“The Young Vibrate at a Different Frequency”: Mick Harvey, Serge Gainsbourg and going to gigs alone in your 40s. Or “Mick Harvey live at Under the Bridge London 25th March 2017.”

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Delirium Tremens, Dublin Stories, Hovel Press, Intoxicated Man, Intoxicated Women, Josh Savage, Mick Harvey, Music, Mute Records, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Odd fragments of biography, Pink Elephants, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Serge Gainsbourg, the two man travelling medicine show, Travel, Under the Bridge, Under the Bridge London, UTB London, writing

“The Young Vibrate at a Different Frequency”:
Mick Harvey, Serge Gainsbourg and going to gigs alone in your 40s. Or “Mick Harvey live at Under the Bridge London 25th March 2017.”

“My loves that have passed on, are blown away like autumn leaves..” – The Pervert’s Song.

I have been feeling old. How? Why?

Let me count the ways and break it down by the numbers.

1- I am 45 years old and I feel the 5 more than the 40. 40 is a landmark, the extra 5 is just an indication that the ageing process never stops, the months and years just keep on adding up.

2- I love combat sports and the best and worst thing about combat sports is that they deal in brutal truth.

When you are trying as hard as you can to bring someone to the point where they must submit to avoid being choked unconscious or having a limb snapped and that person is trying just as hard to do the same to you, you cannot fool yourself about the outcome. You achieve your goal or you don’t.

That is a profound sort of truth. One aspect of that truth is the fact that being 20 is different from being 40. Being 20 is better. Say what you like, dress it up as you will- 20 is better.

After a training session recently I was chatting to a warrior and wise man (same person) about the difficulties of sparring with younger guys- the sharpness of their movement and the speed of their decision-making. It’s hard and frustrating to contend with that when you are also contending with a stiffening body and diminishing hormones of your own; when all you have on your side is some guile and a mysterious thing called ‘old man strength’ – a type of dogged isometric strength that is closely related to stiffness.

“The young vibrate at a different frequency.”

My friend and teacher remarked.

That says it. The young vibrate at a different frequency. Watch them, it’s obvious… and it’s annoying.

3- Lemmy died, Leonard Cohen died! This is not ok. This should not happen.

This is the reason I decided to go to gigs this year after years of listening to music mostly recorded (if it isn’t the band I write the lyrics for), staying comfortably at home with my own things around me, with none of the hassle and expense of getting to and from gigs and dealing with large groups of people. I decided to see and listen to the artists and musicians I love live and in person while both they and I still can.

That means dragging my home-loving ass up to London from my home in the middle-of-nowhere Dorset, staying in little hotels of varying quality and hygiene, spending too much money for food that isn’t worth it and dealing with the frightening realities of the Tube.

It’s a lot to ask of an old man who could be at home with his records and CDs and itunes and Spotify.

4- The damn, dreaded drip.

When I have absolutely definitely finished peeing and then about a dessert spoon more appears from nowhere and goes where it shouldn’t.

God I hate that. It makes me feel as if the death of my libido is approaching. I can hear it dripping in the darkest, most insecure places in my mind, like Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. It says I have a limited time left as a man. It says the juices; sexual and creative, don’t last forever. It says the day is coming when I will be no more than a burden to the pack.

5- Missing friends. You get to my age you’ve probably lost at least one friend and by that I mean they have died. But you will also have friends living all over the place. You will have real friends who you never get to see. People you care about spread across the country or the world through work and family commitments.

You realise that the time you get to spend with them is ticking away too.

I could maybe combine going to a gig or two with meeting a friend or two.

So, partly as an antidote to all this ageing I decided to do stuff. You know; say yes to things, compete in grappling competitions, go to gigs and see the people who make the music I love before they or I die. Also try to meet up with old friends.

That’s the background to the long trip to London to see Mick Harvey.

(I was planning to meet one of those old friends before the gig but circumstances took him away. That’s what life does when you’re a real grown-up adult, it makes demands that have to be met.

It’s also why you have to keep trying; making and taking opportunities.)
—————————————————-

A little background on Mr. Harvey: I first saw him in the picture on the back of the album “Tender Prey” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds that was released in 1988 I think. He was one of the original members of the Bad Seeds and indeed one of the original members of The Birthday Party and even The Boys Next Door, the two bands Nick Cave was previously in. He and Nick Cave have worked together since they were in school. I use Nick Cave as a reference point; as I possibly do too often in life, because he is more well known, more famous and it should, I hope, position Mick Harvey for readers.

He has worked with Crime and the City Solution, Einstürzende Neubauten, P J Harvey; more people than I can name.

In short, Mick Harvey has been played a crucial role in the production of many of the best and most influential ‘alt-rock’ music made in the last thirty years, working with bands across the borders of geography and language.

He is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, musician and song-writer.

Recently Mr. Harvey has produced four records (Pink Elephants; Intoxicated Man; Delirium Tremens and Intoxicated Women) of songs by the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg.

So when I found out that he was playing a gig featuring the songs from those four albums at a venue called Under the Bridge in London I decided this was just the sort of thing I should be going to.

So, the 25th of March found me rocking up at Poole train station with my smallest backpack in tow.

I visited the public toilet and saw a syringe in one of the cubicles. That is something I have been seeing more and more of lately in the Bournemouth/ Poole area and there would seem to be a real increase in the number of people using heroin here.

The area around Poole rail station is filled with a number of large abandoned buildings which are clearly being used by homeless people and ‘chaotic drug users’ as squats and the whole place has a bit of a George A. Romero zombie feel about it. The situation doesn’t effect me like it did when I was young because I don’t have to live around it but I know the misery it causes and it makes me sad. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to run back to the Dorset woods and hide.

The train, of course, was diverted half way to Brighton and back again to cover for ‘planned engineering works’; a phrase only slightly less dreaded than ‘replacement bus service’

Still, I had a book to read, an audio book to listen to and my notebook to write in. The book is set in the ruins of Hamburg in 1947, the audio book, is largely set in the ruins of Ramadi in Syria and the book I am writing is about a child assassin so I was setting up the perfect state of mind for travelling to the great metropolis. Maybe I should have brought something sunnier.

A little background on London and me: London kicks my ass. It amuses London to do so. I never seem to get in and out of London without some minor trouble or disaster. I expect it now. I get off the train in Waterloo thinking ‘Ok London, what’s it to be this time?’ It’s a game we play, London and I, a game that London always wins.

This time London surprised me- everything went basically smoothly. The journey to Waterloo was long but steady; I got something to eat near the station that was nice and not too expensive (although I got grumpy about the fact that the price was printed on the menu with no ‘£’ and no pence, just numbers like 5. Five what? Five beans?); the tube form Embankment to West Brompton was not too crowded, easy to follow and the stations were pleasant- with flowers and everything.

I left the station anxious about finding my hotel. I was getting my A-Z out of my pocket and taking a deep breath as he walked though the door and… there was the hotel right in front of me.

It was a sixties, brutalist building looking a bit the worse for wear but then those buildings looked tired on the day after they were built so you shouldn’t judge.

It seemed to me to be a family run hotel. Things were done in a somewhat old-fashioned way. There are quite a few of these establishments around London, where things are a little more individual and idiosyncratic than your average Travelodge or Holiday Inn.

The good thing about these hotels is that I like to pretend to be in a 70s German New Wave film (whenever I can really) and they really lend themselves to that. The old-fashioned décor, the process of registering at the desk with passport details etc, the slightly scary lifts that are just about big enough for two and have that inner and outer door combination like a crocodile’s double eyelid.

I checked in and got to my little room, and it was a very little room but a clean one so that would do fine.

Ten minutes later I was on my way out again, on a scouting mission to make sure I could find the venue (and continuing to pretend I am a detective in a 1970s German movie, pounding the black and white streets of Hamburg or Berlin). I did fine going down North End Road but then went right where I should have gone left and ended up nearly at the King’s Road.

I took a deep breath, looked around, assessed the situation and make a decision. Turn back to the left and look for Stamford Bridge. Five minutes later I was in front of Chelsea’s football stadium. I asked a security guard, who was keen to ask me what I was doing wandering gormlessly about, where Under the Bridge might be.

“You mean that,” he said, not unkindly, pointing to large neon sign that said ‘Under the Bridge’.

“Yep,” I replied, “I’ll be back later.” ..and I departed mysteriously.

On the way back to the hotel I bought some pasta, a veggie samosa and two beers in an M & S foodhall and took them back to my hotel. Nothing if not classy me!

By six o’clock I was back out on the road and heading to a pub half way to the venue for some chips and a pint. I took my time and pushed off for the gig just after seven.

The venue is friendly. The door staff are really polite and genuinely pleasant to chat to. In fact they probably wished I was less friendly but I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day. Downstairs there are photo prints on the walls that you should take some time to look over if you are ever there. I was particularly taken by a series prints of Sadé (Ah, memories). And this one of The Buzzcocks.

I get myself a comforting pint of Guinness although I am starting to feel a bit tired and am wondering if I have already had too much to drink.

I sit myself down at a booth and have a good look around. The place is filling up.

It quickly becomes clear that none of us here is young, except for the support act who sings his own songs and works well with the crowd. His name is Josh Savage and I find it particularly endearing that he was selling raw honey as well as his own album after his set.

Here is a video for one of his singles. He told a good story about making it, I’ll let you hear it from him if you go see him some time-

Looking around there is no way to deny that we are an older crowd for sure. There are an awful lot of bad postures, even outright orthopaedic disasters limping around the venue. I don’t say that to be cruel. In my proper job I am a Physical Therapist and I have feelings of real concern looking about me. I feel like lining some people up and getting to work.

Time is ticking on am I’m on my second Guinness and beginning to feel like it’s getting to my bedtime. Then the band start to take the stage. There’s James Johnston from Gallon Drunk. Now I’m getting excited and waking up again. Mick Harvey comes on stage and the music gets going with that song about the ticket-puncher in the Paris Metro losing his mind and obsessively taking about holes until he starts to consider putting another little hole in his head with a rifle. That’s the territory we are inhabiting here.

Mick Harvey’s approach to performance is tactical. Much like Brian Eno he sings like a producer, like a scientist. His performance as a singer is not showy (nor are the performances of the two other singers on stage) He builds an emotionally affecting whole by layering all the sounds available to him, the voice (his own and others) being only one part of that.

Like the crowd he is also getting on in years and in between being impossibly cool he has some trouble with his specs.

Gainsbourgh himself, as a lyricist was clearly concerned about ageing and the death of desire. He was constantly engaged with questions of desire, often personal and pressing but a great deal of his songs take place at a distance from his own person also- either in the past or in the notional.

Through it all the lyrics reveal a character determined to keep living, to hang on to the core of life long past youth, long past good form and decorum, past the point where desire becomes disgust (and for Serge it always turns to disgust or absurdity) for its own sake. There is always this conflict, this attraction and repulsion: and ageing brings it closer and closer to you. Flavours get more complex even if palates don’t.

I think this was the first evening of a tour and the band loosens up and gets better and better as the set progresses through songs like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “New York USA”. By the encores the band is blazing, sounding like a combination of The Velvet Underground and The Dirty Three.

After the gig I walk back to my hotel in the cool air enjoying a feeling I haven’t had it along time; surfing the wave of energy that you take from watching a fine band live. It’s hard work getting through the extras, the ‘everything around’ art, travel and living as we get older but that doesn’t kill the passion and the love of what is really important in art and life.

So the (slightly clichéd) advantages of age are there: experience, sophistication, best of all wit (Harvey and Gainsbourg have a genuinely pleasing grown-up wit about them); but there’s more than that, there’s old man strength, that dogged ability to hold on.

And maybe us older folks vibrate at a deeper frequency…

..No? Well, it was worth a try.

——————————————————————————————-

Next morning things are quiet and London is at its best, just waking as if from the river bank up; from history as much as from Saturday night. Before I get the train for the long, diverted journey back to Poole I take a stroll down the Southbank and happen to spot a reason why I might just be making another trip soon…

 

 

 

Jamie Lynch is an Irishman living in England. He is the author of numerous short stories, poems, child’s stories and a novel entitled “Opinion Pieces”. He has been published online and in print. He also writes the lyrics for the band “The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show”, who play at the crossroads where David Cronenberg and Merle Haggard meet. He maintains a blog at www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com.

 

Twitter: @HovelPress

 

Read for free: “Bodies” https://thefictionpool.com/2017/01/15/bodies-by-jamie-lynch/; “The Night I got lost on the way home from China” http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/02/the-night-i-got-lost-on-the-way-home-from-china/; “The Pleasures of Reading Short Stories” http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/12/the-pleasures-of-reading-short-stories/

& any- and every- single thing on http://www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com

 

The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/medicine-show-136232208

 

Children’s Stories on Kindle: ”The True Story of how Plopinton got its name” https://www.amazon.co.uk/true-story-how-Plopington-name-ebook/dp/B00DY8S2XM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361666&sr=8-1&keywords=The+True+story+of+how+plopington+got+its+name

“Small tales of little creatures” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-tales-little-creatures-James-ebook/dp/B008NALXTG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361727&sr=8-1&keywords=Small+tales+of+little+creatures

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Iggy & Me; Part 4

Tags

Hovel Press, Iggy Confidential, Iggy Pop, James Lynch, Nick Cave, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Odd fragments of biography, Rock Music, Songs, The Stooges, Trailer Home

4-

‘I was born in a trailer camp, the days were cold and the night’s were damp.”- Iggy Pop

The boy who would become, on and off, Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg near Ann Arbour in Michigan. He was raised in a 500 square foot trailer home situated by a cornfield by a mother and father he describes as inspirationally decent, hardworking and kind.

This is the problem, for me, with biography- there is too much to it. Those first two sentences have so much in them, so much resonance and potential that they make my temples throb and my pulse race.

How am I to properly tease out and develop all the history and emotions implied by the picture they paint?

How am I to interweave all that with the bells it rings in my own psyche?

In fiction you can play around with the scenes you choose; the facts of an actual life are so demanding, the responsibility so great.

“There should be a painting,” that is my first thought. A painting would capture this so much better:

The Osterberg family outside their trailer home with the golden corn waving in the background. The father is study, steady of gaze but not aggressive. He has a neat, short haircut and neat clothes. The mother is smiling, her shoulder length hair is gently held back from her face with a single pin. She too is neat and combines a look of strength and gentleness.

A simple, clear painting. Perhaps with the perspective slightly flattened; nothing too dramatic, nothing that draws too much attention, but enough to give the viewer a slight ‘iconistic’ feeling. A certain sense of transparency that makes the viewer feel that they might see through the painting, for just a moment, and catch a glimpse of something transcendent.

And then my mind skips, as it does so often, like a vinyl record. I wonder why Americans are so keen on describing their homes in terms of square feet. Does it come from the abundance of space? Would it not be more likely to occur in countries where space it at a premium, like Japan? Is it some kind of shadow of the urge to occupy space expressed in the move west, the cowboy movies of my youthful Saturday mornings?

It puts me in mind of a story that the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski tells in an interview from the book “Kieslowski on Kieslowski” published by Faber. He had made a film called “Three CoIours: Red”. It was the last in a series on the symbolism of the colours of the French flag.

The film was about to be released in the States and there was a problem. The problem was that in one scene a young female character, after the break up of a relationship goes and visits an older man. Apparently, American test audiences found this confusing. Who was this old guy? What was she doing there?

It was, of course, her father. The director didn’t feel there was any need to make that explicit but perhaps there was such a need.

On the plane on the way to the States to try to fix the problem he was sitting beside a European manufacturer of windows. This man also had business to do in America and a story to tell.

His firm had manufactured windows in Europe for generations. They were very proud of the quality of their work and they offered a lifetime guarantee to back that up. Not long ago they had started doing business in America. Business had not gone well at first. They were puzzled. Did they not offer the highest quality window at a fair price with a lifetime guarantee? What did these Americans want?

Then an American business colleague suggested that they should reduce the length of the guarantee to twenty-five years. It didn’t really make sense but it was worth a try. Anything was worth a try at this point. They did it; and sales of windows went up. They reduced the guarantee still further, to fifteen years, and sales went up still more.

Now they were doing a roaring trade and he was on his way to New York to organize the legal end of reducing the guarantee still further.

Form this, the businessman had taken a lesson about Americans; they did not enjoy the feeling that they would be in the same home for a lifetime. He thought they were motivated by the unconscious desire to be always moving to a bigger and better place- more square feet. He suggested that the director’s problem may be that the idea of one, fixed home might not be the most immediately available to the American psyche.

Who knows? At lot of ‘maybes’ and large generalizations there but I find it interesting. I would genuinely appreciate suggestions, especially from my American readers.

Young Jim Osterberg’s father was a veteran of WWII, educated on the GI bill and by the time Jim arrived in the world, a high School teacher.

The topic of fathers and sons hits home hard here. Mr. Osterberg was a man of intelligence, imagination and ambition who, like a lot of people for his generation, found that when he should have been fulfilling those ambitions he was off to fight the Nazis and when he got back it was time to settle down and be responsible.

I should say that no doubt the same thing and worse was probably true for mothers. It was true for that generation of Americans; it was equally through for my parents generation of Irish. I notice it was true for people like Nick Cave, whose father sounds very much like Iggy’s. It is probably a good bet that if someone is able to spend a decent amount of their time and energy on expressing their thoughts and feelings, exercising their artistic muscles, there was likely to be a generation before who sacrificed their opportunity to do the same thing so that they could work jobs and keep homes that nurtured within their children from a young age the feeling, the expectation that they had the chance and the right to try to do fulfilling work and even follow an artistic path if they choose. The people who open those doors make up many ‘great generations’.

Of course you still have to put the work in, and it helps if there is some support outside the family.

It seems that Jim Osterberg found that in the public school system in the Ann Arbour area which was an example of excellent progressive educational programming. He mixed there with the sons and daughters of ‘the great and the good’. The children of Robert McNamara attended his school for example. From a young age, Jim thought he should find a way, a decent way, to “syphon off some of that power and money”.

The Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott (a.k.a. Rock Action), who would become the guitarist and drummer in the Stooges, also attended Iggy’s high school. They were not the children of ‘the great and good’, they were what people called ‘Townies’ back then, which gets me to wondering how a word can carry with it such weight of condescension even when you have never lived in an environment where it was current.

The Ashetons would be dropped off by their mother at the back door, walk through the school and out the front door again. Presumably to go stand on a corner and smoke. My grandmother would have called them ‘corner boys’ or ‘guttersnipes’, I think.

But that’s not exactly how it started.

It started with Jim Osterberg learning to play the drums, or just starting to play the drums, he taught himself with endless hours of practice in his trailer home.

In fact his bedroom was too small to fit his drums into so he took over the living area. After about a year of that his parents ceded the large bedroom to him and moved their own sleeping quarters to his child’s bedroom. Parents again.

That’s it for this instalment. Next time we’ll see where all that noise in the trailer home so productively lead.

Jamie Lynch is an Irishman living in England. He is the author of numerous short stories, poems, child’s stories and a novel entitled “Opinion Pieces”. He has been published online and in print. He also writes the lyrics for the band “The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show”, who play at the crossroads where David Cronenberg and Merle Haggard meet. He maintains a blog at www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com.

 

Twitter: @HovelPress

 

Read for free: “Bodies” https://thefictionpool.com/2017/01/15/bodies-by-jamie-lynch/; “The Night I got lost on the way home from China” http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/02/the-night-i-got-lost-on-the-way-home-from-china/; “The Pleasures of Reading Short Stories” http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/12/the-pleasures-of-reading-short-stories/

& any- and every- single thing on http://www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com

 

The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/medicine-show-136232208

And the debut album “Weeding out the Wicked” is released worldwide on April 28^th 2017.

 

Children’s Stories on Kindle: ”The True Story of how Plopinton got its name” https://www.amazon.co.uk/true-story-how-Plopington-name-ebook/dp/B00DY8S2XM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361666&sr=8-1&keywords=The+True+story+of+how+plopington+got+its+name

“Small tales of little creatures” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-tales-little-creatures-James-ebook/dp/B008NALXTG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361727&sr=8-1&keywords=Small+tales+of+little+creatures

I was a slave to big stationery

Tags

fragments, notebooks, notes, obsveration, Odd fragments of biography, stationery, Travel

It has been suggested by the likes of David Cronenberg and W. S. Burroughes that human beings may simply be devices thought up by water, or in another formulation by clever viruses, to move the water or viruses around from place to place.

Regarding myself I feel it is more likely that I was invented in order to carry notebooks around from place to place- and back again.

When I was very young I made note of the numbers on houses as I was wheeled past in my buggy… It is perhaps better if I leave it to others to make some sense of that.

All my life I have carried notebooks and made notes. I think it is true to say that I have probably quite a fetish for stationery. I’m ashamed to admit that Moleskine brand notebooks set me all a quiver.

I’m going to share some of the notes I’ve made over the years on the blog in the hope, probably the vain hope, that there may be something interesting in there which I don’t need to stitch into a plot (and ‘oh god, a novel needs a plot’, to borrow from E M Forster)

This is something I wrote in a notebook in the later half of the 1990s; the most miserable time of my life, so it may say more about me than the subject.

My grandmother’s garden was a mess. She never did any work out there. There were roses grown mutant huge and frightening. There were rhubarbs and some kind of lettuce or cabbage, never harvested, never eaten. There was a coal shed and a tool shed, painted green. In the shed there was leather glue and leather and the smell of them.
There was a lilac tree at the back lane.
The only thing she ever did in that garden was kill. She killed snails and slugs. She used salt, it melted them like witches. It was one of her great pleasures. And she had to go out there to get coal.

She had an “under the stairs”, a little dark space that was well, under the stairs and in there she had string or twine as it was called, probably still is (for those of them left). 

She had a one bar extra long heater attached to the wall. High up there.

Her kitchen table was pushed right up against the wall so one side was permanently disabled. The side that you could sit at, you couldn’t sit at, it wasn’t allowed. 

She made toast over the open fire and liked to think we didn’t know she smoked- menthol cigarettes. 

I used to like to hide under the chairs in her living room. I got stuck under there once. I wonder if any of me was left under that chair, I still think about that room a lot.

A long series of [bright] disappointments- encounters with Art and the occasional artist… Part two

Tags

Bad Seeds, Music, Nick Cave, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Odd fragments of biography, Rock Music

Part two- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (and the ‘Bad Seeds’ part is important)

Unusually, I know exactly when this happened- because it’s printed on the ticket. It was the Second of May, 1992. The doors apparently opened at 7.30pm.

Those doors opened into the SFX, the St. Francis Xavier Hall, in the good auld north inner city of Dublin. The SFX was like a school hall, very basic. It was another relatively small room filling with some relatively very unstable personalities.

A large skin head pushed his way to the front of the crowd and froze in place with his fingers gripping the edge of the stage. There was a clear and not unpleasant feeling of confrontation in the room and that feeling deepened, seriously, when the Bad Seeds took the stage.

It took a little while for them to get going but when they did.. well, it was like when the levy broke. It felt like the entire enterprise could collapse at any moment. Like a drunk sprinting, falling forward and barely maintaining balance. Like an army charging, running on adrenalin, terrified of what is ahead but unable to cease its terrible forward momentum.

It’s a characteristic of powerful live bands that the band members always look unusually tall (Even Iggy pop, who is famously ‘only five foot one’, looks pretty tall on stage). Most of the Bad Seeds are tall but on stage that night they looked like giants. Blixa Bargeld was so thin and wasted he looked like a sky-scaper without proper foundation, held up by the magic of the CNS. When there was a problem with his battered guitar and he turned to the side and raised his arms to someone off stage in frustration he looked like an eagle or maybe even a phoenix. I am told the Phoenix and he are friends.

That was the night that the Bad Seeds were fixed in my mind as something essential and beautifully not a lot has changed since then.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UyDqULz9ECc

A long series of [bright] disappointments- encounters with art… and the occasional artist.

Tags

Aki Kaurismaki, Dublin Film, Dublin Film Festival, European Film, Film, Odd fragments of biography

Part One- Aki Kaurismaki

Sometimes the event is as important in fixing the work of art in your memory as the work itself.

There is the well-rehearsed story of the premiere of ‘The Rites of Spring’ which was accompanied by riots. Although it seems that ‘riots’ were not at all uncommon at performances at that time I’m sure the people who attended that night’s performance when the violence was particularly intense will have had the experience burned into their minds in a way that fused the music and the physical sensation so that they could never be separated.

The first Aki Kaurismaki film I saw was during the Dublin Film Festival of 1992 or 1993. It was ‘La Vie de Boheme’, his version of the classic opera.

Sitting in the row in front of me was Michael Nyman and his wife. Nyman looked like he had a very dodgy 70s perm but the feeling of being a cool sophisticate I got from sitting near him in the cinema was not damaged in any way by that.

After the film Aki Kaurismaki was interviewed my Michael Dwyer, who was then the film reviewer for The Irish Times. I didn’t respect Michael Dwyer so much at the time because of my own immaturity and insecurity but I started to respect him as I should during this interview which was very difficult for him and he handled very well. He brought out the entertaining best in Kaurismaki in a quiet but very skilful way.

Kaurismaki himself looked like a pig with long, greasy hair which had been feed entirely on alcohol and cigarettes. He rocked on his chair, drinking direct from a bottle of champagne. He was gloriously drunk and performing drunk (you could tell he was practised). There was something of the risen ghost of Fassbinder about him.

He referred to each of his films as a particular kind of masterpiece. When a female audience member accused him of being sexist because the main female character in ‘La Vie de Boheme’ is the only one who dies. He replied that in the context of the film dying was probably the best outcome any character could hope for and besides he had already made his feminist masterpiece in ‘The Match Factory Girl’; which is a genuine masterpiece by the way. He was funny, difficult, iconoclastic, in and out of control.

You could clearly see that Kaurismaki lived his life like he made his films and that that commitment, which must have cost him a great deal in his personal life and his health, makes him one of the most interesting and important filmmakers in European cinema.

Kaurismaki has been ploughing his own row for many years in a way that few people have. He was quiet for a while and I’ve been paying less attention to the workings of fringe European cinema so it brought back a lot of good memories and stirred some excitement when I saw posters last autumn for ‘La Havre’ a brand new Kaurismaki film- and in the cinema too.

I started a bit of a Facebook campaign to get someone to go see it with me but in the end I went on my own.  The average age of the audience was well past 50 and I guess I’m not too far off that myself. It got me thinking that Kaurismaki has fallen out of notice for a lot of film goers, there was no real excitement about the release of his new film.

It was a small cinema in the BFI which always makes me feel a bit claustrophobic but when the film started it was all ok again. Guess what, the main character is one of the characters from ‘La Vie de Boheme’, older and downer and outer than before.

The film is slow, very low budget, warm, funny, humane and beautiful. Michael Nyman wasn’t sitting in front of me this time but that, as it turns out, wasn’t necessary. I’ll remember it for a long time.

Have a look at the below for a taste of Aki Kaurismaki’s singular vision.

The New Writer in Residence

Tags

bible, Odd fragments of biography, Storms, Writer in Residence

“Ladies and Gentlemen; would you welcome the new writer in residence.”- Momus

The affects of bad weather on the social behaviour of society’s upper echelons.

For three years I have been in a kind of Writer in Residence programme the technical details of which are not important here.

The first year I spent living and working in a rock pool in a seaside town on the south coast of England. I learned to live on what could be found on the beach and to co-exist with the strange and sometimes dangerous Pixie folk who occasionally came to meet in a copse on the cliffs over looking my station.

The second year found me in a large, doorless and windy barn on a large private estate in Northhamptonshire. I learned to hide foxes from the hunt and to kill myxomatoid rabbits with one quick stroke of a stick. I have become very fond of sticks during this period.

This last year I have been living in a hovel in Windsor Great Park. I have learned a lot about small rodents and may soon be able to mobilise a good sized army of rats, mice, voles and shrews, if I can teach them to get along. The friday night fights between the 2nd Rat and 1st Mouse battalions have become rather too disruptive of late.

The accommodation is cramped and damp. The wind comes in through any number of large and small holes in door and wall.

When things get too much, as they sometimes do and I find myself not having shaved or washed for perhaps a week or two; when I find myself wistfully day dreaming of being found someday naked and squatting in the chest cavity of a missing tourist I find a particular stray dog who exists rather more successfully than me in the park and we walk and talk for a hour or two. He sets my mind aright with his quiet wisdom and all is well.

I am greatly exposed to the elements here. The roof leaks, the walls only make a show of keeping the outside outside. My only means of transport walking and bicycle and everywhere worth going a long journey away. I notice the weather like a prehistoric hunter gatherer might.

Therefore I have been taken up completely by the recent storms. I crouch in my hovel avoiding drips and listening to branches falling and crashing onto the roof. The weather has colonised my mental landscape completely.

God saw that human sickness was great on earth and that human hearts contrived nothing but wicked schemes all day long.

The sound of the rain on the roof, the sound of a big, thundering bass guitar, the words of Genesis bubbling up from somewhere in the dustbin of my consciousness and my friend the dog nowhere to be found.

Of every clean animal you must take seven pairs, a male and a female; of the unclean animals, you must take one pair.

Why take even one pair of the unclean animals? Was it to have something familiar to look down on right after the flood? At least it gives hope to us all, the most unclean, my rats, mice, voles, shrews and me.

The park is in a very affluent area. The percentage of children hereabouts who wear Barbour jackets and Hunter Wellington boots must be amongst the highest in the country. We are bordered by Ascot and Windsor- more than once I have been blasted form the road by a dust storm blown up by the passing of the Queen’s speeding convoy of bullet proof Range Rovers and Bentleys.

This proximity to people with money, much of it old, has given me an opportunity to study their behaviour more closely than ever before. It is true, they are different. In terms of the way they interact with strangers in a park they seem to be ruled by a strange axiom, the less likely you are to have been the victim of violent crime the more likely you are to fear it.

It can’t be that I am surprising them. The roads here are long and straight, you get a Capability Brown view on everything, and I am quite luminous on occasion.

It seems to me that if you are approaching someone on a long, straight road, there is no one else in view and you watch each other grow from specs in the distance to full grown people like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia with more bikes and fewer camels, the decent, polite thing to do is to acknowledge the other’s existence. A small, a nod, a simple ‘hello’ will do.

Surely it is stranger to try to pretend the stranger isn’t there but that is what the majority of the people I meet in the park do. They frown, they look away, they look disgusted, they look like they have just recognised my face from a wanted poster. Even their Labradors and Spaniels (standard issue round here) turn their wet noses up at me.

Another category of person I meet is the Warden and Ranger. These are the men who stop me and ask me what my business is. Complicated explanations of the Writer in Residence programme ensue. The dominate feeling in these interactions is fear. The wardens approach aggressively because they live in a state of near constant low level fear of some kind of nameless tartar hordes who will ravage the park and for whom they will not be able. They approach in the way inexperienced men do to a task they suspect will find them wanting.

Rain, however, really heavy and miserable ran changes some of this. Firstly, I meet fewer people all told but the ones who are walking or cycling become much more friendly. Everyone returns my greetings with a ‘we must be crazy to be out here in this hey’ sort of grin. Everything becomes much more pleasant, social differences are briefly forgotten and the unclean animal is invited onto the ark.

The wardens still suspect I’m up to no good but while the rain hammers down the atmosphere in my current part of the world becomes a much more pleasant one in which to be building my ark.