Silverlake Blvd.

The Miners' Hymns @ RedCat

 

 

 

Everything about Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns is ambivalent.

 

There is no story, but the material is organized into episodes illustrating the work and life of the mining towns in north England in the first three-quarters of the 20^th century. A prologue implies that this world has been pretty much obliterated.

 

On the other hand, it’s unclear whether Morrison makes an argument at all. What, exactly, does he claim about the work in the mines? About life above ground? About how it ended? Nothing in particular.

 

The most you can say is that Morrison claims the archivist’s privilege of presenting evidence that the past was very different from the present. That once upon a time a whole way of life existed around the collieries. A banality, and yet not so simple.

 

An artifact becomes evidence when it is incorporated into an argument. But, again, where is the argument in Miner’ Hymns? If not an argument, there is perhaps a frame, an archival presumption—an assumption that the footage presented was made a long time ago. The assumption that the footage of the Battle of Orgreave is a document of events that happened in 1984, and not, for example, an historic reconstruction for a film, such as Jeremy Deller staged in 2001.

 

And yet it appears that Morrison manipulated his Orgreave footage rather freely, changing the original color video image to black and white—to maintain a distinction between present-day color images—such as the aerial images of the prologue—and the black and white archival footage.

 

Though implied and never explicit, the archival aspect is the least ambiguous aspect of Miners’ Hymns. At the very least, Morrison has rescued some compelling footage from neglect, bringing to a worldwide audience those wonderful banners, the crowds of people wearing hats, the faces ….

 

 

 

 

Morrison’s strategy of presenting the archival footage without narration frees the audience from the full names, precise dates, the generally accepted historical accounts that are not always welcome or helpful.

 

Morrison refuses to provide a moral. He offers no explanation why the culture that produced the Durham Miners’ Gala evaporated—neither the explanation of the Left nor the explanation of the Right. His reticence generates an effect like Tolstoy’s descriptions of battles: precise descriptions of noise, confusion and violence, without reference to military strategies and objectives. Adhering to the first-hand experience, and rejecting words that would reduce the experience to a formula.

 

In Miners’ Hymns, Morrison takes on similarly charged subject matter, and proposes that instead of using the images to cue a speech, we try to see what’s in them.

 

Morrison, the archivist, offers a glimpse, not a story. A glimpse rich with allusions. Not the political message of the demonstration, but the gestures, expressions, clothes, interactions of the participants. A glimpse also of the past, and the uncanny experience of long-dead world that is lively and appealing, full of ghosts who seem to be better socialized than we are, more alive, participating in a culture they fashioned for themselves.

 

But this reticence also gets Morrison off the hook. He doesn’t have to take a stand on any hard questions the footage evokes—Was there any way this way of life could have survived? Was it doomed by the government? the unions? global post-industrial economic restructuring?

 

And the refusal to offer any contextualizing words also means that every viewer is free to read into the images his or her own prejudices and clichés: the harrowing work conditions of the miners, their rough but authentic town life, their beautiful celebrations of solidarity, the brutal strikebusting that ended it all, ….

 

This is certainly the point at which Morrison definitively departs from the documentary tradition. My preconceptions are not challenged, but pandered to.

 

 

 

 

However Miners’ Hymns is far from open-ended or opaque. While it is sparing with explanatory words, it is lavish with passionate music. The steady pace, uniform sonority, and slowly unfolding melodies of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack unifies the disparate images by infusing them with deep, sweet melancholy. Jóhannsson’s symphonic threnody imposes a rhythm and literally sets the tone. The marriage of music and image creates tremendous moments—as at the movie’s conclusion, when the orchestra swells to images of union lodge banners begin carried in procession to the altar of Durham Cathedral. Elsewhere the music jars with the images: glimpses of light-hearted merrymaking at the Durham Gala are musically coerced into some unspecified dark end. The captured smiles and collegiality might contain premonitions of doom, but surely that isn’t all.

 

This presentation made it impossible for me to resist taking the material in Miners’ Hymns nostalgically. Impossible not to swoon over an authentic, indigenous, progressive, secular English working class culture based on collective bargaining and solidarity. It’s impossible, also, not to read it as a eulogy, a monument to a tremendous political disillusionment.

 

In short: sentimentality, which seems especially inappropriate in this context. To sigh and a shrug over one more lost thing among an endless inventory of already lost things seems disrespectful to the lives evoked here.

 

But, again, who or what is really being evoked? An important clue is how calm the movie is. I expected it to be shameless, it isn’t. Though mournful and coercive it is also restrained: it doesn’t howl. Tears almost come, but remain unexpressed.

 

This is the fine line Morrison treads. The conflict he employs in Miners’ Hymns—and other movies like Decasia, Outerborough, and Release—is the conflict between the passionate images and the dispassionate presentation.

 

Just as Decasia is not a documentary about the decay of old film but a meditation on how images momentarily click into intelligibility, but then shimmer away like haze, Miners’ Hymns is not a documentary about the culture in Durham that grew up around the mines, but a documentary about inexorable time estranging us from such worlds. It is not a permanent monument of remembrance, but a provisional sortie against the inevitable forgetting. 

 

 

Maria Nordman’s Filmroom: Smoke @ LACMA

 

You enter Maria Nordman’s 1967 Filmroom: Smoke to discover two films being projected on the far wall. A stubby projecting wall divides the wall in half. In the left half, a white lounge chair glistens in its crumpled plastic protective wrap. The two movies project the same rocky beach with waves tumbling in. You see the same chair sitting in the film on the beach.

 

A man who could only be described as a Dude (boots, soul patch, wild hair) ambles up, sits down in the chair, and lights a cigarette. After a while a woman who is a nothing other than a Chick (miniskirt, mascara, listless affect) appears. She perches on the arm of the chair, bums a cigarette off him and starts smoking herself.

 

As the waves come crashing in, the pair begins attitudinizing strenuously—adopting what I suppose they believe are interesting dramatic poses. They are, in fact, completely ridiculous. She attempts to convey to us that she is really and truly fascinated by the lichen on the rock wall. He attempts to convey to us that he is a really fine-looking dude and breathtakingly cool. After exhausting their whole repetoire of ideas (in two minutes) they place a big hunk of driftwood in the chair, shake their respective manes, puff, and The End.

 

The text panels try to tell you that this piece is an investigation into conflicting perspectival systems. Not at all. Whatever this project may have begun as, it lives today as a satire of late-Sixties hipsterism, and it’s fabulous.

 

What a shame that the visual impact of this little satirical gem had to be lessened by presenting it as a digital projection, rather than actual film.

 

Ellsworth Kelly’s balancing act @ LACMA

 

They are simple-seeming at first; then you look.

 

They are not ideas translated into form. They aren’t conceptual art. They aren’t minimal. Their geometry is not rigorous; it’s the geometry of organic forms, the forms and colors of things found in the world.

 

You get the sense that most of these forms and colors are discovered, not fabricated, whether a grape leaf or boxes stacked in the street. EK refines the source into a perfume, but a perfume that retains the tang of the source.

 

They aren’t logos, flags, or graphic design—though they toy with those realms. EK slows them down with his deliberate scale and sensual materials. He translate those speedy modes of communication into something much more thoughtful.

 

They aren’t pictures or windows but things. They function as objects in real space—of a certain size, color, material. Even the drawings of plants are conceived as objects in real space.

 

With different nuances of mood, they generate a sense of open spaces, freedom and tenderness. I keep thinking of Shaker furniture, quilts, and other expressions of humane Yankee clarity.

 

The pleasure comes with some cost. You don’t get everything in EK. You don’t get any anecdotes, autobiography, or myth. While there is mystery and maybe even tragedy in these sunny pictures, there is no drama. Everything comes out in the first-person singular.

 

An un-classical art based on balance, not extremes. Refinement without purity. Simplicity without bluntness. 

 

[Image: Kelly, Grape Leaves, 1973-74]

Schubert's Winter Journey @ Disney Hall

 

It starts with a farewell full of regrets. As the songs unfold, we get a bit of a story—the singer’s love is marrying another. He explodes in bitterness and anger. He feels the cold.

 

Then with the fifth song, The Linden Tree, the mood changes: Wilhelm Müller’s words continue the pastoral themes, but Schubert’s music becomes more introspective. The subsequent nineteen songs go deeper and deeper.

 

We never get the details, we only get his experience. From a cozy Biedermeier salon the audience is propelled into the world of expressionist monologue—out into the forest with the keening woman in Schoenberg’s Expectation, or into the dusty junkshop of Beckett’s regretful Krapp.

 

There are variations of tone, nuances of feeling, that take us inside the abandoned lover. For a moment he forgets his sorrow (Dream of Spring), but he’s overwhelmed by a sense that his life is over (The Inn).

 

Matthias Goerne’s voice is an amazing dramatic instrument: infallibly fine in quiet passages, but powerful when necessary. 

 

Then at the end (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), he encounters a wretched street musician. Our fictional narrator, given voice by the singer, comments on the music-making that has been happening for the last hour. It is pathetic and futile, of course, but “Strange old man / Shall I go with you? / Will you play your organ / To my songs?”

 

It’s dramatically inevitable that the singer should address those last words to the accompanist at the piano, but Matthias Goerne spent the whole recital turned to Christoph Eschenbach. Bernard Shaw wrote somewhere that the best theatrical prop recital singers have is their eyes. Goerne directing his outbursts toward the pianist was a dramatic conceit that hindered connecting with the audience.

 

 

[Image: Samuel Palmer, Study, 1830s?]

 

Missa solemnis @ Disney Hall

 

Beethoven's mass begins with a Kyrie that really is a cry for help, a few chords shimmering and reverberating. Then it explodes.

 

Just last February we heard how Bruckner set the mass, soberly and introspectively …. Well Beethoven can’t be bothered with any of that. It’s not prayer that his mass supports, but storming the Bastille or resisting the Assad regime. Rather than piety and grace, it evokes liberty, fraternity, equality without irony and without apology.

 

Not that it’s all thunderstorms. Martin Chalifour must have been very happy when the piece was scheduled, since it meant he could steal the show with the violin solo in the Benedictus—the one moment of really angelic sweetness.

 

This was the music that Aldous Huxley in 1931 described as

 

Blessed and blessing, this music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound, it pours itself, stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising and falling, falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night in another mode of being, as an essence is the equivalent of the flowers, from which it is distilled.

 

The price you pay for good seats is that you sometimes see a bit more than you really need. The soloists's expressions often betrayed terror and grim determination to get through the ordeal somehow. No need to worry: they did fine. It blazed.

 

[Illustration: Turner, Slave Ship, 1840]

 

Katie & James @ the Police Academy Firing Range

 

 

Sunday was also a lovely day for an outdoor wedding. Cheers!

 

CicLAvia

Yesterday was a CicLAvia festival. We rode from Heliotrope & Melrose to Central & 14th, south of downtown. Then we went up through downtown, over the 4th Street bridge, to Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights.

This is looking eastbound on 7th Street.

 

Participants chill at the historic Coca-Cola Bottling Plant on Central.

 

Towards afternoon, there was gridlock of bikes, as here, Westbound on 7th Street.

 

It's ideal for architecture snooping. The whole Spicy complex won my heart. Note Elvira on the security gate.

 

 

John Cage @ Disney Hall

 

Tuesday night at Green Umbrella, Gloria Cheng and the L.A. Phil ensemble played John Cage’s 1951 Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra.

 

The featured instrument is not celebrated but humiliated. Instead of a piano’s rich sonority, there were raspy and percussive taps that clang out of tune. Instead of exciting extended passages—which Cage had been writing three years earlier—a few phrases that abruptly cease.

 

The orchestra contributes pulverized expression, pulverized gesture and feeling. Expression smashed to a few rarified fragments.

 

The effect is dry rather than exquisite. It is sober and sharp. The momentary outburst from radio isn’t amusing—it makes you jump out of your seat.

 

As the piece progresses, the phrases become briefer, more abrupt, and isolated by longer and longer silences. At the end, the conductor Jeffrey Milarski was gracefully signaling the beat in the noiseless air.

 

At intermission, A Certain Person remarked, “I know you loved it, but for me it was water torture.”

 

“Torture” is extreme, but certainly music, here, is not entertainment but an extraordinary situation contrived to evoke the truth. I detect the influence of the moral earnestness of his teacher Schoenberg, and, ultimately Beethoven. Music engaged not as a way of amusing audiences, but of castigating them. Confronting them.

 

I don’t want to reduce it to a symptom of the post-war blues, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a work taking place among ruins. The toys are broken; the game is spoiled: it is finished. The music of mere distraction and reconciliation can’t go on.

 

It made the Stockhausen Five Star Signs that preceded it seem like Richard-Straussian divertimenti. They were short, sharp and delicious. Mark Swed in the Times called it, “maybe the worst and least characteristic music Stockhausen ever wrote.” Maybe the fact that it was not characteristic is what appeals to me, but I liked it a lot.

 

The world premiere of Oscar Bettison’s Livre des Sauvages offered lots of sound effects lifted from fifty-year-old scores by Messiaen, which is not entirely a bad thing (dreamy French horn solos).

 

Unfortunately it also included moments when the first violinist and violist had to play slashing virtuoso passages while stomping on air pumps to make toy melodicas wheeze into carefully positioned individual microphones. A bit of levity was welcome at this point, but the effort seemed a waste.

 

But the athletic champion of the evening was Mark Robson on keyboards, who had to dash between a grand piano, a toy piano, and an electric keyboard schlepping his copy of the score. The Esa-Pekka Foundation that commissioned this piece couldn’t pay for two extra photocopies?

 

I confess I’m totally out of it, but may I ask what was up with the extraordinary turnout of gay men in the audience? I realize the Phil is clever at promotions, but did they sell it as a White Party afterparty? What’s next, Difficult Music Night at the Abbey? 

 

[Illustration: Gérard Castello-Lopes]

 

Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last

 

 

Like the first four novels in the Patrick Melrose series, the time and place of the action is narrowly restricted, and there is only one event—in this case, the funeral of Patrick’s mother Eleanor.

 

It takes place exactly on April 9, 2005, conflicting, as Patrick’s impossible Aunt Nancy vehemently complains, with the wedding of Charles and Camilla.

 

We’ve covered a lot of time with Patrick. We first met—in Never Mind—in 1965 when Patrick was five. Bad News presented one weekend of Patrick’s drug-addled twenties, Some Hope presented one weekend of Patrick’s semi-cleaned up thirties. Mother’s Milk brought Patrick up to the 21^st century, viewed through the eyes of his two sons.

 

St. Aubyn is focused, not expansive. He writes about a small number of events, concerning a handful of people, from an extremely limited milieu. Aesthetic fastidiousness coincides with a clear-sighted awareness of limitations.

 

On the other hand, there is a clear ambition to document the change of eras during a life.

 

Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time is the most obvious precedent. Beyond the obvious similiarities, St. Aubyn has Powell’s virtue of a style that is hard, dry and uninterested in fantasy—crisply empirical.

 

However unlike Powell, St. Aubyn is never boring. Where Powell is rigorously mundane, St. Aubyn is always describing something so grotesque, or quoting somebody’s grotesque remarks. Above all, everyone in St. Aubyn seethes with hunger. Though Patrick Melrose might be less probable that Nick Jenkins, he’s definitely more entertaining.

 

Waugh is probably St. Aubyn's patron. I can imagine prayers and tears directed toward his shrine. However Waugh fatally ended up identifying with and believing in his poshies.

 

Proust is not so far-fetched a comparison. Proust is one of the few authors who come up in the Melrose novels. St. Aubyn’s literary references are very few, but they are always choice. At the end of Chapter 3 in Never Mind, Victor jokingly recalls to Anne Proust’s scene where a lunch of lamb with sauce Béarnaise left “the poor Duc de Guermantes so famished that he had no time to chat with the dying Swann’s dubious daughter before hurrying off to dinner.”

 

That scene—which the philosopher Victor doesn’t remember quite accurately—is recalled for the sake of the pretext, instead of its content. It’s an apex of Proust’s art—a perfect fusion of comedy and pathos. St. Aubyn doesn’t fuse the two so elegantly, but it’s the resonance he aspires to.

 

However unlike Proust or Waugh—or Alan Hollinghurst—St. Aubyn can never be accused of being infatuated by his wealthy and aristocratic characters. They are all monsters, spreading evil even when they intend good (e.g. Eleanor, “so entranced by her own vulnerability, so desperate to be saved.”).

 

Nicholas Pratt is Exhibit A. His death at the end of At Last is really a conclusion, since the series began with him. He is emblematic and allegorical, illustrating and exemplifying a whole culture that has no longer has any excuse for existing--if it ever did.

 

However St. Aubyn provides no hope that Nicholas—or the less toxic Aunt Nancy—is the end of the line. Patrick’s unspeakable ex Julia represents the continuity of the younger generation, quite happy to carry on the hypocrisy, false values and parasitism into another century: “Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more.”

 

Not that anybody else comes off any better. A source of suspense throughout the series is awaiting the arrival of a “positive” character. Spoiler alert: this never happens.

 

Anne, the one relatively sane and sympathetic character who memorably takes pity on little Patrick in the first novel, is carefully identified as being completely ineffectual. For all her sympathy, she accomplishes nothing. Mary, the mother of Patrick's two sons, is presented as an admirable mom, but completely cut off from everyone and everything outside of her kids (though Patrick's view is distorted by his own extreme neediness).

 

Nobody accomplishes anything, but then nobody really does anything. Other than servants and service providers, there are no descriptions of anyone working. Some of the main characters do, in fact, have jobs—but their working life is kept off-stage. Whatever they do, they inevitably make a muck of (Patrick forgetting his father’s ashes in the hotel).

 

The one extended glimpse of people with careers is Jim and Jilly Packer in the first part of Mother’s Milk. They are not only vulgar brutes, but demonstrate to Patrick and his astonished wife and kids new varieties of selfishness and greed.

 

Hence it’s no surprise that the events that would comprise the meat of more conventional novels always happens off-stage.

 

There are some terrific dramatic confrontations: Patrick standing up to his father; his mother leaving his father; Patrick getting hooked on heroin, and quitting; Patrick becoming an attorney, marrying Mary and fathering two boys; Mary and the boys leaving Patrick. However all these thrilling scenes occur in-between the volumes.

 

It’s a sign of St. Aubyn’s fastidiousness and malice that he doesn’t dramatize any of Patrick’s school days. The boarding school/high school/university episodes that in Anglo-American literature serve as all-purpose, foolproof dramatic distillation of a character’s psychological, sociological, political, metaphysical world are merely alluded to in a handful of grim asides. He leaves all that to Sue Townsend--whose Andrian Mole, come to think of it, is probably as much an influence as De Sade and William Burroughs.

 

Patrick doesn’t need boarding school to learn that his world richly rewards selfishness, sadism and stupidity, and punishes without mercy any hint of sympathy, kindness or insight.

 

When events aren’t kept entirely off-stage, they are presented retrospectively, long after they have taken place. The two great events of the series, the deaths of Patrick’s father and mother, are both presented this way. As a general rule, the drama takes place in Patrick’s memory, while the comedy takes place in Patrick’s present.

 

The one notable exception being Patrick’s brutalization by his father in Never Mind, the crime which starts Patrick down the path of disillusion and dissolution. From that point on, the series becomes the story of the Melrose family legacy, which St. Aubyn clearly but without hocus-pocus identifies as a family curse. Patrick’s recurring lament throughout the series is the loss of his mother’s house in Saint-Nazaire. Even though it has the grimmest of associations, Patrick clings to it as the one good legacy he has been cheated of.

 

Instead of handing down anything nice, like a grimly contemporary House of Atreus, the House of Melrose family perqs of wealth, freedom, and aristocratic connections produce nothing but their opposites: insatiable greed and envy, pissed away lives, and estrangement from humanity.

 

And so the great question of the Melrose novels is Can Patrick escape the curse? The question is amplified in Mother’s Milk, where St. Aubyn—cleverly aware that some readers might have already given up on Patrick—restates the question as Can Patrick restrain from passing on the family curse to his innocent boys?

 

The saga consists in the working-out of this dilemma. What do you do when every memory of happiness is inextricably entangled with memories of horror? What do you do when your parents frankly and ostentatiously failed in their duty to protect and love? What next? How to proceed?

 

At Last ends with a distinct Maybe. Patrick decides that what he wants, after all, is to be with his sons. It doesn’t offer any guarantee that they will receive him warmly, or that things will work out. However, there is a note of longing that suggests that, after years of “reacting,” he is finally capable of “responding.”

 

[Illustration: De Chirico, The Double Dream of Spring, 1915]