Thursday 1st of March, 2001
Happy St David's day.
The CD player decides that what I want to listen to first is Theusz Hamtaak by Magma. I wonder whether I want to listen to forty-five minutes of zeuhl space rock, and then decide to leave it, since skipping it would be against the rules.
E-mail frenzy, trying to clear up all the e-mails that I have promised I'd send, but haven't quite got round to. I did send a few, but I'm still not finished. This is still a hangover from when I came back from Italy. There were so many that it's taken me ages to sort out the junk from the real messages. The ones that were urgent got answered, what's left are the "hello" messages, which have been sitting there a bit long for comfort.
Go to the gym. More Deconstruction of the Modern Pop Video. I'm in a much better mood than last time, but still cannot see the point in Westlife. The new Steps video is an interesting case of popular culture fracturing to such an extent that meaning is wrung out of any piece of it: The song title has the word "blue" in it, which obviously reminded someone of the Thunderbirds' uniforms. The video starts with a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown (like Thunderbirds) and then the Stepsters doing their song in the aforementioned uniforms, except made out of a shiny material. Only the girls wear the little hats, presumambly because someone thought they were girly (although anyone who calls Scott Tracy girly has to answer to me). And they do their bloody formation dancing. And then without warning, it cuts to a Stepsiste in some kind of wacky animal or leather costume. And then back again. And it sort of toggles between the two.
For no reason whatsoever.
Of course, if they had done a straight rip-off of Thunderbirds, some kind of buttock-clenchingly embarrassing International Rescue-themed video, I would have been the first to complain. But what has been done is considerably more banal (and thus more interesting to some of us of a certain bent): They have gone to all the trouble of referencing particular cultural signifiers, and then fixed them to nothing ∆ we can see that they are wearing Thunderbirds uniforms, and that has certain resonances for us. And the uniforms are shiny, so there's some interesting suggestion of the uniforms that the Beatles wore on Sgt Pepper. But they just dance around in them ∆ they go to all that trouble to get cheap pop culture references, and then, without a context, they are designified. And then they mix in the totally unrelated special effects and costumes to undermine the significance of... well... anything. If they were just dancing around in jeans it would be simple meaninglessness, but with this much money being sunk into it, it must be a deliberate and exciting attempt to plumb depths of banality hitherto unseen outside of QVC. And even then, no one could actually dance to QVC. I hope no one's tried, anyway.
I know it's just a pop video aimed at ten-year olds, by the way. But why, then, do they make old men like me watch it?
When I get home, I'm just about to make my lunch when there is a buzz at the door. It is a man with a very large box: my Extravagant Sacrificial Purchase has arrived. I open the box, which contains a lot of packing and a considerably smaller box. Inside the smaller box is a Steinberger Spirit guitar. It is very small.
It is so small that it was thrown out of the Land of the Tiny Pixies for offending them with its tinyness and making them look elephantine by comparison.
Well, maybe not.
But it is exceptionally wee. For a guitar.
The idea is that I should be able to take it almost anywhere and practise. Not potholing, obviously. But I don't go potholing.
And it sounds terrific ∆ very balanced and clear, and resonant. It will take me a while to adjust to the Guitar Craft picking style, but apart from that I'm very satisfied.
I spend the rest of the afternoon trying it with various combinations of pedals and making wailing lead guitar noises.
Mmm. Rock and Roll.
D'OH!
Laura picks me up at twenty-five to eight and we go off to the Barbican. She's been delayed by backed-up traffic everywhere, that sort of mad congestion thing that happens apparantly for no reason at all (although we do suspect road works at the Elephant & Castle roundabout). Neither of us really sure where the Barbican is or, when we get there, where the carpark is. We see a sign, but it sends us off in the opposite direction. I suggest a left and we find ourselves on Old Street. How did this happen? We take a left turn and, now completely lost, find ourselves in front of a big sign that says Barbican Car Park.
We still manage to get there with a couple of minutes to spare. It is an evening of films commissioned by the BBC, a couple of which have a live soundtrack.
First up is a Hal Hartley short about battling mathematicians, with a Louis Andriessen score, performed live by the Electra Ensemble ∆ an all-female quartet of soprano, violin, baroque flute and marimba, all dressed in, um, electric-coloured dresses. Fun, perhaps slight. Second is a Nicolas Roeg short, music by Adrian Utley. And there's Roeg himself answering questions and being genial. I wasn't expecting a legend on stage. The film is the kind of thing that someone like Roeg does under these circumstances, all sorts of digital editing techniques are used to transform images of Claudia Schiffer in various contexts - fake aged film, just standing there, swimming, whatever. Lots of explosions. Conception to... well, not quite to death, but to something. Better than I can make it sound, but I wish he could make a feature film. After the interval is the thing that I specifically came to see ∆ a new Brothers Quay short ∆ In Absentia with music by Karlheinz Stockhausen. They go up on stage to answer questions - identical twins, they look younger than me (at least from the circle of the Barbican) and must be nearly fifty. I have been a Quay Brothers fan for about fifteen years and am looking forward to the film. It doesn't disappoint. The score is deafening and terrifying, and I admire the fact tha he uses his electronics straight but it never sounds hackneyed - he does remarkable treatments on voices. The film itself - an expressionist narrative of a woman in an asylum obsessively writing the words "darling come" over and over in pencil - the pencils continuously breaking, the broken leads almost achieving an identity of their own. There is a demon in there somewhere, too. It has all the unearthliness of something like Street of Crocodiles, but Stockhausen's score lends it an astonishing intensity - it is quite breathtaking and the film I am almost certain to tape when it is broadcast. And the only one that I think could enter the canon of its makers. I suppose that, being animators, the brothers could not afford to use an opportunity flippantly. The final film is a collaboration between Werner Herzog and John Taverner. Herzog has filmed the pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, where the pilgrims approach the Madonna on their knees, which are bloodied from a journey of many miles. Tavener's score is much as you might expect, but he is very good at what he does, a vocal motif over sustained string orchestra chords with ocassional percussion and boys' choir interjections that is apparantly repetitive, but in fact spirals inexorably upwards in pitch, so that with each repeat the piece gains intensity, without having to overdramatise the arrangement. Very clever indeed, and very moving. Although, of course, Tavener would not want to be called clever. At the end, the orchestra cuts out leaving the voice to to finish by itself. I felt that many in the audience didn't want to clap until they had to, that they wanted the piece to linger in silence. Stockhausen and Quays' Hell vs Herzog and Tavener's Heaven. The couple next to me were talking throughout the concert, not through the performance itself, but whenever there was a pause they turned to each other to discuss what they had just seen or what they were then seeing or were about to see. As if they could not bear for something to happen without validating it by their commentary on it, understandable when something's finished, but why the necessity to have a commentary something as it is happening? Surely you'd miss a lot that way, wouldn't you?