I Feel Love

Just finished watching The Talons of Weng-Chiang on DVD. It really is extraordinary. As Mark says, it’s madly intertextual, a compendium of literary and cinematic Victorianism that somehow captures the oddness of the era (as we imagine it, but also as it imagined itself) better than any number of vastly more expensive (and no doubt more “accurate”) literary adaptations. It’s part penny dreadful, part Dickensian social comedy (those policemen in particular are straight out of Dickens, as is the preposterous but good-hearted theatre manager Mr Jago), part Holmesian detective story, part Wellsian time-travel adventure, and the whole thing is soaked in decadent Chinoiserie. Mark mentions the unforgettably sinister ventiloquist’s dummy/”homunculus” Mr Sin, but almost as memorable (if not entirely for the right reasons) is Li H’Sen Chang, theatrical magician and acolyte of the evil Weng-Chiang of the title. As played by John Bennett—not, as you may guess, a Chinese actor—Chang is an outrageous Stage Oriental of the type that (as Bennett admits in the commentary) you would never see today. But, after all, we’re never asked to believe that Bennett is giving us a “real” Chinese person; all the way down to the accent, what he is performing is Chineseness, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, its reference points (”inscrutability,” emotionlessness, uncanny mental powers) lying entirely inside the nineteenth-century Orientalist imagination.

I know I said I wouldn’t, but…

In Australia, an Esky is an insulated box that you take to picnics, barbeques, the beach, the cricket, etc, to keep your drinks cold. So if Eski took off as a genre label, for us Aussies it would evoke not bleak wintry dystopias, but leisurely summer afternoons! That’s Antipodeans for you: determined to have the opposite weather to everyone else, whatever the semantic cost.

I’m still trying to listen to every new song on the Australian singles chart; I’m just not writing about them any more. This week, though, to make up for the Christmas/New Year lull, there were sixteen of the buggers, so I thought that deserved at least a brief mention. None of them are much cop, to be honest (it’s hard to be a poptimist about the Australian chart; maybe I’ll switch to the UK one instead, it’s not like it’s any harder to get hold of the tracks these days!). Still, here they are, in descending order of quality, actual chart positions in parentheses:

1. Girls Aloud – Jump (25)

2. Ludacris – Stand Up (33)
3. 50 Cent – If I Can’t (22)
4. Hilary Duff – Come Clean (17)
5. Dido – Life For Rent (39)
6. Pete Murray – So Beautiful (19)
7. Christina Aguilera – The Voice Within (9)
8. G-Unit – Stunt 101 (32)
9. Beyoncé – Me, Myself and I (11)
10. Jay-Z – Change Clothes (48)
11. 3 Doors Down – Here Without You (2)
12. Chingy – Holidae In (14)
13. Mercury4 – 5 Years From Now (20)
14. Atomic Kitten – Ladies Night (44)
15. Nickelback – Figured You Out (24)
16. Jet – Rollover DJ (36)

Hard to believe anything could be worse than that atrocious Nickelback song, but Jet manage it by releasing a song that is (1) completely inane, and (2) a calculated insult to everything I hold dear. Plus, they’re from Melbourne, which makes me ashamed to be a Melburnian, and Triple J listeners apparently really like them, which makes me ashamed to be an Australian, so they need the kind of lesson that can only be taught by means of a curt dressing-down from a minor blogger.

I can’t really explain the high placing for Dido, except that the central metaphor of this song, especially the melancholy line “nothing I have is truly mine,” somehow captures exactly what I dislike about the artist but turns it into a virtue of sorts. Or perhaps I’ve just gone mad.

Funny how every time I idly mention grime/garage/whatever, all sorts of people seem to link to me. Surely it’s obvious that I know absolutely nothing about the topic? Perhaps to avoid feeling like a fraud, I’ll just avoid it from now on. But it does seem to be one of those topics (like, er, Doctor Who maybe?) where the blogosphere seems to be weirdly, insatiably hungry for any discourse of any quality. I wonder why that is?

Mark replies and I think I see his point better. That eye to the bargain bins of the future is not cast in anticipatory deference to the judgement of history, but rather as a way of resisting the hubris of the present: “there’s an overwhelming pressure, a neuronic pressure – as the nervous system is blitzed by hyperstimulus, by the ambient barrage of publicity – to not see beyond the Now.” I guess it all comes down to whose presence you experience as more oppressive and more in need of correction: the voice that, like Freud’s superego, keeps telling you “you’re not supposed to be enjoying this” (the voice of rockism, more or less), or the voice—Sasha Frere-Jones’s voice, apparently!—that, like the postmodern superego (according to Zizek), commands you to enjoy everything (popism, at least in its extreme incarnations).

Incidentally, as Mark points out, Go West might not have been the best illustration of my earlier point. In fact I honestly don’t remember ever having heard any of Go West’s music: my one surviving memory of them is of a high school friend deriding them as the epitome of brainless popular music. He regarded the rest of us as peasants because we weren’t listening to the most significant artist of the age (you’ll like this): Laurie Anderson! (If that’s not a snapshot of the 80s I don’t know what is.)

One more thing: in the comments to the same post, Tom Ewing refers to the blogosphere giving “soulfulness” “its annual kicking”; mea culpa, and I speak as someone who actually likes much of what passes as “soulful” music and has even been known to use the adjective in a non-pejorative way! Unfortunately I’ve yet to find a way of defending, say, soulfulness à la Marvin Gaye while deriding, say, soulfulness &agrave la Simply Red, without getting caught up in precisely those specious dichotomies (”real” vs “fake” and so on) that one was trying to escape in the first place. But that’s no excuse, is it?

The talk about “poptimism” doing the rounds at the moment (set off by Marcello’s magisterial 1985 roundup) is interesting. I guess by temperament I’d tend to side with the poptimists, but by the same token it wouldn’t occur to me to describe 2003 as “the best year ever” or even to attempt to rank it in relation to other years. I envy those who have the kind of synoptic view of pop music that would allow them to play off one year against another, even decades apart; as for myself I was such a different type of listener in 1985 that it wouldn’t make sense for me to try to judge it in relation to (say) 2003. I can certainly go back now and listen to the music from the mid-80s that influenced the music I listen to now (electro, freestyle, etc), but back then it was a steady diet of stadium rock for me, so getting a sense of “what 1985 was like for music”, matching my memories of the time with the music I’m only now discovering, is a big ask. Nor do I really have a clear sense of what 2003 was like for music, either; I certainly listened to more of it, and had access to a greater variety of it, but in such a haphazard, dare I say dilettantish way that I wouldn’t care to advance any overall judgement beyond “there was plenty of music in 2003 that I enjoyed a lot”. So I really have trouble even seeing myself as a participant in this discussion.

I did find, though, that amongst Mark’s thoughtful comments one thing grated on me somewhat, namely:

Ask yourself this: is the choice between British Sea Power and Justin Timberlake really that much better than the choice between the Loft and Go West? Is Beyonce much of an improvement on 85’s Whitney?

Are we really to start second-guessing our judgments, to allow ourselves to be disciplined by the spectre of hindsight? The trouble with that is that the enormous condescension of history is very selective about its targets; Go West might now be regarded as prima facie bad (we’ll leave Whitney out of it, because I still think she was rather good), but surely what was worst about 1985 wasn’t Go West and the like but the dread cult of “authenticity” and “realness” and “soulfulness”, so eloquently skewered by Marcello, none of which has suffered the ignoble fate it deserved. In a fair world, wouldn’t Sting be regarded as just as much a joke as Go West? Wouldn’t a line like “finally, a band that plays guitars and writes their own songs, what a novelty, what a glorious antidote to manufactured pop!” be impossible to write with a straight face? Marshalling the judgment of history to your side is a bit like calling in the US Army: a lot of your allies will end up as “collateral damage,” while in the meantime the worst villains go untouched.

(Completely agree with Mark about the direness of “big” as an adjective, though; see also Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time”.)

Heterosexuality doesn’t really come across as a very attractive thing in movies these days, does it? Old movies certainly did a much better job at making “boy meets girl” seem like the most achingly necessary and wonderful story in the world. Admittedly this can’t have been much fun for gay people who already had to contend with possibly being locked up, bashed to death, etc., but at least you could take some aesthetic pleasure out of the stylishness with which these films fulfilled their ideological mission. These days, movies seem to be filled with straight people in search of love who are either so tentative and passive that the relationships they form can scarcely be said to exist (the unbelievably wimpy “romance” between Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah in Sliding Doors is surely the nadir of this), or so solipsistic that you never for a moment believe in their relationships as relationships, rather than as opportunities to work through and/or receive approval for their neuroses (Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love—which I liked, but, again, hardly an advertisement for the healthiness and righteousness of man-woman love—springs to mind).

For some reason, the exceptions often seem either to come from Asia or at least to be set in Asia. Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, with its (mostly) unrealised affair, makes romance seem dignified again. (Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for unconsummated affairs; to me the most romantic relationship in the whole of literature is the stalled affair between Frédéric Moreau and Mme Arnoux in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale.)

No need for me to add much to the considerable dossier of blog commentary on Lost in Translation, but of course one of its successes is in leaving its central relationship undefined, so that there’s always a tension between friendship and romance. Hence Scarlett’s annoyance when Bill sleeps with the naff Australian lounge singer (played by the daughter of a high school music teacher of mine, incidentally); she’s put out in part because it’s not clear that she has any right to be jealous.

To these examples of “good” heterosexuality I’d add a sequence from Edward Yang’s exquisite Yi Yi, which I’ve just seen on DVD, where the main character reunites (again on a business trip in Tokyo!) with his first sweetheart, and the two (both married to other people) spend a few blissful days taking advantage of the liminality of the situation and renewing their intimacy, without ever undertaking anything so crass as adultery.

I guess I’m saying that heterosexuality is only aesthetically appealing in the context of renunciation! The Casablanca model of romance…well, maybe it’s just that watching relationships where you feel a real sense of fragility is a pleasing antidote to all the contemporary romcoms and melodramas with their deadening certainty about how things are going to end up (somehow a more monolithic certainty than in any Jane Austen novel), that remorseless narrative logic that sweeps psychological logic aside.

***

And on another note…yay!

Blogger has finally made it possible for you to automatically generate site feeds. Instructions about how to do this are here. Can I please encourage all Blogger users to enable this feature? It’s free and it will make it much easier for those of us who use newsreading services (like Bloglines) to keep up to date with your blog. More readers, faster responses, what’s not to love?

(Thanks to Tim for the alert.)

I’ll spare you the usual apologies for not posting and the pious promises to do better. That way, if I do do better it’ll be a nice surprise, won’t it?

I have to endorse Matt’s comments about “grime” being a rubbish name for a genre. It sounds so forced doesn’t it, as if it’s trying to convince you the music has qualities that wouldn’t be otherwise apparent. The best genre labels are either completely accidental and barely meaningful (”disco” or “house”), or kind of semi-onomatopoeic (”pop” or “rock’n'roll”).

So I’m joining Matt and using reliable old “garage” for the music formerly known as grime. Yes, yes, I know, Dizzee says “I ain’t UK garage,” but surely we’ve learnt by now not to take musicians’ situational rhetoric at face value? In any case, the charm of “garage,” especially when applied to the tougher end of the spectrum, is its very incongruity; the notion of a kinship, however distant, between Larry Levan and Dizzee Rascal is one that should be kept alive, not swept under the carpet. “Garage” (like “hardcore”) also has the advantage of creating transatlantic rock vs dance confusion; people assume you must be talking about “garage bands” and there’s a kind of snobbish fun about correcting them.

So, inspired by Matt, I’ve taken the radical step of re-labelling all my grime MP3s as “garage”. What bravado! Who’s with us?

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I don’t usually stray onto political topics, both because others do it better, and because for the past couple of years I’ve had my head buried so completely in the sand that I rarely have much of a clue what’s going on, but I was rather amazed to read in the LRB the other day that North Korea probably doesn’t have, and probably never has had, a single nuclear bomb. Am I the only one surprised by this?

Interesting to see Mark lamenting the current state of British TV drama. By coincidence I’ve just been rewatching the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (often wrongly attributed to the BBC). Mark talks about the slowness of recent costume drama, but those were the days when British TV would happily spend 14 hours (13 episodes, the first a double) on an adaptation of a book that’s, what, about 600 pages long? The other thing that’s quite astonishing is the sheer amount of voiceover; at times Jeremy Irons ends up intoning so much of Waugh’s prose (especially the purpler passages) in his quiet, reverential tones that you might as well be listening to a book on tape.

There are lots of pleasures still, though, chief among them the brilliant handling of the Charles/Sebastian relationship by Jeremy Irons (never better, miraculously transforming himself from gormless lovestruck undergraduate to bitter thirtysomething army officer over the course of the series) and Anthony Andrews (whatever happened to him?). Naturally, this is one area about which I have a love/hate relationship with the book itself, with its prudish tiptoeing around what Charles and Sebastian actually get up to, and its tiresome but, for the time, entirely predictable implication that same-sex flings are the sort of thing one has en route to growing up properly. (Waugh himself, with his disdain for all things modern and trendy—another aspect of the book that gets on my nerves—probably didn’t realise how faithfully his novel reflected early twentieth-century psychological orthodoxy.)

Claire Bloom is the other lovely thing about the series, a beautiful balance of poise and self-deception as Lady Marchmain. And of course John Gielgud hams it up gloriously as Charles’s father. The mock-Handel score is nice too, except for one ill-advised flirtation with the Charleston, which sounds rather bathetic on an oboe. But what strikes you the most is the sheer amount of time in takes anything to happen (although in fact I don’t find it dull, nowhere near as dull for example as the almost unwatchable second series of the recent Forsyte Saga). In an age when even a 900-page monster like Our Mutual Friend is only given four hours of screentime (and as a result becomes, for all the beautiful atmospherics, completely incomprehensible), a bit of real slowness is actually rather refreshing, especially when, as here, you’re watching the kind of entropic narrative where you desparately want everything to stand still. (The difference is, of course, that the adapter, John Mortimer does actually know how to tell a story, despite all that voiceover.)