Talking of Which, 25.09.24
Talking of Which, 25.09.24
Magnetic Fields, Soul Death, Parcel-Delivery Guru
Another rucksack of bibelots and whim-whams.
Beautiful Poseurs
I went to see The Magnetic Fields play 69 Love Songs at the London Barbican, and very enjoyable it was too. Sat in a large room with thousands of middle-aged, middle-class white people, which made a change from watching classical music in a large room with thousands of old-aged, middle-class white people. The band were tight, and the album they performed is a gold-standard classic. Stephin Merritt, as I’ve said before, is one of the greatest living songwriters, not to mention an adorable little curmudgeon.
But the strength and the weakness of both gay music and indy music — and Merritt produces both — is that they can’t take themselves seriously. There is not really any genuine suffering, or genuine joy. It’s all a fabulous imitation, a gorgeous pose, a sparkling gesture; which is to say, pretension, pretending to have real feeling. The pretence can be beautiful, so much so it can actually meet the condition of art, but it is not really depth, it eschews depth and it is, ultimately, a symptom of corruption and decay.1
The style changes radically, or seems to. The Stone Roses seem to be very different to Patrick Cowley, and The Smiths sound like they are on the other side of the cultural planet to Bronski Beat, and The Cure don’t seem to have much in common with The Village People. But all these bands — who trace their pedigree back to David Bowie (and, beyond him, back to the first gay, indy artist, Oscar Wilde) — make a living from a masquerade; the hand on brow, the knowing wink, the theatrical aside, the ironic sneer.
As I say, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, an insincere pose can express real beauty, even real feeling, but such feeling nearly always has a wistfulness to it, not so much love, but nostalgia for love. The bleary-eyed, drunken smile behind Merritt’s World Love, for example, or the affect-deadened Take Ecstasy With Me, or the wipe-a-tear-from-my-heart Why I Cry? My Sentimental Melody is to my ears one of the loveliest songs ever written, but, as it proclaims, sentiment; which to say, cynicism on holiday. Beneath Merritt’s beautiful tears, there is bitter, profane, perverse, unforgiving and unrelenting despair. Bless him!
It’s no surprise then that gay and Indy music should flourish in a decadent civilisation — the late Roman empire, late Tang dynasty and the autumn years of Byzantium were all noted for their emphasis on beauty pursued for its own sake (and ugliness for its own sake — presumably the last days of the Mayan empire had its versions of hip-hop and metal?). Bowie and his progeny are just giving us songs of a dying society, and as the man said, ‘the surface collapses last’.
The Death of the Soul
The Guardian published a harrowing account of psychological ruin the other day. Australian children under ten were invited to paint pictures of their favourite sea creature which famous artists then ‘responded to’.
Behold, the death of the soul…
It reminded me of the following story from Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. It’s a bit long, but worth it…
I felt crippled, and ‘unfit’ for life, so I decided to become a teacher.2 I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example. It wasn’t so much what he taught, as what he did. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher.
I’ll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating.
He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn’t like, but which I thought I understood—‘He’s letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,’ I thought.
He made us mix up a thick ‘jammy’ black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper. ‘Don’t paint the clown,’ he said, ‘paint the mark he leaves on your paper!’
I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I’d always been ‘good at art’, and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student. This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks?
‘He cycles on and off your paper,’ said Stirling, ‘and he does all sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very interesting …’
Everyone’s paper was covered with a mess of black lines—except mine, since I’d tried to be original by mixing up a blue. Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me.
Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had made.
‘What kind of colours?’
‘Any colours.’
‘Yeah … but … er … we don’t know what colours to choose.’ ‘Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like.’
We decided to humour him. When my paper was coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the outlines black.
‘Johnstone’s found the value of a strong outline,’ said Stirling, which really annoyed me. I could see that everyone’s paper was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody else’s—but no better.
‘Put patterns on all the colours,’ said Stirling. The man seemed to be an idiot. Was he teasing us?
‘What sort of patterns?’
‘Any patterns.’
We couldn’t seem to start. There were about ten of us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this madman.
‘We don’t know what to do.’
‘Surely it’s easy to think of patterns.’
We wanted to get it right. ‘What sort of patterns do you want?’
‘It’s up to you.’ He had to explain patiently to us that it really was our choice. I remember him asking us to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which it didn’t. Somehow we finished the exercises, and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor, and it was the same exercise done by other students. The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive—clearly they had been done by some advanced class. ‘What a great idea,’ I thought, ‘making us screw up in this way, and then letting us realise that there was something that we could learn, since the advanced students were so much better!’ Maybe I exaggerate when I remember how beautiful the paintings were, but I was seeing them immediately after my failure. Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘these are by young children!’ They were all by eight-year-olds! It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they’d done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. I was speechless. Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered. It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.