Slenderfire-blog - A Slender Fire

I need you all to stop what you’re doing and look at these pictures of George and Ringo

Sugar Street

My Goodreads review of Sugar Street, the third in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Black Swan edition, translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan)

Two main things struck me while I read Sugar Street: firstly that while I don't know Arabic, I got a strong sense of the elegant economy and poetry of the written language from this translation. The second thing was how much traditional Egyptian middle-class life in the 1920s and 30s as depicted in the book reminded me of Irish culture up until relatively recently. While on the surface there wouldn't seem to be many similarities, the conservative, family-focused, deeply religious patriarchy in which mothers dominated the home felt very familiar. Even the way religion infused the language and thinking of the characters, even the nonbelieving ones, was very like the way Irish culture was for much of the 20th century a Catholic culture. Like in Ireland, families observed religion, gossiped about neighbours, argued about the politics of a young nation and mothers hoped for a civil service career for their sons and a good marriage for their daughters. 

The story covers a long period of time and is a little episodic - there were many subplots that could have been explored more, and some main plots that could have been trimmed. I had limited patience for Kamal's endless romantic vacillating, but was engaged by his nephew Ahmad's adventures working for a Marxist magazine and trying to break free of the constraints of traditional middle-class life. 

Politics runs through the story constantly, as the characters debate and wonder where the new country will go once the double-crossing English are finally gone. It might be advisable to have a wikipedia entry on pre-war Egyptian history open as you read as the various parties and individuals are mentioned without backstory (and there's no reason why they should be, considering the novel was written first for an Egyptian audience.)

The Way to Santiago

Anyone who undertakes all or part of the Camino de Santiago will be familiar with the question 'Why are you doing it?', implying that everyone who laces on a pair of hiking boots and shoulders a heavy backpack for the long tramp across Northern Spain has a clear-cut mission in mind for undertaking this 1,000 year old pilgrimage. In reality, few have one concrete reason for doing it, or even any reason, and those who set out with one intention in mind nearly always have a completely different experience than what they expected. Particularly for those who expect some kind of miraculous 'road to Damascus' moment, the sheer banality of the trudge, during which few thoughts more profound than 'I'm hungry' or 'My feet hurt' tend to occupy the mind, can be a rude surprise. But sticking it out does lead to a strangely satisfying experience, both more ordinary and more transcendent than what the enlightenment-seekers expect: the sense of wholeness that comes from perseverance. 

This ordinary extraordinariness is the subject of Emilio Estévas' film The Way, clearly a labour of love for the director and his father Martin Sheen, who plays the lead role. Sheen is Tom Avery, a taciturn California opthamologist with few interests outside work and golf at the country club. Tom's son Daniel (played by Estévas himself) is the exact opposite, a wanderer who abandons his doctorate studies to travel the world, much to his father's disapproval. A flashback scene shows Tom telling Daniel 'My life may not look like much to you, but it's the life I chose', to which Daniel responds 'You don't choose life Dad, you live it.'

Daniel's living of life takes a tragic turn when he embarks on the Camino in southern France, and ignoring warnings about inclement weather, is caught in a storm in the Pyrenees and killed. The story of the film follows a shellshocked Tom as he travels to France to identify his son's body, has the remains cremated and in an uncharacteristically spontaneous decision, continues the walk himself, depositing handfuls of Daniel's ashes along the way. Like all peregrinos (pilgrims) Tom encounters cranky alburgue (hostel) wardens, crowded dorms filled with snoring fellow walkers, sore feet and even sleeping rough on his journey. Along the way he is first annoyed by, and eventually forms a grudging friendship with, a party-loving Dutchman, a neurotic Canadian and an loudmouth Irish travel writer. The foursome encounter various obstacles, including robbery, arguments and even an arrest, but finally reach the cathedral of Santiago, each having learned far more than they intended or expected to.

The Way is filmed along the real Camino route and is wonderfully accurate about the day-to-day realities of doing the walk - the beautiful countryside, the physical privations and the un-pilgrim-like behaviour of many fellow travellers. Eccentrics abound, and one of Tom's biggest challenges is learning to tolerate people he'd never meet in his ordinary life. In a way, the walk teaches him to understand Daniel's waywardness, by revealing how stimulating it can be to talk to people (even annoying, half-crazy people) that one would normally never encounter.

All the characters are profoundly sad in their own way, yet their capacity to appreciate the absurd carries them along and saves them from complete self-absorption. The uniquely communal feeling of the walk, where people join up, drift apart and reunite along the road without the need for mobile phones or internet is perfectly evoked. There are frequent lapses into sentimentality and some clunky dialogue, but the characters (with the possible exception of James Nesbitt's over-the-top Jack) are believable and humanly flawed, and the brotherly friendship they form over three months, full of humour and bickering and understated affection, is beautifully shown. A character tells Tom halfway through 'This walk is nothing to do with religion', meaning that while many may expect miracles, it is the very non-miraculous nature of the characters' development that is the point of the Camino. Like so many peregrinos, Tom reaches the end of the route fundamentally the same person, but touched by a profound sense of acceptance, kindness, love and wonder, a state that comes at him obliquely while his intentions are elsewhere.

Beatlemania was fun but now it's time for beatledepression

crossing a picket line, abusing striking workers AND littering, all before 9am smh. No one deserved a slap more that day.

Also not convinced by that teacher's assertion that Lennon would be on the picket with them, unfortch. Rich guys are still rich guys.

Anyway, important to remember that wealth is the greatest corrupter, even of our faves.

What did goddess mean by this?

Stories from the city

In Our Time recently had a great two-part episode on the history of the city, charting the economic and political rise of cities from Ur to Bogota. Some of the information was familiar, and some quite unexpected. For example, after the fall of Rome heavily populated cities became a minority, and London didn’t reach first-century Roman population levels until the beginning of the 19th century. The political architecture of 18th century cities was illuminative – Hausmann’s wide boulevards were designed as much to prevent rebellious working classes from erecting barricades as they were for aesthetic reasons. The earliest ‘gated communities’ were the Georgian townhouses of 18th-century London and Dublin, where the mews at the back gave access to carriages, so that their inhabitants need never step on to the main street outside and encounter any of the ordinary inhabitants of the city. But cities were often reclaimed by the very people who they were designed to control – New Delhi was designed with Hausmann-esque boulevards after the Indian Rebellion of the 1850s in a concentrated effort to consolidate imperial power, however after independence in 1947 Lutyens’ architecture was celebrated and the city accepted as a key part of India’s history. Similar accomodations with the symbols of past conquest have occured in Dublin and Kingston. And there’s no doubt that a dense concentration of people, while often leading to poverty and disease, is a significant factor in the development of revolutionary ideals and a vision of a fairer society for all – Engels’ Manchester and early 20th century Paris and Moscow being key examples. Part of the second programme focused on the astonishing effect the development of the railways had on British cities, particularly London. One commentator referred to the light-speed adoption of railway travel as the equivalent of an ‘atomic age’ and the analogy is not exxagerated – within 30 years London and Paris had evolved from cities which relied on horse-drawn carriages to ones with mass under- and overground transit systems. This had the effect of finally bringing the rich into almost direct contact with the poor masses, as the engraving above by Dore reveals. Bridges ran directly over slum tenements, leaving the passengers in no doubt as to the conditions the inhabitants lived in. Many poor people were evicted from their homes without compensation in the early days of the railways, yet ironically it was the social mixture and opportunities for mobility brought about by those same railways that later helped increase employment opportunities, and subesequently, aspiration. Modern cities were analysed too, with a fascinating parallel drawn between the development of Los Angeles as a car city in the 1930s and its imitation by South American new cities like Mexico and Bogota. One contributor broke past the usual cliches about the relentless ugliness of modern cities – an argument that has been pitched against all new building since probably the days of Ur – and described how run-down slums in Bogota have evolved into respectable neighbourhoods after the introduction of good public transport. He seemed to be siding with the unfashionable but hopeful view that regeneration is always possible where people are concentrated together, even in desperate slums, and it is good planning, support and an understanding that millions in the developing world would rather live in cities than in the country that are needed to improve cities, not hand-wringing over their lack of beauty. Human life is messy and complex, therefore our cities are too, but that’s no excuse for neglect and doom-mongering. I would have liked more analysis of the cultural life of cities, and the greatest city of all, New York, was barely touched upon, but overall the series was extraordinarily comprehensive and informative. Above all, the history of cities is the history of humanity, a story in equal parts unequal, cruel, thrilling and wonderful. As Velutus says in Shakespeare’s Corialunus: ‘What is the city but the people?’ Listen to In Our Time: Cities here.

Have One On Me review

In anticipation of Tuesday’s gig, here (finally) is my review of Have One On Me:

It’s been over three months of gradual (gradually becoming constant) listening and finally I’m in a position to deliver a full assessment of Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom’s latest album. My initial reactions were not very favourable – I found her newly softened voice somewhat insipid and the exhibitionist sleeve pictures off-putting – but a lot of this negativity is part of any reaction to a new work from an artist I hugely respect. When faced with change in our idols, we tend to stubbornly retrench, refusing to see anything good in the new. I was similarly cool towards Ys at first, before the spell was cast.

And this spell is the secret to Newsom’s talent. She can conceivably be compared to some contemporary singers, writers and composers, and certainly has drawn inspiration from a huge variety of sources, but like all the best artists she creates a world that is entirely unique and that can only be appreciated on its own terms. Throughout her three full-length albums she has maintained certain thematic consistencies, such as immersion in the natural world, a love of wordplay and elaborate language, a kind of timeless musical dreaminess, acute observations on key philosophical questions and an unapologetic celebration of femininity. Despite the different musical styles of the three works – The Milk-Eyed Mender, Ys and the current album – the continuity and development of these themes mark each one out as uniquely Newsomesque. This is her world, and the listener is a guest in that world.

It’s impossible not to be drawn into this world once you take the time to listen closely to her words and harp playing. Like many who inhabit a heightened, mysterious artistic sphere, Newsom seems quite normal and placid in real life. The songs on Have One On Me are more emotionally direct than anything she’s written before, and clearly inspired by real-life events, but it would be simplistic to take them as a straightforward commentary on Joanna Newsom the person. Instead they are a kind of alternative reality, where the songs’ nameless narrator sings of grandiose love, cataclysmic betrayal and the joy of sheer existence, occupying strange liminent spaces between solidity and air, music and silence, dreams and reality.

The songs vary from heavily orchestrated epics to almost silent, harp-driven elegies. There is a huge variety of instrumentation running through the album, to the point where it almost seems distorted and confused, but Newsom knows what she is doing – a complete listen, though time-consuming, reveals that not a note or a line in this work is accidental. (Headphones are also recommended for listening, part of the reason it underwhelmed me at first was the way much of the musical complexity was lost through traditional stereo speakers.)

Newsom has alluded in interviews before to her albums being inspired by a different element, and she returned to that theme in a recent interview with the Times when she said of Have One On Me that it is “earth and dirt, very grounded”. Certainly, themes of home, while strong on all her previous work, are the carrying force of this triple-CD opus. She returns again and again to the theme of pastoral home, whether in the form of an allegory like in ‘81′, or directly, as in “Occident”, where she sings ‘to leave your home and your family/for some delusion of property – well I can’t go…’.

However, home is not a place of unambigiuous peace. ‘In California’ – placed pointedly at the dead centre of the album – presents the narrator fleeing the ‘trouble and sorrow’ of the world by resolutely ‘abandoning the thought of anywhere but home’. This flight is not joyful, rather it is a denial of life’s fullness, emphasised by recurring references to loss and heartbreak and the statement ‘I am no longer afraid of anything – save the life that here awaits’. Even the most stalwart homebirds can’t hide away forever, and must face the confusion and strangeness of the wider world. The narrator loves her home, but comes to understand that: ‘I am native to it, but I’m overgrown’.

An elusive man is the next most important character in this work, after the constantly present narrator. He stars in the opening track, ‘Easy’ where the hazy joy of lying in bed with a lover is tainted by the narrator’s knowledge that her all-consuming love is not fully returned. The beloved’s ambiguity leads the narrator to ever wilder declarations of undying love ‘I was born to love, and I intend to love you’, ‘Pluck every last daisy clean, till only I may love you’ and so on. Themes of self-effacement in the name of love pop up again and again in the album, most notably in that track where she declares ‘you must meet me to see me, I am barely here’. Similarly, the narrator frequently refers to herself as a fragile creature, a ‘little clock that trembles on the hour’ in ‘In Califiornia’ and ‘your little nurse’ or a ‘princess of Kentucky’ with ‘ankles bound in gauze’ in ‘Go Long’. Yet the album as a whole does not reveal a personality that is likely to to be swallowed up by another, and sharp irony and wit, as well as affection, come to the fore in other songs that dissect that unhappy relationship.

Towards the end of the title track, after the section told from the point of view of 19th-century courtesan and dancer Lola Montez (another creative woman trying to find a balance between self-expression and love), the song swings back to the present-day narrator’s point of view, listing moments from the past that have leapt into sudden relief in her memory. She repeatedly maintains that she was ‘helpless as a child’ when her lover held her in his arms. This helpless longing is expressed musically in a gorgeously swooping vocal arrangement, the very power of which reveals to us, more than any lyrics could, that the narrator has mistaken great sex for great love, and is suffering the consequences of that mistake.

But the narrator has not lost her sense of humour to heartbreak, admitting frankly in the wonderfully rollicking ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ that ‘I knew right away that the lay was steep, but I fell for you honey, easy as falling asleep’. She is a winning mix of sardonic and sweet in the line ‘I know you meant to show the extent to which you gave a goddang, you ranged real hot and real cold but I’m sold’. The impermanence of the love that she has banked so much on is revealed when she refers to it as ‘this thing we’ve been playing at, darling’ which will only work when the beloved is wearing his ‘staying hat’.

Later in the album,’Soft As Chalk’ looks at the affair with the wryly detached eye of someone who has realised she spent a great deal of time falling in love by herself, as the narrator frankly admits that back in the heady days when she and her man would ‘talk as soft as chalk till morning came, pale as a pearl’, ‘time was just a line that you fed me when you wanted to stay’. That song ends with her calmly wishing her old love well, but acknowledging that her own life must move on:- ‘I have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel – and then, lord knows, time will only tell’.

In all these tracks wonderful tunes, arresting lyrical imagery and intriguing musical arrangements breath new life into what is probably the oldest of poetic themes. The only track that could be considered anything resembling a classic ‘f**k you’, is the spooky ‘Go Long’, where frightening images of broken ankles, rooms made of ‘the gold teeth of the women who loved you’ and a burning river are offset by perhaps the most heartbreakingly direct admonishments of the whole album: ‘Who is going to bear your beautiful children…Who will take care of you when you’re old and dying?’. Musically, that track pays homage to the West African influences of Newsom’s early work with a pitch-perfect collaboration between her harp and the Malian kora.

The main story arc of this album is the tale of this ultimately unrequited love, and it’s fitting that the last track, ‘Does Not Suffice’ closes the book on that story. The narrator catalogues the possessions she packs up as she leaves the home she and her man have shared, the ‘pretty dresses…sparkling rings….coats of boucle, jacquard and cashmere’ – a veritable junk-shop of belongings that remind her lover of how ‘easy I was not’  (a line that ties in nicely with the opening track). She goes on to imagine her newly freed lover ‘stretching out’ on a ‘boundless bed’ and sadly tells him ‘everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again, and only yours.’ Sad, but not despairing – the narrator may have initially wanted to immolate her identity and replace it with that of her beloved’s, but has come to learn that real love is the meeting of two equal individuals, not the absorption of one into another.

The narrator’s sense of self is reaffirmed by her celebrations of home, friendship and her femininity. Newsom celebrates motherhood, both that of others and her potential own – the latter in ‘Baby Birch’ a beautiful hymn to a dreamed baby daughter, and the former in the exquisite ‘Esme’, a celebration of the joy a child brings to everyone. She links themes of motherhood, home and creativity together in a way that seems both ancient and thrillingly new, in a piece of art that is firmly, unselfconsciously female in its aesthetic. Newsom’s artistic world does not and cannot define itself in relation to a male prototype. She sings on Go Long  of ‘the loneliness of you mighty men, with your jaws and fists and guitars and pens, and your sugarlip – but I’ve never been to the firepits with you mighty men’. It’s clear that that the world of the ‘mighty men’ is a different world to hers, with a different aesthetic, and even the narrator’s love for one man does not cause her to turn her back on or lose pride in her femaleness. She does not criticise or denigrate the male world, but simply takes for granted that it is different, and not suitable to her mode of creative expression.

The musical feel of this album is quite different to the medieval-style arrangements of its predecessor or the minimalism of her debut, though it shares the common Newsomian themes of rich instrumentation and experimental tunes. Newsom has said of this album that its sound is supposed to evoke a hedonistic, 1920s atmosphere, but the musical styles are broader than that, taking in 70s Californian rock, 60s folk, avant-garde composition and any number of other influences. Colloborators Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan bring wonderful warmth to the string and percussion arrangements respectively. Francesconi contributes guitar, banjo, mandolin and the beautifully rich-sounding Bulgarian tambura, used to great effect on the title track. Morgan’s clattering drumwork provides the backbone to some of the best tracks, including ‘Have One On Me’, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ and ‘Soft as Chalk’, but his percussion is more than just a backdrop – he plays the drums as a fully realised instrument. Combined with Newsom’s harp – more accomplished than ever – her increased use of piano, and the talent of the many other musicians playing on the album, the informally named ‘Ys Street Band’ are the heart and soul of the most soulful of Newsom’s albums to date.

At over two hours long, naturally not all tracks are top-drawer – the recorders on ‘Kingfisher’ are a little too reminiscent of Pentangle for my tastes, and Newsom has always been prone to cringey lyrics – the title of Good Intentions Paving Company being the most obvious example, though the song’s charm more than makes up for that. Newsom needs to be accepted on her own terms or else her music can be difficult to understand, but the extra effort required pays off enormously. This is a magnificent piece of art, encompassing enormous themes of life, death and meaning, but also small celebrations of the joy of everyday existence. ‘Ribbon Bows’ explores the eternal question ‘God – no God?’ without coming down conclusively on one side or the other, but a powerful sense of transcendence and faith in humanity permeates this whole work – even in despair, the narrator is never nihilistic. Perhaps Newsom’s spiritual beliefs can best be summed up in this wish-blessing from ‘Esme’:

‘May kindness, kindness, kindness abound’.

Dark times in the city

Below is a review of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, showing in the IFI in Dublin till Thursday. This review has also been published in Politico magazine.

For decades the only version available of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece ‘Metropolis’ was a cadavre exquis made up of what footage survived after American distributors cut nearly an hour from the original edit and the lost scenes were left to rot in various warehouses. Bits of film have been rediscovered over the years, leading to various ‘definitive’ versions, including the 1986 cut accompanied by Giorgio Moroder’s infamous synth-heavy soundtrack, but it’s only this year that the fullest, most logical version of the film can be seen. This was faciliated by the discovery in 2008 of over 30 minutes of original footage in an archive in Buenos Aires, and it is the existing footage plus these additions that is on view in the IFI until Thursday 23 September.

‘Metropolis’, set in a dystopian future where countless workers toil underground to facilitate the luxurious lifestyles of the inhabitants of the eponymous city, is a truly unique film, combining high art with blockbuster melodrama with complete unselfconsciousness. Its technical and imaginative achievements remain unparalleled – the prototype for all TV robots, the ‘mad scientist’ and his lab and the dystopian city of the future are found in this extraordinary feat of technical and creative imagination. The plot apparently makes far more sense in this complete version than in previous edits, and centres around the discovery of the subterranean hell of the workers by Freder, the somewhat hysterical son of Metropolis’ founder, Joh Frederson, and his attempts with the saintly Maria to help the workers using non-violent means. Rotwang, the mad scientist employed by Joh Frederson, creates a robot version of Maria to incite the workers to open rebellion and thus justify Joh Frederson’s intentions to crack down violently on them. Modern-day parallels are hard to ignore, when the third world labours on subsistence pay to accommodate the lifestyle of the West, but the film had more immediate, and questionable, appeal at its time – its message of a ‘Mediator’ being needed to reach concord between the workers and the bureaucrats struck a chord with Goebbels and Hitler. This appeal can perhaps be attributed to the movie’s scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife at the time and later an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party (she and Lang had divorced by that time). The ‘good’ Maria’s peasant-girl costume and rather wimpy appeals to the workers to wait for the mythical ‘Mediator’ are easily identified with the contemporary growth in nationalistic sentimentality that the Nazis piggybacked so effectively on, while the ‘evil’ Maria’s exhortations to violently rebel are clearly meant to echo (and criticise) Bolshevism (her gestures while speech-making are even reminiscent of Lenin).

But ‘Metropolis’ is by no means a ‘Nazi’ movie, and should not be judged by its political sympathies of its writer and fans. Frankly, the script comes a poor second to the magnificent cinematography and montages that Lang showcases, from the iconic opening sequence of the cogs and pistons of the ‘Heart-Machine’ to the jaw-dropping sequence where the ‘evil’ Maria performs an atavistic erotic dance, spinning off into wild apocalyptic fantasy with the Grim Reaper and the personified Seven Deadly Sins turning up for good measure. Sequences such as these will more than make up for the tediously melodramatic acting beloved of silent cinema at the time. The addition of the original score by Gottfried von Huppertz also carries things along at a fine pace. Not to be missed.

A couple of fics I wrote

I got an ao3 account this year and have 2 fics in the Beatles fandom that I'm a little proud of. Both character studies focused on late 1970s John in NYC. Have a read if you're so inclined. Username bodhbdearg.

Where I would be: Househusband era John is very depressed and disengaged from music, but is nudged out of it by folksinging lesbians & NYC queer culture.

Singing a song of ruin: Writing DF-era John is no longer depressed, and spends a night trying to talk someone out of jumping off a bridge.