St Patricks night in the Cellar
Upstairs Folk Club, hidden away in a back street near glamourous
Euston Station, was a bit special. I was there because I wanted to hear Mr Ron Kavana who regular readers will remember won
the Monty Award for Best Gig of the Year in 2010. Irish guy
with guitar. He sings traditional Irish songs: ("the Night the Goat Got Loose on Grand Parade") and traditional Irish songs he wrote himself ("Reconciliation") and modern old fashioned protest songs. ("We laid the last old soldier to rest today / a lingering relic of the older way")
There don't seem to be too many opportunities to catch him live: he describes himself as having "gone amateur" and complains at some length about the pricing policies of the CD sellers: there was no point in him selling copies of his new collection of Irish folk music, or his epic musical history of Ireland, because Amazon and HMV are selling them to the punters for less than he could get them wholesale. Not quite as intimate a gig as
the one in the Bristol pub; possibly the St
Patrick Nights atmosphere didn't lend itself perfectly to his
intimate, meditative, interpretative singing-around-the-songs style
of delivery. He suggested that the audience join in with Mountains of
Morne in whatever key, rhythm or tune we liked. Some members of the
audience took this a little literally and decamped to the bar when
they were politely asked by the regulars not to drown out the act.
There appeared to
be some controversy about whether, as Ron thinks, the stanza which
says
I've seen England's king from the top of a bus And I've never known him, but he means to know us. And tho' by the Saxon we once were oppressed, Still I cheered, God forgive me, I cheered with the rest.
is the heart of the song shamefully
omitted by some performers; or whether in fact he has discovered or
interpolated a treacherous new verse. Obviously, I've never been oppressed by Oliver Cromwell and shouldn't have an opinion, but it looks to me as if the whole song, with or without the "bus" verse is about assimilation: Paddy tells Mary that this London is a funny old place, but he's not actually planning on going home any time soon.
But very much the star of the evening,
from my point of view, was the actual club: an old-fashioned folk
club of the sort that I didn't think existed any more. Upstairs in a pub; a little room that
had that complete lack of atmosphere normally associated with church
halls. Very friendly: lots of people chatted to me. Give or take a loud lady, lots of
appropriate singing along with the act. And, before each of Mr
Kavana's sets an open mic in which regulars at the club got up to
sing. Every one of whom was worth listening to, and several of whom you would
have happily paid to hear. Didn't get any names down, unfortunately: there was a dotty fellow who did comic readings of cod Oirish poetry; a couple who did traditional Irish songs; and a fellow who sang "Price of My Pig". But the thing which really blew my head off were the two old time fiddle sets -- that very delicate, understated, polka style violin -- performed by a a very elderly gentleman with the remains of an American accent. He turned out to be (I had to come home and check, but I'm right) Tom Paley, usually referred to as "the legendary" whose been active in traditional American music since the 50s and once performed with Woody Guthrie. It really isn't every club where you
get a bona fide legend playing support.
At the end of Ron's set there was still raucous Paddy's Night noise coming from the downstairs bar, so he wave persuaded back onto the stage to do his famous Midnight on the Water (recorded by the Watersons among others) his meta-song incorporating the traditional American waltz tune. Mr Paley couldn't get his fiddle tuned in time to join in; but someone spontaneously accompanied him on a musical saw.
I
don't think the existence of this club is quite enough to make me relocate to London. I see they have one Leon Rosselson (who he? ed) playing there in
June.
It doesn't come back, but it sings about how it's going to some day.
He comes out onto the stage; peers out
into the audience; says "Hello!"; pauses to re-tune his
guitar. And straight into "Come, listen to my story, lads, and
hear me tell my tale, how OVER the seas from ENG-LAND, I was
condemned to sail". And we're off on another mixture of long,
long ballads, give away comic songs, and "The Fall of Paris".
At one level, he's a showman, of course he is – the walking onto
the stage at the opening of the second set and reciting a Victorian
music hall monologue (this time "Me Mother Doesn't Known I'm On
the Stage") has been honed over many decades of gigging, of
finding out what works and what doesn't. He always opens with Jim
Jones because he's found that Jim Jones is the perfect song to open
on. But it's still the naturalness which floors me; that sense that he'd be
singing these songs even if the audience hadn't turned up.
He does the one about the Blind Harper
who stole the kings favourite horse, which is one of three he
regularly claims as his favourite; he does Patrick Spens which he
says has only recently come back into his repetoire. Everyone jokes
about folk songs which go on for ever and ever; but in fact, songs
like Sir Patrick really, really gain from being song in full. It takes 25 verses. (Martin Simpson rattles
through in a dozen or so.) Because it's a story, and leaving in all the verses
makes it clear and easy to follow; we're in no doubt about why the
King needs Patrick to set sail in such a hurry, nor why he has to
come back in an equal rush.
He winds up with the best double-whammy
you could hope for; the epic Prince Heathen and the silly Feathery
Wife; both, in different ways, about love: the evil domineering
love of the satanic nobleman for lady Margaret; the devoted love of
the nagging wife who comes up with the ruse to free the farmer from
his faustian bargain.
I spent some time in this forum earlier in the year trying to answer the question "What is a folk-song, anyway?" Carthy's Prince Heathen could stand as a test-case. It's Carthy
who matched the words to the incongruously jolly tune; its also Carthy
who adapted Child Ballad 104 (I looked it up) into modern English.
The Child version has the refrain:
"O bonny may, winna ye greet now?" "Ye heathenish dog, nae yet for you."
which Carthy freely turns into
"O lady will you weep for me? Lady tell me true" "Ah, never yet ye heathen dog, and never shall for you!"
Sometimes he's fairly close to the original:
"A drink, a drink, frae Prince Heathen's hand, Though it were frae yon cauld well strong!" "O neer a drap, Prince Heathen," said one, Till ye row up your bonny young son."
becomes
"A drink! A drink! The young girl cried All from Prince Heathen's hand!" "Oh never a drop Prince Heathen cried Til you wrap up your son!"
But sometimes, he's bringing his own imagination to the printed text:
He's taen her out upon the green, Where she saw women never ane, But only him and 's merry young men, Till she brought hame a bonny young son.
Becomes the horribly brutal:
So he's laid her all on the green And his merry men stood around And how they laughed and how they mocked, As she brought forth a son
But it's recognisably the same story; except, of course, that he's changed the ending: Carthy rightly feels that after the Princess has kidnapped lady Margaret, wiped out her entire family, raped her, and imprisoned her in a dungeon, its unacceptable for Anon to imply that, in the end, his heart was softened and they lived happily every after. Traditional song or new song? For all we know, the anonymous source who submitted the "traditional" version to Mr Child might have interpreted and earlier version just as freely.
A lot of Martin's identiy as a folk-singer continues to depend on the idea of source-singers: for every song reconstructed or re-invented out of a printed source, there is one that he got from an old recording on a wax cylinder. His My Bonny Boy is Young But He's Growing comes off a recording Vaughan Williams made of a pub landlord in 1907. He kisses his fingers to show how beautiful the long dead singer's voice was. (*)
"These songs are the real crown jewels" he says before Prince Heathen "And this is one of the jewels in the crown." His own acoustic guitar is "in hospital" but his guitar maker has leant him a beautiful instrument to use in the interim. At the end of the song, he allows the guitar to take the bow and acknowledge the applause.
(*) You can listen to it here, through the wonders of the internet. In places it sounds uncannily (even disturbingly) like Mr Carthy's version.
When you saw Star
Wars, you honestly felt that you would give anything to find out what
the Clone Wars were and to see Obi Wan Kenobi in the days when he was
a hero and all the Jedi Knights had Swords and the Old Republic.
But that
"honestly feeling that you would give anything" is
precisely the emotion that made Star Wars the Best Movie Ever, and
actually telling you what the Clone War were like removes that
"honestly feeling you would give anything" feeling and
actually ruins Star Wars forever. Watching a lady not quite taking
her clothes off is far more sexy than being on a beach where no one
is wearing anything at all.
The Star Wars prequels were just a very bad
idea. As it was, they were a very bad idea poorly executed but they
would have been an equally bad idea even if they had been very
well executed indeed. Their one redeeming feature is that they were George Lucas's really, really bad idea. It was George Lucas who created Star Wars to begin with. He didn't just dream it up: he actually thought up the characters and wrote the script and worked with the actors and model makers. So of course I was interested to find out our George Lucas imagined the Jedi Knights at the height of their powers and the Imperial Senate and the pre-lapserian Darth Vader because he created the whole idea of the Jedi Knights and Imperial Senates and Darth Vaders in the first place. If the movie had been made by Some Other Guy then it wouldn't even have had that excuse. I like the Jedi Council scenes because they tell me what George Lucas thinks the Jedi Council should look like. Some Other Guy's version would have exactly the same validity as the version of the Jedi Council that me and Jeffrey made up in the playground of East Barnet Lower school in 1978 with airfix spacemen and toy action figures. (Less. Less.) Even if the films had actually been really rather good. Especially if the films had been actually really rather good. Especially if the films had been actually really rather good and George had specifically said that he thought they were a really, really bad idea.
XIV
Whenever I re-read
Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan's very tactful phallus reminds me of the enormous anatomically correct cock in the movie. Something that I hardly
noticed in the comic has become funny, or embarrassing, offensive or whatever the hell the socially approved way of reacting to an enormous blue willy is.
The movie changed
the comic. It did. It just did.
Read Frankenstein
without thinking of Boris Karloff. I dare you.
XV
Does DC comics
appalling opportunistic piece of shit corporate Watchmen rip off
really matter?
No. In the total
scheme of things, of course it doesn't.
Harry Potter and
the Da Vinci code are not reducible to the MSS that J.K. Rowling and
Dan Brown submitted to their publisher. This is true even if the
published text was very close to those MSS and not, as sometimes happens, co-authored by their editors. At the
very least, several hundred people were involved in drawing covers
and typesetting and printing and physically manufacturing the object
that you bought in Waterstone. And someone else created the
marketing campaign; decided that it would be cool for bookshops to
open in the middle of the night to sell the first editions; carefully
honed the Rowling persona; spotted that a series of school based children's fantasy stories might be the sort of thing that kids would want to read. No-one but JK Rowling could have written Harry Potter but if JK Rowling
hadn't written Harry Potter, some other publisher might have identified some very similar author to place at the center of a very similar
maelstrom.
It is tempting for
a writer to think "It is my words that the Public wants, and all
the publisher does is put them in the hands of the reader."
It is equally tempting for a publisher to think "I make beautiful books, and
one small part of the process is the artisan who I hire to write the
words which go into them."
It is tempting for an actor to think: "I have a special talent: people
come to see me act, and the director's job is simply to decide where I should stand so that the audience can hear me declaiming.
It is equally
tempting for a director to think: "People have come to see my
version of a play, based on my knowledge of literature and stage
craft. An actor is simply a skilled individual whose job it is to
read the words and perform the gestures that I am tell him to."
Would it therefore be unreasonable for the theatre architect to say "I am in the business of
giving people an exquisite evening. You create a beautiful building,
and then you hire anyone to sell ice cream, pour drinks, and strut
about on the stage?"
XII
You can sometimes
get a very small child to eat his greens but arbitrarily declaring
that these are special Tellytubby greens. It works better if the
person performing the alchemy is Mr Sainsbury: the spinach that was
wrapped in official Tellytubby packaging really does taste better
than the kind which Mummy says came all the way from Tellytubbyland.
I am sometime told that Peter Jackson's parody of Lord of the Rings
has to be judged on it's own terms: it doesn't matter whether or not
it is an accurate translation of Prof. Tolkien's book.
It is certainly
true that Lord of the Rings works very well as a Hollywood pop corn
flick. I would place it almost precisely on a level with the Pirates of the Caribbean
series, full of sound and fury but signifying less and less as it
goes along.
This is not to deprecate Lord of the Rings. I like the Pirates
of the Caribbean series very much indeed. They provide a huge dollop
of cutlasses, cannons and eye patches, wrapped in the illusion of a
narrative, and enough macguffins and plot coupons to propel the ships from exotic location to exotic location. They are, in short, exactly what you want from a pirate movie.
I feel much the
same way about Lord of the Rings: it is the Goonies with dragons,
ill matched semi competent protagonists dropped into the middle of a
story in which far too many precipices collapse underneath them and
far to many dragons drop rocks on them for anyone to have any chance to work out what is actually meant to be happening.
Saying that the
Lord of the Rings is to be judged on its own merits is the same as
saying that Jackson, having made his big budget cartoon, used the
name Lord of the Rings to give it a quite spurious gravitas:
that the Lord of the Rings movie is only a Lord of the Rings movie in a manner of speaking, just at the Tellytubby spinach is only Tellytubby spinach in a manner of speaking.
If I say this, I am
accursed of snobbery by the meta geeks.
Can anyone remember who the Ghost Rider was, or what comics he appeared in, or what kind of villains he fought? (It was a rhetorical question, Nick. Please sit down.) I believe he had sold his soul to the devil, as one does. Gary Friedrich didn't dream up the idea of the Faustian Pact: Christopher Marlow did. He didn't come up with the idea of the heroic stunt-cyclist, either: that was Evel Knievel. The not-that-bad-movie did indeed make use of the idea of the stunt cyclist who sold his soul to Beelzebub and then tried to use his evil hell fire powers for good (or something). But what everyone remembers about the character is the guy in biker leathers on the harley davidson with the flaming skull where his head ought to be. It is, how you say, iconic.
Stan Lee, as
everybody knows, believes that comic book characters have an essential, platonic being outside of the actual stories they appear in. He believes that these platonic essences are created in a single, metaphysical, quasi-divine act, which only he has control of. He calls this unified act "dreaming up". Once the "dreaming up" has been done, the character has existence, and any one of a number of different hired hands can do the donkey work of putting it on paper. There's no actual work involved; the demiurge just sits in his armchair and has creations. On this view, the person who came up with the elevator pitch "He's kinda like Dr Faustus, only on a bike" "dreamed up" Ghost Rider, and everything else (drawing the pictures, thinking up villains, making up words for him to say) was just dot-joining that any artisan could have done. I believe that there are sincere differences of opinion about who did the original up-dreaming in this case.
You might think
that 90% of the success of Spider-Man came from Stan Lee's funny
speech bubbles, and only 10% from Steve Ditko's design the costume. You
might think it was 50/50 or 60/40. No-one apart
from Walt Disney's legal department doubts that two people were involved. It seems to me that 100% of the success of Ghost Rider as a comic book and 100% of the reason it was turned into a not-too-bad movie was the physical design of the character: the idea-of-the-Ghost-Rider is the guy on the bike with the flaming head not Satan or Mephisto or Zathros or anything
else. In which case, if anyone "created" the Ghost Rider,
it was not Mike Friedrich or Roy Thomas but Mike Ploog, who drew the actual pictures.
It will be
remembered that in 1969 Stan Lee allowed Cadence Industries to believe that he was
sole creator of all the Marvel characters and Ditko and Kirby were merely hired illustrators. This applied even to the Silver Surfer, even though Stan had said over and over again, that Kirby created, and therefore presumably "dreamed up" the character without input from him. It is perfectly true that Stan Lee's inferior 1970s version of the character added lots of elements which had not been part of Kirby's original conception, and that it is this inferior version which still appears in comic books today and was used in the the not-completely-awful Fantastic Four movie. It is also clear that the three Spider-Man movies were based on John Romita's version of Spider-Man, which was inferior to Ditko's tio the point of being parodic.
It is not to be suggested that Lee had no imput into the creation of the Silver Surfer; only that, by his own arguments, he didn't dream him up. This is not to argue that Steve Ditko was the sole creator of Spider-Man; Mike Ploog the sole creator of Ghost Rider or Jack Kirby the sole creator of everything else; only to argue that the concept of "dreaming up" is palpable bullshit. The idea of Spider-Man, or Ghost Rider doesn't exist apart from actual Spider-Man or Ghost Rider comics: the people who created them are the people who did the hard work of drawing and writing, not whoever it was who happened to have first pitched "What about a guy on a bike with a skull instead of head."
Sigh. No, I don't think
that Marvel Comics should pass 100% of the profit from The Avengers movie to
Jack Kirby's estate. 15% would be fair; 5% would be a realistic. 1% would be a nice gesture. At this stage of the game it would count for more if
Kirby's grandchildren joined Stan Lee on the red carpet, and if Stan
Lee said "Me and your grandpa created these characters together"
or even "I suggested this idea to your grandpa, and he created
the characters, and I thought up things for them to say" which
everyone knows is the truth. But even that can never happen, because
Stan Lee's faith-position conveniently matches the legal fiction that
characters have essences and those essences are created and owned by corporations and buildings and legal
entities, not by human beings with stuff they want to say.
X
What were the
Daleks?
Were they
1: A script written
by Terry Nation
2: A prop designed
by Raymond Cusick
3: Characters in a children's
television programme directed by Verity Lambert
4: A cultural
phenomenon which began in 1963 and was over by 1968
Once you've framed the question in that way, the answer is pretty obvious. "The Daleks" were an ambience, an atmosphere, a period
when, wherever you looked there were Dalek toys and Dalek magazines and Dalek soap and Dalek colouring books. Those of us who came in
during Jon Pertwee sometimes feel that we missed "the
Daleks". BBC props moving around a quarry just don't have much to do with Daleks. Re-runs of Peter Cushing movies on wet Sunday afternoons and dog-eared Dalek comic books seem to bring us closer. But no collection
of ephemera can really recreate the Daleks. We weren't there when they
happened.
Similarly, people of my generation have seen The Beatles reduced to 15 very good CDs, 2 very good movies and Magical Mystery Tour. This has practically nothing to do with the Beatles, although Hard Days Night goes some
way to telling us what the Beatles would have been like had we been
there. The Beatles were a moment when people
were wearing particular clothes and watching particular cartoons on
TV, and incidentally stopped rationing sweets and hanging people. The fact that John, Paul, George and Ringo also happened also to sing some quite good songs was neither here nor there. People only went to Beatles concerts in order to shout them down.
Or again, the 12 action figure that were sold in 1977 were not an adjunct to Star Wars. They were
Star Wars. Star Wars was a particular summer, which included Star
Wars toys (if you had lot of pocket money) Star
Wars bubble gum cards (if you didn't) Star Wars comic books...oh and also a film. (Remember, if you are British, Star Wars was a comic first and a film second. One of those big Treasury Editions they don't make them like any more.) You saw the film once, or, if you were particularly sad, five times. You read the comic every day for a month. You played with the toys until you got too old for them. George Lucas's attempts to deny that things like The Star Wars
Christmas Special and Christmas In the Stars ever happened
represents a blatant falsification of what Star Wars was. Is.
Can you get "Force Blades" on ebay? Not reproductions of lightsabers that actually look like lightsabers -- actual 1970s force blades. The real thing.
One imagines the
Beatles and Star Wars and Spider-Man putting their essential being
forth into the surrounding culture until they themselves no-longer
exist. (This is a reference to Tolkien. It would take too long to explain.) Everyone knows what Mickey Mouse looks like: hardly anyone has seen an actual
Mickey Mouse cartoons. Disney rather discourages it. A strange composite Winnie the Pooh -- definitely not A.A Milne's character but not exactly the the Disney character either -- seems now to
have an existence outside of the original stories. It is very common
to find young children who are crazy about Spider-Man, but who have
never seen a Spider-Man comic or scene a Spider-Man movie.
So far as I can tell, the inhabitants of Barsoom never do anything except get captured, get rescued, and fight minor wars. So it is possible, not to say plausible, that Dejah Thoris was kidnapped on more occasions than the seventeen or eighteen recorded in the canonical texts. A twelfth John Carter novel would be no sillier an idea than a tenth or an eleventh. (The series had, in fact, run out of steam by volume 4.) So if I were to write a Martian fan fic, an admittedly remote contingency it could be judged purely on its own merits. The best you could say about such a book was that it captured the tone of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel rather well, in which case I'd have given the world something it arguably needed – more stories in style of the second greatest pulp writer who ever lived. But the worst you could say is that my novel is rather dull, and you would rather re-read the ten and a half canonical stories than waste time with my apocrypha.
But why write a
story set in Edgar Rice Burroughs setting rather than create one of
my own? Because we all love the Martian stories and wish there could
have been more of them. Because I think that Burroughs' Mars is a
distinctive setting, and the the story I have thought of couldn't
have happened anywhere else. Because the fact that it is pastiche gives me
freedom to write in a way that I couldn't if I were using my own
voice. (It is easier to write about abduction and rescue of
incomparable princesses in a Martian setting because we already know
that that's the kind of thing which happens there.)
Or maybe the real answer is as simple as: "Yes, I could create my own setting in which to tell
thrilling adventures. But I don't need to, because E.R.B has already
done it just about as well as it could possibly be done."
E.R.B did, in fact,
write "Tarzan at the Earth's Core". He never wrote "Tarzan
on Mars" but he damn well should have done.
This is, I think,
how the endless stream of Fantastic Four
knock offs have to be regarded. In one sense, the idea of the
Fantastic Four without Stan Lee is almost as ridiculous as the idea
of the New Gods without Jack Kirby. No-one but Stan could
write Reed Richard / Ben Grimm dialogue; and no-one could fail to see that Reed Richards / Ben Grimm dialogue (and Reed / Johnny
dialogue, and come to that Doctor Doom dialogue and Galactus
dialogue) were a very major part of what made The
Fantastic Four The Fantastic Four. The other major part was Jack Kirby's villains and alien worlds and plots and characters and fight scenes, obviously.
On the other hand,
Fantastic Four #103 is not an intrinsically sillier idea than Fantastic
Four #102. The Kirby conceived the F.F, not as the protagonists of a self-contained novel, but as heroes who would continue to have adventures, month after month, for as long as he could think them up and readers wanted to read them. No-one supposes that it is important to the impact of Fantastic Four 1 – 102 that after defeating the Submariner (again) they all gave up heroing and retired.
But if you want to tell a story about a group of heroes who fight space monsters and
mad scientists, why not think up your own group of heroes, rather
than steal Kirby's? Well, because the chances are that any team you
dreamed up would consist of The Clever, Stuffy One; The Sensible,
Motherly One; The Firey, Impetuous One and The Strong, Bad Tempered
One, because that's a natural kind of team to send on adventures. We
know how they talk to each other and what they are going to argue
about; we know what Reed will say to Ben and what Ben will say to
Reed; we can drop them into any situation, however banal, and it can
hardly fail to turn into a story. It would, of
course, be possible for you to dream up your own group of
interlocking characters and send them off on Adventure. But you don't
need to: Kirby already has.
VIII
Yes, yes, yes of
course it is cool that the
Fantastic Four lived in Spider-Man's city and Spider-Man lived in
the Fantastic Four's city, and that that city was based on New York and this remained true even in
those episodes of Spider-Man where the Fantastic Four weren't
mentioned and those episodes of the Fantastic Four where Spider-Man
wasn't mentioned
But get this:
Marvel New York, or indeed the Marvel Universe doesn't really exist and
never did. It isn't real in the way Camden Town is real: it isn't even
real in the way that Barsoom is real. It is a way of
thinking about stories; it is not itself a story. It is a literary
conceit. The idea that we could read the Avengers because it
"reveals" to us "fact" about "history"
of the Marvel Universe is as fundamentally wrong headed as the idea
that we might listen to Elenor Rigby in order to find out about the architecture of Father McKensie's church -- indeed, that the church has some kind of essential existence outside of the words of the song.
NOTE: Remind me to write an essay one of these days on The Fantastic Four as an instance of C.S Lewis's Four Loves. Reed loves Sue as a wife, Ben as a friend and Johnny as a son; Ben loves Reed as a friend, Johnny as a brother and Sue as a sister; Sue loves Johnny as a mother but Johnny loves Sue as a sister, etc etc etc. You could probably draw a map.
When Jimmy Olsen is kidnapped by the
Clan of the Firey Cross (or as it may be, the Yellow Mask) Clerk
Kent gives his description to the police chief, and distinctly
describes him as brown-haired.
Do you say:
a: Clark Kent made a mistake. The Historical
Jimmy is a red-head.
b: The red haired Jimmy is a different person from the dark haired Jimmy: there
are two Jimmies, just like there are two Ronnies. Radio Jimmy is
dark-haired, but Comic Book Jimmy is red-haired.
c: How interesting: when he was very
young, Jimmy must have been embarrassed about his colouring and used
hair dye (when that would have been a very unfashionable thing for a
boy to do in the 1940s.) Perhaps his friendship with Superman caused
him to accept himself as he was. Or maybe hair colouring just became
too expensive during the war. That could make a really interesting
piece of fan-fict, come to think of it...
d: I wonder what specific cosmological
force resulted in the Jimmy Olsen of Earth-R having different
colouring to the Jimmy Olsen of Earth-2?
VI
Some people got very cross with Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows because it closed the
setting down and off. Some of these people had written stories in which Harry married
Hermione. J.K Rowling revealed that in real life he didn't, and this
matters a great deal to them.
I overheard someone
who had just seen the abomination remarking "I am well pissed
off with J.J Abrams, because I have two shelves of Star Trek DVDs,
and now they didn't really happen."
Whatever "really"
means. In real life, neither Harry Potter nor Captain Kirk exist. Nor Santa Claus, nor Hamlet. I have serious doubts about Nick Clegg.
Some people say
that they have tried to read Jane Austen, but felt that it was
spoiled because someone had removed all the zombies. Actually, disregard that: they probably only say it to annoy me. But go back and try to read The
Final Problem on the assumption that Holmes really died and is really
not coming back, which is clearly what Arthur Conan Doyle intended when he wrote it.
That's the problem with worrying about what authors intended, isn't it? If an author writes his story meaning one thing, and then goes home and changes his mind, does the story change, even though it stays exactly the same? Did Obi-Wan "really" lie to Luke
Skywalker because George Lucas says he did, even though, when he made Star Wars, he clearly intended him to be telling the truth? Obviously, Obi-Wan didn't "really" do anything at all, because there is no such person.
Try to excavate Bob
Howard's pulp hero from the corporate Conan that L Sprague de Camp
and Lin Carter and Frank Frazetta and Arnold Schwazenegger and above
all Roy Thomas created out of his corpse. Reading the stories in
publication order, rather than as a spurious biography helps
somewhat. Imagining that you are reading them in a magazine helps a
bit more. Consciously picturing Conan as not looking like Frank
Frazetta's pictures helps a lot. (He was Saddam Hussien's favourite artist, don't you know?) Saying "Bob" helps, a bit, actually. But it can't really been done. The bad
fantasy epic has overwritten the very good collection of yarns and tall
tales. The terrible movies are the dominant flavour in the soup.
Conan has that haircut. He just does. The lake of story has been well and truly
pissed in.
Books and movies influence
books and movies which come after them. But they also influence books and movies which come
before them. Jackson's King Kong and J.J Abrams abomination will affect every single viewing of King Kong and Star Trek for as long as people continue to buy DVDs of old TV shows and very old movies, which. They aren't just parodies: they are acts of psychic vandalism.
Whatever you may have heard, all stories are NOT true.
Just occasionally, I wonder if I might give up on the whole the geek thing; that maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world if there was a folk gig in Bristol and I wasn't there. And then there is an evening like tonight, and I remember why I started to listen to this stuff to begin with.
Robb Johnson's gig at the was literally like nothing I've ever been to before. He was going to wind up his set with a sentimental song about talking to a fox on his way home from the pub. (The fox says its heading for the street where he grew up, where he used to pick blackberries; but there's a supermarket there now "and none of the fruit tastes of anything at all.") But someone from the audience calls out a title, so he sings that as well, so instead of lyricism we end the night in chanting: "We hate the Tories! We hate the Tories! Yeah Yeah Yeah! And Tony Blair! Same difference there!" Except, of course, that he comes straight back onto the stage and encores with "Be Reasonable (Demand The Impossible Now)" It's a small audience, but they all seem to be fans, or friends, or his. So everybody except me knows all the songs:
No master, no landlord, no flag, no guru, No gauleiter, no commissar, Just justice and poetry with jam on it too, When they ask 'who's in charge here?' We'll all say....
"WE ARE!" calls out the audience as one. But even this isn't the end...he can't leaves the stage, and the finally finishes on The Siege of Madrid, and heartfelt mediation about the fall of fascism. Two guys stood up at the back, arm in arm, and started singing along to the whole thing, making clenched fists at the appropriate moments. ("Each child born is born an anarchist") I've have never, repeat, never felt a more corporate communal feeling at a folk gig, or indeed performance of any kind...never had the sense that everyone in the audience wants to get up and shake each others hands because we've just shared such a great....thing.
How to describe him? There's an element of Billy Bragg in the deliberately naive tub-thumping socialism; folk with a fairly large dollop of punk sensibility behind it. But it's lyrical as well; "be reasonable" is much prettier than it really needs to be. He can do satire: possibly the highlight of the night was a ranting, comedic, diatribe against the press corruption, ending up in a grotesque parody of Rupert Murdoch: "We're sorry...we're sorry...we're sorry we got caught"...which leads directly into a straightforwardly chilling rant about the summer's rioting:
Cops shot Mark Duggan on Thursday night When his family asked why, they wouldn't say a word When they still said nothing Saturday night Tottenham burned
There's a pastoralism to it: it seems that once we've overthrown the state and a lot of our time is going to be spent drinking tea and sitting in fields. We start in fully grown up agitprop mode -- ("they cut all the benefits, close all our libraries") but just when you start to think that maybe a whole evening of being harangued is going to get tiring, he starts to talk with great affection and wit about his pupils (he is, of all things, a primary school teacher) but there's still a socialist moral to be drawn from a series of perfectly observed vignettes about his kids. ("Little people, big ideas.")
I don't endorse all his politics. I think maybe its okay to send Christmas presents to soldier, even if we think that the war in Afghanistan was a catastrophic misjudgement. I don't think we middle class folkies would really be that happy in the anarchist New Jerusalem. I think that bankers might be slightly easy hate figures, although I did like the idea of a lot of city wide-boys getting trapped in a pub basement at the same time as the Copiapo disaster. (People come from all over the country with whatever bricks and rubble they can spare to make sure they don't escape.) But as I've said before, I think "agreeing" with a song is a category mistake. You don't have to agree with all his politics to agree with what he is doing: creating a communal outpouring of joy based around the idea that things could, maybe, be different from how they are.
The King died and then the Queen died - History The King died and then the Queen died of grief - Story No one knew why the Queen was so ill: but it turned out that it was with grief over the death of the King -- Plot
IV
A movie on the theme "The Death of the First Mrs Kane", or "Was little Charlie Really A Victim of Child Abuse?" or "The Woman On the Ferry With the Parasol: Her Backstory" could, in fact be imagined. It is even possible to imagine a good movie on those themes. A good director could make a good movie on any theme. Of course the death of a failed politician's ex-wife in a car crash is a possible set-up for a story. (Was it just an accident? Or suicide? Or did Prince Philip dunnit?) But if the story is worth telling in it's own right, there is no need to give the main character the same name as one in Citizen Kane. And if the story is NOT worth telling, why does it become any more worth telling if the name of the main character is the same as one in Citizen Kane? "Because every time I hear the narrator of the News on the March sequence mention that Kane's first wife died in an accident, I want to know what really happened." But nothing "really happened": she's only a character in a story. One of the things she does in that story is die mysteriously. That is the point of her. Your film will not tell us what really happened. It will just be some shit you made up. Out of your head.
Will anyone claim that such films (even if well made) could ever be regarded as expansions or additions or extensions to CItizen Kane, as true, in their own way, as Orson Welles' version? And will anyone say that the original movie would be improved (or left the same) if it became a truth universally accepted that "the story of Citizen Kane" comprised "Orson Welles epic + Andrew's home movie"? Does anyone think that it would be a good idea for some third party to bring on stage what Welles left off it, to say outright things that he chose to hint at, to provide answers where he only gave questions? Could anyone possibly be stupid enough to think that the question 'Doctor Who?' might one day be answered?
Does anyone remember the daft attempt to recut The Godfather and The Godfather II into chronological sequence, on the assumption that TV audiences are confused by non-linear story telling and freaked out by the expression "son of a bitch"? The Sicilian material from Godfather II came first, then the bulk of Godfather I, then the 70s material from part II. Will anyone say that this made no difference: that a film in which the murders of Don Ciccio and Fredo Corleone are juxtaposed is the same as one in which they are separated by four hours of screen time? That Coppola carelessly filmed his epic out of order and the TV version corrected the mistake? That the Magicians Nephew is the first book in the Narnia Series?
Granted, I have picked examples of movies where theplotis a lot different from the story: where the order in which events unfold is a lot different from the order in which they actually happened. (But nothing actually happened. They are stories.) But the same is true to a greater or lessor extent of all fiction: what happened is never as important as the way in which we are told that it happened. A film which includes a steamy bed scene is not the same as one in which the lovers tantalizingly close the bedroom door, even if, as a matter of fact, in both versions, copulation can be assumed to have taken place. A film which depicts some hideous childhood abuse in shocking detail, and then adds a caption that the victim suffered from mental problems for the rest of their life is not the same film as one in which it is slowly revealed that a mental patient suffered from some horrible trauma when they were a child. A detective story starts with a dead body and works backwards to the murder and the motive; a thriller may start with the motive and move forward to the murder. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is so the first Narnia Book. The Phantom Menace was such a bad idea. Is any of this complicated?
Ernie: Yes, but I'm going to do it
just that little bit better.
I
We sit in your front room, which looks
like the bedroom of a very rich 14 year old.
We move the pile of this months 52 DC comics (cost:
roughly what the government says a single person needs to live on for three weeks); brush the dust of our latest box of Dalek action figures (cost: two weeks child benefit) ; pause disc 27 of our complete
Battlestar Gallactica boxed set and say "Oh, you aren't getting
worked up about some comic book are you? The original graphic
novel will always be there, and anyone who is friendly with
psychopaths can find it. You don't even have to read the new thing if
you don't want to. It really doesn't matter."
We are, to a man, the same people who said George Lucas Raped Our Inner Children when he made a small change to the screen play of Star Wars and that only a genius like like Peter Jackson could have taken
such a boring book and turned it into the single
greatest masterpiece since John Logi Baird invented the cinema.
If Geek B says something which Geek A
doesn't agree with, then Geek A's first resort is always to say that
Geek B is geekier than he is. You think Phantom Menace was a good
movie, and I think that it was a travesty, but you are the sort of
person who cares about Star Wars so I'm certainly not going to pay
any attention to YOU.
We are also the ones who read bad reviews of good movies and say "What right have YOU got to say
if a movie is good or bad, having never made a movie yourself?
Critics are just embittered frustrated writers! No movie is good or bad there's only what you just happen to like and anyway you are only pretending that you enjoyed the Artist because you don't want to admit you wasted two hours watch a terrible film if you were an honest-to-god all right joe you'd watching Twilight with me wobbly sets wobbly sets wobbly sets."
Goo goo g'joob. Goo goo g'joob.
II
I am dimly aware that, in the 1970s, some corporate House-Roys tried to write Kirbyless continuations of the New Gods. One of them was called "The Return of the New Gods", which was a pretty good signal to stay away. They might as well have called it "The New Adventures of the New Gods" or "The New Gods Babies." I think I may even own a couple of 1980s issues by people who should have known better and John Byrne.
They are irrelevant.
The Fourth World is, for better or or worse, and very often for worse, what it is, Hunger Dogs and all. Jim Stalin can pretend that Darksied died, if he wants to. It has precisely the same impact as if I were sitting in a pub and said "Fnaar, fnaar, what if the Green Goblin had a WILLY? Fnaar, fnaar, what if he fucked Gwen Stacy behind Spider-Man's back." It's not part of the comic. It's just something I said when I was drunk. It doesn't become part of the comic even if Marvel inexplicably hire me (say on the basis of some incoherent Star Trek rip-off I worked on twenty years ago) and write "Stan Lee presents" on the front of my sad little wank fantasy.
I haven't read Sins Past. For all I know it is quite good.
Actually, the Fourth World is a pretty bad example, because the original is so definitively enormous that it makes everything that has been pinned on to it after the fact look pitifully small and insignificant. I can paint a man's willy on my poster of the Mona Lisa if I want to: the Mona Lisa is still the Mona Lisa and I am still a pathetic little child who paints willies on posters. It doesn't become a witty subversion of male sexuality just because I scrawled it on a famous painting. Even if I am quite a good painter and it's quite a good painting of a man's willy.
And please, please don't say "It doesn't matter that he painted it on the Mona Lisa. He could have painted it somewhere else. Consider the willy on its own merits." It does, he didn't, and you can't
Superman would have been a better example. Everyone has long since forgotten Man of Steel, and I seem to remember that Man of Steel was quite a good comic, provided you pretended that it didn't have anything to do with Superman. If New Gods is a vast adamantine monolith which repels every attempt to paint graffiti on it, which admittedly it isn't, then Superman is more like a vast lake whose composition is only slightly changed when someone pisses it it.
It's rather a shame that so many cooks spoiled Siegel and Shuster's rather piquant broth quite so quickly. It is worth going back and tasting their original flavour from time to time: it really is fresher and crisper and more bracing than anything that was added to it afterwards. But the broth was well and truly spoilt, and Action Comics # 1 now has almost nothing to do with Superman. So many ingredients – Jor El and Jimmy Olsen and Lex Luther, to say nothing of Kandor and Krypto and Kryptonite were added by subsequent hands. Even I am not pedantic enough to say "Superman's news paper is really called the Daily Star, not the Daily Planet, because that's what Siegel and Shuster originally wrote." All Star Superman is connected to Action Comics # 1 only in a manner of speaking, like the lumberjack who said that he still used his grandfather's axe, but admitted that it had had a new handle and perhaps a new head.
There are fans for whom post-Kirby New Gods does matter: it is quite possible to be a fan of Darkseid and never to have read New Gods. There are websites that straightfacedly say that The Great Darkness Saga is the "greatest" Darkseid story.
They are wrong.
(continues)
DOES DC COMICS APPALLING OPPORTUNISTIC CORPORATE PIECE-OF-SHIT MONEY-GRABBING WATCHMEN RIP-OFF REALLY MATTER?
if you do not enjoy this, then you will almost certainly not enjoy Who Sent The Sentinels ("the finest analysis of Watchmen that I have so far read" -- Eddie Campbell)
In the movie "A Mighty Wind"
the bland Weaver-esque Main Street Singers take to the stage at a big
folk benefit gig and immediately ask the audience: "Does anyone
want to hear some folk
music?" In the same movie, the more-authentic-than-thou
Folksmen find themselves arguing that The Star Spangled Banner and Purple Haze are
examples of folk music. Anyone who's ever been to a concert felt a cringe of recognition.
Folk singers are indeed pretty self-conscious about
being folk singers. It
isn't just Steve Knightley howling "we need roots":
it's Jim Moray charmingly asking
the audience if they know what a Child Ballad is, and Chris Wood
paying tribute to "Anon" as the greatest songwriter who
ever lived. It sometimes feels as if folk music is the main thing which folk music is about.
So
what is folk music? Mark Slobin is an academic. He studies something
called ethnomusicology and he doesn't know. It would be fair to say
that much of what he is interested in -- Hungarian marraige
ceremonies and the state appropriation of peasant music in the old
Soviet nations -- wouldn't be recognised as folk music by the average English or American concert goer. The only modern English
singer who appears in his index is Kate Rusby. Bob Dylan is mentioned
in passing
He
does think there is such a thing as folk music and that we know it
when we see it. But he throws up his hands in despair when looking
for a definition. The nearest he gets is a quote from One Of Those
Sociologists who had did a research project in which he talked to
every folk group, god help him, in Milton Keynes. "There
can be no real definition of folk music, beyond saying that it was
the kind of music played by those who called themselves folk
performers" he concludes.
That's actually a good deal more
helpful than it sounds. It's like "Science Fiction". You
can define it so widely that Jane Eyre is sci-fi (it involves
telepathy) or so narrowly that Star Trek is not (warp drive? warp
bollocks, more like) but we know which would be more likely to be
discussed at a sci-fi convention.
Last week I went to the Frome Folk
Festival. I listened to songs which poor people really did listen to in the days before the gramophone (e.g Spiers and Boden singing All Along And Down A Lee) and songs that were more or less sophisticated pastiches of
that kind of thing (e.g Steve Knightley's Transported). But I also heard
modern compositions by young men with guitars who wanted to explain in
some detail how they felt about the girl who had dumped them; and a
band playing middle eastern instrumental numbers on instruments I
didn’t recognise. And lots of Morris Dancing. One sort of see why
they all go together, where, say, a Beatles cover band wouldn't have
done, but what did they actually have in common? Slobin cites another
academic who says rather desperately "Acoustic instruments
that can be heard by everyone within earshot, a certain musical
simplicty and acccessible thoughtful understandable lyrics are the
most commonly quoted reasons for an interest in contemporary folk
music"
Not that specific definitions aren’t
possible: when I interviewed a couple of local promoters last year, I
was told in no uncertain terms that folk music was lyrics-based
song-writing using open tunings and avoiding blues changes. Very
true, no doubt, but not the kind of definition which would interest
your average ethnomusicologist. .
Slobin is very interested in the
trajectories of individual songs: where they come from; where they go; what they are for. Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star is almost his archetypal folk song: everyone knows it;
no-one knows or cares who wrote it; but it gets passed on from
parents to children because it can be used as a singing game or a
lullaby. Indeed, I think “song with a use” might be a possible
definition of what Slobin means by folk music. A song's use might be to encourage everyone on a chain gang to dig in time with each other; or to encourage your team to score goals, or to calm down a stroppy baby. He claims that a
western ologist once played a piece of popular American music to a
Native American and asked him what he thought of it. The Navajo said
that he couldn’t say if he liked it or not until he knew what it
was good for. A lot of people in the book seem to produce these kinds
of gnomic aphorisms. "You and your dried words...The meaning
of my words is in the moisture of my breath which carries them"
"To you, they are words: to me, they are voices in the forest."
I suppose traditional peoples really do speak like that. But is seems
suspiciously close to how hippies and folkies would like
them to speak.
For something to really be
folk music, as opposed to performance art which some professional
musician has given that label, it needs to be circulating without an
author "out there" in the musical culture. Playground
rhymes and football chants are about the closest we can get,
nowadays, and they hardly count as “music” by most people’s
definition. (You wouldn't buy them on a CD or listen to them at a
concert, would you?) Didn't the Opies find that, when they asked
children to sing them songs, they literally didn't understand what
they were being asked for? The whole idea of music turns out to be
another one of those pesky Western constructs. Slobin thinks that a Muslim might
literally not understand that we regard the call to prayer and the
songs a mother sings to her baby as two examples of the same kind of
thing.
Football
songs or a playground chants are anonymous: silly words just get stuck onto classical
tunes, pop tunes, and very often hymns. But then, a great number of Woody Guthrie's songs were simply new words to old tunes: in some cases, he didn't do much more than take a hymn and substitute the word "union" for the word "Jesus". American folk's most holy martyr, Joe Hill, was writing what a science fiction fan would easily identify as "filk". Slobin talks about a process of “folklorization” whereby something which had a
known author is passed from listener to listener, possibly changing
in the process, and thus enters the musical culture. A pop song or an
advertising jingle can easily become "folklorized" in this
way; swapping songs on YouTube might even be a modern version of
folklorization.
Slobin
is skeptical about the existence of a dying oral folk tradition in
rural England and the American south which Cecil Sharp and John Lomax
fortuitously preserved. Barbara Allen may be the most frequently
collected Anglo American song (that is: many different
collectors have heard different people singing different versions of
it in different places) but it had been very frequently written down
and published before the
big revival. (*) The people who sang it to Cecil Sharp might very well have learned it from songbooks or even early gramophone records. He demonstrates that John Lomax learned the the cowboy
song "I ride an old paint..." in a saloon in 1908, although
he learned it, not from a real cowboy but from another college
educated folklore student. It was published by Carl Sandburg in "The Great
American Song Bag". Aaron Copland had used it as part of his
classical ballet "Rodeo" before Woody Guthrie recorded for
Alan Lomax. Gurthrie probably learned the song from the Sandburg book. But this
is okay, says Slobin because Guthrie re-folklorized it, adding
verses about the Oakies and the dustbowl migration. This doesn't seem
to me to amount to folkorization: it sounds to me like producing a
more heavily authored version, just like turning Casey
Jones into Casey Jones The Union Scab. (The Union Scab version is definitely Joe Hill's song.) Sloban
points out that there are now lots of performances of "I Ride an Old Paint" on
Youtube, including an anoymous lady in a cowboy hat and a chinese
child with a toy organ. Which rather makes it sound as if
“folklorization" just means “the song has been sung by lots of
different people over the years”
Which
isn't, come to think of it, a terrible definition. I
would guess that there are more extant recordings of Yesterday than there are of the Two Sisters; but each new version
of Yesterday consciously depends on the late Paul McCartney's
version of the song, and indeed, of George Martin's recording of him singing it; but
no single version of the Two Sisters depends on any other or supersedes any other. The song
is just out there and anyone can have a go at it.
I enjoyed the
sections about "Celtic" music and didgerydoos. It isn't
quite clear what Celtic music actually has to do with the Celts; it
isn't even clear what the different kinds of music which call
themselves Celtic have to do with each other: "no one has
identified traditional structural, meldodic or rhyhtmic elements that
can be isolated as Celtic". But it does seem as if Irish
people and Welsh people positively started to play what they at any
rate believed to be old songs because their languages were a lost
cause and their songs were something they could cling to and use to
represent what was theirs. (English teachers, as Welsh people never tire
of reminding us, used to beat children who they caught speaking Welsh
in school; they found it rather harder to stop their parents singing old Welsh songs at home). Modern music with the label "Celtic" is made by
professionals, played at concerts, sold on records. "It only
exists after it has been produced and marketed: It has not existence
outside of its commodity form." So how is it folk music?
Because, er, it doesn't sell too well, so the publishers market it on
their folk labels.
Lots of Irish and
Cornish people went to Australia, so Australian folk music can be
quite a lot like Irish music, and therefore distantly connected to
the Celtic thang, but apparently some Ozzie groups have transmogrified into, god help us, “folk rock bush bands” which incorporate the
didgerydoo but apparently not the wobbleboard. The didgerydoo doesn't
seem to have been that big a deal for the First Peoples; it was a
hollowed out log that that you blew down in certain religious
ceremonies, but it has become a signifier for Australian-ness and in
particular for the idea that the Aborigines were specially spiritual
and in touch with nature and stuff. It has a distinct sound, of
course (Jim Moray uses it in Leaving Australia and Christ
Ricketts in Bound For South Australia) but Slobin thinks
that it is the idea of the instrument -- what it symbolizes --
that has caused a separate musical sub-culture to grow up around it.
"Turned into a myth, the aboriginal's cultural essence
distills into a single object made from a log". The sound of
the didgerydoois thought by fans to be bound up with the Native Australians respect for
the environment, and fans think that just listening to it will help
you "reconnect with nature, earth energy and each other". They don’t seem to be playing traditional Native Australian tunes:
it's the instrument itself which is special.
This reminded me of
Joseph Campbell’s odd idea that free floating things called "myths",
shorn of their cultural context can return your mind to a blissful,
telegraph-wire free utopia. But it's also maybe not too far from
Steve Knightley's idea that our stories and our songs will connect
us with our roots, with all questions about who “we” are taken
for granted.
Ursula Le Guin famously said that she wrote science fiction because science fiction was what her publisher called the kind of thing she wrote: but folk music is a label which certain professional musicians wish to apply to the kind of thing they sing. Martin Carthy's Prince Heathen and Jim Moray's Lord Douglas are not part of any process of folklorization: they are the result of the conscious study of multiple written versions. (But I suppose that some folkies may sing Prince Heathen in Carthy's version and believe that they are singing something unchanged since the Olden Days.) Reading this book made me wonder if it's the label which is important, symbolizing something about the Olden Days for certain middle class English people in the way that the didgerydoo does for certain Australian hippies?
Chris Wood says that when he sings a song, he feels the ghost of the person who taught it to him standing behind him: but that person learned the song from someone else, so there is a long chain of ghosts standing behind him. You only really become a folk singer, he says, when you understand that one day you will be one of the ghosts. I don't think it matters very much whether that chain of ghosts is real or imaginary, any more than it really matters what aborigines did with their didgerydoos before white people arrived on their island. What matters is the idea.
(*) The haunting version of the song performed as part of the Cecil Sharp project doesn't sound as if it has been carefully honed by Anon to fit the needs of a new continent; it sound more like a product of misremembering and mishearing: "Sweet William died on a Saturday night, and Barbara on a Sunday; the old woman died for the love of both, she died on Easter Monday" sounds like a something out of a playground chant: the old woman has found her way into the story simply to provide a rhyme.