantled the exhibit. There were still poppies in one corner of the moat but the rest was bare. What was left looked a bit forlorn, but one could still imagine how the whole exhibit would have appeared. It must have been stunning, a theory supported by surviving photos of the poppy filled moat.
There is a lot of talk about how best to commemorate the First World War (or even if it should be commemorated at all) and many quite rightly decry the creepy enforced conformism of poppy-wearing in Britain. Regardless of that, seeing the huge moats of the Tower as a sea of red would have been incredibly striking and must have made anyone who saw it think about the losses suffered during the war. Whether they would then think that the dead soldiers were all brave lads doing their duty or the victims of a warmongering elite in a pointless conflict would be another question entirely.
After looking at the poppies I walked up to Rough Trade East off Brick Lane, a haunt I am always drawn to. This is one of those places that some Londoners I know are very dismissive of, but I think perhaps they would be less so if they did not have other record-selling emporiums. I am conscious of having too many CDs and was also trying to not spend loads of money on this trip (ha!) while also foreseeing that I would probably end up buying something at the concerts I was going to later, so I limited myself to just one CD here, a Sublime Frequencies release of proto-Rai music. One day the so-called powers that be will let you see my review of this record.
Come back tomorrow when I will describe the Barbican concert for Lindsay Cooper.
This is a Mike Leigh film in which Timothy Spall plays the well known 19th century artist J. W. M. Turner. It tells the story of the latter part of his life. It looks great and has some great scenes and performances but overall it is not brilliant. It lacks a narrative thread and seems to be just a sequence of events. Turner's inner life is largely unexplored. Instead we see him being casually exploitative of his housekeeper and needlessly cruel to the mother of his daughters (born out of wedlock), yet he is capable of genuine tenderness with another woman he ends up forming an attachment to.
I find with the less successful Mike Leigh films I end up wishing the entire film had been about one of the minor characters. With Happy Go Lucky I wanted an entire film about the uptight driving instructor (even if "uptight driving instructor" is something of a lame cliché), while with Career Girls it was the Welsh flatmate who needed to have his story told. In this one, it was the personally difficult and unsuccessful other artist whose story seemed more interesting (if also more miserable) than that of Turner himself. Or perhaps a film about Ruskin, who appears briefly here with the actor capturing the man's strange mix of punchable ponciness and impressive critical sensibility.
Still, the film has much to recommend it. You do get a sense of how mid-19th century art did seem to be moving towards stylised and abstract forms that were then abandoned until the 20th century. The evocation of the period generally is very vivid. And as noted above, there are great performances here. Spall shines as Turner, even if the man remains a mystery. Also impressive are Dorothy Atkinson as his housekeeper and Marion Bailey as the widow with whom he strikes up a relationship. And although she only appears in a short scene and has almost no lines, I was struck by Kate O'Flynn as a prostitute Turner visits and sketches in a brothel; her face was wonderfully communicative of a sense of contempt for her clients, though she may also have stood out in a film otherwise mainly featuring older actors.
Sound design corner: the film-makers lavish great attention on the correct depiction of Turner's derisive snort.
I was also amused by how every time we saw the exterior of Turner's house, the same gentleman was walking by with his dog.
This is an Australian horror film. It is about a widowed mother and her troubled young son, who is obsessed with the idea that monsters are going to come and get him while he sleeps. His fears keep his mother awake at night and for much of the film she is in a sleep-deprived state. As someone blessed by an inability to sleep properly I empathised with her.
The film undergoes a transition when the son finds a storybook in the house about the Babadook, some kind of monster that comes for people when they sleep. The book has no author information but the illustrations seem to be about the mother and her son. And the book seems to change, with more text and illustrations appearing on hitherto blank pages. Nevertheless the film preserves an ambiguity as long as it can as to whether the whole business is just the woman suffering a breakdown triggered by sleep-deprivation or whether they are actually being stalked by a strange monster (spoiler: they are).
As a horror film, this is very effective. Without the use of jumps or things leaping out at you, it manages to communicate a sense of terrible dread and unease. At one point the film had me so on edge that I was genuinely wondering why I was putting myself through this kind of wringer. Light, sound, and a suburban house that mutates into a gothic mansion all work together to create an atmosphere of palpable evil. The ending is unusual, though. Without revealing the terrible secret, it does not end with the horror defeated or the horror triumphant; rather there is a strange accommodation reached with the demonic force.
Directed by Yann Demange, this is a film about a British squaddie (played by Gary Hook) sent to Belfast in 1971. You get the sense that like most of his unit, he had never previously heard of Belfast; their officer has to explain to them that they will still be in the United Kingdom. While out in West Belfast he becomes separated from his unit and has to try and get back home while being hunted by an IRA hit squad. I first became aware of it when I saw a poster for it while attending a folk horror conference in Belfast and it struck me that the concept has some similarities with all that folk horror business. The protagonist is an outsider in a location where things are strange, the locals unfriendly and alliances shifting. The urban setting is perhaps a new twist.
Because the film is told very much from the point of view of the soldier, there is relatively little sense of the politics and background of the Northern Ireland conflict. The viewer has to infer as much as they want to from conversations and things observed. While the best bits of the film might be the relatively few scenes in which the soldier is being chased around West Belfast, the film is nevertheless more than being a straight high octane actioner. By the end of it you do have a sense of the murky world of the struggle at that time, with undercover soldiers supplying bombs to (incompetent) loyalist paramilitaries and running double agents in the IRA factions.
The film begins with scenes in which the soldier is undergoing basic training in Britain. I was struck by how different these were to the training scenes in Full Metal Jacket, say. While the trainers were shouting at the trainees, a gratuitously abusive element seemed to be lacking and there was a sense that the training was about imparting skills that would keep soldiers alive rather than just breaking them mentally. Apart from the shifty undercover soldiers, the army is portrayed relatively positively, at least towards itself. The soldier's unit is headed by a dimwitted Rupert from central casting, but his heart does at least seem to be in the right place, and with the rank and file soldiers and NCOs there is a sense of them looking out for each other. The undercover soldiers and the more senior officers are different: they seem to have been morally corrupted by their role.
On Twitter I read Graham Linehan saying of the film that it suffers from having the main character becoming essentially inactive in the second half of the film. After actively seeking to stay alive in the first half he becomes almost entirely reactive, with his life and welfare relying on the decisions of others. In some ways that criticism is valid though it perhaps misses that by the second half the soldier has been through one incident of an extremely traumatic nature (physically and mentally) and is not really in a position to do very much. The change also works in plot terms as it allows for a widening of point of view, to the various British Army actors, to IRA cadres in West Belfast, and to the ordinary people of the city into whose lives he descends.
I have also heard one or two people grumbling about a film set during the Northern Ireland conflict taking the point of view of a British soldier (rather than, say, heroic members of the struggle for Irish freedom). They may have a point, in that it will be a while before anyone makes a film portraying the Lads as the heroes. But this film is too wise to the ambiguities of the Northern Ireland conflict to be a British equivalent of John Wayne's The Green Berets. And a film about a soldier lost alone in hostile territory is always going to be more interesting than one about people making bombs out of fertiliser in their attic.
The music is by David Holmes, who is himself from Northern Ireland, and is very impressive in context.
People have asked me why I am doing my World War 1 live blog. One inquirer in particular wondered whether I have been caught up in the commemoration frenzy and found myself stuck with a desire to mark the "brave sacrifice" of the men who fell in battle.
