versus

You’ve got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe
It’s right to fight for what we want
To live the way we please

As long as we have done our best
Then no one can do more
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for
(themetune to The Flashing Blade)

(I googled about a bit, without success, to see if this was a well-known spot: in the movie, the fellow playing chaz jankel says “you stole that from somewhere!” to the fellow playing gollum dury, with a big grin… )

Lightning review of film: the visual direction is so sophisticatedly smart and witty — full of jokes about the relationship of punk design to pop art, barney bubbles to peter blake, the videos jankel’s sister annabel would shortly direct — that it’s a bit of a let-down the script is so VERY much a classic and conventional biopic, in which BIG TRAUMATIC EVENTS from childhood SHAPE EVERYTHING, from songs on out…

It is about music writers and music writing throughout ALL OF TIME! If you wish to make nominations in all or any of the categories the details are here.

(Not posted on Popular per se because needn’t be just about Chart Music — unless YOU THE INDIVIDUAL VOTER wish to push it in that direction!)

viz
A: music writers all should read (two parts)
B: music writing all should read (two parts)
C: zone of exchange that all should learn from
D: music-related film or documentary all should see

Eventually there will be polls and everything! (Note: this already went up at LJ on Poptimists, so you can also put answers up there if you like. Also read answers. But it has reached that stupid LJ point — 50 replies in — where the thread folds in on itself. Also NOLJies are afeared, I know, and RIGHTLY SO NO DOUBT…

ANYWAY: the four sections above will entail SIX tranches of nomination, as follows…

1: First, imagine you were inducting a reasonably intelligent outsider, of natural curiosity and openness, into the world of strong, useful, insightful or inspirational writing about music: which FOUR writers would you point them to? (Note: it can be any kind of music AT ALL…)

To start us off, I am going to name nine writers not to bother naming: they get a bye into the poll. DON’T WORRY OR BRIDLE: If you hate them, this is your chance to vote against them! I just want to get a slightly wider pool of potential entrants, really. The nine not to name are: Richard Meltzer, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jon Savage, Paul Morley, Ian Penman, Richard Cook, Simon Reynolds. ALSO: Don’t name me. I will be all over any project I am involved with. Known and active contributors here or on LJ (me aside) you can of course name, though you’re all kind of a given just by turning up. Since this is the nomination stage, no need actually to nominate anyone or anything already taken care of — though you may wish to state it for the record. (viz “I am not NOMINATING Loyd Grossman’s “A Social History of Rock Music” as it is already nommed, but I wish to note for the record that no finer tome blah blah…”)

2: Now imagine the pool of writers we generally get to see in a “best of music writing”. Which FOUR writers would you like to see added to it that currently don’t get in? (This can be based on a much smaller body of work I think…) Which writers do you think are overlooked or poorly understood? Which writers have an approach — perhaps mainly directed at some “non-popular” music, or indeed some NON-music — which you think would be valuable if others adopted it? (Over on LJ, I see this has been short-handed as “Four writers who AREN’T the Usual Suspects that you’d like to see anthologised” — if you feel terms aren’t being well defined enough, feel free to DEFINE THEM YOURSELVES to SUIT YOUR AGENDA)

re 1&2: Please append to any writers nominated an exemplary work –book, interview, review, sleevenote, whatever, long or short, typical or atypical. Links are very useful!

3: Name SIX books about music that everyone should read. It can be about ANY kind of music. But it can’t be by any of the folk you nominated in 1 or 2 (so yes, you may have to do some juggling to get the results you favour…). If six such books do not yet exist, please say so.

4: Now name FOUR pieces that AREN’T books — can be reviews, blog posts, comments — that everyone should read (they can be collected in books, though needed’t; they just can’t be books). Again: not by any of the folk you named in 1-3.

5: Name THREE zones of debate or discussion that were really hoppin. Thus for example: the Zigzag gossip column 1977-79; the comments threads on the War Against Silence in 2001; the reviews pages of the East Village Eye in 1967… They have to be accessible — so eg not pub discussions on that amazing night or so-and-so’s tutorials when x was in her class; they can be the whole of a magazine across a slice of time; or a website; or whatever you want that fits the bill. This is a question about chemistry of voices, voices that haven’t perhaps been so strong or interesting when divorced from their co-squabblees.

6: Name SIX films or documentaries about music that everyone should see: ; non-fiction; fiction; biopic — whatever. What matters is the question of how they deal with music itself: how they make it the subject, or backdrop, or whatever they do. (Interestingly, responses in this section have so far been somewhat less wildstyle.)

(PS: Feel free to air reservations about my methodology or assumptions! I am A: anyway making it up as I go along and B: as interested in the process of decision as the final result. This isn’t about what I want out of it; it’s about what YOU want out it!) (He said disingenuously…)

If you have google earth, then paul rademacher‘s plug-in will help you visualise the physical scale of this environmental disaster — just type in the locale of your choice as the epicentre

via comments at Blood and Treasure. Better views of Kapoor’s Orbit here

Nepalese Maoists: “Long Live Prachandapath“

It’s all about the numbers, obviously, so let’s begin there. This is a nicely turned haunted-room tale, with four very excellent aspects to it, and five oddities. Actually it’s a subvariant of the haunted-room tale. The classic would be something like F.Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth“, where those who stay overnight in Room 105 on the ship Kamtschatka encounter something pretty grisly, and respond accordingly. This subvarant is probably better termed the “hauntING room tale”, as it’s less a matter of the unsuspecting visitor to the house being at certain times troubled by the room’s occupant, as of the building being at certain times troubled by the room.

It’s also, less obviously but very wittily, about social unease caused by variance in social practice: an Englishman abroad, in a Danish hotel; fascinated by local custom — they don’t seem to have a Room #13 — and then increasingly caught up in the awkwardness of how to respond to ambush by extreme weirdness. Plus of course deeply unsettling strangeness of numbers themselves; how they are and how they’re not…

It begins wth a lightning sketch of its setting, the historic town of Viborg in Denmark: MRJ uses a trick he’s fond of, pastiching the tone of a guide-book, which he immediately and wittily squelches: “But I am not writing a guide-book.” Perhaps he SHOULD have written guide-books; at least they wouldn’t have been boring — this paragraph shifts from “a handsome but almost entirely new cathedral, a charming garden” to the lovingly described assassination by multiple maceblow of King Erik Glipping in 1286, which didn’t even actually HAPPEN in Viborg.

And already the tone is set: “It’s pretty here. Here’s how pretty: PEOPLE GET HORRIBLY KILLED. HERE’S HOW HORRIBLY etc etc”

But if this is the opening excellence, it also features the first two oddities. The first being that, as per wikipedia at least, King Erik Glipping was *stabbed* 56 times, not bludgeoned: and that this number derives from legend, rather than as discovered (as James claims) by counting the dents in his skull when his tomb was reopened (stabwounds are generally hard to discern on 500-year-old bodies).

The second oddity is this: yes these names are fabulous, and yes they are historical. King Erik Glipping was a ne’er-do-well womanising wastrel villain of a monarch, known as “Glipping” — or “Klipping”, the Danish equivalent of “Clipping” — because (a) he blinked a lot, or (b) he WINKED a lot (viz at other men’s wives), or (c) he engaged in cutting little bits of the coin of the realm so as to short-change one and all. And the man MRJ calls Marsk Stig — meaning Marshal Stig — is indeed his historical assassin. Except he is more usually known as Marsk Stig Andersen. Which means that (secretly) he has the same name as the English protagonist of this story: the narrator’s cousin “Mr Anderson”. Is this just a coincidence? It adds nothing concrete to the story except, well, what, exactly?

Anyway, Mr Anderson arrives in Viborg for the purposes of historical research, and installs himself in his hotel. He is amused to note that there is NO ROOM NUMBER 13 on the blackboard — brief digression here on the Danish custom at the time of chalking up the name of a room’s occupant by the number of the room occupied. After a satisfactory visit to the library archive he’s back, and getting ready for bed; notes without thinking about it that there is in fact a No.13, whether or not available to stay in; feels something is strange and different about his room; plus can’t find his luggage. While smoking at his window, he also spots the shadow silhouette of his neighbour, like him leaning out and watching the world.

Next morning there’s his luggage plain and plain — not before he’s embarrassed himself with the maid — but number 13 is not there. He wangles a late-night visit from Mein Host, ostensibly to look at photos of other Danish towns he’s visited, actually to confront him with the strange goings on. More archive research — an intriguing exchange during the religious conflicts that made up the Danish reformation, the beleagued Catholic bishop of the time embarrassed by the disgraceful, perhaps satanic behaviour of his tenant, one Mag. Nicolas Francken — and once more to bed: again the room seems strange, but Anderson has moved his trunk to another part of the room and it’s still there. Tonight his neighbour appears to be dancing alone in his room, judging by the capering shadow. The landlord arrives: as they chat and look at Anderson’s snaps, the man next door starts singing “in a manner which could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was either exceedingly drunk or raving mad.” And gradually over the next few pages, a group of guests and hotel staff assemble to tackle these bizarre developments…

But this is mere narrative, which you can read for yourself — we are sweeping past the excellent details, which are worth savouring (I think in some ways this may be my favourite MRJ story). The first (or rather second, after the opening paragraph) is just this: be he the ghost of Mag. Nicolas Francken or whatever he be, he is one of the most excellent inexplicable beings in fiction. The spook in “The Upper Berth” is — a bit like the skeletal figure in “The Mezzotint’ — a kind of pro forma dead-not-dead revenge-beast, all dank rotting bodyform, still very engaged with the shape and habits of the world it’s supposed to have left. This whatever-it-is is loudly up at all hours, chuckling to itself, breathing heavily at or groping the other guests, basically behaving as if only its own whims and amusements signify. It doesn’t seem troubled in its inability to leave our dimension: exactly the opposite — it’s, well, BOTHERD. If it could dance and yell along to LOUD TECHNO till dawn, selfishly encroaching on the personal space of others — but hey! This is almost exactly what it DOES!

The third excellent detail — just because it’s so unnecessary and yet so inventive, in its slight and silly way — is the poem that Anderson composes about his dancing neighbour, who he at this point assumes is the lawyer in no.14, while he awaits the arrival of the landlord: “I dance all night upon the floor/and even if my neighbours swore/I’d go on dancing all the more/For I’m acquainted with the law/Their protests I deride”

Which is Anderson’s expression of amused tolerance: the private quirks of others are their affair. Once the raving starts, it”s like a door flung open on a hidden shame. When I started writing this up, I flirted a little with exploring it as a gay subtext: the highly closeted encounter between Anderson and the landlord — blatantly flimsy pretext to get him to visit Anderson’s room late at night to “smoke a cigar”, which pretext code is neverthless accepted — set against the outrageous public flagrancy of his disco-queen bachelor neighbour. But actually I think this is misleading: projecting a more recent source of homosocial awkwardness, accessible and familiar to us today, back onto something that’s more interesting in its own right, the fourth area of excellent detail. The Englishmen — reserved, observant, laissez faire — is thrown among foreigners trying to work out the etiquette of response and intervention: what counts as unacceptable here, what do we do about it? Is it OK to be scared and embarrassed in public? How are these people so unobservant? OR ARE THEY? Exactly what do they already know about the er Ghoulephant in the Room…?

And it’s in this area — of what is not being seen or said or acknowledged — that the remaining three conundra come in. Questions you can’t help asking once you start thinking (too?) hard about this story. First, when the lawyer comes down the passage from No.14, to complain about the hideous racket he assumes is coming from No.12, he has to come *past* No.13. It’s true that he’s as blithe about the way his room changes shape at night as Anderson is. But how does he miss the door, or not sense the distance between rooms? (Anderson had seen a light under the door the evening before, so presumably the corridor is dark — but he also hears the occupant breathing, so how does the lawyer go past the door without realising it’s where the singing is coming from, even if he perhaps misses the light in his fury…) (Adding: I think this is actually probably an error, rather than a deliberate oddity…)

Second: is Anderson the first guest really to notice what’s going on with this room and its occupant? Has it all been manifested just for his benefit — because of his researches? (The landlord says that he heard it once before and thought it was a cat. Perhaps that WAS a cat!) (Or an urban fox…) Whereas “The Mezzotint” has the sense of a “message in a bottle”, a story unfolded so that supernatural justice wll be seen to have been done, no story is unfolded here — we don’t actually know if what they uncover, as the (presumable) cause of the disturbances, has anything whatever to do with Mag. Nicolas Francken; or even if the hotel is actually what remains of of the Archbishop’s house.

Third and last, and, well, weirdest of all: how does the ghost room get to land up in the space left for No.13? That’s to say, when the hotel designers were numbering Nos.12 and 14, how did they know to place them on either side of a room that wasn’t there? Or would the room have appeared between wherever Nos.12 and 14 were placed?

Footnote: there’s actually one last tantalising detail, which I refuse to number with the others, for my own reasons. The narrator describes a manuscript he’s aware of — which I take to be something real, that MRJ himself had seen (an “astrological work”, with a woodcut frontispiece by Hans Sebald Beham) — with handwriting on the flyleaf: “during the ten years in which I have owned the volume, I have been unable to determine which way up this writing ought to be read, much less what language it is.” The idea of the writing reminds me a little of the Voynich manuscript and the Rohonc Codex — was MRJ aware of either? I guess I want to know if this is another half-obscured clue, or — like Stig and Glipping — a subtle, secret tease.

The next story we’ll be reading is Count Magbot

c.s.lewis had a fear of female sexuality: I’m sorry the more telling psychological evidence says otherwise…

<— The Old Narnians, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

He was less than a month older than me — we were both born in 1960 — and arrived at NME first. He absolutely wasn’t the reason I started writing: I’m pretty sure some of my inspirations were exactly what he was most contemptuously against (in fact as well as pose). By the time we were mutually bemused colleagues in the mid-80s, the IPC-owned paper was a mess — a publication without clear idea of what it was for or where it was going, a staff riven by bitter faction, too many experienced editorial sensibilities vanished elsewhere. Hostile corporate management was putting a weak mag leadership under tremendous weekly pressure; the contributor list (with hindsight the unlikeliest collective of would-be voices) was stifling itself in an atmosphere of moralising confusion and conflicted timidity. Whoever’s fault all this was, none of us — and I include Swellsy in this — were at our best then: this was of course the era of the debilitating Hip Hop Wars (soulboys versus indie kids FITE!), but if that’s the debate that’s entered public legend, it certainly wasn’t the source of the tensions.

Also at IPC in the early 70s, another great unacknowledged comic legislator had been artfully and hilariously depicting a far older, deeper, more intractable war, between eternally opposed poles within Brit culture: Leo Baxendale — creator of Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids — had distilled his long-time obsessions into a lubriciously anarchic draftman’s line, and the bluntly decisive cleavage of a title: The Swots and the Blots. And somehow, between 1975-85 (roughly), the NME had established a cultural field which (by deciding to take pop seriously and inventing a tone and an argot to explore this) not only brought together but for a season (amazingly) fused both poles, Blots and Swots alike: this impossible, unsustainable chemistry had been its energy.

And Swells — who all his adult life resembled nothing so much as a Leo Baxendale character — was passionately, vocally, unendingly anti-Swot. Thinking too much was bad for for you; thinking about music, music made to be thought about, the Swells line was that such behaviour was crime and blunder and joke, all in one. And by the end of the 80s, rescuing itself from its flaws as well as its best potential, NME was become Blot Central — with Swellsy its strongest (which doesn’t always just mean loudest) voice, yet — paradoxically — somehow beleaguered, even diminished. As the paper’s intellectual ambition dwindled, his scope for challenge, for challenging the world, for challenging himself, became increasingly circumscribed.

Or so I saw it at the time, from the outside. I’d left NME by then, flouncing out on some semi-confected point of principle. My perspective was deeply soured; my project was not his: in the end I was (I am) a Swot, after all. I think reflectiveness and delicacy are values, I don’t think brash one-note max-volume blaaap is the be-all and end-all, I think knowledge matters, I’d seen and loved the 70s rock papers as a labyrinth of gorgeous arcana, and very much felt that — to open doors to non-parochial or otherwise obscure or intangibly half-formed wisdom — you have to move somewhat crabwise, to tread sensitively and thoughtfully, to not always carry with you all of the irrepressible self-involved noise of your cultural preconceptions and convictions. I moved on to The Wire, and tried to fashion the right space to work more at this — and it really wasn’t at all Swellsy’s kind of space, even after he discovered John Zorn.

The frustrations and limitations of my time at The Wire aren’t part of his story — except (I seem to be saying, in my perfect too-late-now ideal of our working together, as it should have been) I really wish they had been. Actually existing Swot-World blurs far too easily out of patient mastery of tricky and forbidding material — the element that’s genuinely to its credit — into wrinkled-nostril distaste for the spontaneous, the cheeky, the intellectually unsanctioned, the creatively not-yet-articulate. The Tiny Necklaced Ponds of the Ending of All So-Called Rules are surprisingly many of them infested by prissily controlling superegos, long on the manipulation of undeclared etiquettes and very short indeed on generosity towards everyone they feel superior to. Steven in full halfbaked know-nothing flow, in mind’s hindsight eye I see him as the avant-garde’s radically explosive id, utterly unapologetic about (a) not being “in the know”; (b) being bored; and (c) wanting more. This refusal an attribute beyond price in a milieu where too few dare admit to such…

That’s if the hook-up had lasted, which I doubt — he rather distrusted patience.

So was SW a cap-G cap-W gR-R-REAT wR-R-R-RITER, as those who miss him are inevitably insisting? Well now. He was a self-taught self-wrought stylist who grasped — recklessly at first, and as time passed with more and more dexterity — that care and precision REALLY aren’t always writing’s friends, not 100 percent. And yes, now and then his comic timing was way off; and for sure so were his facts sometimes. Which resolutely slapdash approach — besides sometimes being very very funny indeed, and sometimes imaginatively liberating beyond all expectation — gave a LOT of readers permission to trust their own intuition. Perilous punk-rock lesson: find your authority in yourself. Throw yourself right into the fray; find your own way home. Because how this last comes to you (if it does, and it won’t every time) is also called thinking, thinking about music (and thinking about anything else). Intellectual activity isn’t JUST the stuff that fussily walls itself off as such: this last the lesson that self-appointed sinkers thinkers are easily the worst at learning…

The circumstances — all set about with the pitfalls of socially acceptable sentimentality — make it fun and even fitting to amp up our differences. Obviously we argued — he argued with everyone; he loved to pick a fight if he thought he could get you riled up and wrong-footed. A while after I left NME, he phoned me up and suggested a TV project together. The project went nowhere — I can’t now even remember what it was to be about — but I was touched and flattered by the approach. The fact is we weren’t foes at all: except that the shape of the world as things fell out pushed us off into different niches. I think (from the narrow complacency of mine) that he allowed his stage to be set too small for him — even adding journalism to comedy writing to video-directing to [whichever] to [that other thing] — but only because we all did; one way and another every one of us collaborated in the dismantling of our own reach.

What I mean by this — and what I hate to have to recognise as demented, in respect of the current multiply-segmented media settlement — is that in the early 80s it was possible to believe that Leo Baxendale, and, oh, the Metaphysical Poets and highlife and Fassbinder and Bridget Riley and, yes, Michael Jackson, all existed somewhere on the same cultural plane, distinct but in mutual reach of one another; and that we — by which I mean the entire barmy Swots’n'Blots army — had between them the knowledge, the will and the skills to bring them into meaningfully combative contact, outside the patronising and greyly reductive zones of the grown-up papers or academia. The rockwrite language we’d invented was a way to celebrate the tiny and the overlooked, and to cut the mighty down to humansize; but it democratised without demolishing; it seemed to have imagined a discussion space that everyone, cat and king, pop princeling and spotty schoolkid newbie, could participate in; could confront one another in and meaningfully communicate; fruitfully disagree; argue things out — tactics, strategies, ethos, better futures for all. There was a strong hard-to-name politics to the fact of this potential encounter — or dream of it, if it was just a dream — which is certainly now dispersed (and foolishly disdained): an encounter in which post-trial Jacko in his vast unhappy pomp, at full late spectacular stretch, would nevertheless have had to (and wanted to) respond and react to Swellsy’s lewd street-level hilarity and post-cancer derision — and (because we’re obviously deep in my own consoling fantasy now, where you get nervously to wonder about responding and reacting to me) each would learn from it and rescue himself and in this impossible contortedly tolerant clash of styles and technologies, and out of it and beyond same, would deliver himself of his pain and terror and torqued intelligence, elucidate his strangeness and his crimes and his gifts, share tales of roots and comforts and bright ridiculous maybe-mutual utopias…

Or in other words, as Emma Goldman surely actually meant to say: “Revolution, yes — but I don’t want yours if I can’t do knob gags.” Of course he was a great writer.

MARK SINKER

daniel davies of dsquared digest proposes a better buzzer-causer than h!tler-mention

(useful pointer: the thread that alex and dsquared are actually commenting in is not itself especially relevant to this issue…)

he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:

“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”

(raspberries and chocolate cake and cream to follow)

The ask here was an easy-to-chew-and-swallow FANCY BIRTHDAY FEAST in nice rich flavours. Main prep time is 30 mins, but potatoes shd be semi-boiled a good deal earlier and let cool (an hour before you eat minimum; ideally a lot longer, so they can dry nicely).

YOU WILL NEED:
A large frying pan or skillet; a griddlepan or non-stick frying pan; a large pan (possibly two but can use the same one twice); a roasting dish; various mixing bowls; a chopping surface and knife; something ideally to blend or mince the ingredients of the prawn-and-potato cakes.

Salmon steaks or fillets (c.500 gms for 3 adults)
Prawns (as many as you can possibly imagine a nice bunch)

Potatos (4 large or 8 small, suitable type to end up fried)*
Spring onions (about 8)
Coriander (to taste: i like a lot)
Dill (to taste: ditto)

Leeks
Courgettes

Butter
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Sesame oil (could be sunflower oil)
Cornflour

Ground ginger
Cinnamon
Cumin
Cayenne,
Sugar,
Salt
Pepper
Coleman’s Mustard Powder
Sweet chili sauce

NOW DO THIS:
(Note: start with Ci, some time before S-30)

Ai: chop courgettes once lengthwise, then in half across
Aii: douse in olive oil on a flat roasting tray or similar
Aiii: at S-25**, place in hot roasting oven for c.25 mins (check after c.15 to see if need turning)

Bi: chop leeks small
Bii: at S-15, melt butter in large pan, with slish of balsamic
Biii: turn low and add leeks; stir and allow to sautee quietly until soft — if you add salt this will occur quicker, but ideally add salt only to taste at the end

Ci: S-60 ish (MINIMUM; S-24 hours is also good) chop potatoes into smallish chunks, boil until not quite edibly soft
Cii: allow to cool and drain mash or mouli***
Ciii: S-20, chop or mince prawns; chop dill, coriander and spring onions a bit (or a LOT if the mouli isn’t workin)
Civ: mix everything up, with salt and pepper
Cv: on a cornflour-dusted surface, make into flattish patties
Cvi: at S-10, start to heat sesame oil in a frying pan
Cvii: when nice and hot, start to fry patties into cakes, doing both sides will richly brown****

Di: mix together half a spoonful each of ground ginger, cinnamon, cumin, cayenne, sugar, salt, Coleman’s Mustard Powder
Dii: chunk the salmon to two-inch blocks; dredge it in the spice-mix until coated, let stand
Diii: make “chinese hot mustard”, equal parts mustard powder, sugar and warm water
Div: at S-6, place dusted salmon in a heated griddle or non-stick pan for 2-3 mins a side
Dv: the spice will blacken — don’t worry about that — it’s cooked really when it’s still moist and dark pink inside but some ppl are squeamish and prefer it a bit more done (ie lighter pink, and flaked)

E: serve all at once***** piping hot, mustard sauce near the salmon, chili sauce near the prawn-potato cakes

GENERAL COMMENTS: If you can avoid eating in the same room as cooking, all the better — hot frying can make the kitchen a bit smoky and hot, unless you’re super-adept. I didn’t really get my potato-cakes to cohere in nice cake-shapes… this doesn’t matter much unless you’re trying to win masterchef, but it’s vaguely annoying. Similarly, apart from the nice yellow mustard and red chili sauce, the overall LOOK can be a bit brown and burntish, at least till you crack the nice pink salmon open. But the taste is lovely!

*You may want to play around with the ratio of prawns to potatoes
**ie 25 mins before suppertime
***I had forgotten how incredibly rubbish the mouli at dad’s is and had to squudge everything up by hand, which is no fun with hot just-boiled potato
****or they’re meant to — my potatoes were too hot and moist, and didn’t really
*****If you want to start the potato-cakes a bit earlier, and let them stand (kept hot), it may make the final simultaneity a bit less hair-raising (but actually it’s perfectly achievable)

i: Old Testament Legends:being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal books of the old testament, by montague rhodes james, which i bought a facsimile copy of about six weeks ago and now it has rather sinisterly VANISHED oo er — illustrations by the great h.j.ford (see left, “solomon summons a demon”)
ii: the new testament vol.1, edited by m. j. james, assisted by delia lyttelton, engravings by eric gill, which i just gathered in from the room-full of books my aunt c is about to give to charity
iii: a copy (from same source) of w.h.ainsworth’s “old st pauls: a tale of the plague and the fire“, a 19th-century novel about treasurehunting and urban conflagration in the 17th century, very briefly mentioned in “canon alberic”

more on these when i find where i put i and have time to read ii and iii

i wasn’t really watching closely enough to make this an actual real REW, but tonight’s ep of robin h. featured LOLLARDRY! (or at least wycliffism)

UPDATE: didn’t think properly about this last night — robin is set in the reign of king richard (and john?), c.200 years before wycliffe’s translation of the bible into english: the plot point was that such translation was HERESY, which it was in john’s reign: in 1199 pope innocent iiI forbade unauthorised versions in the wake of the cathar and waldensian movements (which lollardry is loosely linked with); prior to this translation hadn’t been considered problematic — the venerable bede made a partial translation, and there’s also the wessex gospels, from c.990

“In March 1644 [Matthew Hopkins] had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of Witches living in the Towne where he lived, a Towne in Essex called Maningtree, with divers other adjacent Witches of other towns, who every six weeks in the night (being alwayes on the Friday night) had their meeting close by his house and had their severall solemne sacrifices there offered to the Devill, one of which this discoverer heard speaking to her Imps one night, and bid them goe to another Witch, who was thereupon apprehended, and searched, by women who had for many yeares knowne the Devills marks, and found to have three teats about her, which honest women have not: so upon command from the Justice they were to keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to see her familiars, which the fourth night she called in by their severall names, and told them what shapes, a quarter of an houre before they came in, there being ten of us in the roome, the first she called was:
1: Holt, who came in like a white kitling.
2: Jarmara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all, she said she kept him fat, for she clapt her hand on her belly and said he suckt good blood from her body.
3: Vinegar Tom, who was like a long-legg’d Greyhound, with an head like an Oxe, with a long taile and broad eyes, who when this discoverer spoke to, and bade him goe to the place provided for him and his Angels, immediately transformed himselfe into the shape of a child of foure yeeres old without a head, and gave halfe a dozen turnes about the house, and vanished at the doore.
4: Sack and Sugar, like a black Rabbet.
5: Newes, like a Polcat. All these vanished away in a little time. Immediately after this Witch confessed severall other Witches, from whom she had her Imps, and named to divers women where their marks were, the number of their Marks, and Imps, and Imps names, as Elemanzer, Pyewacket, Pecke in the Crown, Grizzel Greedigut, &c. which no mortall could invent…

Hopkins was in his mid-20s in 1644, and had just three years to live — though the manner of his death has long been unclear (his sidekick Stearns wrote that it was quiet, of a consumption; popular legend — more satisfyingly — says Hopkins was accused of witchcraft himself, and drowned during the test for it). His victims were almost all very poor, old, friendless women, physically tortured and browbeaten into confessing specific acts of devil worship that sprang largely from Hopkins’s own imagination. He battened, shrewdly, on feuds and violent dislikes (doubtless often mutual), within the villages willing to pay his substantial wage as witchfinder, during the brief (not brief enough) folk panic.

The Ash Tree appears to be the story of a witch and her revenge. Sir Matthew Fell gives fatal testimony at her trial — on the way to her execution, she promises that there will be “guests at the hall”, and there are, even unto the third generation!

Curiously perhaps, the first half of the tale is set a half century after Matthew Hopkins’s heyday, when the hideous craze was on the fade — the judges of the day largely disliked it, perhaps for its dangerously populist nature, perhaps its uncontrollable irrationalism, and increasingly worked to undermine it (trying Jane Wenham in 1712, Mr Justice Powell spiritedly and sarcastically note that there was “no law against flying”, and ensured she was reprieved; tin 1736 — the year after Sir Richard Fell succeeds to the Baronetcy in the story, though nearly 20 years before the first part of the tale catches up with him — George II’s Witchcraft Act entirely repealed James I’s statute of 1604). True, there were a handful of Suffolk trials in the 1690s — Suffolk being James’s own birth-county — but nothing on the scale of the ghastly cluster he depicts: “five or six more unhappy creatures, at Bury St Edmunds…”

I want to pick up on three elements in the story, one strong, one intriguing and one frankly peculiar — if not a flaw then something deliberate, but very hard to interpret.

The first is straightforward: James had a lifelong loathing of spiders, and very effectively carries this revulsion into his story — which has the valuable effect (for the story) of rescuing the idea of “imps” from posterity’s high cutification. Read the list above and we don’t seem that far from LOLkitans: Grizzel Greedigut! When we read of a woman with black cat named “Satan” we think aaaw, not ew or eeek. James returns us to the genuine terror-panic of the times (or 50 years before the times): that such creatures were not the ickle pets of the lonely and sad, but vile and malevolent pests. (Interestingly, Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic argues that the whole thing of witches’ familiars is a peculiarly English phenom…)

(As a personal sidenote: I’m not especially frightened of spiders — I rather like them — and, as a consequence, seem to have edited the images in my head. The creatures I see at work on Sir Richard Fell’s head are leathery, brown and bulbous rather than leggy; James’s word “veinous” — do spiders have veins? — does a lot of work… These are laidly monsters; you are meant absolutely to apprehend them as such, Mr Modern and Blasé.)

The second goes to James’s general view of ghosts: they are beings of extra-legal revenge, for crimes that go unpunished in the living and social-historical world; crimes that have gone unnoticed or (occasionally) are not even recognised as criminal in the living and social-historical world. The Fells — whose family name at least must make you wonder as to their upstanding goodness — are pretty sharply punished for something, by the spider-imps. Perhaps at Mrs Mothersole’s behest; perhaps rather on her hapless behalf…

I think the clues that Mrs Mothersole was wronged — the clues that, as so often in the Jamesian back story, this is a crime of property and theft — are multiply present and very rigorously ambiguous. Matthew Fell’s testimony is has no independent witnesses. He says he saw her as a hare; but the one time he confronted her, she was apparently just roused from sleep. Gathering sticks from a tree in yr nightie is not a capital crime, even when it’s not your tree and it’s on someone else’s land and you have a SICKLE. Unlike most accused witches, who were dirt poor, isolated creatures, Mothersole is well-off and fairly well-connected: meaning that she has significant material wealth which, in the absence of issue, would revert to the parish and the squire (that is, to Fell). Perhaps she was indeed a malicious person, capable of “poysonous Rage” and ugly threats — doubtless many of the historical “witches” judicially murdered were not especially lovable neighbours — but nothing that we see as objective reader-observers directly connects her to the imps. They are birthed of the ash tree of the title: if she worships the ash, perhaps the ash returned the favour.

(Sidenote on the ash in legend: Yggdrasill is the holy ash of pre-Christian Norse legend — Yggr being a name for Odin, meaning “Terror”, and Yggdrasill, “Odin’s Horse”, by rather tangled association combines the ideas that a gallows was poetically known as the “horse of the hanged”, and the ash being sacred as the site of Odin’s wisdom-seeking self-sacrifice by hanging… ) (However there’s not much of a hint of any of this in the story itself, except that Mothersole was hanged not burnt; witchlore said that witches hanged not burnt passed their evil gifts on to their children…)

And the third? Is the clumping great — and pointless? — coincidence that seems to mar the climax. Sir Matthew Fell’s vicar was one Crome, present on the discovery of Fell’s murder. Why on EARTH is it necessary for Crome’s grandson William to turn up in person, the very night of Sir Richard Fell’s terminus, complete with Crome the elder’s (not entirely to-the-point) writings on the earlier event? Well, it does keeps the “testimony” all in one social circle, as it were: if the Fells are tainted witnesses, it’s perhaps not irrelevant that the Cromes are friends of the Fell family, and hardly disinterested observers. And another family friend — the Bishop of Kilmore, with his seemingly inaccurate wealth of Irish peasant lore about the ash’s unluckiness — it is that declares the corpse to be that of a woman 50 years dead.

Crome the elder puts Sir Matthew’s death down to the Popish Plot, and considers headchopped Charles I a blessed martyr; Baronets were a Stuart innovation, associated with the Plantation of Ulster; it’s easy of course to make too much of elements in the telling that seem may perhaps be no more than passing descriptive context, but we shouldn’t forget that James’s professional expertise was text and its life in its context — he wasn’t just a bibliophile, he was a worldclass expert in the relationship of historical and antiquarian manuscripts to the world in which they were made. I think this means two things; one is that he never deploys these bits of narrative colour anachronistically or merely meaninglessly; two is that the full reach of the social setting they lead us to — these little invisible portals in the text, hidden doors we unwittingly pass — speaks to the unsettling sense of violence and retribution that stands in back of so many of his tales. What we have here (in Crome’s sermons; in Kilmore’s presence; in the Fell baronetcy) is a deftly precise if guardedly compact hint of a sketch of the clash of historical forces over some 150 years (from the start of the Stuarts to the mid-Georgian), encompassing Puritans and Catholics, the Civil War, the English in Ireland, and witches and bogles and land-rights…

It’s probably a mistake to assign a systematic theology of magic and justice to James: a horror story has, after all, to break with (or anyway play with) assumptions both rational and supernatural, about fairness and deserts, to be effectively scary. The law is based in reason, or wants to be seen to be — this is one reason why judges increasingly began objecting to the Witchcraft trials. The underlying threat of many of the stories is that, if crimes occurred that were somehow beyond the law’s reach (and in this case the hint is, I think, that Matthew Hopkins’s crusade was just such a crime), then revenge may also be extra-legal; undertaken by agents of powers beyond sublunary compulsion or control. And the menace is that (i) such crimes HAVE occurred, and our settled and pleasant state of life, yours and mine, is rooted in them; (ii) in which case, when revenge arrives, how do you know it won’t come straight, dear reader, at YOU dot dot dot.

And what if reading the tale is indeed the spell the wakes the dead and lets loose the beasts…

“They do not like all that about ending and failing,” said Merry. “I should not sing any more at present. Wait till we do get to the edge, and then we’ll turn and give them a rousing chorus!”

It starts with the heart of the song; the bit not by the Bunnymen, the element allegedly foisted on them in remix, when the record company sent the first drafts back: the drone-clot of Carnatic non-rock violin, as played by Tamil sessionman Lakshminarayanan (more usually just L) Shankar. Respected composer and ethnomusicologist in his own right, Shankar had played on such (half-forgotten) outer-edge countercultural landmarks as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, Amon Düül’s Wolf City, and — with Yorkshire prog-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin, the acoustic Indo-jazz virtuoso collective Shakti. Frank Zappa produced his first solo LP: he belongs, in short, to a world set aside; an era of swirlingly expansive transformational utopia shelved, and (in less than a decade) lost from view.

It was the early 80s, the age (as some of us excitedly imagined) of the Death of Rock: and what I liked about the Bunnymen (when I liked them, which was far from always) was that the rock they made seemed to come from right inside this territory of loss of belief; this sense of a catastrophic cultural ending. In the 60s and 70s, there had existed within rock culture — somewhat off to the side of its mainstream, true, but there and known and broadly tolerated as true to some notion of rock’s larger social purpose — a pan-cultural project, a proposed radical centre setting the standard rock quartet (vgbd) and electric production and dimensions of packaging and distribution and discussion as the state of the encounter with and acknowledgment of a global and pan-cultural colloquy of music tongues… as prog had brought blues and classical habits into naive exploratory contact, so it would widen (it was imagined and hoped) to embrace musics from Africa, South America, Asia, wherever… It would be the map of the entire field of play as well as a player on it, as daring as it would be stable (in content, shape, presence, social motion)… George Harrison’s pal Ravi Shankar (no relation as far as I know) was the early posterchild for this meeting of sensibilities; “Within You Without You”, its musicians uncredited, is the posterchild for what would come to be purged.

Punk of course had defined itself by saying no to a whole lot of things prog was said to stand for — I’m not going to list the benefits and faults of this long-ago sibling war; we’ve all been there too often. What I am going to insist on is that postpunk, announcing itself repeatedly as an intellectual expansion, often quietly kowtowed in the cull. Tainted hippydippy piffle was out, and this — for a long time — included anything remotely associated with the Indian subcontinent. To the extent that you likely don’t experience now The Cutter’s violin sample (which isn’t a sample, of course) in terms even of an absence of awareness of any of the above: the lost detail has to be brought in back for the shock of this juxtaposition to flare. This sense of appalled incomprehension, even panic, is (I think) part of the song’s meaning and effectiveness, if not necessarily its self-aware intention. Focus back on EatB: their own sound, mac’s own words; what you’d get if L Shankar hadn’t been semi-invitedly guesting.

The sound is big, a sense of a space dabbed in via high-reverb ambient fragments, and streaking across it the long-form lope-and-glide that U2 were already successfully refining away off into their own patent arena-manipulative pseudo-religious yearning-and-redemptive-smugness (I *really* don’t like U2). Guitars scythe across the Bunnymen soundscape (and scything turns to ambience and back, and to rhythm and back); this zone isn’t one to be comfy in, a quasi machine-driven
high-volume near-monotony of semi-hysterical unease.

As oblique non-disgressive sidepoint, here’s the Mac lyric I’ve always liked best, from the seemingly U2ishly named song ‘Pride’, on Crocodiles: “Mother says/Sister says/Would you mind if we laugh at you?/Do you mind if we sing with you//Daddy says/Brother says/Make us proud of you/Do something we can’t do/Do it…” It’s a song about stepping up and being good — in a rock band or anywhere else — and I love the compressed sense of ghastly daring, the snidey family fondness and doubt…

The Cutter — in sound and structure, in tone and energy — is also a song of dread, and doubt; a figure for the fear of how wide the failure of the 70s project would travel, for the revelation that nothing — in this particular vgbd tongue — was anything but doomed. If EatB are in anyway presenting themselves, and the way they play, as a needed route out of something, out of a failure or a failing or a blockage (the impasse of expressive fright), this is not a happy let alone a convinced self-presentation. As rock the sound is the sound punk wrought, stripped of pretty much anything black or blue — of anything of the conventions of prog-metal bluesiness, that uncalculated shared argot at the heart of the fusion project, the platform an earlier rock had improvised to enable global inclusion — of Africa, India, Latin America — in this collective generational anti-elite resistance to the Man, the System, the War-Machine, the War. Stripped of anything that had come to be seen as, despised as, feared as unselfcritical delusion, of any sound of this mark of every kind of collusive failure…

So, “Porcupine”: a deliberately mysteriously titled project. Mac (or someone) loves a wholly unmoored metaphor, and this LP is a chilly, hurtling flood of them, a torrent of frozen blocks of words and ideas and sounds… as the cover-image declares, the foursome stood gingerly at the lip of the frozen Gullfoss Waterfall near Reykjavik, loomed over by TWO major sub-species of the gothickal sublime, which (rather awesomely) cancel each other out emotionally: a CATARACT, as in ever-rushing, ever-tumbling body of water, made of ICE, petrifying monument to pent-up power stopped forever in mid-flow blah blah blah…

Turn to the internet for Bunnyman lyric interpretation and largely you get yr own private cataract of semi-anachronistic speculation about “cutting as self-harm” (which of course works as a meaning, but entirely narrows and privatises the sense of doom). A cutter’s also a fast sailing ship (once used in the slavetrade, now largely found in the world of yachting). It’s a type of pig — bigger than a porker, smaller than a baconer. It’s a blade, a guillotine, the technology that editors or producers or directors use on celluloid or audiotape or text; it’s the means by which L Shankar’s swell and throb and turn is introduced into Bunnymen noise. As a lyric-writer, Mac is a helplessly addicted cutter-and-paster (a later song on Porcupine notoriously cut in his little sister’’s a-level englit notes about John Webster’’s revengers’ tragedy “The White Devil”… )

We needn’t choose: the song yells “spare us” because the cutter — whatever else it actually “is” — is the threat of cultural cull that’s the founding crime of punk… the fear here, and the force, is the EatB terror, having stood up as part of the gale unleashed, of falling and failing (as we now knew rock could; as we had begun to think it couldn’t not). The boldness of the song is that — with a bit of a market-eyed push from someone not in the group? — it presents in the face of this bolt of music outside the “movement”; presents as a foe or a rival or a compadre, this isn’t clear or meant to be. EatB don’t know; this isn’t a situation they’re analysing politically, just like ‘Pride’, it’s an emotion and an energy they’re capturing, a response to extreme uncertainty and unclarity, to distrust of the very possibility of successful art, or successful them.