The Basement Tapes

The Song Remains The Same

2012-01-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

Just got off train. Pretty amusing ride. Heard this voice at back of carriage going 'Fuck!' 'Fuck.' 'Fuck!' 'Fuuuuck'. Then a staccato set of 'fuck fuck fuck'. And so on. I was trying to work/ read but he drove me crazy. Then after a while I started to enjoy it. Like some weird John Cage performance art music piece.

I was amazed this unseen guy could get so much variety out of one word. We're talking a twenty minute train ride here. During it people slowly started moving by me, an evacuation. Eventually I could not resist and turned around. Fatal move, the eye contact thing. And I see this very grubby street guy moving towards, steel wool hair, the spider shuffle. I turn away as quickly as possible hoping he wont sit next to me. Lucky me, he goes for a big seat just ahead of me and lays down on it in a state of frustration, rubbing his temples. Nut case.

Then I hear the voice again - from behind me - 'Fuck!'. So even the mad street person seated in front of me now cannot bear this crackpot behind me cursing. Then all of a sudden the curser sounds surprised, even happy and expands his reportoire with a 'fucking hell'. It's almost cheerful. The musical climax. A eureka moment. Then its back to 'fuck fuck fuck' again, by which time I leave the train.

- Mark Mordue

Ceremony (The Poem of the Dead)

2012-01-30T16:12:00.000-08:00

The poem of the dead is made of this:

dirt or fire, bones and skin, worms or ash,

favourite things, a book, a ring, a guitar or just a toy,

a song to carry out the coffin out, tears and wine and tea that’s not too strong,

a cruel blue sky, consoling rain, the weather as a voice,

one shiny car, quiet movements made, a stunning Bible line,

a few lyrics from Dylan Thomas’s light, white flowers, a Stop sign,

a priest whose words just sink away, the incense in the air,

a friend who laughs, a mother’s cries, a father’s face of stone,

a hand upon your shoulder now, a strange car ride, a bird’s cold tune,

a child who lost another, cakes and bread and garden chairs,

the note they left, the will they wrote, the things that we have heard,

their favourite clothes, and when it passed, take a handful of this soil,

the milk is here, the beer is there, an aunt from way up north will speak to you,

new machinery creaks them into fire, a curtain closes slow,

a hallowed be thy name is called, the sunlight on the graves,

smoke rises from a chimney slow, we turn our eyes and walk away,

by night the loved ones, still, are gathered around the songs we used to know,

the family lives alone with loss, the ceremony is tomorrow.

- Mark Mordue

Gil Scott-Heron: The Questioner

2011-12-12T14:34:00.000-08:00

Gil Scott-Heron greets me genially. He's slightly spidery in his dangled movements, surprisingly slight and aged. At 45 the man oft referred to as The Godfather of Rap is an undeniably emaciated figure.

Sitting on opposing beds in his modest hotel room, he asks if I mind if he smokes. Tender, even tentative, his gentlemanly persona and attenuated physicality are at odds with a ferocious political reputation as a songwriter, though not his dry dismissal of the O. J. Simpson case buzzing on the television. "I've just been watching the questioner question the questions of the other questioner," he laughs.

Exposing internecine political realities, attacking the absurd and the downright stupid, has always been Scott-Heron's forte. On his new album, Spirits, his first release in 12 years, he lambasts the Gulf War ethos and America's techno-Disney chauvinism:

"Yeah, there was some smart bombs. There was some dumb ones, too." He laughs. "Oh, I love that line!" Struggling to overcome a fit of chuckling, he says between gasps: "See, we don't want to get too heavy with our politics. We want to let people know we're here, not just tell them things all the time."

It's impossible to underestimate the significance of Scott-Heron in the history of contemporary black music. As one American newspaper observed: "If rap, as Chuck D. (of Public Enemy) said, is the CNN of the black community, then Gil Scott-Heron was its first anchor."

His music, however, is far broader than affinities to rap music via Beatnik poetry might suggest. Scott-Heron's soulful, smokey baritone, a little drier now but still like syrup at the bottom of a glass, his piano-based compositions and his potent grasp of bluesy jazz and soul can take seductive flight.

"I don't know about all this Godfather of Rap business," he says dismissively, hands trembling, legs trembling. "I just think people say that because they haven't listened to the people I was listening to; they just don't know about them."

On a song like 'Message To The Messengers', on Spirits, Scott-Heron takes rap, or more particularly gangsta rap, to task for its negativity. "And the media loves to use these 20-second grabs that perpetuate these violent images of our community, these sound bites. But they don't look at a guy going off to work, watch him coming home, trying to put food in the mouths of his children. They don't tell that story, which is the real story of 95 per cent of our community."

Scott-Heron lives on 125th and Lennox in New York, "right in the middle of Harlem. It's no heavier than a lot of places. Most people are just trying to go about their business, get on with living. We've got more than our fair share of depression, of unemployment, of poverty, but that ain't so different either from a lot of places I've seen in the world."

Understanding the heritage of hate that can take root in any oppressed culture, he tries to explain that "it's hard to act like you're equal when you've been oppressed for centuries. See, we're a colony of people who were transplanted through slavery into America - we don't have a claim on the land to bind us like the American Indians. But what we are as a culture was born there. Rap, jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, these are the things people think of when they think of America, but not many black people have profited greatly from them. When people see a lot of money being made out of their culture, but not by them, they don't feel very equal either."

Nonetheless, his debate with gangsta rap stems from a need to say they represent "1 per cent of what our community is".

Despite his proud emphasis on constant live gigging, the gap of 12 years between studio recordings before Spirits and highly mixed reports of his live abilities have been associated with rumours of drug and alcohol problems and snide references to "Gil Scott-Heroin".

That his physically imposing stature - in the '70s he was as lean and tough as the proverbial "black panther" - has given way to such a frail, middle-aged man only adds weight to those stories of dissipation and squandered talent. Scott-Heron boldly shows me his arms. "I ain't no junkie. You don't see trackmarks on my arms. I'm afraid of needles! I'm a diabetic and I still won't use needles.

"It's like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull or Taxi Driver. He's an actor. But while he's doing those parts, we believe him. That's because he does it so well. So when I sing a song like 'Home Is Where The Hatred Is' ("A junkie walking through the streets at night, I'm on my way home") it's a story. But I can't really blame people for saying all those things about me because it just means I told the story so well they believed it."

You don't have to be an addict to suffer foibles. And pay for them. Scott-Heron certainly looks well worn in. Glasses perched on a gaunt face with a greying, straggly beard, a beautiful smile, teeth tobacco crooked, everything about him hurting with kindness. Something most definitely catches in the image of the man before you, in the many years away from the studio, in the live shows that veer from sublime to average: Drugs? Maybe not now. Ill health? You can't escape the thought, but whether it be diabetes or some unspecified illness ravaging him, who can say.

Born in 1949 in Chicago, Scott-Heron was raised in Tennessee by his grandmother. He was one of the first black children to be used in the experiment of integration, one of three children brought into Jackson elementary school. It's been said that after the cursing and abuse from white children became unbearable, his mother moved him to New York City, to the Bronx, then the Hispanic-dominated Chelsea neighbourhood.

It was Scott-Heron's grandmother who bought him an upright piano from the funeral parlour next-door after it closed. "People see me as a writer who discovered the piano, but I'm really a piano player who discovered writing." Given his deep musicality, his writing skills cannot be overlooked: a published novel at age 19 called The Vulture; a book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th and Lennox, by 21.

The poetry led to recordings and music as a way to reach the masses at that point in American history in the early '70s when the civil rights movement was losing momentum and Black Power was showing its hand.

Not surprisingly, Spirits is about the spirits behind these movements. The tune of John Coltrane's 'Equinox' forms a trace-line beneath the Spirits title-track, a tribute "to balances. Coltrane was born on the September equinox, when night and day are equal." He likens this coincidence to a spiritual politic. "And the spirits have always helped me." Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela - they're all there among his muses. But you'd be a fool to mistake soul for cosmic naivety in Scott-Heron.

When a friend suggested his 1975 song, 'Johannesburg', came too early for the Nelson Mandela fever that much later gripped the world, he said: "Well, by the time my song was out Mandela had already been in jail for 12 years. I don't think he would have thought it was early."

Having broken out of a decade of obscurity, Scott-Heron is now working on an autobiography due later this year. It was inspired when he toured the United States with Stevie Wonder, who was working to get Martin Luther King's birthday established as a national day of celebration. Wonder succeeded. "Stevie always sees the positive in things." Spending time with Gil Scott-Heron can do the same.

- Mark Mordue

* This story appeared under the title 'A frail Godfather' in the Sydney Morning Herald dated 01.03.1995. Gil Scott-Heron played two shows at the Metro Theatre in the city: an extraordinary first night at the height of his powers, and a free-jamming and seemingly endless second night where people left wondering what the fuck was going on.

... so anyway the bones are small

2011-11-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

for Jim Carroll

…so anyway the bones are small, fan-like, tender in their motion
It’s surprising to consider that dinosaurs evaporated this way
Up into the blue yonder, the branches, the breeze
After so long thundering the earth

What fine legs
A chest you could crush with your thumb
Only the beak betrays an old viciousness
A map left over from a hunger for fleshier times

I’m always sent heart-beating into this mysterious evolution
Beatified and depressed by it depending on the hour of the day

Like now, in the afternoon, with a late winter wind rustling the sunny leaves,
A mower whining over suburban fences, my children still at school,
When belated news of a New York poet dead brings these same impressions to me
And I have no reason clear why such associations fly into the mind

But fly they do

A basketball through a rusted aluminium hoop
Loneliness into a glass of wine
My children’s smiles up into the sunshiny day of dreams
The homeward teeming of the city into something reassuring
A passing train upon its tracks a rattled music from my past
Leaves, wings, death, grace, loss, sky, heart – bones

- Mark Mordue

* Image sourced from Wikipedia: shows Jim Carroll in New York in 2005.

Giving Up The Ghost

2011-10-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

IN one of his greatest poems, People, Yevgeny Yevtushenko says, "In any man who dies there dies with him/ his first snow and kiss and fight".

Part of an intense recognition of our mortality, the poem also deals with the power of memory and the role of art as Yevtushenko admits: "The secret worlds are not regenerated./ And every time again and again/ I make my lament against destruction."

Having encountered the loss of three people in the past year -- all by suicide -- it's no wonder the Russian's poem should speak to me. At the same time I was struck by a recent viewing of Clint Eastwood's film Hereafter, and its focus on George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a spirit medium trying to escape the burden of his relationship with the dead. "A life that's all about death," he says, "is no life at all."

Yet the need to negotiate death's place in our lives has re-emerged in all manner of projects lately: from a mainstream supernatural entertainment such as Hereafter (one of the top 10 grossing films in the country) through to art-house drama Rabbit Hole, with Nicole Kidman as a mother who has lost her child, and Biutiful, featuring Javier Bardem as a small-time criminal and struggling father trying to put his affairs in order before he dies.

The sensational opening of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, showcasing a mercurial collection assembled by founder David Walsh that has a strong emphasis on the themes of sex and death, may be connected to this larger inclination towards morbidity. MONA also points to another obvious fact: this subject matter has been around in art for as long as we have reflected on our own natures. Even so, it's hardly original to add that while we celebrate sex with an advertorial heat in almost every facet of our culture, we more usually prefer to keep death out of the picture.

You would expect literature to meet this theme in braver and more complex ways. But in the case of authors such as W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano and Cormac McCarthy -- whose books The Rings of Saturn, 2666 and The Road have towered over the past decade -- the connections between creating a novel, the feeling of being in a dream and an atmosphere of death are overwhelming. These men write like titans at the end, rather than beginning, of something, focusing on subject matter that suggests the respective cultural histories of Europe, South America and the US are traumatised, decayed and passing away.

Stunning debuts such as David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and late Philip Roth works Exit Ghost and Nemesis only add to the outpouring of terminal narratives today. As does Patti Smith's US National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, a eulogy to her former lover, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: "I was asleep when he died."

As our rock stars age, modern masters Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Lou Reed are all delivering their own existential blues, too. Dylan gave the end some resigned bar-band fatalism on one of his most recent songs, Beyond Here Lies Nothin': "Beyond here lies nothing, but the mountains of the past." Young, meanwhile, sounded as if he were haunting himself on his latest album, Le Noise, a recording that played like an electrified ghost raging against the dying of the light. As for Cohen and Reed, they continue to offer their own somnambulant observations in song as if they are ferrying us to the other side personally.

It's a stretch, but one could even argue the Twilight phenomenon and the darkening shades of the Harry Potter saga are part of this movement. Recent Australian television programs such as Laid (a comic twist on the black widow story) and Spirited (Claudia Karvan's update on The Ghost and Mrs Muir) indicate death is so commonplace to the zeitgeist there's enough material for two new series, if Alan Ball's Six Feet Under were not black-humoured evidence enough.

IT'S hard to pinpoint why this deathly current has intensified. While the symbolic reverberations of September 11, 2001, and the continuing tremors of the global economic crisis appear to signal everything from the end of US imperial hegemony to that of the Enlightenment era itself, there are more intimate cultural pressures, too. A bottomless obsession with youth culture and the corresponding industry in anti-ageing technology is part of that, as well as the irony of an ageing population in the West and ethical debates over euthanasia.

There is also the decline in formal religious practice, along with the pressures of constructing our identity publicly in an aggressively commercialised and digitalised world. Michael Jackson emerges as an off-kilter Jesus in this mediated ether, having introduced an entire generation of our children to the dark fairytale of death and continuing presence as everything about his miserable end and his re-canonisation at the top of the charts puts him at the centre of family entertainment again.

It's my suspicion all these elements may be sparking a retreat to an internal frontier, an intuited notion of the soul as "the person within person" where we can feel something sacred or mysterious at work that has little to do with how we appear out there. Certainly we are learning that fame is cheap, and often crass. Privacy, by contrast, is taking on a magic aura, a profound and elusive value. To upend Andy Warhol's tired dictum, we may yen soon for a world where everyone can be private, rather than famous, for 15 minutes.

There is, of course, a difference between privacy and being alone, between spiritual integrity and feeling atomised. In a secular culture, art provides a key to the door between those worlds, if not the kingdom once promised us in the Bible (let alone by Facebook). It also can pre-empt the dangers of premature withering, of being dead inside long before we are buried or burned.

In reminding us of our internal universe, of that person within the person, art marks us with mystic residues and consolations and a degree of consciousness that dilates our being with what might be described as a renewing vividness. As Bolano so wisely observes in his novella The Skating Rink: "We all have to die a bit every now and then and it's usually so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive."

WHETHER or not you believe in an afterlife it's true to say most of us end up speaking to the dead. The depth of those conversations may differ and fade, though time itself is no barrier as those long forgotten return to us with unexpected aliveness. One can feel haunted without seeing ghosts. A place, a song, a sea breeze, almost anything can open up a dimension through which a presence is felt and corresponded with, if only internally, nostalgically. It's as if this communication is native to us as human beings.

It seemed important to speak to some artists who traversed this space between the living and the dead in their work, and to ask them what that communication might mean.

"I lost my father and my mother, and more recently my brother," 75-year-old poet and author Antigone Kefala says. "And each time this happens, there is no getting used to it. Every time, it is a new event, a terrible happening. I don't think you can ever become that familiar with it. And yet we are predisposed to speak with the dead."

Kefala's poem Absence concerns itself specifically with this: it is a dialogue with her mother, whom she found herself talking to again "while doing the dishes just the other day". At that she laughs and says brightly, "This is normal, it is nothing to apologise for. You feel that you are talking to friends," she explains. "Not that they have become something else in death. You feel that you have some connective thing with them, not that they have gone. Of course people do not want to hear negative things. But it is a double issue -- yes, the end of life is a negative thing, but then people who have been in our life, that attachment does not just disappear. So it would be a negative thing not to communicate with them still, if this is how we feel."

Unfortunately, Kefala believes "death is not a subject people like writing about in Australia. Everyone here is trying to escape the issue." She describes this disdainfully as "an English thing", and speculates that "we Greeks, and the more 'primitive' races of Europe in the south, in Italy and Spain, we have more rituals and are closer to the phenomenon than the northerners. The same is true of North and South America. Look at Mexico and its Day of the Dead."

For Kefala this relates to an absence in Australian literature. "There is a lack of intensity here. People are not fully engaged with what they are writing. A lot of it is journalistic, I feel. But serious writing must have passion, must have a tenseness to it.

And we must not be ashamed of passion," she says. "I write about death -- and many other things -- oh, they must see me coming and think: 'Eh, her again! Oh no! What about some jolly business this time, please Antigone!' "

Kefala roars laughing this time, but she laments the way we continue to deal with death "through a certain type of fantasy, running away from or around a more immediate involvement. So these 'ghosts' people like to read about, they are not immediately involved with your life, it's something less real and light and approachable. But if we are to write seriously, we have to also write about what is not easily approachable, and there is something about poetic language that deals more fundamentally with such issues than a journalistic, surface language."

She goes further and implies we shy away from these depths in our literature because of something in our history. "You feel it when you go out bush, these forces that unnerve you in certain landscapes. It is a very powerful landscape, a magnificent landscape, a country full of light and colour, as well as a place full of terrible things that no one wants to confess to. The two things go together. Whether we can come to grips with that and produce something magnificent."

Her thoughts trail off as if that task might be beyond her. But Kefala begins talking again in a way that seems tinged with her own migrant odyssey into this antipodean world she has long called home. "In a discussion of spirits I know I am always moved when Aboriginal people look into a landscape and ask permission to come in," she says. "Deeply moved."

IT is hard to imagine a more Australian-sounding record within the rock 'n' roll idiom than Gareth Liddiard's Strange Tourist. Best known for his work with the Drones, Liddiard imbues his debut solo album with a Spartan intensity -- voice and guitar only -- that suggests he is the missing link between Paul Kelly and Nick Cave.

As a picture of contemporary Australia its vernacular feel for character is startling, as good as any short story collection we have. But the album tends to leave a listener lost in space. There is that final feeling of sitting with a storyteller around an open fire as it ebbs into darkness. A line from the record's most beautiful song, High Plains Mailman, leaps out like a lonely spark: "He knows you don't have to die to reach the netherworld."

Liddiard thinks critics who have tried to come to grips with Strange Tourist by alluding to painters Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan are reaching towards "something about the outback that is primordial, real and unforgiving. And that's there in the music maybe." He admits: "The way you see a landscape depends on your state of mind. A rainforest can be a very lovely thing to experience. Unless you're Joseph Conrad, then it becomes hell. But there's a real truth in depression when you experience it," he adds. "You get what a dingo would go through. A world that is tough, brutal, where you can feel what it might be like to starve."

Combined with a garage-rock-meets-folk sound that has brutish colonial overtones intensified by the singer's broad Australian accent, Strange Tourist comes off as a supremely existential record rooted in this tormenting world. It becomes clear that Liddiard's ghosts are living among us, be it the amphetamine dealer of the title track or the David Hicks figure who inspired an eight-minute piece of biographical song voodoo entitled The Radicalisation of D: "D finds a one-room flat that overlooks an underpass . . ."

Reared by atheist parents, Liddiard thinks we have a tendency to hide from the fact "the universe does not give a shit". He believes civilisation allows us to mask the processes behind the way we live, from how we get the meat we eat and the petrol we use. "Everything you do is brutal and cold, but we are built to deny all that, to keep the universe at bay.

"The place I tend to go is where all that [civilised] resilience and denial is rubbed away. I'm not doing it to be downer," he emphasises. "And even though I'm not spiritual at all I am not saying I am impoverished. There's this ritual thing in rock 'n' roll, something in it from a long time ago. It's like a guy banging bones in a cave. That's not so different to seeing [Iggy Pop and] the Stooges play.

"All the real stuff has that ritual. There's some need for it in our head, so in that sense it's not spiritual but it is deep. You just need somebody to transport you. Jim Morrison was good at it. Warren Ellis [from the Dirty Three] is, too. Whatever you do, you have to take them away. Hendrix did it, Coltrane, Samuel Beckett. Beethoven was maybe the greatest. It's transcendental."

Liddiard smiles to himself. "It's why people travel. It's to do with an internal wanderlust. And that part of our brain seems connected to the part that needs to be spiritual. An artist just takes the vagueness out of it and makes it into an experience."

AT 43, Melbourne novelist Chris Womersley admits, "I haven't had that much actual experience of death." Then he checks himself and mentions "an ex-girlfriend of mine who died two years ago from a heroin overdose. We had not been in touch for 20 years but for some reason she has come into my mind again lately."

It makes him consider whether an element of remembering the dead is connected "to longing them back into existence. And a nostalgia that maybe casts them in a better light than they deserve, I don't know. It's more pertinent with someone who is young. That sense of waste. People who die in their 70s and 80s, it's a shame, but you think they had a good run."

Womersley sighs. "It's hard being human. It's hard getting by and doing the right thing and living. Art and literature are vehicles that can help us understand the metaphysical, that can show how we deal with death and loss and sex, how one ages gracefully, how you make a transition."

His first book, The Low Road, opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding: "And what the dead had no speech for, when living / They can tell you being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued by fire beyond the language of the living."

The author says he conceived of that novel "as an underworld journey", whereby it operated as a noir thriller and something more spiritual that occurs in "a mythical space. I've always been interested in myths and fairytales. It's a subconscious thing, and it's profoundly a part of our being for some reason," he says. "Look at Dante or the tale of Orpheus, there's something primal there. It just seems impossible to believe you die and that's that."

Yet despite a somewhat obsessive interest in death and the supernatural, Womersley firmly describes himself as an atheist. "I guess I'm just interested in the immersive experience of literature," he explains. "I like my reading to take me to a whole other realm. That's an aesthetic thing. I'm not interested in the domestic but something striving towards the ineffable."

Accordingly he set his second novel, Bereft, in the immediate the aftermath of World War I during a time of plague in Australia when entire towns were quarantined as Spanish influenza spread across the country. At a seance a young soldier is passed a note by a psychic that sparks his return home to deal with a family murder he was accused of committing as a boy. "It's a semi-ghost story," Womersley says, "but it's all about love really, about someone who is gone and is no longer with you."

Womersley explains the historical context for the ideas he developed in Bereft: "The Victorians were not so much obsessed with death as with mourning. They had mourning costumes and mourning jewellery, it was an elaborate process. With the discovery of radio waves and photography, things of a spiritual dimension got tangled with the scientific. So you have this onset of a secular century where belief in the great faiths are waning and it's being replaced by the quasi mystical. Then you have World War I and a million dead, and where did they go? Where did they go? That scale of mourning was unprecedented. I read one story of a mother who lost all four of her sons. You can't deal with that scale of grief rationally."

As if to reach for a parallel between that era and the present, Womersley tells me an anecdote. "There was this co-worker of mine who died tragically, both her and her baby," he says. "I suddenly saw her pop up as one of my friends on Facebook recently, and I was a bit surprised, and bothered by it. I would feel unethical somehow to delete her. So I feel I can't do anything about it. But it struck me there must be many cases like this now where people continue to exist in this weird digital life we now have."

IT seems to me the communications revolution we're experiencing may be prompting some neo-Victorian surge in our fascination with death and mourning again. And that there are indeed parallels between that previous era -- which was exhilarated and traumatised by the industrial revolution and a countervailing passion for gothic and romantic sensibilities -- and the great time of technological change we exist in today.

There's an intimacy and connectedness available to us across time and space that is somehow bodiless and eerie. It may be that our digital life is taking on the vaporous qualities of our ghostly superstitions; that the texture of the communications alone is awakening something in us. It's certainly an odd coincidence that, like Damon's character in Hereafter, Bardem's dying criminal in Biutiful is also a figure of psychic abilities. This ability intensifies a need to prepare for where he is headed, as a fellow medium indicates when she warns, "You and I know the dead suffer when they leave debts behind."

In dealing with death, the guides we most seek for wisdom or consolation are indeed the dead themselves -- along with the way art can bring us closer to them and ourselves if we're lucky: Womersley's acts of mythical transition; Liddiard's primitive transcendence; Kefala's intense conversations.

It takes me a while to realise these three people I have interviewed match the three friends of mine who killed themselves: a male journalist of great literary ability; a brilliant male guitarist; a fine female painter who adored poetry. So who was I really talking to here?

I find myself listening to Give up the Ghost on the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs. The way Thom Yorke sings a final haunting refrain of "I've been told to give up the ghost into your arms". Yorke could be talking about the end of a relationship, or the problem of addiction, or personifying death itself, along with evoking a ritual in song that suggests Yorke himself is fading to end, and trying to come to terms with this mortal inevitability. In a voice double-tracked and smudged against his own it's hard to make out what he is saying in counterpoint to the main lyrics. Either "don't haunt me" or "don't hurt me" or "don't worry" or more likely all those things.

Listening to it is rather like being involved in a strange prayer where I feel as if I periodically appear to, and disappear into, myself in some kind of dream of life. Don't haunt me. Don't hurt me. Don't worry.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Weekend Australian Review on April 9th, 2011

In the Garden

2011-10-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

“A man who doesn’t have a rice field should

strive to cultive the land within himself”

– Ida Pedanda Made Sideman, ‘Salampah Laku’

We lived like kings and queens

in a spoiled garden

our homes built of stone

while the locals lived on grass

their feet pasted with mud and rice

serving our smiles

away to the west a cloud rose

a sort of incense finishing the day

we drank beer

watched frangipani fall into a pool

ducks and dogs and flags

moving in the padi fields

the rest of the world

was made out of t-shirt slogans

motorbikes, kites and wi-fi connections

children played football in the dust

the sun was the sun but it was green

voices talking, a séance of the globe,

jewelry on a wrist

beside the road men sat caressing roosters

children stared through a window screen

men like tiger-things – teeth + smile –

Sprite, fries, sorrow: the entrepreneurs,

while the musicians turned echoes into bells

outside at night the dogs barked

at the already dead, hepatitis moons

shone in the eyes of the mosquitoes,

a boy holding a used plastic bag

walked down the road seemingly happy,

horns tooted and a thin trail of smoke

ghosted the darkness as a motorcyclist

took another drag of Djarum Bl∆ck

and rode on

everywhere else the strewn offerings

for the dead

were kicked and trodden on, or avoided,

a climate of flowers and pizza

breathed in the shadows and dirt,

masks and dancing, cobras, transgenic rice, cobwebs

they dug up the dead chanting a new litany and burned them

while the roosters killed each other with knives

and the crumpled notes unfolded in dry bloom.

- Mark Mordue

* Written on the eve of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali.
First published at Meanjin online October 7th, 2011.

Consuming Passions: Jarvis Cocker, Pulp and This Is Hardcore

2011-08-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

Jarvis Cocker wanders through London's Tower Books and Records like a spy in a foreign country. Close by, music fans are harvesting the racks of pop releases, among them the extraordinary 18-year legacy of his band Pulp.

"You must feel like you're running the gauntlet," I whisper. "It's OK," he says crisply, "as long as you keep moving."

The lead singer has acquired a taste for the disappearing act. Aged 35, he's staging a contradictory battle with stardom, from the very core of his being through to the icy soundtracks and acoustic regrets that characterise Pulp's latest CD, This Is Hardcore.

Hit him with a direct question about fame, however, and he'll state that he is "barely at the mezzanine level". Pulp are a British phenomenon.

Originally we'd arranged to meet at Bungees, a London cellar cafe, but it turns out to be closed. Cocker is disappointed - the area it is in reminds him of his past as an art school student in the late '80s. We move to a wine bar, where he keeps fidgeting with his watch until he confesses that the American writer, Ken Kesey (famed for One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and his antics leading the Merry Pranksters), is doing a book signing down at Tower. "Do you want to come?" he asks.

Interviewing Cocker you encounter his diffident intelligence, a humility mixed with self-loathing, and a certain indefinable will. He has cycled to our meeting (cycling is admittedly de rigueur with London groovers right now), and once we check out Kesey he ends up giving me three hours of his time. When Cocker does encounter the odd fan on our walk through the city and in the store itself, he quietly extends the conversations. He's at pains to be like them.

Cocker himself is something of the ultimate fan. He slaughtered all comers on Pop Quiz and aside from a fascination for Kesey and '60s obscurities he maintains an avid interest in the culture around him, from fronting a new Channel 4 series on "outsider artists" to fossicking around the city for books and CDs. He's declared a moratorium on reading magazines - "it got so bad I'd have opinions on films without ever seeing them" - and is making efforts "to read more novels. I'm about 50 pages into Irvine Welsh's Filth but it's too early to say what I think. I've also got a copy of [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] This Side of Paradise by my bed. A friend says it's perfect for me," he says, raising his eyebrows.

The oily brown hair, the sallow skin, the burgundy polyester of his matching shirt and slacks, the slightly hunched posture of a man used to diminishing his own height ... he's cool in the way that all suburban dreamers are when they've managed to transform themselves into something exotic and uncertain. At heart, there's the polite Sheffield lad with permanently damaged eyesight from a meningitis attack when he was five, the young man who didn't lose his virginity until he was nearly 20. It is hard to recall this is the same strutting creature who dazzled an open-air crowd of 20,000 in North London recently, parading like a cross between a refined Iggy Pop and a strange, venal bird.

"Being on stage is about the only exercise I get," he says dryly.

Poor sales and uncertain critical responses for This Is Hardcore and a pair of stunning, if uneasily beautiful, singles ('Help The Aged' and the chilling title track) have been cited as benchmarks for the death of the Britpop phenomenon. Cocker was "gutted" by the popular rejection of 'This Is Hardcore' as a single, probably the most ambitious gesture of his recording career.

This Is Hardcore is a dark, epic world away from the almost vaudevillean, kitchen-sink wit of 1994's His 'N' Hers and 1996's Different Class. Its alienated sex fantasies, fears about aging and droll confessions don't fit the pop mould at all. And yet it is this material that the band - Nick Banks (drums), Candida Doyle (keyboards), Steve Mackey (bass), Mark Webber (guitar, keyboards) and Richard Hawley (a guest guitarist from The Longpigs) - attack with a devouring intensity in the live arena. And although one can immediately sense a quantum leap between most of the pre-Hardcore material and the orchestral, marooned density of songs such as 'Seductive Barry', it is clear that, for Pulp, this is the way to go.

"Pop music traditionally deals with young flash things but pop music itself is middle-aged," Cocker says. "I just want to find a way of being an adult without it being boring. I don't want to continue acting like a teenager for the rest of my life because I can't hack it, you know."

This Is Hardcore may sound bleak, but it combines all the glamour, sophistication and decadence of Pulp's major influences: Roxy Music, The Walker Brothers, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, glam rock and John Barry's James Bond movie-theme urbanity and drama.

Or, as Cocker sings: "This is our music from a bachelor den, the sound of loneliness turned up to ten."

It's been a long trip to the lizard lounge. Pulp actually made their first album, It, in Sheffield in 1980 and did a live-to-air performance for DJ John Peel when Cocker was only 17. It would be quite a while (and several albums) before 'success' came their way again.

Frustrated with his band's progress, Cocker left Sheffield for art school in London. But the urge for making music never went away. "I heard the other day that crocodiles can slow their heartbeat down to three times a minute if they're conserving energy. That was kind of like what we [Pulp] were doing - we weren't actually dead, we just looked like we were."

With his National Health Service specs and geeky cool, Cocker made his name as "the Mike Leigh of Britpop", securing hit after hit from the mid-'90s with songs about hiding in a cupboard to watch his girlfriend's sister having sex ('Babies'); losing your virginity ('Do You Remember The First Time?'); taking drugs at a rave ('Sorted For E's and Wizz'); and the tale of a northern lad being seduced by a female art student interested in some lower-class experiences ('Common People'). The last song virtually became the anthem of 1996.

"'Common People' transformed things for us in this country. It seemed to enter the public imagination," Cocker says.

This Is Hardcore is an about-face, a blow against that "imagination" and any possibility that Jarvis Cocker could continue in the role of Britpop's quirky jester, the man who waved his arse to Michael Jackson on stage at the 1996 Brit Awards.

Of fame, he would later tell Time Out magazine: "It would be great to walk into a club like John Travolta does in Saturday Night Fever and have everyone give you a high five and yelp 'hello', but the reality is some pissed-up bloke going, 'How's your mate Michael Jackson, eh?'"

It brought other dubious rewards, too. A 1996 Sunday tabloid kiss-and-tell expose of a fling he had with a make-up girl. Of this he says, "You really have to keep it locked away. You don't want to do a Clinton, do you?"

Even more painfully, a tabloid newspaper in Australia tracked down his estranged father in Darwin. Cocker hadn't seen or heard from his father since he was seven. They offered to pay Cocker's air fare to visit him. Cocker quietly declined.

It's an awkward subject. "I only met my father face-to-face this year for the first time. It's a personal thing. Something that can only be worked out by the two of us. The papers only cloud the issue," he says, before holding each word like a blow, "it's ... not ... right."

To add to the events of the two years leading up to This Is Hardcore, Cocker also broke up with his long-term girlfriend. He is now single. Again, there's that sense of Cocker being hit by his own words as he speaks.

"It's not the best thing to happen to you if you want to keep the relationship together ... to be successful."

'Help The Aged' and 'A Little Soul' were inspired by his encounter with his father. In the latter, Cocker sings: You see your mother and me, we never got along that well/I'd love to help you but everybody's telling me you look like me/I've had one, two, three, four shots of happiness/ I look like a big man, but I've only got a little soul.

"I know it's boring," he says, hating the moaning rock star image as much as recent depictions of him as "a porn-fixated heroin addict". "But you do get a distorted view of what life's about, chasing this thing called success. When you get it you have to ask, 'Is this it?' There's a loss of innocence."

"Pornography seemed like an appropriate comparison. Because it takes all the romance out of romance. It's like there's always a forward urge in people's lives to go deeper. That when you get there it's going to be better."

He talks about the process of reflection, the way "you accumulate a lot of stuff, then sit in a room and instead of taking more stuff in, you dredge it out. It's like you get too cluttered.

"Your 20s are a period of exploration, finding out who you are. But you do have to cut back on experience. And find some kind of order instead of leaving stuff strewn about everywhere. When you are young you don't understand that. Secretly at the back of your mind, you're quite pleased to go through trauma. It gives you something to write about. You might even see something noble in it. But as you get older it just f - - - s you up. It does you in.

"I hate the consumer-based society," he says. "Everything is based on consumption, using something and throwing it away. It's no surprise divorce rates are rising. People do the same with relationships."

The restlessness that burns away in him found some respite in his work for Channel 4. "I first read about outsider artists in a book by Roger Cardinal when I was a student. It's stuff made by people who've never had any training: people who are in institutions or people who are isolated, usually.

"They're pleased that people look at their stuff. But that's not the reason they made it. It's more that they feel compelled. They say they had a dream, or that God made them do it. In the me, me, me world of popstardom, who has that attitude? "

- Mark Mordue

* This story first appeared under the title 'Pulp Friction' in the Sydney Morning Herald Metro, 18.09.98

When Cool Goes Cold

2011-08-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

The very thought of writing this story made me feel like vomiting over my laptop and down my flannelette shirt. Yet another lifestyle piece on Cool with a capital ``C", another voice-deadening set of icons whose style and attitude should be genuinely rebellious and outside easy mainstream embrace.

I imagined how it would go: the file photos that would link Lord Byron, James Dean, Jeff Buckley and New York's latest rock'n'roll bad boys of dissident pretty, the Strokes.

Trying to capture Cool is a loser's game worse still, it's uncool. Plenty of you have no doubt groaned and rolled your eyes already at the very idea of this story, turned the page sneering, said no.

In keeping with this mood of negation and refusal, Cool can be regarded as the street's desire to turn stardom inside-out: to strengthen what's moving beneath the radar, what's not apparent, and so-far undiscovered. It's a kind of secret identity that corporations and the media will eventually wish to mine, but they can't have it or define it no matter how hard they try, or at least they can't have it for long.

In his 1998 essay The Birth of the Cool, an analysis of Miles Davis's groundbreaking 1949 album of the same name, Greil Marcus observed that, ``Cool is a mystery, because while everyone knows what cool is nobody can define it. It's like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement on pornography: `I know it when I see it."'

I'd dare to say it's a synonym for integrity. And that's what it has always been, even at its most anarchic or dissolute or just plain unlucky.

Perhaps that's why Cool is often fatal, like those last steps Jeff Buckley took fully clothed into a tributary of the Mississippi for a gentle swim in 1997, his music left to us in a state of permanent promise. As his mother said in the memorial documentary Fall in Light, ``I have a picture in my mind that was actually a metaphysical image. That the body of my son was not the speck of dust they pulled out of the Wolf River but the body of his work."

Cool is this kind of moment or person or subculture up ahead of the present or lost somewhere far behind it but still intact in some sacred, radioactive way, still living a half-life of intensity, self-possessed and eternally unpossessed, like Marlon Brando's feminine shyness in The Wild One or Sonny Rollins walking away from jazz at the height of his career to practise his saxophone devotions to no-one but the wind as it blew off the Williamsburg Bridge. It's danger in vulnerability. And you can't buy that.

Cool can become fashionable, of course, but becoming fashionable is often what ends it. More usually it is the opposite of fashionable, a force of reaction like punk rock in its heyday and grunge when it first broke, movements whose anti-beauty aesthetics attacked the high style directives of consumer culture before becoming self-annihilating in themselves. The dialectics of fashion Cool are certainly constant and unforgiving, if strangely cyclical: I often yearn for the wardrobe I had when I was a 12-year-old boy in Newcastle, recast in adult sizes of course, because it was so right, so ``now", when all it felt to me back then was wrong and out of place.

This suburban discomfort and the rages of its energy, from AC/DC and Cold Chisel through surf culture and silverchair are enjoying a comeback in Australian Cool, something the ``aging hipster" and author of Golden Miles, Clinton Walker, attributes to ``the fact it's all localised Australian stuff. It's real. Cool to me is about that localised quality. Look at the old muscle cars like the Charger and the Holden Monaro, now they're cool unlike all those silly cars and 4WDs you see people driving in Sydney's east".

The distance of Australian suburbia from international design and fashion, and its being subsumed into kitsch, also explains the surreal bent at work in everything from the humor of Roy and H.G. to the films of Baz Luhrmann: a genuinely Cool Australian style.

Equally vital now is the nascent formation of what Social Change Media's Tony Moore identifies as ``deadly culture" (``deadly" being an Aboriginal slang for ``cool"), and what Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page sees as the surge in Aboriginal influences on a contemporary Australian identity. ``Look at Cathy Freeman," Page says. ``There's a spirit that's Cool. A cool spirit is what I want to know about something joyous and sacred. I wonder if the word `cool' comes from spirit?"

Maybe there's a virginity of cultural experience to this as well, to that true spirit of Cool and how one encounters it, like reading J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye when you are in high school, or hearing Nick Drake's Pink Moon at university and thinking you are the first one of your time to know it again, take it deep inside. As Kerouac so famously and so lovingly put it in On The Road: ``The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, delirious of everything at the same time..."

Speaking about that vitalising energy in his 1999 manifesto Against Cool, the writer Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, Demonology) recalled his love for ``beat writing as a young reader. The velocity and the spirit, the opposition to the stuffiness of academic writing (to the monolithic sobriety of New Criticism), the sheer, dizzy glee. What the great beat writers did for American letters was appropriate America's one truly indigenous music form, jazz, and fuse the lessons of that music with the transcendentalism that had been irrigating American literature for a century. The beats yoked Miles and Bird to Whitman and Emerson. And by the late '50s and '60s, the cool beat idiom had become as frankly spiritual as its transcendental models".

Whatever happened, though, to that passionate, spiritual form of Cool? How did Cool, so romantic, so possible, so immersed, get so cold and superficial today? How did we move from Jackson Pollock and Brett Whiteley to wallpaper; from the spiritual might of Sonny Rollins to the ironies of cocktail muzak and a self-congratulatory, thuggishly macho rap hyped as ``sonic reportage"; from the anarchic situationist theories of Guy Debord and Paris 1968 to modern advertising with a sly conspiratorial wink?

Of course, it's easy to identify another strand to Cool, the very opposite of the transcendental mode I've been pushing: the reptilian slither and icy nihilism extending from Burroughs through Warhol into Bret Easton Ellis, the electronic ennui of Radiohead. But this does not explain the shallowing of the feeling.

Nor would it be fair to say that Cool no longer exists, or that it has lost its spiritual or activist edge, whether one speaks of Patti Smith's ongoing musical career and techno-music-inspired environmentalists or magazines like Adbusters and concepts like ``culture jamming" (media pranks like the recent ``Dole Army" fiasco that saw A Current Affair and Today Tonight led down stormwater drains looking for a subterranean world of bludgers).

Cool is still happening out there, fighting for life, but the word itself has been given a mainstream makeover and a mobile phone to keep it busy. Cool now: it's what you buy to look good, isn't it? Isn't it?

In their book Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, writers Dick Pountain and David Robins (the former an author of computer textbooks, the latter a student of criminal sociology, a combo somehow appropriate to the subject at hand) study the political and cultural history of Cool. They trace its origins back to the slave trade and acts of ``silent rebellion" against authority, a ``pose of resistance" unable to make itself explicit.

They then move through the classic and archetypal history of what Cool became as a style, noting ``a strikingly similar attitude to be found in European culture, the sprezzatura of Italian courtiers during the Renaissance, the famous reserve of English aristocrats and the Romantic irony of 19th century poets. Cool is by no means an American phenomenon, although its modern manifestation was incubated among young black American jazz musicians during the first decades of the 20th century, before being discovered by hard-boiled crime writers and Hollywood scriptwriters of the '30s and '40s, and finally injected into youth culture during the '50s by Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll."

Obviously the beats, the hippies and the punks get a look-in, along with the influences of French existentialism and the nouvelle vague cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Berlin cabaret and Brechtian theatrical techniques, the paintings and aphorisms of Warhol, the debaucheries of '70s rock as epitomised by the Rolling Stones, and era-defining films like Easy Rider, Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction.

From the beginning of Cool Rules, Pountain and Robins announce a desire to ``show how this attitude, which originally expressed resistance to subjugation and humiliation, has been expropriated by the mass media and the advertising industry in the '80s and '90s, and used as the way into the hearts and wallets of young consumers".

A little more bluntly, it's stated: ``Cool consumer capitalism has discovered, as Thomas Frank puts it, how to construct cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent."

For those in the know, Thomas Frank is the giant killer of Cool today, a philosopher of anti-Cool. In his book The Conquest of Cool, and more regularly at his Web-magazine The Baffler, Frank argues that big business hasn't just appropriated the language of youth culture, it's always been the driving force behind it.

This business revolution is ongoing today as ``a host of self-designated corporate revolutionaries outlining the accelerated new capitalist order in magazines like Wired and Fast Company gravitate naturally to the imagery of rebel youth culture to dramatise their own insurgent vision".

It's this depressing landscape of Cool that made Rick Moody cry out for a Cool that was ``gone, long gone. Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop labourers in Third World countries. Cool is Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid."

Since September 11 there is a desire to rerun the 1950s in America and with it a creepy rage for consensus at any price. Conservatives everywhere have taken possession of the event as a vindication for their righteousness; there is no room for dissent, for unsettling voices, off-kilter words. The national agenda is one of unity, ``healing": a new conformity. The McCarthyist tone, the lauding of material satisfaction and security at any cost is very familiar.

Speaking of Kerouac and the beat phenomenon in a famous 1957 essay ``The White Negro", the title an acknowledgement of the influence of black jazz musicians on a new style of American revolt and literature, Norman Mailer wrote: ``The only life-giving answer to the deathly drag of American civilisation is to tear oneself from the security of physical and spiritual certainty, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey with the rebellious imperatives of the self."

He was being extreme; the end result of that thinking for many was perversion, suicide. But in this squarest of times, ``the rebellious imperatives of the self" remain a necessary adjunct to any lifestyle and the purchase it has on you, an interrogating and humanising request from within to stay Cool but keep warm.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Essay section,Saturday, February 23, 2002.

John Cassavetes: A Sovereign of Space

2011-07-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

THE 19th century French writer Charles Baudelaire once compared the plight of the poet to that of the albatross. A sacred bird which would "nonchalantly chaperone a ship across the bitter fathoms of the sea", it sometimes suffered the boredom of sailors who would capture and torture it, "a sovereign of space... exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered, he cannot walk because of his great wings".

John Cassavetes had something of that grace and futility in him every time he chose to occupy a screen, whether as a director, actor, or often both. A strange, subtly erotic presence that hinted at an existential update on Bogart's tough charm, he went for a realism in his films that kept him mostly alienated from mainstream success.

"Nowadays, the big question is: Can a picture make $100million? Who the hell cares? If you're thinking that way, you're making money. If that's what it's come to, let the audience look at pictures of money. Put money on the screen, and then rape it, shoot it, defecate on it - because that's basically what everyone is doing."

Eschewing the materialism of success, and with it Hollywood's smooth aesthetic codes, Cassavetes's films were long and winding, populated by middle-aged, complex characters, and rarely resolved in a pat or comforting manner. Love, loneliness, madness, and the struggle for identity were his themes, unbalanced in tensions between private and social worlds, as if the latter's imprisoning rituals somehow bullied the former's visionary fragility.

His death on February 4 this year from complications incurred by a three-year battle with cirrhosis of the liver, was not a surprise. During the making of Lovestreams (1984) he'd been warned he could die at any moment, perhaps the reason why it is suffused with an intensity that is almost hallucinogenic, reality-in-overload, as a dissolute writer tries to cope with his loneliness and mortality.

Regarded as the father of a New Hollywood, Cassavetes was one of the first to rebel against the studio system and prove that independent filmmaking could force its way past American cinematic values bound to the chauvinism of the 1950s.

Cassavetes had built a reputation quietly as an actor in live television drama as well as low-budget social conscience films. But it was his starring role in the television series Johnny Staccato (1959-60) that put Cassavetes on a celebrity map he only ever saw as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Playing the part of a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village who moonlighted as a private eye, he immediately found himself touted as a sensitive sex symbol with his lean, Greek, good looks, clear intelligence, and coolly-disposed execution of one of TV's first hipster roles.

Born on December 9, 1929, to immigrant parents, Cassavetes' father was a Harvard-educated businessman who made and lost millions. Consequently, Cassavetes knew the middle class territory of Long Island (a world whose infidelities he explored in Husbands in the 1970's) and the much tougher, more ethnic Bronx area (whose compassionate and murderous loyalties he would celebrate in Gloria, a delicately-humoured, Latin-paced thriller in the 1980's) - experiences that caused him to mature as a leading man with a distinctly New York blend of the urbane and the savage.

But rather than accept a careerist momentum that cast him as a sex symbol or an American rebel, Cassavetes ploughed his earnings into directing an inter-racial love story called Shadows (1961). The film sprang out of improvisational acting classes he had been running, and took away a major award at the Venice Film Festival, establishing him on the international arthouse circuit. For the next three decades, though, Cassavetes never really belonged anywhere except in his own, almost capriciously obsessive, milieu.

His days as an independent film-maker were launched when the big studios filmed on sets and dubbed their sound. Instead, Cassavetes used his garage, warehouses and the streets, incorporating extraneous elements like traffic noise and passers-by with a stylistic freedom considered absurdly crude, even outrageous. The likes of Martin Scorcese would be grateful for these technical liberations, let alone the new visceral possibilities they unleashed.

By the time Hollywood was catching up with the counter-culture, in films like Easy Rider and Woodstock, Cassavetes was busy taking his hand-held camera into the malaise of suburbia and to an older, disenchanted and lost generation. He was questioning what was driving society in places where people weren't looking, confronting the burgeoning 1960s myths of youth and freedom with portraits of age and doubt.

Wary of being stereotyped, he once angrily said, "I'm not an intellectual. I'm not an intellectual film-maker"; a feeling borne out in the way he approached one of his greatest films, A Woman Under The Influence (1974), which featured his wife, Gena Rowlands, in an Academy Award nominated role as woman struggling with mental instability against domestic inertia and the dumb romantic faith which cruelly underpins it.

Mortgaging his own house to finance the kind of film he's been repeatedly told over the years there was no market for, Cassavetes split the costs with the help of its co-lead, Peter Falk, a close compatriot who used the earnings he'd made from the popular television detective show Colombo. Cassavetes then rejected conventional wisdom that would have had it distributed as an arthouse release, opting instead to book the film into blue-collar working-class neighbourhoods where it became a box-office success.

Cassavetes had always explored relationships with an unflagging sense of the insoluble. In his films it's just when you think you hate someone or have them boxed that their capacity to be human shakes you, just as his heroines or heroes invariably display problems or moments of horror so convincing you can understand the pain they draw, the negative gravity they've somehow set in motion.

Interestingly, Cassavetes' own relationship with Rowlands, personally and creatively, thrived since 1958, and they had three children - Nicholas (also an actor), Alexandra and Zoe. Reflecting on A Woman Under The Influence, Rowlands only remarked, "I'm a little crazy. We all are. And sometimes I let things go. It was a question of taking that small, wild, desperate feeling we all get and raising it to the highest pitch."

Born into a Welsh community in America that still speaks its own language, Rowlands still returns home every year. An intense and uncompromising actress, her eccentricities clearly charmed Cassavetes, particularly her jumping from hobby to hobby - from diamond cutting, to studying languages, to mechanical engineering.

It was the positive quality of his relationship with Rowlands that inspired Cassavetes's scouring journeys into love. In Faces (1968), which was typically financed from his leading role as Mia Farrow's husband in Rosemary's Baby, he bemoaned the lack of truth at the core of America's love life.

"I was bugged about marriage. Not my marriage. Gena and I have always disagreed out in the open, we never hold back. But I was bugged about the millions of middle-class marriages in the United States that just glide along. Couples married 10-15 years, husbands and wives who seem to have everything -big house, two cars, maid, teenage kids - but all these creature comforts have made them passive. Underneath, there's this feeling of desperation because they can't connect.

"What's worse is most couples aren't even aware they can't communicate. The whole point of Faces (and much of Cassavetes's work before and after) is to show how few people really talk to each other. These days everybody is supposed to be so intelligent. 'Isn't it terrible about Nixon getting elected?' 'Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?' And you're supposed to have all the answers.

"But when it gets down to the nitty gritty - like 'What is bugging you mister? Why can't you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake at night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognise you have problems and deal with them?' - the answer is that people have forgotten communication. There is no communication between people.

"Instead it's long-winded stories, or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody's really laughing. It's more an hysterical, joyless sound. Translation: 'I am here and I don't know why.'

"Nobody knows how to use himself or love himself. That's the tragedy of our age."

- Mark Mordue

* First published as 'Sense of Grace and Futility', Sydney Morning Herald, 5th May 1989.

Ian Rilen: "Someone must have put the mozz on me"

2011-05-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

Former Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker calls him 'a national treasure'. Hunters and Collectors made his song 'Stuck On You' a live anthem. Rilen even sparked a minor craze for singlets on Oz Rock front men when Mark Seymour, then Tex Perkins, imitated his on-stage look. Indeed each new generation seems to rediscover Rilen as an inspirationally authentic figure akin to a modern-day bluesman.

Unless you're a music fanatic, though, or a denizen of Darlinghurst or St Kilda, it's unlikely you would know of him. Because as much as they say a lot about Ian Rilen he probably puts it best himself when he sings, with a succinct blend of humour and menace and pride, 'I'm bad for good.'

It's not something he entirely controls, of course. Lately, for instance, every time he tries to show someone a video of his new group Ian Rilen and The Love Addicts, it breaks. He shakes his head and works away at my complimentary cassette with a pencil, muttering 'Someone must have put the mozz on me.'

"I've very rarely fucked up in live shows in the last thirty years, though," he states defensively. "Afterwards maybe. but I don't do any shit before. I don't smoke pot or anything. I still remember the time I had a line of coke years ago before playing. We were four songs in before my feet hit the ground. When I realized I said "Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I'm back!"

The word 'bad' comes up a lot around Ian Rilen, you see, not least in his own songs, notably the Rose Tattoo classic 'Bad Boy For Love', which he says 'still keeps me in beer money'. By the time it was becoming Rose Tattoo's first hit in 1977 Rilen had left the band because "they weren't hard enough" and "it was turning into the Angry Anderson show". "I was also starting to write songs like 'Hate City' and Angry didn't like that. He thought it was too punk."

A reformation tour in 1999 that featured their original and toughest line-up included a contract stipulation that amused Rilen. 'Pete Wells and Angry demanded that they not be on the same floor as Mick Cox and I in any hotel we stayed at. We always did like to party out more than they did.' Rilen forgets to add that Anderson and Wells also requested they not travel in the same vehicle because of he and Cox's inability to wake up and get to the next gig in what might be called comfortable time.

Rilen has 'heard all the bullshit' before, of course, how he's halfway between Iggy Pop and Dorian Gray, how he's gifted with a reptile handsomeness that mostly belies his demonic lifestyle. "It's better than being half way between Johnny Farnham and Perry Como," he supposes, puffing on a Camel and breathing out a burst of smoke that suggests he must be laughing, a distinct blue 'X' tattooed on his index finger.

Now into their 25th year, X are arguably the most important and enduring underground rock band in Australian music history. Rilen still recalls seeing them at an early rehearsal session. 'They were playing their instruments so hard they were soaked in blood.' The passion impressed him enough to leave Rose Tattoo and join up.

As their bassist and sometime vocalist, Rilen still shares the unit creatively with its other great survivor, guitarist and singer Steve Lucas, after a series of deaths, departures and sporadic break-ups that would have wiped out most other acts. X recently celebrated their 'silver jubilee' with the release of Evil Rumours, a double live CD recorded at Sydney's The Basement. 'No one ever really captured the full flight of X on record,' Rilen says now. ‘It was unfortunate. You just had to be there to cop it.'

Over that time Rilen has distinguished himself with a downward stroking, 'wall-of-sound' bass style, a gravel and honey voice that hints at Tom Waits and even Jacques Brel, and hardcore, surprisingly melodic songwriting reinforced by lyrically minimalist pictures of street life. For a man who claims, somewhat awkwardly, to be 'no good at reading books', his taste in songwriters is decidedly refined, with a notable passion for Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as well as the fine and low arts of conversation. 'If you can say it in a few words or less it's always better.'

Given X's wayward approach to everything and a highly charged personal history that included Rilen taking up with Lucas's wife for a while, it's no surprise there has been a need to pursue other tangents. Ian Rilen and The Love Addicts are but the latest example. In distinguishing the two bands Rilen says The Love Addicts "rock like shit, but with highs and lows. It's soft and lazy and sleazy, but then it snaps out," he adds with an excited snarl. "As opposed to X, which snaps out all the time."

He's just recorded a new CD with The Love Addicts for Christmas release under the title of "Passion,Boots and Bruises". In that group Rilen prefers to play a loose style of rhythm guitar, saving his devastating and punishing bass work for X. He points to the bass guitar that has kept him company for so long, lying in a corner of the room, noting that he has no copies of anything he has ever recorded, nor does have a car, a home, or a stereo. "Someone could come to town for three weeks and own more than I do. I've thought about it lately. Music has taken everything I've got."

His Fender Telecaster 61 has burn marks on the side and an atmosphere of long-term damage written all over it. Aside from his aggressive playing style, it bears the marks of his relationship with then girlfriend Cathy Green, who was X's extraordinary drummer from 1984 till 2002. Rilen and Green's relationship would prove as combustible as his friendship with Steve Lucas. "Girls are girls," Rilen says, as if it were a futile mystery, before confessing, "I came home late one." He pauses for quite a while without saying a word. Finally I say, "night?"

"Actually I was gone about a week," he says. "I remember pulling into the driveway and sitting there too frightened to go inside. You'd know the sound of my Buick pulling in anywhere though. When I did finally go in Cathy was sitting at the kitchen table reading the papers. She just said 'hello'. And that was it. I thought, 'I've gotten away with it!' Then I said, 'Can you smell something burning?' I looked over to the stove and there was my guitar, both jets on full bore. It'd taken me five minutes to do my cowardly creep inside. She must have put it on as soon as she heard me."

Rilen admits he doesn't make a living from his music "yet, but I'm working on it". The fact he's on his way back down to Melbourne for his girlfriend's 21st birthday tonight might give some indication of both his charm and his energy along the way. Does getting old frighten him, I ask? "No," he says. "Music is about how you feel inside and how you give that to people. If you're lucky it's enough to do the job."

- Mark Mordue

* Article first appeared in The Weekend Australian, 20th September 2005.
+ Portrait shot by Richard Sharman, www.blackshadow.com.au, accessed via Flickr. Shot with car from Bang Records website.

Berlin Dreaming - Ned Collette and Wirewalker

2011-04-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

"No use permitting

some prophet of doom

to wipe every smile away.

Come hear the music play..."

Cabaret – Music: John Kandor / Lyrics: Fred Ebb

BERLIN IS WARMER than usual for this time of year, with weeks on end of near perfect summer weather. From an Australian point of view this warmth is distinctly home-like, discouraging remnant thoughts of the Wall and Nazism or anything like the Cabaret shadows of the Weimar Republic. No, they all seem a world away, like an old movie, a distant song.

Instead, everyone here is on pushbikes and bells are ringing. The wide streets are drenched with sunlight and people are flooding into the parks of one of the greenest cities in Europe, designed in the open manner that the 19^th century Prussian capital was intended to be experienced. The city is light. And it moves to a whirring easy rhythm that could sedate you with joy.

Above me blue skies are pinned to a gospel of brass green church spires. It’s only the memorials that stop you in your tracks; that stab with a tear and the unexpected weight of history. Their names alone tell the story.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe – Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas – is a five-acre block of blank cemetery slabs meant to represent each page of the Talmud. It has a small, often overlooked museum below it where handwritten notes and letters that survived the Holocaust are buried into glowing floor panels and translated for your sorrows: “goodbye father”, “what future”, “mud and blood in my ear”.

Across town the Topographie des Terrors documents the former headquarters for the SS and the rise of their infernal bureaucracy, a museum of photos and facts that looks like a Bauhaus aviary of aluminium and glass placed in a wide field of pebbly slag. Close by there’s a preserved section of the Wall for you to parade beside, the graffiti on it faded, but easy to read, and strangely alive: “fuck this”, “LOVE”, “mary was here”.

Old hands shake their heads and tell me Berlin is not what it used to be, that even the weather here has changed permanently. No one can imagine what it was really like. The bullet-riddled facades are plastered over now; the vacant lots like missing teeth in the skyline have been built on and filled in; the unremitting greyness painted in colour! Why, once upon a time…

IN A TYPICALLY SHADOWY hinterhofe (apartment block courtyard) a dozen or so adults and children are gathered round a picnic table celebrating the fine weather. As their talk echoes up the concrete walls, into a framed patch of sky – an archetypal Berlin ‘view’ – it becomes obvious this mix of Germans and Australians are musicians, artists, translators and writers.

They’ve dragged a boxy-looking television out into the open and mounted it on a bar fridge filled with beer. Football fever has the city in its grip. On the television Australia and Ghana are slugging it out in a preliminary for the World Cup and groans erupt as an Australian player is tripped mid-field on his way to what looks like a certain shot at goal. The free kick feels like paltry compensation.

“You can’t buy back momentum,” I say. A young man next me agrees with an intensity that surprises me. “You’re dead right there.”

This is how I meet the 30-year-old singer and songwriter Ned Collette, formerly of Melbourne, now Berlin. “Came here six months ago with my band,” he says. Pretty soon we’re talking about everything from To Kill A Mockingbird (“We’ve just discovered how good audio-books can be when we’re on the road”) to the virtues of an obscure Elton John album called Madman Across the Water (“back when he was skinny and cool”). He says he named his backing group Wirewalker after seeing the documentary Man on a Wire (2008), the story of Philippe Petit’s illegal high-wire walk between the World Trade Towers in 1974.

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS TRUST a single blaze of light but when Ned Collette and Wirewalker finish their set a few nights later at a small bar on Schonhauser Allee it’s hard not to feel witness to something major. As he walks off-stage dripping sweat over his star-white linen suit I notice a girl retreating from front of stage after an hour of furious dancing. “I haven’t cut loose like that in six months, it was just fantastic,” she says. “They were like some kinda Melbourne Crazy Horse up there!”

The allusion is apt. Collette’s thinly bearded, white-suited look is pure Neil Young circa On the Beach and he has that same mighty guitar sound to incendiarize his songs at will. But his group Wirewalker don’t mimic Crazy Horse’s epic garage rock sound, nor does Collette limit his playing to Young’s levitating, fiery chords.

Instead three-piece unit – guitar (Collette), bass (Adam Donovan) and drums (Joe Talia) – fan out into jazzier positions that hint at early 70s troubadours like Tim Buckley when his ecstatic performances went sea-like and experimental; the addition of some keyboards (James Rushford) also recalls the textured, ambient influence of one of Melbourne’s most under-rated musical icons, David Bridie. Then there’s the parched singer-songwriter on electric guitar stuff that implies Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt have been on Ned Collette’s record player at home, though his singing voice is so sonorous the results remind you more of The Drones at their strine-ishly articulate and devastating best. The dominant impression one takes away from the show is that of heat, a curiously Australian aesthetic signature.

Collette first made an impression back home as the leader of an improvisational and mostly instrumental Melbourne band called City City City. Towards the end of their run he began to sing a few songs. By the release of his solo debut, Jokes and Trials (2006), he’d evolved into your archetypal singer-songwriter – with a textured taste for arrangements that weaved electric Australian folk-blues in the grand tradition of early Paul Kelly, some beautiful finger-picking guitar that hinted at Nick Drake, and a pastoral psychedelic wash indebted to Pink Floyd’s original Mad Hatter, Syd Barrett.

The guy could obviously go anywhere and on his second album Future Suture (2007) he did. Collette’s electric guitar work developed a distinct Neil Young smoulder to it, orchestrated arrangements for trumpets and strings appeared, and a much greater use of tape loops and sampling suggested further ambient depths. The record was a triumph but it was hell to play live and Collette took to drinking heavily to calm his nerves.

Like-minded souls saw the possibilities anyway. Smog’s Bill Callahan invited him on a national tour of Australia; Joanna Newsome took Collette on the road to Europe; Camera Obscura invited him across for a series of UK supports. Holed up in Glasgow, Collette developed his most complete set of songs to date, backing away from the introspective singer-songwriter approach and seeking out something more observational. “You just get sick of yourself,” he says to me as if it’s a question rather than a statement. His broadening perspective was also entwined in the formation of a full-time band and, Collette admits, “letting go of the control I’d had as a solo artist”.

After writing off their first attempt to record his new songs Ned Collette and Wirewalker would turn to the American producer Joel Hamilton (Tom Waits; Sparklehorse; Elvis Costello). Over the Stones, Under the Stars (2009) emerged with all the astral spaciousness its title suggests, combining the intimate coherence of Jokes and Trials with the depth and range of Future Suture. The new record even loosed a memorable single in ‘Come Clean’, a tersely stroked ballad set in a “little town [that] has gone to sleep”.

Collette says he was inspired by seeing The Lives of Others and reading Stasiland to weigh up what it means to live an honest life in a compromised society. Poised to break through onto another level with ‘Come Clean’ in Australia, Collette moved to Berlin and left Melbourne behind him.

COLLETTE WORRIES AWAY at the band’s scope when we speak after the show on Schonhauser Allee. “I think our biggest challenge is limiting ourselves,” he says by way of confession. Both he and drummer Joe Talia graduated with honours degrees in modern composition and improvisation from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. “I’ve spent years trying to get away from it and really simplify things,” Collette says, describing the study as “disintuitive”.

One hears this struggle with sophistication across Collette’s records. Ambitions that can disperse the unity of the songs or, perversely, be suppressed just when you might hope for an even grander latitude to unleash itself. There’s also a self-conscious literariness that does not always hit its mark, puns. With Over the Stones, Under the Stars, Collette actually refers to songs as “chapters” at one point. I’m struck by the novelistic equivalent he is seeking to make on record.

“Inventing characters that are rich and deep seems like an excellent pursuit to me. And I’m trying to get away from me and my life,” he says.

Collette’s mother, New Zealand born Susan Hancock, studied at Oxford and taught English Literature at La Trobe. She has published a book of short stories, Sailing through the Amber (1997) and a Jungian study of children in literature and fairytales entitled, The Child that Haunts Us (2008). His father, Adrian Collette did his thesis on Henry James and also tutored at La Trobe, later working in publishing before becoming CEO of the Australian Opera.

Though Collette is an only child and his parents long since separated, he can detail half brothers and sisters from his mother’s earlier marriage and his father’s three marriages that “make it for a complicated family to explain,” he says with a laugh. It turns out that Collette’s Sri Lankan grandmother (on his father’s side) was a cousin of Michael Ondaatje’s grandmother, the one so startlingly depicted in the climactic drowning scene to that author’s travel memoir, Running in the Family. “It’s the same story and heritage,” Collette says of the Sri Lankan connections, “it was a pretty small community.”

“So I’m essentially a first generation Australian and my family doesn’t have a lot of history there, really. I guess I always thought I’d end up living overseas for some time.” There’s a sense that this drives the floating quality within his music. It’s roaming, dreaming energy.

“It does frustrate me that a lot of bands show up who are like contemporary copies of old things,” Collette says. “And in Australia’s case a lot of bands that have been successful over past ten years have often had one or two years of great success as nothing more than carbon copies riding a wave of nostalgia before they disappear again. I don’t want us to be associated with that.”

He talks by contrast about bands like The Drones and Augie March and The Devastations in particularly loving terms. “They’re bands who don’t fuck around. They’re complex and deep and thoughtful. That’s a tradition I am proud to be a part of, which is strange for me as I shy away from meaningless generalisations. But I do like to put my name to it when people here ask me where I am from and I can say ‘Melbourne’.”

The definitive evocation of that city’s rock ‘n’ roll dreaming for him is the instrumental group, Dirty Three. As a student at VCA Collette says he despised all the jazz nerds with their love of guitarist Pat Metheny and the endless complications and frills to their playing. On his own guitar case he pasted a picture of violinist Warren Ellis. “And people would still come up to me and say ‘Is that Pat Metheny?’” he laughs.

“There’s this aural quality to the Dirty Three, an Australian sound… whatever it is, they have it in spades! When I hear them it makes me think of 30 degree days and hot sunny laneways in Brunswick and North Carlton, and corrugated iron.”

Collette almost sounds homesick at this point. Sitting outside in the warmth of the night after the show, ne nonetheless compares his life in Berlin now to a potential one in London “where everyone I know has to bust a gut just to get by. Things are easier and cheaper here, slower. My work comes together haphazardly, so I need the time and space. A lot of people say Berlin is like Melbourne, so it’s not a terribly adventurous choice for me to live here,” he admits with a shrug.

“My routine here is pretty loose. The city feels vast and open… and there is a feeling of space and a sort of strange under-population,” he says. “There is that feeling of history, obviously,” he says, “but also that I’m 30 years too late for a crazy, interesting city. Sometimes it feels like a place where all these people have come without really knowing why they are here.”

IT'S CERTAINLY AGES since David Bowie evoked the mood of West Berlin in the funereal instrumentals that so startlingly filled side two of Low, or crooned and cried his heart out over Robert Fripps’s guitar drones to forge an unlikely Cold War love song for the title track to Heroes.

Ages too since Iggy Pop improvised a lyric about travelling through “the city’s ripped backsides” in ‘The Passenger’: an observation on a then divided Berlin’s post-War condition as well as his friend David Bowie’s capacity to take detached advantage of any situation as “he rides and rides” through it all.

Loosely known as ‘the Berlin quartet’, David Bowie’s Low (1977) and Heroes (1977) and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot (1977) and Lust for Life (1977) would form a sonic and imagistic template rich and risky enough to inspire vast swathes of the post-punk musical era to follow. Not bad for one year’s work in a foreign city.

Bowie would return to the city to perform a live set at the Brandenburg Gates in 1987. He made sure the PA system was turned toward the East as a 1000 people gathered out of sight and over the Wall to also listen to his show. When he sang ‘Heroes’ the voices of the East chorused above a listening West German audience: “And the shame was on the other side, and we kissed as though nothing could fall…”

U2 would visit the city in 1990 with Bowie’s other main confrere, the producer and conceptualist Brian Eno, to reinvent themselves as a post-modern rock ‘n’ roll band turning radically to the future on Achtung Baby. The Wall had just fallen; Germany, and thereby Berlin, were being formally united – there was an ecstasy here in the ashes of history.

Recording at the legendary Hansa Tonstudios had as much to do with U2’s renewed, deep, dark, alive-in-a-room sound as Eno’s ambient influences and lateral suggestions. Studio 2, or ‘Hansa by the Wall’ as it was more commonly known, was a former Nazi ballroom, a room freighted with ghosts and superb acoustic properties to match.

That the Hansa building was still half ruined from bombing during the war, leaving it standing alone amid overgrown, vacant lots, only added to its symbolic power. Once upon a time West Berlin too had been an island of capitalism and democracy within the East German totalitarian wasteland. At Hansa you could lean out a tiny window as David Bowie once had and look over the remains of the Wall where he had seen the lovers kissing who inspired him to write ‘Heroes’ most famous lines.

Synth popsters Depeche Mode became a seriously moody and credible stadium act by recording in this studio throughout the 80s. Nick Cave practically owned it over that same decade, first with The Birthday Party in their death throes (‘It’s a Wild World’), then across a string of acclaimed solo albums with his backing band the Bad Seeds – recordings stained in Weimar reds and blues and clouded in the exile of heroin addiction. No one caught the German Romantic ethos of ‘sturm and drang’ (“storm and urge”) quite so deeply in a modern context as Nick Cave, manifest not only in his bohemian lifestyle but also a cinematic, spiralling depth in the Bad Seeds music that U2 would feed off for textural innovations of their own.

Come to Berlin, all these artists seemed to say, to be born anew and journey darkly. Everything from Wim Wender’s 1987 film Wings of Desire (in which Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds appeared) to Anna Funder’s 2003 book Stasiland continue to reinforce that font of inspiration for Australians. But it’s the Nick Cave connection that has proven particularly enduring. Indeed it’s hard to meet any Australians in Berlin today who are not from Cave’s hometown of Melbourne.

FORMER BAD SEEDS like Mick Harvey and Hugo Race continue to visit Berlin and play to devoted local followings to this day, maintaining connections that go back three decades. But Race is sceptical of any ongoing Melbourne-Berlin axis. “Personally I think the two cities no longer have a real bond,” he says. “In former times they had the commonality of being isolated – one by politics, the other by geography – leading to the creation of these intense, introspective scenes. This is no longer the case.”

“What I see are foreigners under the illusion that Berlin has something for them, and what these musicians need is some imagination. For example why not move to Kiev or Skopje instead of Berlin if you are looking for inspiration and new stimulus? Berlin used to have the kind of edge and appeal that these cities have now. But who is going there from the next generation?”

Grand Salvo’s Paddy Mann has recently been performing around town for the past few months. He delivers some of his cracked and tender country Death songs in a final intimate gig at the Sofa Sessions, a showcase afternoon event held at a private apartment where underground folk acts and poets converge and artists hang everything from photos to animated illustrations on the ‘gallery’ walls.

Speaking in what seems like an assured murmur, Mann says he was “attracted to Berlin mostly by its atmosphere… a kind of protected and livable existence that at the same time vibrates with this dark intrigue and restlessness. It’s welcoming in a strange aloof way, and also a little Melbourne-like while being utterly different. In fact it’s lots of things at the same time, often contradictory: dirty and clean, easy going and rigid. Boozy idleness flourishes but so does a rigorous artistic integrity and exploration, often in the same people! No one’s here to make money, everyone shares ideas and time. Perhaps I'm romanticizing it, but I’m leaving [now] with a vague sense of regret.. ... I have to admit I've never owned a Nick Cave album. He's just 'been around' so much over the years I feel I haven’t really needed to.”

“And yes, Berlin has associations rich in death and it’s hard to avoid constantly ruminating on its past, particularly with the ‘stolpersteine’ [literally ‘stumbling blocks’: brass name plates created by the artist Gunter Demnig which he places among over a cobblestone to commemorate where people lived before they were taken during the Holocaust] that peer up at you on any given street.”

“But my record Death is coincidentally about guilt and an effort towards redemption, which I think is more about what Berlin is today. It’s a very self-aware city and is very open and active in coming to terms with its role in World War Two atrocities. I think it’s a positive and important attitude, particularly coming from a country that can’t even admit its own humble efforts at genocide.”

IT TURNS OUT the Sofa Sessions in Berlin are run by another young Melbournian singer-songwriter called Sam Wareing, who performs under the moniker of Ms. Sam. In trying to explain the Melbourne-Berlin axis she’s far more enthusiastic than Race, talking about “an aesthetic sympathy between the two cities. Melbourne’s the most European of Australian cities. Broadly speaking, I think they [Melbourne and Berlin] share an intellectual, melancholic, angular, monochromatic, anarchic feel. Long, grey, grim winters….”

Wareing hesitates, reaching for something deeper to explain the seductions that still draw so many young Melbournians to Berlin over twenty years after Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds evacuated the city. “Perhaps it’s a peculiarly middle-class Melbourne rebellion [that leads us here],” she admits, “like all the kids memorialised in Dogs In Space. Berlin seems more ‘real’ for the incredible, fractured and living history in every street, more ‘dangerous’, mythical maybe, and a lot more free than Melbourne too.”

“Somehow it's a city of hope and collaboration, not [dominated by] sad old losers bitching about the past. Except the ‘Friends of Nick Cave™’, my friend’s term for all the hangers-on that litter Berlin,” she says.

It wasn’t so long ago that Rolling Stone Germany cited The Devastations for debut album of the year in 2004. The Melbourne group have gone on to do a film soundtrack with Alexander Hacke of with Einsturzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), without doubt Berlin’s premier avant-garde musical act. Ironically enough, Einsturzende Neubauten’s legendary guitarist and singer, Blixa Bargeld, is best known outside Germany as one of Nick Cave’s most critical collaborators during his tenure (1983-2003) with the Bad Seeds.

As for Ned Collette, his experiences of the city don’t necessarily conflict with Race’s contempt for false nostalgia or Wareing’s more impassioned insights either. “Songs are starting to come here – I mean I always have things bubbling away, but I don’t know if they are a result of the city as such. They aren’t about Berlin,” says Collette. “They are a result of having some time alone though and that’s that sort of enforced exile coming into play I guess.”

It’s in comments like this that Race’s word “introspective” flares back up. So many artists responding to Berlin have been forced to turn deep inside themselves for inspiration. Songs like ‘Heroes’ and ‘One’, brilliant as they are, are actually anomalies; the Berlin aesthetic is more usually withheld, distant, solipsistic, hedonistic, mysterious: Bowie’s post-apocalyptic instrumentals on Low; Iggy Pop’s sado-masochistic jive (“love’s like hyponotizing chickens!”) on Lust for Life; Nick Cave’s enclosed universe of grotesques, murder and gnawing blues across albums like The Firstborn is Dead, Your Funeral…My Trial and Tender Prey.

Lou Reed could even put together an iconic rock ‘n’ roll album called Berlin (1973) without ever having visited the city, drawing on the Brecht-Weill flavours of the Weimar era and connecting them to his suite of songs about a drug-withered love affair. “Hey honey, it was paradise.”

THOUGH HE CURRENTLY plays bass for Ned Collette, Adam Donovan is better known as the guitarist for Augie March. Donovan is only filling in while Wirewalker’s original bassist Ben Bourke stays at home in Melbourne with a newborn child. Once Bourke rejoins the unit at the end of 2010 Donovan will then shift to guitar and the band sound will naturally expand.

Donovan tells me he calls the rest of Augie March “the four wives”. They weren’t happy with how their last album and have “taken a hiatus, I believe that’s what it is called in the industry,” he says tartly. “So with the burden of having to be in the same place as the other guys removed, I thought I had to go somewhere.”

He decided on Berlin because he wanted to learn German, and he’d heard the city had an interesting music scene. Simple enough. “I remember when I told a friend of mine, who had done this before, that I was making the trip his only words were, ‘Good Fucking Luck.’”

Musically Donovan can’t see much of a happening local music scene at all. In fact the most interesting thing he has seen in Berlin was Grand Salvo. “Moving from Melbourne, which has one of the richest music scenes I’ve seen anywhere in the world is going to mean any other city will be slightly disappointing,” he says, as if to console himself.

Wirewalker’s drummer Joe Talia has not bought into the mythology of Berlin at all. He says, “the city feels lazy to me, like a big playground”. So much so Talia prefers to stay in Melbourne and visit Berlin as touring and recording with Wirewalker necessitates, though he’s attracted to the city’s experimental musical history which takes in everyone from Neu! To Einsturzende Neubaten, bands that don’t so much influence Wirewalker as encourage a commitment to something bolder and singular.

Ironically this feeling of being on your own in Berlin is something that seems to offer Donovan respite as well as disappointment. “Trying to make a start in a new territory is always difficult. And when you arrive with hardly any contacts and support you have to rely on the music. What do you do but have faith in your music?”

“The songs are what holds bands together and the industry is what tears them apart,” he says with some zeal. “So yeah, essentially we could be in any city in the world.”

“Berlin just allows us to be creative without spending much money and still enjoying what the city has to offer [including easy access to the rest of Europe]. Ned and I are still checking it out, trying to get a feeling for what transpired here. From getting lost on the way home after a night of cheap beer and cigarettes to visiting Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp on the edge of the city which is now a tourist attraction. But the words ARBEIT MACHST FREI on the entrance strips any inkling of it being just another tourist attraction away.”

“We also went to the old Stasi headquarters museum. Great furniture but poor policy as it turned out,” he says. “I can’t remember where I heard the quote but it was something along the lines of, ‘You can’t build a Wall unless you are prepared to kill people.’”

"IT IS REALLY HARD not to get caught up in the many stories Berlin holds,” Collette says as if there’s a trap to all this. “It has seen so much in it’s relatively short life and that is impressed upon you all the time.”

“Last night with some neighbours I got up on the roof to watch a storm come in and saw the whole city spread out under a very dramatic Berlin sky, and it occurred to me how strange it must have been for people to do that thirty years ago realising that half that city was completely inaccessible to them. It’s very affecting.”

Collette talks of the way “the city feels vast and open. I like to take advantage of it by just riding around. There are so many galleries and museums and monuments, and this feeling of space and a strange sort of under-population.”

Perhaps it’s the intensity of the history that also creates a sense of some ghost city parallel to the present one? Collette is not sure, but his new songs do deal with questions of identity, something he connects to the way people now live online. “There is a theme emerging of how roles are played out in society rather than actually inhabited,” he says. “Roberto Bolano keeps coming back to that idea of ‘semblance’ in [his novel] 2666; and I recently saw the Australian opera 'Bliss', from the Peter Carey novel, where the protagonist feels like he is surrounded by actors in hell rather than real people.”

The after-show crowd is slowly thinning out around us. Characteristically of Berlin, everyone is jumping on their pushbikes and whirring off along the Schonhauser Allee. Collette happily nurses a beer but his conversation runs deep. “I did a TV interview in Austria recently,” he says, “and the interviewer asked me why my songs were all so sad when I didn’t strike him as a particularly sad person. The question flummoxed me a bit and my response wasn’t very insightful.”

“I've been thinking about it a lot and it occurs to me that an artist doesn’t have to be in a particularly dark place to be able to comment on the abyss that we all walk beside, as humans, throughout our lives. Life can be perfectly pleasant on a day-to-day level while at the same time revealing there is a massive void beside us, and that void can be totally unrelated to the happy and immediate events that occur in our lives.”

Collette motions his hand, to the dark, to the city maybe, to us. “I think the void is essentially death, which is unknowable, and which all the terrible things that we encounter in the human race essentially leads towards - our terrible treatment of each other on a grand scale as a result of manifestations of power, corruption, betrayal, etcetera. And for me, all good art dares to look into the abyss, and songs don’t necessarily have to sound sad to address it, and if they do ‘sound’ sad they aren’t necessarily futile - sometimes they can just be an acceptance of the uncertainty we all face on a bigger scale than the small things that make us happy, or at least make us seem like fairly relaxed people.”

“And even if you can’t offer a solution, just to accept this is important,” he says. “At some point it seems to me that his was the domain even of pop music, though I rarely encounter that these days.”

While he is talking Collette has set down his beer and started strumming his unplugged electric guitar lightly, as if to help organize his thoughts and get nearer to whatever it is he means. It’s the encore tune to the set he just played, ‘Somewhere in the Middle of the Road’. Collette doesn’t sing the words, of course, but they float up into the night sky on silent thoughts anyway: “O my heroes take me towards the light.”

- Mark Mordue

* An edited version of this article first appeared as a cover story for The Weekend Australian Review on October 23rd, 2010

CREDITS: Leading colour portrait of Ned Collette by Anna Steele. Portrait of Ned and Adam Donovan, and black-and-white shot of Ned, both by Esther Michel. Painting of hinterhof sky view by Heinrich Zille, early 20th century German artist described as 'the purest incarnation of Berlin'. Other images sourced from internet.

Goodbye and Hello: Joan as Police Woman

2011-03-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

Birds are shrieking through the trees all over Rushcutter’s Bay. It is as if something violent and tuneful is going on at once as we sit on a hotel sundeck and take in the riot around us. “Birds are cool,” says Joan Wasser in an accent that fairly drips with New York tang, “but your Australian birds, o my god, I’ve never seen or heard anything like them. I mean, look at that… thing,” she says, pointing to a creature that appears to be part-pterodactyl, part pelican. “What do you call that?”

In scuffed boots and blue jeans, with a diamond-shaped, lapus lazuli ring that seems to cover her entire middle finger, Wasser is something of an odd bird herself. She has just flown in from Spain for the Australian leg of a 2007 world tour to promote her debut album Real Life. Not to put too fine a point on it, she looks like the rock ‘n’ roll bitch you don’t want to mess with.

And yet there’s something a little kooky about Wasser that belies the sultry glower. Better known by her musical moniker, Joan as Police Woman (inspired by the 1970s Angie Dickinson TV program) she will appear in a golden ball gown at her Sydney solo show two nights later, shimmying her shoulders and throwing round stage-patter as if the disco-fied Courtney Love in her were periodically channeling Lucille Ball.

The woman who inspired Jeff Buckley to write ‘Everybody Here Wants You’ is not someone to put in any kind of box. Long after Buckley’s death in 1997, Wasser has affirmed that by singing a few lines back to her old lover: “Just in case you never knew, I can’t be the lighter of your eternal flame”. One of the truly great songs of the last year, ‘Eternal Flame’ was a beautiful, even confronting way for someone to finally say farewell: “No, I can’t stain your white lace baby, not even you can stain your white lace baby.”

A decade may have passed, but Buckley’s death is still not an easy subject to broach, song or no song. Eventually, though, Wasser does start to talk – and every word has its weight. “Meeting Jeff…” she says, pausing for a while then starting over again. “We had a really special thing. Both of us felt safe for the first time ever. And you start to open up with someone when you feel safe. That’s where we were at when it happened.”

“It was such a strange thing that he did,” Wasser says, referring to the impulsive walk Buckley took, boots and all, into the Wolf River in Memphis, singing out a fragment of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to the night, only to be swept away and drowned. “But that’s the way things happened... I’d never experienced a death close to me before. A part of me definitely died with him. But another part was opened up,” she says, un-folding her fist in her lap. “It took a long time and there was so much chaos after he died for me. But hopefully you learn. You learn.”

A project called Black Beetle, which involved her fronting Buckley’s old band in the wake of his death, dissolved after a year and half of abandoned recordings. Classically trained in both violin and piano, Wasser had previously distinguished herself with dervish wildness as an instrumentalist in her first major group The Dambuilders. She would continue playing with everyone from Antony and the Johnsons to Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, and Sparklehorse. But it was her working relationship with Antony, in particular, that would transform her. “At that stage Antony was really obsessed with playing soft. I learnt a lot from that. Antony is so supportive. A lot can happen through his guidance. He’s always holding you, even if he’s not near you.”

Broadly describing her refreshed and softened sound as “American soul music”, Real Life came on like Roberta Flack fronting Steely Dan. It certainly vindicated the My Space website slogan for Joan as Police Woman: “beauty is the new punk rock”. Almost out of the blue, Joan as Police Woman was put beside the UK’s Beth Orton and Canada’s Feist when it came to women producing pop music of profound subtlety and range.

A year has passed, and the 38-year-old Wasser and I are talking once more. This time by phone, about her second album To Survive, and strangely enough about death again. During the making of To Survive, Wasser lost her mother to cancer. Both Wasser and her younger brother were adopted, but she feels only grateful for this and the arts-loving, mixed race family she became a part of. “You learn that family is about the people you grew up; the people who stand by you; the people who love you unconditionally.”

“We all knew she [her mother] was going to go,” Wasser says, “it was just a matter of when. I mean, we’re all gonna go! But when you know there is a lot less time it makes you appreciate the time you have left. I tried to take advantage of talking to her a lot and sharing her memories. ‘To Survive’, especially, is written from her perspective.

“I think the older you get the more you find that people around you are dying,” Wasser says with a surprising laugh. “You can feel very depressed about that or you can really grasp it and be reminded that there’s a time limit for you too. Because it does go fast, incredibly fast, unbelievably fast. I really hope that feeling is on the [new] record.”

The feeling that time slips away, I ask? “Yes,” she says. “And the hopefulness that remains because you are lucky enough to be here.”

If Real Life’s roots were in dance-floor soul with a streak of indie rock insouciance, To Survive shows off Joan as Police Woman’s jazzier influences, the like of which I can only compare to an urbane white girl, jazz-pop classic like Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Though not as instantly grabbing as Real Life, To Survive has the same dark shine and continuously evolving arrangements that bear repeated listens. Wasser suspects the forward moving song structures are to do with having lived on the road for so long in the wake of Real Life’s success. “I use songwriting to keep myself alive,” she says, “I mean mentally alive. When you are on tour for so long you can start to feel like a ghost.”

It’s a feeling that emerges on a grand scale in ‘To America’, a much lauded duet with Rufus Wainwright that sounds like a Broadway musical lament for the nation as well as a love affair. “I wrote that for us to sing because Rufus and I were in similar positions in our lives,” Wasser says. “We feel the same way about our country and we were also dealing with similar personal situations, with both our mums with cancer. The bulk of that song, the verses are about letting go and allowing what happens to happen even if it’s extremely painful.”

“Cancer, though, is not emotional. It goes until it is done. It seemed similar in some way to what is happening to our country too. Leaders so blatantly and uncaringly not connected to their actions, like some disease taking over, I just don’t understand...” Wasser’s voice trails off before she begins again enthusiastically. “The song works pretty well on all those levels I think. And Rufus is a great singer. He doesn’t sound too shabby our Rufus; not too shabby at all.”

Apart from her mother’s presence one also senses the shadow of an abusive relationship affecting the record. Wasser only comment is “a lot of troubling things were going on. And I did make it through. Yes, there was a personal relationship that I am not dealing with any longer, I am thankful to say.”

“But you know, music is a place where I can go to feel. It was true when I was a kid and it’s still like that for me now,” she says. “The way I feel better when I am feeling desperate is to go to music, to a song, that is full of sorrow. If I can share that in music, or go to music that makes me feel more of that feeling, it’s like a way of letting it out.

“I’ve got so much from music in my life and I feel responsible about giving back to it. On this record I took a lot of chances lyrically, to help me, to help others I hope. I’d write something and think that’s horrible, that’s way too revealing, that’s way too honest. Then a day or two later I’d see it was the most important thing to leave in. It surprised people I know well, the people I would call up crying to on the phone! They’d say ‘I never knew you felt like this Joan’,” she says. “Everyone always thinks I’m so ‘strong’.”

“I’m on a path of trying to be more honest, and that includes being more vulnerable because I think that is the place of power. It’s not like I’ve ‘arrived’ or anything, it’s an ongoing process, but when you can say this is where my weakness lies it’s not your point of weakness any more. It’s the way to personal freedom.”

- Mark Mordue

* This story first appeared under the title 'Music is a place where I can go to feel' in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, August 9-10, 2008.

Network Freedom

2011-03-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

Who are you? In a year bookended by James Cameron's Avatar and David Fincher's The Social Network, this was the central theme, as our lives were absorbed into an accelerating digital culture made up of iPhones, iPads, iTunes, Twitter, Wii, X-Box, PlayStation, YouTube and Facebook.

Thanks to the communications revolution, the notion of a mass consciousness - and, indeed, something like Jung's collective unconscious - has become fundamentally material to daily existence.

The digital realm provides a high-octane and interconnected environment in which we can all become immersed. That we are more likely to drown in it than breathe freely is one of its more miserable ironies.

It's not the first time artists have dealt with questions of identity, or the tensions between one's inner life and public face.

A reading of Jane Austen's Emma or an examination of Rembrandt's self-portraits reveal messages about status, role-play and how the self is snared between what is projected and what is interpreted.

Even the idea of fractured identity has been visited many times before: in cubist art, in the psychedelic rock music of the late 1960s, in Albert Camus's The Outsider, in Andy Warhol's pop art, in David Bowie's creation of an avatar, the alien rock star Ziggy Stardust.

But our ability to construct a public identity on Facebook pages, blogs, YouTube videos and the like has intensified, inviting self-evaluation as well as self-obsession.

Even gaming is an extension of this: the participation in another realm where we become somebody or something else until all our energy is spent, leaving us with what Shakespeare described in Macbeth as a tale "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

I'm not sure how much of this was behind writer-director James Cameron's thinking in Avatar.

But he certainly tried to promote it as a story of an ecological warrior of the future, told with a highly evolved videogame aesthetic, and deeply indebted to Joseph Campbell's archetypal storytelling model, The Hero's Journey.

Avatar is not only a green fable or a veiled critique of the hi-tech vanities of the Iraq war: it addresses a broader need to attach stories to sensations if we are to have a meaningful relationship with our real world and the one that exists somewhere out there in the digitised dreaming places we now share.

Fincher's vision in The Social Network is altogether bleaker, despite the frat house partying and nerdy sandals worn by its bland antihero, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). The film focuses on Zuckerberg's ability to betray everyone in his path as well as make the most out of our basest desires for sex, money and status. In many ways it's a Faustian tale, as Zuckerberg sells his soul to a demon that's a mix of corporate success and technological vision.

By the end the Facebook founder reminded me of a character out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel such as Less than Zero: freakishly undeveloped and naturally detached. As the credits roll he sits at his personal computer (don't you love those two words) trying to "friend" an ex-girlfriend through his own network while we are blankly informed he is now the youngest billionaire on the planet.

The film owes a lot to the script by Aaron Sorkin, best known for his busy Machiavellian work on the TV political series The West Wing. It also mirrors the feeding frenzy that social networking and online commentary invite: overlapping, not-quite-in-step posts that come thick and fast, not flowing so much as jagging along in a sequence of jokes, snipes, trivialities and asides.

Sorkin's screenplay tears away at illusions about the web as a democratising force. Instead it depicts something closer to group-inspired narcissism, with Facebook's founder at the rotten core. It makes you feel bad about taking part in its ether.

And yet the film is an illusion as docudrama, its authority as an individual portrait and a modern history lesson open to question. In an interview with New York magazine, Sorkin said, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy's sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"

This tension between truth and storytelling is part of the difficult new aesthetic frontier, as nonfiction and fiction converge in the stories we are being told. It may be that we are simply learning all over again that identity is a fabrication and a shifting enterprise, depending on who we are with and where we are.

This may also explain our fascination with memoirs and biographies, although it's all too easy to forget Arthur Rimbaud's formulation: "I is another". Even when using the first person, a writer is constructing a mask of some kind.

Jonathan Franzen takes this question of identity to a new level in his latest novel, Freedom. It's my contention that Freedom's success is precisely due to the richness of identity on offer.

We increasingly think we know everyone and everything via the advantages of social networking and digital communications, but the truth is our insights have only become thinner, feebler and more instantaneous.

Franzen's novel gives us back a little complexity and elusiveness, some time to slow down and think again as we read. His characters grow and change, twist and turn. He shows us that, often, we are not even who we think we are. It's a treatment of character that is not only more authentic, but more compassionate.

It's this empathy in Freedom that suggests the novel may still be the most important machine we have for looking both inwards and outwards in the so-called digital age. Its silence and solitude are the real commodities we crave in a faster, brighter, brasher world.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Australian Arts pages, December 22, 2010.

It's a Wonderful Life

2011-01-20T02:29:00.000-08:00

Christmas. 'Tis the season to be jolly? Sing we joyous all together? I think most of us know it is a more complicated and fragile celebration than the Yuletide carol Deck the Hallssuggests. I doubt I'm the only one to sense a deep melancholy coursing through our lives at this time of year. As if something about the season's inclusive, loving, giving, family-and-friends ethos leads one back to aloneness and the meaning of who you are in order to partake of any true unity - if you're lucky, and wise enough, to be able to partake at all.

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), arguably the greatest and most loved Christmas movie of all time, is soaked in this sensibility. For anyone who needs reminding, it features Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man at the end of his tether financially, wishing he'd never been born and about to commit suicide.

The wish is granted as an angel takes him back through his home town of Bedford Falls to witness how things have turned out now his life has been erased. Bailey sees the missed chances for hope and for good, the suffering and disillusionment that have bloomed, how every action is a flicker in the firmament of change.

Of course, he wants to live again. This wish, too, is granted, and the ''real'' world turns one more revolution in his favour. Redeemed.

I must have seen this film a dozen times over the years and I still find myself moved by it. It's odd to think that the subject of a man's suicide has been staple family viewing at Christmas for the past 60 years or so. But Capra's silvery cinematography makes us feel it is all a beautiful wintry dream: another time, another place.

Time has only enhanced this snow-dome feeling. But how awful to be shut out from Bedford Falls and disbelieve in its virtues, this fairy tale place planted inside us with Jimmy Stewart as our would-be Holy Ghost.

Maybe I am just a corny guy in saying all that. The sustained appeal of It's a Wonderful Life indicates I'm not the only one. Fairly obviously, Christmas is the time when redemption stories should hit home. Particularly tales of impoverishment and humility and possibility: Christ being born in a stable, a carpenter and his wife and the animals gathered around the manger, the Star of Bethlehem rising above, the three wise men who've followed it across the desert. That's a pretty good story to imagine whether you believe in it or not. It glows.

We've drifted a long way from that spiritual starlight to the way Christmas is today. The massive feeding frenzy whipped up by advertising, the clamour for things, the pressure. But the day itself - and the eve before - still survive as our most potent act of communal feeling.

Your place might look like Santa Claus meets Las Vegas, or have a simple tree with a few lights and a star on top, or just make do with a bit of tinsel strung between the beer bottles. Maybe not even that. But its presence is there around you in the world anyway, much of it hollowed out, some of it overwhelmingly true.

Children don't need this existential shadow. But even they get inklings of it in the messages of charity the season carries for those less fortunate. It often emerges in the programs they watch, too.

The Little Drummer Boy deals with a child who has no present for the baby Jesus. A Charlie Brown Christmas Special (1965), which basically deals with depression and the commercialisation of the day, remains one of the most successful television specials ever made.

These classic examples seem reliable indicators of the season's eternal moodiness. Christmas is the land of the television repeat, if nothing else. Time and again kids encounter the power of imperilled dreams that such shows evoke.

An equally classic antidote, perhaps, would be to shut up and put on Gene Autry singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town andRudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Those songs still sound great.

Later on, when the kids are in bed, you can watch Bad Santa or even the latest jet-set series of Entourage. Why weigh yourself down with introspection? But in the nights before, and especially on Christmas Eve itself, your thoughts may drift to those who are missing their loved ones, those who are feeling financial pressures and the stress of a busy month, or even just people experiencing some kinda blues they can't put a finger on - probably because you know a few of these feelings yourself.

Then try playing Paul Kelly's How to Make Gravy or Tom Waits singing Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, or even Judy Garland doing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, a song that used to make soldiers weep for their families during World War II. Stop and listen to a clumsy street choir doing Silent Night and marvel at its deeply reflective intensities. Or tune into a modern equivalent such as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, most likely heard via Jeff Buckley's forever-young and yearning voice coming out of your radio.

Yeah, listen to it and sing along to ''the blaze of light in every word/It doesn't matter which you've heard/The holy or the broken Hallelujah''.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Age Opinion pages on December 22nd, 2010

Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

2010-11-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

Istanbul: Memories of a

City

By Orhan Pamuk

Faber, 348pp, $45

You need more than a map to understand a city. You need a soul, a voice.

Of course, Lou Reed's New York is a very different place to Woody Allen's. The Baghdad of fairytales does not have the same exotic lilt to an American soldier. The London of Charles Dickens and his line of influence through contemporary writers such as Martin Amis and Zadie Smith is not the London of a terrorist. But their visions all tell us a story, of one kind or another. And in this way a city accumulates into something path-ridden and alive that we can "read".

For the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk that crucial city is Istanbul. I've visited the place myself, and been taken with its minarets, mosques and fish markets, its sprawling yet oddly gnarled agglomeration of West and East, the traffic and apartment blocks, the call of muezzin to prayer. For all that, I'm not especially inclined to dive into a book of such ethereal, encyclopedic ambition as Istanbul: Memories of a City. At times, I must confess, this book was simply too much. It drowned me in its depths.

But Pamuk had me by the soul well before. Almost a year ago I read his novel Snow, the story of a failed poet and would-be journalist who travels to the "wild east" of Turkey to investigate a series of female suicides in an Islamic border town.

By the time I had finished it I wanted to weep, and was possessed by the urgent sense that Pamuk - who writes with all the sweep of the great 19th-century Russian authors - was one of the most important novelists working today.

His non-fiction work Istanbul is just as magnificent, though clearly aimed at a narrower audience. Essentially, it is a history of the city twined with a memoir of family and growing up that ends with a stunning chapter on first love - and failing to understand its force until that force has come and gone.

"If we've lived in a city long enough to have given our truest and deepest feelings to its prospects," Pamuk writes, "there comes a time when - just as a song recalls lost love - particular streets, images and vistas will do the same." In this sense, Istanbul is a young man's book, and a boy's book too, encircled by grief and age. It is, in short, the story of how and why Pamuk became a writer.

It's hard to quote Pamuk economically and get inside the wave-like, gathering style that can suddenly grip you for pages at a time. Certainly he is not a "perfect" writer. He can be repetitious and overdependent on riffing flows of detail that build into a poetic mass or suggest undisciplined obsession. He nonetheless succeeds in making what should be a weakness or an overbearing stylistic tic into something strangely right for him, circling things over and over until, at last, he lifts up or plunges down into the spiralling intensities and insights you keep holding on for.

Istanbul is about loss; about growing up in the shadows of the Ottoman Empire, where a once great city is now poor and ashamed; about growing up in a family whose wealth is dwindling, squandered by a kind but philandering father (to whom the book is lovingly dedicated).

It is also about a detached mother who imparts a sad sense of reality to her dreamy son. And it is about lost love and who Pamuk might become: a painter, then an architect, then something else he hopes might be true to the "first life" of his imagination; his sense of self divided in a city trapped between the continents, neither Western nor Eastern.

"Happy people in Europe and America could lead lives as beautiful and as meaningful as the ones I'd just seen in a Hollywood film," Pamuk reflects. "As for the rest of the world, myself included, we were condemned to live out our times in places that were shabby, broken-down, featureless, badly painted, dilapidated and cheap; we were doomed to unimportant, second-class existences, never to do anything that anyone in the outside world might think worthy of notice: this was the fate for which I was slowly and painfully preparing myself."

Yet on a depressed ferry ride across the Bosphorus, among workers and old women, Pamuk has an epiphany: "Was this the secret of Istanbul - that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments and its sublime landscape, its poor hid the city's soul inside a fragile web? But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about a city's essence, says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no centre other than ourselves."

Istanbul is a cry against the city itself and all that it contains being forgotten - and a curiously stormy revenge against those in the world who would do the forgetting. At the same time, the writer guiltily admits to thrashing about in its fallen realms and refusing to fall with it. An impossible task finally, but Pamuk goes at it for all his, and everyone else's, life is worth.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books pages on August 13th, 2005.

Dylan on Dylan

2010-10-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

Dylan on Dylan

Edited by Jonathan Cott

Hodder & Stoughton, 2006

Lately I've begun to think that Bob Dylan does not exist. That the boy who made him up might still be dreaming. And we are all inside his dream.

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota on May 24, 1941, the man we now know as Bob Dylan was raised in the nearby mining town of Hibbing, the elder of two brothers to Jewish parents Abraham and Beatrice. Hibbing is right up on the Canadian border and very cold; the boy liked listening to a lot of radio at night: Hank Williams's country, Muddy Waters's blues, Presley, Holly, the birth of rock'n'roll.

This feeling for the magic of radio, for the transport of music, probably explains Dylan's recent decision to do programs for XM Satellite Radio, running with a theme for each show: the rain, fatherhood and weddings, thus far inspiring song choices from his personal record collection.

Unexpected career moves such as this, along with last year's four-hour Martin Scorsese documentary,No Direction Home, and the 2004 publication ofChronicles: Volume1, a fragmentary memoir told in free-flowing Kerouac-like reveries, have contributed to a reassertion of one of the greatest artistic careers of this past century.

That Dylan's last two albums, Time Out of Mind(1997) and Love and Theft (2001), have been two of his best - the former acclaimed by critics as the first masterpiece of rock'n'roll as seen through an old man's eyes - has only intensified this renaissance.

The forthcoming release of Modern Times in August, completing what the singer apparently regards as a trilogy of recordings, seems destined to send this latest Dylanfest into overdrive.

Yet through it all Dylan remains as enigmatic as ever.

As fellow songwriter Tom Waits once observed: "With Dylan, so much has been said about him, it's difficult to say anything about him that hasn't already been said and say it better. Suffice to say, Dylan is a planet to be explored. His journey as a songwriter is the stuff of myth, because he lives within the ether of the songs."

Hundreds of books have nonetheless been written about Dylan, and thousands of articles. One of Dylan's favoured masks has been that of the put-on artist and barbed surrealist, particularly in his younger days when journalists must have quaked at meeting him head-on.

Change, evasion, contrariness, aimlessness and sudden return - these have become Dylanesque traits, from his folkie beginnings to the rock'n'roll dandy of Blonde on Blonde (1966) to the Rimbaud of rock who produced Blood on the Tracks (1975), to the born-again Christian of the early 1980s to his startling comeback in recent years as a latter-day Wyatt Earp of wisdom and regret.

Mapping this elusive and mobile persona across such a vast canvas is no easy task. But in Dylan on Dylan, editor and long-time Rolling Stone contributor Jonathan Cott does an admirable job through a well chosen array of interviews that chart Dylan's career from go to whoa and then some. Where many such collections feel Googled-up and bagged together,Dylan on Dylan excels for quality, chronological pace and genuine rarity as well as contrast and insight. If you're a fan, it's an essential buy.

The multi-faceted nature of a book that is mostly made up of Dylan's own words gives a surprising feeling for who he might be. Even when his attachment to the French poet Rimbaud's dictum "I is another" takes a fascinating turn as he tells his most obsessed fan, A.J.Weberman (famous for trawling through Dylan's garbage), "I'm not Dylan, you're Dylan."

In what is perhaps the most famous interview of them all, Nat Hentoff's 1966 Playboy article, Dylan responds to a question about jazz music and its fading appeal to young people with typically obtuse fire, as well as the kind of Beat-inherited, rapping style that energised his music and indeed his entire life and the cultural dreaming he propelled when an entire generation called "the '60s" found its finest voice:

"I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of feathers? He'd say, 'Who are you following?' And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his belly button and say, 'Jazz. Father, I've been following jazz.' And his father would say, 'Get a broom and clean up all that soot before you go to sleep.' Then the kid's mother would tell her friends, 'Our little Donald, he's part of the younger generation, you know.' "

- Mark Mordue

* This story first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books pages, June 24th 2006.

OUT OF THE FRAME - A look at the Reportage Festival in 2008 and the ongoing state of photojournalism today

2010-10-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

'I smell dead people. Do you?" The Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont is sitting in a London bar with another "conflict photographer" who admits to the same problem. No matter how many showers they take, no matter how often they wash their clothes, no matter how many miles are put between them and their work in Afghanistan and Iraq, they still smell dead people all around them.

It is almost five years since Dupont told me this story. Five years since I saw him in a rage at the opening night for Reportage, the photojournalism festival held at the Academy Twin Cinema in Sydney. Dupont's photos had been poorly cropped for the big screen. Worse than his anger was the look in his eyes: a bugged wildness reminiscent of James Woods's character in Oliver Stone'sSalvador, or Dennis Hopper's unforgettable scenes in Apocalypse Now, both of which depicted the gonzo "reality" of the war photojournalist as a whistle-stop away from madness.

This seemed not only bad for Dupont, but bad for his work, too. It did not make me want to spend more time with him. Nor did it surprise me to hear of his near-death encounter by suicide bomber in Afghanistan this year, something he coped with by continuing to photograph the event as he walked around bleeding - only mildly wounded but traumatised by the deaths of the 15 others he was travelling with.

Today Stephen Dupont is a different man: no longer interested in "just being an ambulance chaser" - calm, even amused with himself as he completes the finishing touches to his role as guest curator for the 2008 Reportage Festival. "Yeah," he cracks, "that's why I've come back as the curator, because they cropped my f---ing photos."

Dupont is excited because it feels as if "it's the first time the event can truly be called a festival", with seminars and talks, an associated exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, and the inaugural $10,000 Reportage Nikon Photo Documentary Grant, which will "fund a photographer to research, create and produce a new and compelling social documentary work in Australia".

These come on top of the Cinematic Showcase that screens a cross-section of the world's best photojournalism: in-depth visual essays and storytelling that, for the most part, you will never see in newspapers or magazines - if anywhere. Among the highlights are John Moore's Pakistan On The Brink, a series that depicts what Moore calls "the Talibanisation of Pakistan", including a sequence on the unfolding assassination of Benazir Bhutto, which won him the 2008 Photojournalist of the Year Award from the National Press Photographers Association of the United States; Seamus Murphy's After Kennedy, a lyrical, Kerouac-inspired road trip into contemporary America that Dupont describes as "pictures of feeling rather than pictures of shock"; Stefano De Luigi's Blindness, a stunning reportage on the living conditions of blind people throughout the developing world; and Dean Sewell's Homeless, which goes deep inside the life of a homeless man in Sydney for an entire year.

Founded in 1999 by Dupont and three other photographers, David Dare Parker, Jack Picone and Michael Amedolia, Reportage was little more than a glorified slide night before it graduated to the old Valhalla cinema in Glebe. Jacqui Vicario took over as director of the event, transferring it to the Academy Twin Cinema, negotiating corporate sponsorship and developing it into what will be the bienniel centrepiece for photojournalism as an art-form in the Asia-Pacific region. Though she is critical of "superstar photographers who can forget they're meant to be behind the camera", Vicario admits: "I do sometimes find it more interesting why they did a story, and what they encountered along the way, than even the actual photos themselves."

Dupont is obviously one of those superstars, working on assignment for the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Stern. His contacts and reputation have undoubtedly enhanced the strength of this year's Reportage as an international event. And he is unapologetically open about the Vietnam-era, combat-photo romanticism that inspired him to pick up a camera: Don McCullin's "dark and brutal photography", as well as the images and autobiographical writings of Tim Page, "a real McCoy from that period", not to mention the basis for Dennis Hopper's character.

Though not a part of this year's Reportage, Page has been involved previously and is repeatedly referred to as "the godfather" of the °SOUTH photo collective that includes Dupont and another Reportage participant, Ben Bohane.There is a hint of moral force, even mystic consequence, accorded to Page's presence, as if the current generation of Australian photojournalists are the inheritors of a deeper historical fate by association. "Almost like a circle has happened," as Dupont puts it.

On the phone from Queensland, Page exudes a mix of dark stoner meanderings and high-impact clarity that does not disappoint. How are online and digital innovations changing things? "It's instant whatever today - but is it gratification or degradation? I don't think we've seen how virtual it can go yet. I don't even know what people dream of these days," he says. "But you can't stop it any more than you can stop an oil company or a B52 bomber," he laughs. "If only 1 per cent of the population sees my photos though, then I've won. It's much less than that, of course, but you've got to give yourself some hope. One frame does get frozen in people's minds. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey."

Reportage has grown at a time when photojournalism is in crisis. The days of the pictorial feature essay and mass-market magazines such as Life (which ceased publication in 1972) are long gone. The golden age of photojournalism from the Spanish Civil War through to Vietnam - when a single image had the power to zero in on the public imagination and "win the war of hearts and minds" (as American government propagandists of the 1960s put it) - also seems to be fading.

Page says: "Reportage is the perfect aquarium for all these desperately swimming fish. We refuse to give up the ghost." But the defiance has a David-and-Goliath ring to it.

The print media is in decline as it copes with online competition, falling sales and ageing readers, surrendering itself to sound-bites and softer news in keeping with lifestyle and marketing concerns to capture a younger audience. News organisations are moving towards having all their photographers shoot on digital video for streaming over the internet. Though the technology of HD digital video cameras is still years behind the quality of stills cameras, it is already possible to take grabs from a video for stills reproduction that adequately serve online and basic newsprint demands.

Online slide shows are celebrity skewed if possible, while "multimedia" is the infotainment buzzword, with photojournalists pressured to mix stills with video and sound (interview fragments, ambient environmental recordings, and voice over, all of which will be used at Reportage).

According to John Moore, "this can sometimes make you feel as if you are competing with yourself. Instead of doing one thing well you end up doing three things in a mediocre way, recording sound while you are seeing great picture opportunities pass you by."

Moore is not opposed to such innovations, and in mini-documentaries such as Frontline Helmand, created in the field "live" with British troops in Afghanistan last year, he demonstrates where this recombination of stills, video and sound can take online news. That said, it is obvious where his heart lies. You do not film video the same way you frame and shoot still images, and most photojournalists still seem to believe in capturing a moment for consideration over and above the multimedia hype.

Against this pressure come interesting statistics that should also qualify the rush to embrace video and multimedia. Santiago Lyon, the director of photography at Associated Press, told a Mediabistro conference this year on the future of photojournalism in the digital world that "something like 70 per cent of people who start a photo gallery will finish it. There's something magnetic about the power of the still image … even in this day of video and 24-hour TV news cycles, something about a still photo allows you to concentrate and absorb it."

As hopes for showcasing photojournalism move online and out of the print arena, much-vaunted multimedia news and documentary websites such as Mediastorm are emerging as beacons. The founder, Brian Storm, calls the blend of stills with recorded sound "captions on steroids", a neat slogan, but the working photojournalist also needs a dose of financial adrenaline to help us see the bigger picture. This crisis in working conditions and exposure has been intensified by the so-called citizen photojournalist, anyone with a mobile phone or digital camera who is on the spot as events are unfolding. Recently this has meant anything from the tsunami in South-East Asia to the London bombings to the leaked snapshots from Abu Ghraib.

News events are increasingly likely to come from amateur sources. This raises the question of reliability: who is supplying these images and how true are they? So far the sheer speed at which events are covered is serving as a security screen, but a fear remains that a big news organisation will be badly burnt, despite talk of software that will detect digital alteration.

It is our visual culture, then, that has become the battleground. What separates the great photojournalist from Joe Blog and the orgy of incidental images we swim in may well be the storytelling impulse itself: the desire to bring a feeling and a meaning to the moment. In this new war to win hearts and minds, Seamus Murphy observes that "how you say something is often as important as what you are saying, especially with images".

He knows all about post-modern debates over aestheticising suffering. "But I don't think it's any less truthful to make something poetic or beautiful. Is it aestheticising suffering, or are you actually giving people more dignity? Hopefully, a beautiful picture will draw you in. Hopefully, it haunts you. And because it haunts you, it doesn't leave you."

*This article was first published under the title 'Frontline shots with true aim' in the Sydney Morning Herald Arts pages on October 8th, 2008

Daniel Lanois Live at the Basement

2010-09-28T17:57:00.001-07:00

DANIEL LANOIS
The Basement, Sydney
12.04.2006

Daniel Lanois is a strange kettle of fish. You wouldn’t call his voice magic, but there’s a lot going on in his mind and how it’s tuned. Does it bear repeating he is best known as a producer, mentored by Brian Eno, crucial to career-changing work from U2, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris? You can hear that tonight in the songs: the rotating surge and lift-off of U2, the stark night-time lope and regretful swing of Dylan: it fogs your thoughts with who has influenced who.

Initially, though, things are solid rather than inspired. The sound is also oddly dense for such a master of space and rooms. Third song in it shifts. Lanois starts talking about growing up in Canada, about indigenous people in Australia and back home. He lived close by the Six Nations Reservation and played in a bar there: “I would look into the sunken eyes of my compadres and imagine what it was like to dream of other possibilities.” Still Water begins. In its refrain of “sad eyes, sad eyes” Lanois finds a voice inside him like sweet blotting paper.

Time again Lanois hits these moments: On Do or Die, with its ringing guitars and war drum patterns that sound like Native American ghosts, then something more modern and military, before the whole song takes off like an eagle and dissolves in a ripple of furious electric notes that suggest classic Neil Young. On Cool, with its teenage strut and spacey guitar and submarine beat that seems to grow older as the song moves along, till your out on some lost highway somewhere between Dorothy’s Kansas, Barney Kessel’s jazz guitar modes and Paris, Texas. Or maybe that was just the flashing lights of a cold Ontario night passing me by?

He tells a story about his father being a fiddle player, then strays into a new song: “I dunno what is life and what is shadow”. Often the band is singing along with him and it feels less like a solo show than a group effort, until you see how intense Lanois gets inside his guitar, pushing at the band and pushing at himself even harder.

Jolie Louise, sung in Quebecoise French nods again to Lanois’ roots. It could be a joke, a lumberjack love song from a cartoon, but he pulls it off. There are more songs in French, some fine steel guitar instrumentals, and songs that are just okay. Lanois keeps going for something big anyway, as if determination and belief will get him there and sometimes it does. I'm amazed a how historical he is: Quebecoise to the bone, teenage with icy landscapes and dark-eyed fires, adult with where he came from and the uncertainty of where he might be going. Great with what he falls short of achieving - all the while he goes all out to try and get there.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Drum Media, Sydney 14.04.06

American Frankenstein: Bret Easton Ellis

2010-09-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

If I were to have a nervous breakdown and come apart, I can see how reading too much Bret Easton Ellis would help me along. I’ve been spending the past few weeks wandering through his novels, alternatively amused by his wit (there is never enough emphasis on just how funny he can be), depressed by his detachment, and ultimately disgusted, somehow soiled, by the violence he elaborates with such clinical precision.

More than once it has crossed my mind that the body of his work is a preparation for suicide: of an individual, and of a culture. His message is simple – either we pull the plug, or someone should do it for us.

American Psycho (1991) remains the most famous expression of this bleak and relentless ethos. There’s still a ‘Category One – Restricted’ sticker on my copy, which I had to buy shrink-wrapped from over the bookshop counter like hard-core pornography when it came out. No doubt this arcane process gave the item a degree of groovy cultural voodoo all its own: a marketing triumph in the age of appearances.

In Ellis’ books there’s certainly an over-arching notion our identity is nothing more than a role we adopt in order to move across the surface of this world. Or more truly an interchangeable set of roles, masks that we wear, as we pass from place to place, scene to scene. Until it’s clear we are not anything at all. Which may be why the star of his very first novel Less than Zero (1985) and its much-heralded new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms (2010) is named ‘Clay’.

In order to reinforce its veracity as a saturnine mid-life return, Imperial Bedrooms builds on references to Less than Zero as a book (sensationally published when Ellis was a 21 year old writing student and quickly acclaimed as ‘Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation’) and its disappointing adaptation into an anti-drugs film for disaffected youth – as well as the supposed experiential facts behind it all.

From the start of Imperial Bedrooms there’s an emphasis this is Clay’s monologue for real, and not some second-hand author’s version or Hollywood homogenization. A writer friend, then the movies, stole away Clay’s teenage character and that of his peers, Blair, Trent and Julian. Now Clay’s back in town, a scriptwriter working on a project called The Listeners, and everyone is older and colder.

That Bret Easton Ellis actually wrote Imperial Bedrooms in the wake of yet another disillusioning attempt to translate one of his books, the short story collection The Informers, into a film of the same name, is yet one more suggestive layer or palimpsest to the narrative. Both Clay and Ellis want revenge on a world that tries to simplify and tame them, a world they want to dominate.

With that undercurrent in mind best run for the Hollywood Hills everybody, because the ‘truth’ is the Harold Robbins of post-modern oblivion is back in town, as this superb Ellisian opening declares:

“They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part it was an accurate portrayal. It was labelled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away...”

As for the morality Ellis espouses behind his work – the antagonism to materialism and narcissism that obsesses him to the point of a fetish (what an irony) – it once again climaxes in self-dispersing acts of violence, momentary ecstasies that allow us to bathe in a sex-and-death abyss where we finally recognise ourselves. Maybe.

Which means that although Imperial Bedrooms is promoted as a sequel to Less Than Zero what it feels like is a prequel to American Psycho, and part of some larger meta-novel that Ellis has been weaving for an entire career. When this larger vision is glimpsed it’s possible to sense a genius in Ellis of the grandest scope, however flawed and inconsistent his writing can sometimes be.

The author has been toying with post-modern games that link all his books for some time now, culminating in Lunar Park (2005), his mock celebrity memoir. Blurring fact and fiction altogether, that ‘novel’ is an hallucination of what an autobiography can be, with an imaginary movie-star wife and children, an oppressive suburban existence, and what appears to be a haunted house, sutured into the genuine details of Ellis’ life and career. A serial killer who appears to have been inspired by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, also emerges. The ghost of Ellis’ dead father also haunts him in the book, as does the approaching menace of a news story about ‘lost boys’ who disappear, never to be seen or heard again.

This could become incredibly tiresome, yet another hall of mirrors project which numbs us as we are taken for a wildly distorting turn through literary puns and cross-references. But Ellis saves himself by being amusing, then eerie if overly inclined towards a Stephen King pastiche, and finally distressingly poetic as he reaches out – futilely – for an imaginary son he will never connect with. Ellis dedicates the novel to his father Robert Ellis.

As a work of self-criticism Lunar Park begins soberly enough with an analysis of the opening passages to all Ellis’ novels up to that point in time, part of a number of critical re-evaluations and confessions he performs. This also makes Bret Easton Ellis difficult to review since there doesn’t seem much left to say about him that ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ that hasn’t already said here by him. I had, for instance, also considered beginning this review with a comparative analysis of the openings to Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms. It’s the type of comparison that not only seemed obvious but necessary given the fact Less Than Zero has one of the most brilliant openings in modern American fiction:

‘People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city…’

Of course it’s a young Dante wearily entering Hell. Once that journey was taken, the been-there, done-that feeling would cast a foreboding over all of Ellis’ novels to come. From a drug dealer nick-named ‘Dead’ in Less than Zero to a body so crushed it is initially mistake for a ‘flag’ when it is first spotted in Imperial Bedrooms, the amount of actual murder and soul murder in Ellis’ books leads to a body count and world view that sticks to a netherworld pattern.

Re-reading Less Than Zero now it’s all the more amazing to witness the consistency of it in tone, plot and vision. Something Ellis has had trouble repeating as his books have swollen in length and complexity, bloating out into failure with Glamorama (1998), a ramped up tale of fashion models who become terrorists – if you want to swallow that trip.

Given this misstep it’s nonetheless possible to argue Ellis greatest progress has been as a comic writer – as evidenced by his return to form in Lunar Park. But the fact remains that Ellis burst out of the box with Less Than Zero in a fully formed state and he remains little changed as an American Existential stylist whenever he leans toward tragedy. That’s devastating to see from the outside; it must be tough to negotiate from his perspective as an author. In some ways you can read Imperial Bedrooms as an attempt to shut the door on that dilemma forever.

For all its notoriety American Psycho certainly isn’t Ellis’ best novel, largely because it’s too epic, teeming with everything he has to offer as a writer. The Ellis aesthetic here is more, and more again. To the point where you wish an editor had cut the book in half instead of letting Ellis’ Armani-clad serial killer Patrick Bateman dismember yet another body and gorge us with another shopping list of details. The opposing argument also applies, that the excess is a necessary accompaniment to the themes.

As an attempt to re-write Crime and Punishment for Wall Street in the ‘80s his creation of a reverse Raskolnikov (filthy rich, no guilt, no desire to be caught) still seems on the money, if not more so today. To think that once upon a time his obsession with designer labels and fine restaurants appeared absurdly overdone.

Until the torture and murder really set in, however, the biggest shock is how hilarious that book is for the first hundred pages or so. Rather than blood and guts it features stockbrokers one-upping each other with the quality of their business cards (fretting over the merits of bone, egg-shell and off white backgrounds), as well as drolly-written chapters focussed on Patrick Bateman’s appreciative album reviews of Genesis and Whitney Houston.

This is one of Ellis’ favourite techniques, the comic-book mundane placed beside the vicious. A running gag where an advertisement for the stage-show Les Miserables keeps cropping up is another sardonic example in American Psycho. Ellis loves working off this accumulated detail, until the funny becomes nasty and he buries you.

Like all of Ellis’ narrators, Clay included, Bateman is also ‘unreliable’. In his discussion of American Psycho in Lunar Park, the equally unreliable Ellis observes:

“…if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman’s mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fuelled by his rage and fury about how American life was structured and this had – no matter the size of his wealth – trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book’s thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone read the book and not see this?”

To call American Psycho a pure satire, though, is a little kind as it’s never been entirely clear what Ellis attacks and what he celebrates. The author plays the complicity card so close to his chest my suspicion is he’s not really sure where he stands. Maybe that’s the necessary truth of his oeuvre as he lacerates everything and everyone, including himself. The rage and fury, the wit that can curdle into something so black humoured you wonder what the hell you are laughing at? It’s not just satirical – it’s brutalizing. That Ellis admits having based Patrick Bateman on his own abusive, status-obsessed father just makes this fury all the more palpable.

Imperial Bedrooms once again confirms that rage in Ellis’ typically leached pulp-fiction style. It’s especially notable in Ellis’ usually commanding grasp of minimalist dialogue, with blankly counter-pointing, single-line riffs of conversation that carry on like something out of an Albert Camus novel then slide off into the scripted camp of an episode of The Young and the Restless (a soapie tone Ellis only seems half in control of, with results that are part satirical and part lazy writing, as if the former might hide the latter in this sequel). Some of the grim verve and witty use of mis-heard ‘conversations’ that Ellis made play of in Less than Zero is also missing here, as if the additional heaviness of the sequel has also made the dialogue slightly more leaden too.

Together with Clay’s point of view and alienated scenes that tend to run for barely more than a page at most – and which Ellis has rightly called “controlled cinematic haiku” – the amount of white space on the page nonetheless adds to a deserted feeling, an L.A. emptiness. Like everything else in Ellis’ Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms this is a highly visual quality, movie-like, voyeuristic, floating.

Unfortunately the new instalment does not sustain its opening rush, and its plot devices featuring drug debts, elite prostitution, threatening text messages and a blue jeep that follows Clay around all seem contrived and false, an over-loud echo of Less Than Zero’s more muted and believable lifestyle voids. Ellis has got the storyteller’s voice right in this sequel, but he can’t quite catch the old one’s pointless momentum.

And yet there is something strangely spiritual permeating the edges of Ellis’ writing in Imperial Bedrooms. A shimmer, spooky and beautiful – and available in only the slenderest of his passages – that implies some regard for the haunted, and even the transcendent that has always been present in his work.

Indeed if one were to select a genre for Ellis, modern horror would seem most appropriate, conjuring as it does the attendant clash between technology and spirit, surface and soul. Which of course makes Bret Easton Ellis an essentially Romantic artist, and typically death obsessed at that. It’s just instead of the mechanistic, Industrial Age clash between God and science that the likes of Mary Shelley originally dealt with in Frankenstein, Bret Easton Ellis is now wrestling with late stage American Empire capitalism in decay, with television, celebrity, modern drugs, and communication and identity itself as products. It’s even possible to say that Ellis’ Frankenstein is himself. Which is not so far away from the original theme of Mary Shelley’s novel, if you think about it, given that she based her own monster on the poet Byron and his tormented image of himself.

Very late in Imperial Bedrooms and flowing on from a deeply disturbing scene featuring a young male and female paid to be beaten and sexually violated at a desert ranch house outside of Los Angeles – a scene so disturbing I have regrets I ever read it – this cinematic reverie emerges:

‘The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills – “the crossing place” is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, “this is where the devil lives,” and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn’t scare her anymore because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.’

Within this strange luminescence one senses another realm that Bret Easton Ellis might enter. A dream world rather than a nightmare, although it is couched in seductively evil terms – and so hardly light yet. The tone of initiation and ritual is similarly hard to miss above. One might extend this to the act of writing and reading itself. And ask if Ellis is indeed his father’s son, or someone else?

- Mark Mordue

* A version of this essay was first published in The Australian Literary Review on August 4th, 2010

28 thoughts

2010-08-27T05:00:00.001-07:00

Coffee, rain, umbrellas, grass damp as the sea,

shells washed in wind,

trees sad as limbs we befriend.

The white car, small as acceptance.

The ocean, grey as a breathing, flurried, stone.

It stands up to kill you,

You who stand,

ready to snap in the wind.

Wotya gonna do?

Put Moses and his curses into your hands?

Yeah. Plant wood in the dirt,

ask for water to be turned into sky?

It won't save you.

Inside, glass and radio are gawking.

A question rises.

It's gargled,

on the letter "G"

like "geeeeeeesss-uuuss".

Dry,

I state the argument:

This stem, what is it, paraffin-laced, on my throat,

made of words and burning uses?

Light?

Nah, this is tidal, lapping, cool as lake-water on a

bow.

It laces me with a green-blue wanting sinewed into

night.

But I splash for freedom, kill a friend for the rush.

Sail away, casual, like a cheap fisherman, handreeling

the slick.

I know behind me, a light, blood-thick, muddy fear

is keeping me to the knotted whisper.

Yes. Yes.

Crocodiles bark amid my reaching limbs.

But back here on the coast, deadstone leaves sing

from my touch.

The sky blows down, wet as a winter glass, milk as

wire, even pulse.

Yes. Yes.

I am. I said.

I and I. I and I. Babylon.

Yes.

I am dancing, fine as lemon, crazy as a gin, to the

crunching.

Yes. I answer the snow-want.

Yes. I answer the burnt bitter autumn.

Yes. I touched your leg. I hurt flesh with want.

Yes. I beg sleep, I live the late morning.

Yes, I poison apples.

Yes.

Water and vinegar, thief of clocks.

I will tell time by your demise.

I will tell time.

Look upon this.

Reflect. There are no eyes.

I will tell time.

- Mark Mordue

First published April 2001 in Quadrant, thanks to Les Murray, Poetry Editor.

* Photo sourced from http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Black_Rain/black-rain-2.jpg

Bad Juju

2010-08-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

Bad juju. Friday, August 20, 2010. It’s the night before the election. My youngest son has a stomach bug and has been vomiting all afternoon. A friend calls drunk from a Thai restaurant: “I reckon Abbott is going to get in. You know what, good luck to him. He wasn’t afraid. And all those Labor fuckers were too afraid.”

I think he’s right. I think come Saturday night the Liberal’s Tony Abbott will be our next Australian Prime Minister. This scares me. Like seeing him jump off a stage after changing a scoreboard from ‘151’ to ‘152’. He says “152 reasons to vote Labor out”. That’s 152 refugee boats in case you were wondering.

It sounds hysterical but these gestures have more in keeping with the Klu Klux Klan or 1930s Germany. Abbott, of course, is no Grand Wizard, no Adolf Hitler. That’s ridiculous to say. But it’s way too easy to appeal to the cheapest seats in the house, to play off racism and fear and feed it. Everybody is lowered. You start to see the snakes moving when you’re low enough to crawl in their company. Let’s face it, we can be a racist, reactionary, small-minded country when the mood takes us, and there’s something in the air right now that’s ugly and not going to go away.

This lowering has been the great disease of this election. Everyone has lost faith with the leaders and the main parties, and worse still with politics itself.

I hate the disenchantment and cynicism that has universally infected the conversations I have about who we might vote for in 2010. I don’t think I have seen our democracy in a more debased condition. It’s almost as if tomorrow doesn’t matter to anyone. As if nothing makes a difference because, yes, they’re all the same. And yes, you hear that cynical patter about politicians every election – it’s just that this time around it feels like it’s become ingrained into our being.

The most important moment in this election so far has been the fight to win Masterchef. The best political program outside Q&A has been The Gruen Factor because it recognized how central marketing and the media are to our lives now – and it at least looked at them critically as well as amusingly. Not that I found much hope in that.

I was none too impressed with ALP leader Julia Gillard in comparison to Tony Abbott either. She appeared to be running a visionless campaign, making robotic and cynical moves. How did she and her party let boat people become an issue - again? Then I saw her on last week’s Q&A. All of a sudden she seemed like a leader, like her ideas and her acts had a deeper purpose and logic. I was almost shocked – ‘the real Julia’ at last. But it was too little, too late. Days later on the 7.30 Report she had a duller mask in place, back in neutralizing second gear.

Should she feel bad about knifing Kevin Rudd? No. He dug his own grave and she was the person in line to take the chance that came her way. The real poison in the ALP is the NSW Right and its numbers men who will see out not only Federal but State Labor in a way that not only loses elections, but rots the whole idea of whatever that party was founded on. Can anyone watch TV shows about for Prime Ministers like Curtain and Chifley, or even Bob Hawke for that matter, and not wonder if there is anything is left of the Federal Labor party now worth being faithful too?

And yet this week on Q&A Tony Abbott looked completely out of Julia Gillard’s league by comparison: he was stiffer, dumber, far less articulate – the half-reasonable reasonable face of zealotry in restraint. It hardly seemed to matter. I mean really, how many people watch Q&A?

In fact, how many people spend more than five minutes on national politics or what any national leader has to say? It’s all sound-bytes and media snippets and glib puns, stage-managed appearances, voice and gesture training, every policy compromised by another poll. It was interesting to hear one of the analysts on the ABC say that what the politicians don’t hear behind these surveys and polls are people saying, ‘Yes, we think this or want that, but what do we know? That’s what we expect our leaders to tell us.’

It has nonetheless become clear to the point of insulting that the two major parties are using marketing and polls to target the swinging voter or what lately gets called ‘the floating voter’. That is they are targeting the person who votes not by conscience or belief or loyalty or concern, but by what is in it for them.

Votes like these can either be bought or chased up through negativity. Or both. Someone should read the political pollsters some Greek mythology and take note of the tale of Narcissus. He drowned by looking at himself for too long in a pool.

The media are accomplices to this selfishness and stupidity. Indeed I think they have created the broader culture in which our feelings of political hollowness are now being so profoundly felt. I am therefore thinking if a major newspaper collapsed and disappeared tomorrow in Australia, would it matter any more than the collapse and disappearance of a major political party? There is some type of evaporation of purpose occurring, a weird form of suicide in the body politic that affects us all.

It seems, then, that the best we can be hope for in this election is that our worst is not realized. This of course echoes the Irish poet Yeats in his apocalyptic poem The Second Coming: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Maybe we really do get the leaders we deserve.

- Mark Mordue

- M

snow prayer

2010-08-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

Animal without grace, God-

fearing, something or other, I don’t know –

but I don’t want a truth on my knees

unless I go there to kneel and say my thanks

of my own volition.

Put it another way

Sunlight is one

of the ecstasies of winter

on the skin, on the face

to stop the heart beaching itself

on a bellyful of desires.

Cormac McCarthy was right

children are the last God

in all of us.

And this is why I am

trying so hard to live

in my own present again.

To not regret the future

We can’t cheat time

only rapture it

with our true joy:

my daughter’s eyes,

my eldest son’s eyes,

my youngest son’s eyes,

my partner’s eyes,

how I love you all

and love you all.

Sometimes I dream of snow

like a world of feathers floating.

It’s a memory too.

A street wet with morning light.

The feathers dissolve into my coat.

I’m a bird in this glass cool thought,

dreaming of you all before I knew you.

It’s a memory too.

That Fuller quote, ‘fire

is the sun unwinding itself from the wood.’

Maybe it’s right and I’ve got this inside out.

My love yearning a world away,

the fire unwinding back to you:

I want to love you after I am dead.

When the trees talk to me,

breathing their divine green

wind-woven words

a 1000 tongues

shimmering like Holy Ghosts

on nature’s bones

I feel easier about it all

As if every lie and weakness and failure

since my birth is nothing more than a drop

of rain or light or tears or air.

I forgive everybody and hope they will forgive me.

Nothing matters anymore but kindness and forgiveness.

All else is stone after stone on the chest.

Burial music.

A feather falls to my tongue.

I turn into a bird made of white, white ice

and fly high into a white, white sky.

It’s a long time ago this happened. On that street I walked.

You can’t see me anymore, there or here.

But I love you. I loved you my children and my love

and my love was there before I knew you, and after I went away

into this white forever. A white bird remembered.

God breathes down on me and I melt away mid-flight.

Inevitably. Snow on a country street that you walk one day.

Rain and sleet through the wet bones of the crystal trees

I spoke in prayer

The strangest kiss that you kiss back to me. Air.

- Mark Mordue

* Image of snow crystals by Calico Jack and found at

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs43/f/2009/080/f/3/Snow_Crystals_by_calicojack19.jpg

Pioneers in the Digital Snow

2010-06-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, no time to think. Gimme gimme now! Thumbs up, thumbs down. Should I buy it or should I not? These appear to be the essential frames for modern criticism to function in today. Just serve the ever-shrinking moment and get the hell out of the way of the pleasure stampede. And please don’t bore us with an idea, let alone an essay disguised as a review. Please don’t bore us, period.

Not that ‘the critic’ has ever been a greatly appreciated or understood figure. Some fat toad with a feather in his hat who thinks he is a modern-day Oscar Wilde. A bearded dweeb with a bad tie boring us senseless with his obscure expertise. An uptight librarian type with cats-eye reading glasses taking her revenge on the world. All in all, as the saying goes, a great bunch of faces for radio.

Leading the pack are the assassin and the leech. Producers of the dead-body review where a critic murders a work of art and stands on top of the corpse saying look-at-me! Or the P.R. oriented rave that sees certain critics become notorious for their blurb-worthy copy and all the fringe benefits it brings them.

There’s another standard view around the traps that a critic is some form of reverse mechanic, taking apart a play, piece of music or film, leaving all the pieces everywhere and grunting down at the dismembered mess he or she has made, ‘Well it’s clear that doesn’t work.’

And yet it’s always been my contention that great criticism is about love more than hate, construction more than destruction. That in many ways what a good critic does is nearer to the task of a translator who has found a way of channeling one form of language into another. And in some cases even improving on the original source, sacrilegious as that might sound.

In that regard I’d be so bold as to claim a great critic can, and should be a responsive poet, balancing judgment and empathy in an art of evocation. Though I doubt many people will buy my notion of ‘the critic as artist’ over the stereotypes I just mentioned. Still I must quote that quote-machine Oscar Wilde in support of what I say: “Is criticism really a creative art? Why should it not be? It works with materials and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry?”

There are of course plenty of other quotes that put us in a very different light. George Bernard Shaw said a theatre critics is someone who “leaves no turn un-stoned”. Samuel Beckett was brutal, describing most critical acts as “hysterectomies with a trowel.”

When it come to rock criticism, which is where I find my own grubby origins, Frank Zappa was scathingly funny: “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” Elvis Costello put it marginally more kindly: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture… it’s a really stupid thing to do.”

This kind of Puritanism begins with the mystery of art at its core, something we can all appreciate. But it ends in support of an impenetrability of form that ultimately excludes audiences too from fully enjoying and appreciating something – with only fellow practitioners of an art-form supposedly able to understand or articulate what’s occurring. Across the chasm of various and contesting forms we critics reach out anyway. Trying to describe the sound of a guitar, the movement of a body across a room, the mystery of a colour on a square of canvas and what it makes us feel and think.

It’s a little easier when the narratives of a film or a novel are laid out before us. Indeed the less talented critic will lean on this, regurgitating an entire summary of events and ruining the reading or viewing experience for all and sundry. Don’t you just hate them for that? From a reviewer’s perspective, though, it’s a bind: how much to tell, how much to hold back, in order to give people some grip on what this thing is about, as well as what it is like?

Some preserving respect for the narrative arc and its elements of surprise are nonetheless vital, I think. Good reviews then become a tightrope act between a degree of judgment and a retelling, and something more ambiguous, a gathering of narrative clues and red herrings akin to the way a crime writers sets up an opening chapter someone might wish to pursue further. As a critic reviewer you often suggest as much as you say, trying to write between the lines as much as a person may indeed read between them.

But all this is perhaps arcane philosophy, the equivalent of discussing brush strokes on the Illuminated Manuscripts when all around you the Gutenberg press is changing the world. In such revolutionary times we do live.

Tweets, blogs, social networking sites… if it can’t fit in your iPhone window and be grasped at a glance it ain’t worth your time of day. The trend perceptions on this electronic revolution have leant towards the obvious – more communication on every front, a greater necessity for speed in every act, the compression of information to match that speed, and with all that rapid-fire pressure a corresponding desire to find some alleviating air-space for the mind whenever and wherever possible. Zero sum game: triviality, gossip, and porn are king. Not to mention the brilliant sub-editor who can keep story titles like “Headless woman in a topless bar” rolling across the news breaks when you log out of your email. Click. It works.

It can seem like our culture being ferried on its own electronic light all the way into hell. The digital equivalent to Aldous Huxley’s “soma” in Brave New World, where we become prisoners to our own desires, and raptured out of consciousness.

But is that really all that is happening for those who worry about such things rather than just indulge and enjoy? I feel more positive even as the house of the modern mind appears to be atomizing around me.

Recent debates posit what is called ‘a crisis in criticism’ as symptomatic of this collapse, as if we no longer want or need thoughtful and specialized reflections on our cultural interests in order to get out there and consume it all.

It seems to me the reverse may be true, that the role of the critic is poised to grow in eminence, that great writers and thinkers are slowly asserting their essential value. Complex debates over intellectual copyright today certainly suggest that behind the scenes there are people who see there is still money to be made in owning valuable, well-written ‘copy’ and ‘content’.

This view goes against the grain of what has been described as the death of the written word, the language apocalypse we have kept hearing about. The symptoms to that are many. Poetry lists were long ago dropped by mainstream publishers. Now the literary novel is being put on the mortuary table as shamefully pretentious, not to mention unsellable.

As print newspapers shed readers like sick chickens losing feathers, to the point where some question if newspapers can survive in print form rather than move online entirely – with American newspapers in particular disappearing, city by city, or at minimum dispensing with having book pages altogether – the place of elegant and extended criticism would appear to be a small change argument.

We’re all moving online now and learning how to fit in a box. So make it snappy. Or die.

Newspapers and magazines long ago surrendered their prime ground to this snappy thinking, moving from a tabloid mentality to a matchbox one as marketing-minded editors strutted in mouthing platitudes about “multiple entry points per page”, reducing the lengths of stories and reviews, enlarging the images and breakout quotes as well shaded boxes with gimmicky at-a-glance insights. Journalists bemoaning these developments began to say they no longer wrote stories anymore, they wrote a paragraph. The format fever that drove the creation of so many sections in papers today also tightened what could and couldn’t be published.

Now that the net has really opened up, those formatted sections look increasingly archaic and limited, not to mention what they often are: advertorial disguised as editorial. Newspapers effectively devolved and dissolved themselves. Or as Tom Waits once put it, “Small Change got rained on with his own .38.”

Ironically the innovations in technology are now hinting at counter-currents to the frenzy for rapid motion and quick consumption, and are suggesting another possibility is opening up. The advent of the Kindle, the Nook and now the i-Pad are yet to be fully digested, but they point to scope for a more user-friendly, extended reading experience in the so-called Information Age. One that actually favours the short story, the essay, the novella, poetry and what I sense will be online magazine structures and stylishly presented reading experiences that recognize people may not be up for the Tolstoyean 800-page trip, but they do want something more than a celebrity chef cooking tip and a gossip orgasm on the commuter trip from the Blue Mountains to Sydney.

In the meanwhile news organizations seeking to survive the digital revolution are beginning to consider possibilities like charging for their ‘libraries’. Day to day, second to second, they will need instantaneous news to sustain their users. But the notion of a library where people visit and pay goes to another level of information, to deep reportage, essays, in-depth interviews, and yes, well written reviews of durable value. The outer skin of things, the surface, well I can get that anywhere. It’s the other stuff I might go back and ‘pay’ for.

All of which returns us to the notion that content is not simply an extruded form or shape, but something that contains within it ideas, feelings, and aesthetics pleasures we might enjoy and continue to visit or depend on and spend time with.

Perhaps that summary of the present situation is a romantic vision. It’s certainly a minority view. But I’d argue that great critics are among the pioneers of ‘content’ out there in the digital snow. Lose them and you will lose your way altogether.

- Mark Mordue

* This is an extended essay based on my acceptance speech on receiving the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing for 2010. Unfortunately I was unable to get it published in print in Australia, but I'm hoping it may be of interest here.

Patti Smith's Just Kids

2010-04-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

Art can set us free. Art is holy. Art is love. These are the messages that rock ‘n’ roll poet Patti Smith delivers in her typically earthy, yet ecstatic style in this memoir of her youthful affair with Robert Mapplethorpe, later renowned for his black and white portraiture and homo-erotic depictions of flowers and the male body.

It would take a stony heart indeed not to be moved by this book’s last ten pages, as Mapplethorpe lays dying from AIDS-complicated disease and the resonances of his relationship with Smith gather like electrical fibres behind every word she writes.

Just Kids is framed by Mapplethorpe’s loss and a sharp lyrical reminder that, “In the end truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away.”

“I was asleep when he died,” Smith writes at the very start. “I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his laboured breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.”

Between his dying breaths Smith takes flight into a story of origins. Within moments we are back in her childhood, a winter scene, “vague memories, like impressions on glass plates.” Before we can grasp the impressions she describes how “A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage… Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.”

Smith attempts to sustain this metaphor of ascension throughout Just Kids. Within the telling of her childhood there’s an equally powerful sense that this telling is less for us and more for Mapplethorpe’s departing presence. The intimacy of the writing voice, as well as its lyrical force, is that strong. Smith details her love of prayer, her desire to be a missionary like Albert Schweitzer, the death of her girlhood friend through leukemia and a funeral she could not attend as she lay in bed with scarlet fever herself. At age 19 she falls pregnant to a 17 year old boy and is forced to give her child away, swearing an oath to become a great artist in memory of her child, and setting off for New York with a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her bag.

There is a fabled intensity to all this, and no shortage of will power and wild dreaming. Initially Smith ends up living on the street and sleeping in Central Park, but she makes her way ‘up’, falling in with the boyishly beautiful Michelangelo-obsessive called Robert Mapplethorpe. He is yet to discover photography is his true calling; she is yet to find out that she wants to sing in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Still grieving the loss of her child Smith cries so much in Mapplethorpe’s company he affectionately nick-names her “Soakie”.

Passionately in love, their relationship shifts to something akin to brother and sister as Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality and troubling flirtations with S&M begin to emerge. Smith is oddly passive about this and overly tolerant of other, later lovers’ foibles as well. It’s hard to conceive of such a personality being so weak – and inadequate to judge her that way. By book’s end her idealism and tolerance take on an unimpeachable quality strengthened by her devotion to her own work.

Most people would be familiar with Smith through her stellar albums and ritualistic live performances. Since the release of her debut recording Horses she has secured her place in a grand pantheon that includes Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. We hear only a little of this later career, though Smith makes space for a wry street scene where her first hit ‘Because the Night’ is blasting out of a window and Mapplethorpe enviously drawls, “Patti… you got famous before me.” He well knows the song is a paen to their old love affair, that it’s the dance song he always wanted Smith to write for him.

Just Kids is unashamedly the love story of two artists being born – and never entirely torn apart. At times the gaucheness is striking, the self romanticizing hard to take, with the over-emphatic hero-worship of Mapplethorpe even more difficult to swallow. But these same irritations are qualities I came to envy. Turn a coin and what are they but furious openness, youthful being, blinding love? What major public figure is willingly this open and bold in print?

Because Horses was such a clarion call work of the punk era (if in retrospect a highly literary and sophisticated oddity too), it’s also a surprise to realize how much of a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s Patti Smith is. In her affairs with poets like Jim Carroll and rising young playwrights like Sam Shepherd, as well as her encounters with Jimi Hendrix, William Burroughs and Janis Joplin, it’s possible to feel the age itself shifting and her eyes being opened. There’s an ache too, the expense of inventing yourself anew and the costs this can incur, when she observes the tragic glamour of The Factory scene and draws from Andy Warhol’s perception of its heroes and heroines as “pioneers without a frontier”.

Though it doesn’t have the mystic coherence of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume 1, Smith’s Just Kids impresses with its idealistic bravery and an adventurous heart you can’t help but succumb to, helped along, of course, by brilliant lyrical passages. Together with Don Walker’s Shots it also suggests the finest memoirs of the past few years have grown out of the rock ‘n’ roll scene, where a poetic and personal voice does not lose sight of the texture of the times and even captures it.

As a slice of personalized history and a love story you’d be hard pressed to find better. Late in the book Smith details the photo session she did with Mapplethorpe that would produce the iconic image of her that ultimately graced the cover of Horses. “When I look at it now,” she says, “I never see me. I see us.” Love’s labour never lost.

- Mark Mordue

* First published Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books, April 10-11, 2010

HOMESICK

2010-03-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking about penknife marks in a tree. My initials, and those of my boyhood friends, up there in the thick grey sinews where the wind breathes and green leaves shiver.

I see those trees in my mind. At night when I’m in bed. Branches rustling out of the murk of my subconscious, shaking up the pond of sleep.

I see two trees in particular, the limbs low enough for us to climb with ease. And I keep thinking, I must go back there. Go back and see if my name is still in the branches, if the names of the others are still there too. But I never do. It’s a case of one day I will, next time, I must remember, don’t feel stupid about it, just do it …

The weird thing is I drive by those trees every time I visit home (which isn’t nearly as often as I should). Jammed as they are into a little park butted up against the side of a highway intersection. One of those motorway-excised playgrounds that gets bigger and bigger in the imagination all the while it shrinks into a cosmetic municipal reality.

It’d make quite a sight for passing motorists, a 41-year-old man monkeying around ‘up there’. How would I explain it to concerned locals, the police, a psychiatric nurse sped to the scene? It’d be embarrassing, that’s for sure.

Just the same way I’m embarrassed by the questions this tree-climbing urge raises in me now. Which is why I am tempted to edit such questions out of this story as immature or undeveloped thoughts. Things to be hidden away.

But I do think, or feel these questions, half-formed as they might be. Like why do we stop climbing up trees to sit and talk for a while? At what point do we break such playful habits? How do we decide this is no longer a valid or useful or interesting way to behave? How does it become a part of growing up? Does a native closeness between us die when these ‘habits’ die? Something in us?

I guess there is a strange but compelling atavism at the heart of these thoughts. Even a respect.

Maybe that’s why I empathised with Barry Lopez’s essay ‘Apologia’, from his book About This Life (Vintage/Random House). In it he describes stopping for roadkill, carrying various dead animals and birds off the road to lay beneath trees or rest in long grasses. ‘I nod before I go, a ridiculous gesture, out of simple grief,’ he writes. Then Lopez hops back into his car, trying to avoid the bemused gaze of other drivers on the road.

What Lopez touches on deals with our secret yearnings—and shame—in relation to nature. Our desire to respect life-forces, to commune with more transcendent possibilities in a casually desensitised world. And our clumsy, secular lack of ritual, the way we don’t know how to react or listen to something instinctual within us when it calls. Lopez grieves for our broken partnership with the natural world and the spiritual ways it can feed us.

It’s easy to be frightened of the sentimentality in these thoughts. And bury that sentimentality accordingly. Not to react at all. Quite often these instinctual responses are things we would do as children rather than adults.

With regard to my tree-climbing urges, I’m also aware of the nostalgia involved—the way nostalgia can act as a cancer that devalues and simplifies the past, commodifying it for easy rationalisations, sales-speak, anthems, TV shows. How memory becomes a retreat, not a guide.

But this childish trace in me is more than a nostalgic hook, a retreat. The image of trees shivering in the wind, the sense of watching where I once was as a boy, the detachment, feels colder than that. The way an onlooker feels cold at an accident.

This divorce, this coldness, is why these trees and penknife carvings have pulled me out of bed tonight. From sleep into writing. They’ve set me thinking again about the homesickness that somehow still plagues me even though I have arrived home after a year spent travelling the world.

Iran, India, Nepal and Turkey. Paris, London, Edinburgh and New York. It’s been a huge 12 months. From coming upon a body of a boy at the foothills of the Annapurna Himalayas to underground bazaars in Iran and Calvin Klein’s runway show in New York. After a year away, with so many extreme moments, the experiences begin to extinguish each other, and you start to feel like the grotesque consumer of a life you are not really a part of any more.

At some point during such a long journey you are also likely to find that a restlessness has been cut into you. Most deeply at the journey’s end.

There is of course a reaction to this. I have only been home a month to the day exactly, and already I want to set my roots down so totally and completely there is something violent about it.

It’s an impatient desire. I don’t want to go through any processes, least of all the grind of pulling possessions out of storage, the endless unpacking of cardboard boxes, the dust, the hayfever, the need to prune away all those things that I couldn’t throw away before I left. I just want it to be done. To be over with.

The flipside of this is a desire to burn it all down.

Like that scene in Betty Blue where Beatrice Dalle starts throwing everything—everything—out of the house—‘very Zen,’ a deadpan neighbour observes—before the couple decides to be truly free and set fire to the place altogether. What a scene: home is burning, and the lovers are walking off happily down the highway into the night.

It’s a romantic view. Fun to do for a while. But you do get tired. Desperately tired. Even Jack Kerouac had to observe within the hungry poetry of On the Road that ‘I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer people but my own confusion.’

The great modern travel writer Bruce Chatwin suggests that we are somehow, intrinsically, nomadic at heart. That this is our primal calling. And we are always grappling with that. He almost turns this into a moral position—aesthetically, spiritually, genetically—throughout much of his writing. But we’re cave dwellers too. People who love a good fire, warmth, a safe place from the endless night, the abyss of limitlessness. Even Chatwin admits there is a contradiction.

He implies that our journeys have lost the migratory structure and territorial meaning of our nomadic past. A sense of quest in travel or some reconciliation with the experiences might compensate for that. But these mission statements and reflections cannot entirely settle the contradiction. We need more than just movement, you see, we need an awareness of place.

This is the irony of ‘the global village’, where jet travel increasingly transforms our lifestyle and instant worldwide communication affects our headspace. We are careering through borders more than ever, faster than ever. It’s no surprise people get a little lost, a touch disoriented. It’s why we get so fascinated by indigenous people and their ‘groundedness’.

In his book The Songlines, Chatwin looks at the spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal people, an intensely complex task. His semi-fictional work involves a set of journeys through Central Australia, and is pivoted around a central section that collates scraps of wisdom and anecdotes from his travel diaries (all pushing his theory of nomadic essentialism). Mostly though it’s a dialogue between the narrator and a character called Arkady:

“It was during his time as a school-teacher that Arkady learned of a labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines’; to the Aboriginals as the ‘Footprints of the Ancestors’ or the ‘Way of the Law’…”

He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

‘A song’, he said, ‘was both a map and a direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across the country.’”

It was and remains the duty of Aboriginal people to keep singing these songs. In this way they ‘care’ for the land and keep it ‘well’. Chatwin was naturally fascinated by this, as any writer and traveller would be. In a world of global movement and digital communications, this kind of belief and understanding virtually deifies the writer.

The Songlines was a masterful effort, but it did not win him friends in Central Australia’s Alice Springs. Chatwin used many real people as characters, often cruelly or carelessly. He bent the truth. He suffered too from a tone of voice that suggested an Englishman who had breezed in to see things that all the locals who had been there for years couldn’t. Go to Alice Springs and you’ll find this book on everyone’s shelf, where sooner or later people will tell you they don’t like it very much. And yet it is the book that has done more than any other to introduce Australian Aborigines and their beliefs to the world.

In his new book, Chatwin (Harville Press/Jonathan Cape), biographer Nicholas Shakespeare quotes Nin Dutton, who traveled with Chatwin while he was researching The Songlines. She says that ‘he [Chatwin] knew the mystery was there and he didn’t get it. In The Songlines he was desperately trying to go to the centre. It was the most important thing for him and he realised halfway through he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was excluded. You have to earn mystery. It’s only lovers who get there.’

It was the central tragedy of his life.

In an article called ‘A Literature of Place’ for the Australian quarterly HEAT (#2), Barry Lopez tried to get at the root of a contemporary renaissance in what he calls ‘nature writing’ or ‘landscape writing’.

Certainly something is happening out there in the publishing world that suggests a hunger for more than just the usual travel guides, adventure stories and journalistic analyses. People aren’t just looking for maps and background detail and easy wit, they are wanting experiential guides to living, deep journeys.

Lopez draws a line from Melville’s Moby Dick and Thoreau through to John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, to the more recent expressions of people like Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen and himself when discussing this ‘landscape writing’.

One might well add works as varied as Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’ (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) and Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family—let alone the renewed interest that the Chatwin biography inspired in that writer’s work. You might even include musical figures like Tom Waits, with his textural fascination for farmhouse recordings and what he calls ‘surrulism’ (rural surrealism) in the lyrics to his CD, Mule Variations, or the enduring iconic survival of a rustic rock ’n’ roll figure like Neil Young. A director like The Thin Red Line’s Terrence Malick similarly taps into a natural mysticism.

People are looking for some kind of ground.

In ‘A Literature of Place’, Lopez specifically notes three qualities that indigenous peoples have passed on to him in his travels as a writer:

“Over time I have come to think of these three qualities—paying intimate attention [to a place]; a storied relation to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place … as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.”

This is what travel should teach us, how to find home, how to respect it. All the while it can also displace you from it—sometimes forever. For a writer this tension is deepened by the need to explicate such perceptions and emotions.

You begin to question where your voice is coming from. In my year’s journey I felt all the dilemmas of a Western mind sliding across the surface of other cultures and places, not quite penetrating them, yet somehow influenced: ‘travel’ as a way of getting lost in the world to rediscover oneself again.

I was aware of the colonial taint beneath this adventure. And strangely affected by the greater culture shock I experienced in the Western cities where things were familiar, yet subtly different from what I knew as an Australian. I was not English, I was not American. And yet a part of me was mediated and shaped by both these countries.

Not too long before arriving home in Australia, I had a wild night out on the town in New York. A Chelsea Hotel kinda night.

I won’t say how I managed it, but I ended up dancing around tables in one of the rooms with Abel Ferrara, the director of Bad Lieutenant, and Peta Wilson, the Australian star of TV’s Le Femme Nikita. Ferrara played very bad air guitar to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile, while Wilson and about a dozen other people went berserk. Gotta tell you, I was enjoying myself.

Later on, at dawn, I crawled up out of the downtown subway. I felt hungover, vulnerable, easily permeated, but I was lucky. I caught the faintest smell of wet stone warmed by the underground trainline. It made me think of summer in Australia, this rained-on pavement and the evaporating moisture, the gritty, sweet warmth of it in a light breeze in midwinter New York.

I realised then and there that I needed to go home for a while. The same way I later walked through Central Park and the smell of cut grass reminded me of being eight year’s old and mowing my grandmother’s lawns. Time to go home, the cut grass and the wet pavement seemed to be telling me, time to go home.

So I leave New York for a while to try and reorient myself back in Australia. To experience where I’ve come from and resettle somehow within myself. That’s the real issue: to settle within.

As human beings, we are made up of curious roots. Elemental things. A collection of qualities it is easy to overlook when one lives in a city as big as New York. Citizens of ‘the Big Apple’ might get it, though, from the smell of coffee or the sound of ice under their feet, the wet feeling of snow and how it tastes on their lips, a bad pizza on 8th Avenue, the warm air of a subway descent: New York, winter, home. September 11 has not unwritten this day-to-day reality. Indeed the rhythms and sensuality of it will eventually move in like a tide to submerge the singular event, soften it into the history of living and passing on.

I can’t really speak at that depth. New York is not my home. But now that I am away from it in Australia, winter New York has written itself into my skin, my sense of smell, my tongue. It makes me want to go back.

Travel has done this to me. Made me question what home is.

I want to get back to the penknife cuts in the tree. I want to go back to New York and taste snow as it falls. I want to accept who I am and find a place in the world, from an initial in wood to a footprint in ice and some words on a page. I’m homesick for who I am. Writing my way into the new me out of all the pieces I’ve become and all the places I’ve been.

So I think about those trees that shake my imagination from childhood. And something an old Aboriginal man once told me when we were up in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. He explained to me the way the limbs of the trees grew towards the sun, and how if you really looked at them, you could work out what direction to walk in, where you were headed if you ever got lost.

He then tested me, and I said every direction under the compass as he pointed at the limbs. I was hopelessly wrong each time, and he laughed and laughed. Remembering that incident now, I realize he was less concerned with my abilities at applied ‘bush knowledge’. And more interested to give me a story which explained how all things grow into a pattern.

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published in Madison magazine, New York USA, 1999

= Pen drawing of a tree by Vincent Van Gogh.
= Aboriginal artwork used as cover for first edition copy of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.
= Colour image of New York subway vents by Brett Foley sourced over net at http://www.bugbitten.com/photos/North_America/Axel/New_York/33673-6878-1128156.html

Opium Poem

2010-03-01T00:07:00.000-08:00

Just listen to the conversation in a room:
drum 'n' bass, hawkwind, palace-
musical names and drugs
like hashish and opium.
The candle burns
and the gatherers suck half
a plastic bottle full of smoke.
Spines disappear, skin warms,
techniques get developed.
Stories of the self
can now begin:

The first one is pulled from a river
after an escape through toys
pursued by police in a supermarket.
Another crawls in the dirt
for a committee of childhood
in a secret place among the bushes.
She remembers her hair
in the black world
and bones that held it high.
While the boy wants Nirvana,
a band not a place,
pale and young
on his last cigarette outta here.
All this while the leathermaker
repairs a money belt
and recalls vegetable names
from the farm of his experience.

This is a room in Shiraz,
a travellers' place.
Familiarity is a light cord
around each voice.
Some shared slowness
to the evening's tales
enveloping them all.
Just listen to the conversation
Listen, listen to it disappear.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen & Unwin Publishers, Sydney Australia 2001; Hawthorne Books, Portland USA 2004).

= Photo of opium set by Steve Martin, web sourced.