… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON

i: These days the Silvery Juggheds are quite dead to me, which is a pity. I think there are three reasons I turned against them. First, they really did scare me when I was a wee meatspace tiny myself on Old Mars/Telos/Mondas/London Underground/I DON’T REMEMBER OK, as they stumbled spongily through dark b/w tunnels killing killing killing: and the residue of terror vanished is often contempt. Third and recent, the Nu-Who protocols of UTTERLOGICWAR are primarily feebly stampy gags across the clichés of easycopy post-digitial computer discourse (“Delete!” and ect and ect and zzzz) which are as soon-to-be-dated as they’re dreary. But second middle and most, there really was often something spookily poetic about the pre-hardbody ‘Bermen. They looked half-formed; they battled their confused mass-larval way out of shrink-wrap cocoons at the end of the first ep; there was something genuinely alien about them, somehow, their humanoid form more an organic pod-production than a factory-line metal macho. Or something (for more on this, see my comments on THE INVASION pt 2 at Helix 8b, at para iii. And of course maybe the middle reason find itself more part of reason three than not: hauntology, as we know, is the soft shift of today’s stupid technology-habit back towards yesterday’s anxious unspoken future-threat dreams blah blah beebaw bleugh. All of which is mainly just to set the scene for my not being v.blown away by this v.famous story…

ii: … Not that 5IVE seems terribly impressed either. In fact he’s distracted from the off: he seems fed up, world-weary and enough not his cheerful easygoing self that viewer unease breeds. The whole section of the first ep where he’s elaborately tormenting Young Adric by telling him nothing about anything — kind of a BadBaker Throwback Obnoxion Tic — is actually quite odd, even as a dramatic-irony set-up for later grief and guilt (if this is indeed what is later depicted). And then when the Juggheds turn up, his exasperated fed-upness doubles. Genuine WhoSchoolers will correct me here, but I believe they’d been absent from DW for quite a while, perhaps because writers had got written them off — absent since old HoboDays possibly, except didn’t BIG HEAD briefly skirmish with a forlorn handful late in the ‘Hed timeline (at which point they are declared scattered and diminished and laughable). None of the companions recognise them whn they first appear in EARTHSHOCK, and 5ive does nothing to clue them in to nature of danger: you’d think Who’s ancient war with the Juggheds (how they see each other; how they joust) is worth a bit more than this backstory insertion than this — if 5ive’s mug is a guide, this is just more boring pest control, just more unending admin, bottling up stupid not-really-robots, protecting stupid self-regardless humanity, shepherding and staving off stupid whiny LOGICBOY…

iii: … who (doctoral unkindness notwithstanding) is a good deal of any stumbling block, is he not? See, once there was Sherlock H, and today there is Sheldon C, and in-between — mightier far than either as a science-fictional archetype — is of course SPOCK: and Matthew Waterhouse was a very young unpracticed semi-non-actor required to realise all kinds of facets of the “reason vs emotion: which will win?” type storyline, NARRATIVE AND THE DIALECTICS OF hem hem PURE LOGIC if you will: facets he was simply not suited to (especially when poorly served by the script). (ps by no means a new topic for me to be picking at, in Helixterms: cf also THE INVASION Part 1 and Part 2 (feat.Cybermen), as well as FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (feat.Adric).) Indeed EARTHSHOCK actually skirts (tho doesn’t really resolving into) a kind of high-level Comi-tragic Logic-Off — Logicboy vs the Top Local Botman in Charge — with inadvertent solo self-sacrifice defeating trollingly psychotic mass exterminationism (hurrah). But (certainly compared with linked eps) not in a way you learn anything much from (unless you’re learning how not to write a moral fable). (Or how to write, period.) Primarily because this may be because JugHead-in-Chief is actually a terrifically pompous — and really NOT very rational — fellow, giving his speeches strangely over-emphatic readings and constantly re-improvising a poorly controlled plan to to destroy a planet to disrupt a conference so that he can humiliate and torment the fleshly (“That’s sadistic!” squeaks Tegan at one point. “No, it’s scientific!” declares the Jugghead serenely… ) (Adding: I’m advised by wikipedia that the actor, David Banks, recapped this performance several times and became cultishly beloved for the way he says “Excellent!”…)

iv: Sadly, 90% of Real Actual Proper Good Drama is how deftly you get yr heroes and villains on and off-stage, and into the binds and conflicts youwant them in. <--- if this isn't a well-worn dramacraft apothegm it bloody ought to be, if only to underscore why eps like this are so tiresomely underwhelming. The cast is both numerous and diversely teamed: all teams ceaselessly splitting up, often quite unnecessarily. The Juggheds we encounter are of course part of a vast army united in vast strategic purpose, but an intricate localised part of this army, with much to do, little of it on point (viz why have they been busy murdering crew members if they want the vast plan to remain secret until too late? Why leave scary homicidal android guarding a defusable bomb instead of ACTUALLY HIDING THE BOMB BETTER etc); the cave-exploring team split up largely to be easier for the homicidal kinkybots to pick them off; freighter crew somewhat ditto but this does give a sense of the sheer SCALE of this ship (=15,000 containers-worth); and the Doctor-Companion dynamics are just odd -- especially when you remember it comes after BLACK ORCHID aka NYSSA'S DREAM. There's a very little bit of me tempted to argue that the Doctor is so distracted and distanced with Adric because, in some intuitive pre-cog subconscious fashion, he *knows* that the puir wee prodigy is not long for this world (I don't believe this really, I think it's just muddled scriptwriting really)...

v: Anyway time for a direct and simple positive yip yip: Beryl Reid! As a bored and cynical but actually totally competent captain of avast merchant vessel of space, well aware of the dickishness of her crew and the general uselessness of regulations. A good surprise at the first appearance (which I’ve just spoilered); would have made a good companion actually, Lethbridge-Stewart-style.

vi: various unrelated observations. 1: It’s merely anomalous and quaint given that the ep’s set centuries in Earth’s future, but the various computer tracking technologies, in the cave and on the ship. are also all quite poetic in their blinky bleepy simplicity (= more Hauntology 101 of course). 2: wai oh wai when we encounter a human traitor the Juggheds have suborned do we never see the anomalous charm and guile they must have put into the seduction? How on earth do traitors ever fall for it? (They’re not all dimwits — cf The Invasion — though this one is. 3: I am a bit fascinated by the cultural relationship the ‘Heds have to their blackly clad Latex pervodroids. And 4: why does the droid-killing technique leave such a slimy — and recognisable — mess?

vii: Writing this up has been of a sluggish slog — partly bcz I’m getting back into the rhythm after a too-long lay-off, but also because I find this quite a hard ep to get to grips with. Storywise, it’s potentially really rich — actually probably TOO rich for one four-parter — but I *really* feel I’m projecting an awareness of the richness on the writers (but it seems very unfair to withhold it: none of this is especially subtle stuff). Just to bring focus back to DINOGEDDON to make the point: I genuinely can’t decide if I want them to have made more of this underlying idea, or kept it as a (ideally more deft) Amazing Reveal. The latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event; but the fact of all the mass-produced JuggHeds struggling out of their shrink-wraps as they power up — satirical metaphor ahoy! of human extinction by container-freighter carbon-footprint white-goods consumerism! — would have been very hard indeed for a NuDoc overseer to overlook.

Plus also:

Putting a lot more thought into this issue than I suspect they ever did — no there is nothing at all wrong with this imbalance, plz to bug-off — I think there’s two aspect to the Matthew Waterhouse problem. First is that logic vs emotion — whiskered as it is in DW terms — gains a lot of potential once a major character is a mathematically brilliant child, in terms of big-question SF and in terms of sit-com misunderstanding. (What Jim Parsons brings to Dr Sheldon Cooper is a brilliant layered awareness of different modes and types and age-group modes of intelligence, passing a face at different speeds, pulling a body different clownish ways)

Second is sadder, really: MW actually has a very sweet and engaging face. When he’s not speaking or acting, you quite often really really want to like him (sometimes to hug him). Which possibly powers the abreaction (though others are know get very protective… )

NEXT DAY UPDATE: I say above that the “latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event” but realised as I was bit-by-bit tweaking this entry that this over-compressed reference to the climax actually indicates why the story doesn’t work — which is that it has two Amazing Reveal climaxes combined into just one shock ending, except one is pure Daft Robo vs Dino Thrill Power WHHHEEEE!, and the other is an emotionally important milestone in the long-game unfolding of DW’s understanding of himself, his behaviour, his responsibilities, his failings, his contradictions… The two trample all over one another, in tone and resonance and usefulness.

The disgraced children’s author William Mayne died in 2010, some 57 years after the publication of Follow the Footprints, the first of his more than a hundred books, none of them for adults. A final book came out the year of his death, Every Dog (puissant title in the circumstances), and I haven’t read it yet, though I will. I’ll talk a little about his downfall at the close of this post, and doubtless more later, but what I actually propose to undertake is a gradual reading of these books, such as I can track down, starting with a rereading of the 20-odd that I own and know.

A Swarm in May (1955)

“Five shillings,” said Owen. “Well done, ye!” That was a choir-school phrase: no one knew who had invented it. It was a sign of joy and approval.

Swarm is Mayne’s third book: the first of an admired set of four set in a cathedral school (he went to Canterbury C.S. as a boy): since the cathedral holds services all year round, choristers have to stay in school for at least some of the holidays, or return early. So the setting is emptied: half-staffed, all-male, with Owen, the youngest choirboy — perhaps nine, helped some of the time by an older boy — uncovering curious and unsettling items very material to a bee-keeping ritual rendered vestigial back when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries.
So, buildings with hidden reaches you can creep down into, in which unexpected things are secreted, forgotten or never known by all the grown-ups round you: flashes here of Kipling’s Stalky: which continue in the depiction of teachers (as slightly absurd and eccentric adult cartoons, half-deliberate self-conscious parodies of themselves); in the well observed and witty delineation of trends and memes and traditions and catchphrases in the language the boys speak to one another; and of course Mayne shares Kipling’s fascination with the detailed arcana of specialist knowledge and technique (the jargoned world of choirs and organplayers; the physical feel of the practice of bee-keeping). But really this is a FAR far gentler world than Kipling’s; one in which loneliness very lightly touched on in an ebb and flow of communal affection, and agon (such as it is) uncomplicatedly (and sensibly) worked through.

The Twelve Dancers (1962)

It was no good taking Porky by the hand. The way to lead him was to walk in front. Porky would seem to look at everything else, but he would follow. He would follow anything in a wandering way. Once he had followed a kindly big dog down into the village, all the way from the house. The dog had taken him to its home and then gone to sleep. Ma had rescued Porky, and he had had to walk all the way home as well.

Dancers is set in a semi-isolated Welsh valley, somewhere at the head of the Severn, some not very specified time in the 50s — apparently no cars or radios, let alone TVs, but there is a Queen’s head on the coins: Marlene is new to the village, her mother a cleaner in various local households and a single parent (no backstory on this, or the reasons for their arrival). It’s Marlene’s first encounter with the yearly Traditional Dance, and she’s initiated into this intricate village affair involving girls at the school, curious ‘doors’ of various heights built into the church wall, and a semi-buried old dancefloor atop a nearby hill. The dance-steps (direction and number) decode into a sort of treasure map that will perhaps rediscover a lost or misplaced or deliberately concealed item — a cup — and resolve an ancient dispute over ownership of a tranche of land, known as Commons Wood. If the young-ish local landowner finds and claims it, he believes the land will revert to him: said land is probably not worth much, and he’s really more interested in the archeological riddle, but unsurprisingly there’s a certain crackle of class conflict as various schoolchildren side with or against him in this project (as — in the background — do their parents). Dance as enactment of tension, and as resolution: in the event, everything comes out nice (in fact the ritual indirectly enables a cross-class wedding), but it’s not hard to see this book as a forerunner of Alan Garner’s far more fraught The Owl Service (1967), where the children are rather older, and sexual tension and jealousy power the (explicit) magic that will be uncovered.

A Parcel of Trees (1963)

“I don’t how you’re going to make out at all,” said Mum. “Or I wouldn’t if we didn’t all feel the same. It’s the weather.”
“It’s the dreadful life we lead,” said Susan.
“What do you mean?” said Mum. “You’re the dreadful life, lying about like an old stump.”

Again rooted in a potential conflict about property: the “parcel of trees” of the title is a slice of disputed property cut off from the family garden by the intrusion of a railway line many decades before, and now only accessible through a culvert. Susan (14) discovers this secret near-garden and — when amiably challenged as a trespasser by railway officials — decides to prove that legal ownership has in fact reverted away from the railway company. With the help of a solicitor neighbour (working for free because it’s an unusual and interesting case) she uncovers a pertinent slice of recent very unofficial local history; villagers of very various ages semi-illicitly using the land for several quite unorthodox purposes. Woven into this is the portrait of Susan, her little sister, mum and dad, an odd-because-ordinary family who no more perfectly jigsaw than any non-fictional family (they live over dad’s bakery and must all do shopstuff when it’s busy). What Mayne catches so well is the affectionate combativeness and allusive abruptness of the speech within a loving close group like this, complete with subtle undercurrents of rivalry and rebellion routinised into play squabbles; and underpinning Susan’s need for the intimacy of solitude, probably Mayne’s deepest subject. (The illustrations, which contribute at least equally to the soft-spoken modern sensibility, are by Margery Gill.)

Sand (1964)

The kettle was boiling on a gasring behind the counter, where it had boiled for a century. It had boiled away every layer of paint on the wood nearby, and the steam had removed a deep hollow in the wood as well.

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books, at least those with Jill MacDonald’s cheery pop art Puffin on its cover. Of course, Mayne has a greater interest and thus a superior ear for family-based or school-directed banter than any of these better celebrated ‘grown-up’ modernist counterparts: whose flaw this is you can decide yourself, I guess. The town is situated huddled beside some great sand spar: it is being eaten, month by month, hour by hour, by its own dunes, and — behind the mildly prankish goings-on — it’s very much about the wearisome allure of entropy and erosion, the implacability of non-human forces. While it’s the fourth of four books reviewed here in which some aspect of the past is dug unexpectedly up, it’s the first so far in which the omipresent modern media eye on same plays a role.

****

So can we extract anything yet, from this small and faintly random selection? Actually perhaps not so random: Swarm did much to establish his early reputation: there were four choir school books, and they tidy pretty safely into an already popular a form of middle-class children’s literature: the school story in which “school” very much DOESN’T mean the kind of school most British kids were going to (he would increasingly break from this pattern). The comfortable presence of C. Walter Hodges as illustrator surely helped his recognition. Meanwhile Dancers, Parcel and Sand appear to be be the first three he published with Puffin books, whose role in developing the kidlit canon in the 60s was enormous. This was when Mayne soared into his ‘imperial’ phase; this was when my mum, a passionate amateur expert in children’s book who bought me all three, was paying close and interested attention.

It’s easy — and not especially surprising — to begin to discern themes over a decade’s writing: local ritual and the everyday linked via amateur archeology, generally by children, for example, as well as the persistent idea that digging up and understanding the past can transform a deliberately unmelodramatic but never mundane present. A delicately and often wittily sensual sense of place, and of willed solitude in that place; well sketched location as a kind of flight from company (and vice versa).

And then there’s the fact of his disgrace, and how it fits into all this. In 2004, in his mid-70s, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and placed on the sex offenders’ register for life. The obituary in the Independent contained further detail: “Accusations of indecent assault made in 1973 and 1999 finally came to a head in 2004, when he was taken to court by a farmer’s wife in her fifties whom he had befriended when she was eight. She described being entranced by Mayne, but there were times when her erstwhile friend, normally so kind, witty and affectionate, would force himself on her. This abuse lasted for six years; five other witnesses came forward with similar accounts. Evidence of his criminal behaviour for 15 years from 1960 onwards was overwhelming, leading to a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.”

So there’s the question Tom Ewing discussed several years ago on FT (in a Popular piece on Gary Glitter): “Take William Mayne, for instance, a children’s book writer of immense imaginative and empathic skill, and also convicted of serially abusing fans of his books. Is the thing that makes Mayne an excellent writer for children – his ear and head for how they talk and think – also what made him an effective paedophile, able to win and exploit their trust?” Comments threads on reports of the conviction divide, understandably angrily: anonymous posters arrive to say that they knew Mayne personally (the real Mayne), and the trial was a travesty, in fact and as reported: because he was much worse even than the verdict revealed him, or exactly the opposite, that he was innocent, and maligned. I’m in no position to adjudicate, and don’t plan to: I won’t pretend I’m bringing much new as regards sexual psychology or criminology to this story, and I’m sure I won’t be unearthing relevant new facts in the case.

But I do know a little about books and writing, and indeed about books and reading. All fiction — all writing — is a matter, at some level, of control and manipulation: marks made on a page to nudge a reader from sentence to sentence and page to page, effects conjured in head and heart, to fuse or collide in patterns, some open and undecided, some tried and tested, many much harder to categorise so glibly. It’s not forcing a pun to link the word “author” with the word “authority”: with such easy-to-miss power comes the risk of easy-to-miss irresponsibility, and anecdotes are legion, as we all know, of the ugly behaviour of authors. Nor can it entirely be a shock to recognise that someone who diverts the greater part of their energies to the acts and inner lives of folk that are made up is not always paying intelligent mind to the lives and wounds of those that aren’t.

Mutual misunderstanding was not a new topic in fiction — or even in children’s fiction — but surely few explored it with Mayne’s insight, humour, gentle delicacy or subtlety: how children are not party to adult agendas, compromises, habits and assumptions; and of course vice versa, that in growing up adults have very often lost or set aside a valuable way of seeing the world. That there’s a thread of trust that marks the path everyone is treading, and that this thread is sometimes very fragile indeed. Can sympathetic intelligence and wisdom — wisdom precisely about such trust — sit alongside deep selfishness and a capacity to abuse? Well, yes, sometimes I think it can.

Whether or not it’s the relevant truth in this case — I’m not competent to adjudicate, as I say — it seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

I plan to go back to the books, in all respectful caution, and reread and talk about them. They meant a great deal to me as a child, partly because my mother took such joy in them; I’m a grown-up now: I see many things differently. What’s gained, and what’s gone lost?

Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. Actually she was RCA’s biggest artist before Elvis arrived and the World Changed™ — but even in all the battle, begun in the 80s really, to rediscover undismissive unconfused perspective on pre-Elvis time, nothing apparently re-centred Eartha where she belongs in it.

Not sure how de-confusing it is, but there’s a very intriguing interview with Kitt in Vol.One of RE/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Music”, where she casually demolishes pretty much EVERYONE’s received cartography of values and politics and pop. Certainly she stomped all over LBJ’s notions of the politics of pop: in 1968, Lady Bird Johnson had invited her (along with 50 other women working in various communities across the nation) to the White House, to discuss what black kids want, and what could be done about it. And Kitt told her: in terms she apparently never expected to hear, from a mouth and a compass-point she was (one imagines) quite unaccustomed to processing. So yes, Kitt at that time belonged — as the White House promo department had judged — to a passing age of Las Vegas-y mainstream entertainment, still hugely popular but very much NOT the standard-bearers of the rising young rock-focused political wave. So what was causing riots in urban neighborhoods, Kitt was asked: Vietnam, of course. Reward: being made presidential persona non grata, and banishment from the US light-entertainment universe for many years.

Her fame had started outside America, and she didn’t need its unoffended custom to thrive: in fact she’d spent the years after the war on the left bank in Paris, in the kinds of dives that James Baldwin and and Jean Gabin and Sartre and de Beauvoir could doubtless be found. And well, even setting aside this handily existentialist self-education, the pop-cultural mainstream that rock was busy scorning was surely at least as just as fascinatingly uneasy and complicated in its wit and seemingly shallow opulence as any of the noisier pop that followed, muffling it.

Thursday’s Child is the 1957 LP that “Just an Old-Fashioned Girl” comes from, and it’s the LP my dad had at home (and I have now). It’s a concept album — as so many 50s LPs were — but there’s a sophisticated wit, a subtlety of the unspoken to the concept that’s an unfathomable distance from anything we seemingly habitually associate with this term today. The title phrase comes from the old nursery rhyme: Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s full of grace, and so on. Thursday’s has “far to go” — and the LP is presented as a succession of places Eartha’s been and what she’s seen, dance troupes and night-clubs in New York, Hollywood and Vegas, but also Paris, Istanbul, south and central America. And it’s genuinely an “album” — that’s to say a selection and cross-section of unexpected styles of song, a succession of snapshots and atmosphere — that take us from the delicate, intelligent, definitely somewhat threatening vixen on the cover (shades of Roxy Music) back into the past that made her. Exotic imagined glimpses of the bohemian life and loves of a dancer or singer — of the kind of interzone that gets called “transgressive”, at least by writers determined to drive all joy and energy from the world — further conjoined with an an extract from EK’s first autobiography, also called Thursday’s Child, printed on the reverse of the sleeve (and blurrily reproduced below). As you can read, it’s an intensely evocative passage about Kitt’s mother (a displaced sharecropper, part black, part Cherokee), leading through two barefoot children through the South Carolina night, trying to find somewhere they can all sleep safely. EK was fathered by rape, by the white son of the owner of the farm she was born on — and more or less completely disowned by future stepfathers. As a child she was often dismissed as the ‘Yella Gal’ and — as she wrote and often noted — spurned on all sides; and so she ran away to all the world, to punish all such tiny-minded local bigotry, by becoming an inescapable global success.

Part of the thread of this possibility you can trace via Kitt’s conductor-producer for Thursday’s Child: a New Yorker called Henri René, French mother, German father, musical director for the international wing of RCA Victor from the late 30s, leading his own orchestra from the 40s, he’s best known today — better known than she is in some places — as a pioneer of the “bachelor pad” mode of wittily arranged, lushly recorded music (in “living stereo”), a sequence of LPs released across the 50s, their titles alone a muddled key to the story: Paris Loves Lovers; Passion in Paint; Music for Bachelors (cover feat.Jayne Mansfield in a negligee); Music for the Weaker Sex; Compulsion to Swing; Riot in Rhythm; Listen to Henri Rene (Dynamic Dimensions; Portfolio for Easy Listening; In Love Again; Melodic Magic; White Heat (ha!); and Swinging 59….

The wit is a deeply musically informed wit — the strength and allure of the LP is its breadth, as much as anything — and the “lushness” a very deft use indeed of new-found studio possibility, so that orchestration has a precision and 3D stereo presence in and around the singer. Kitt switches between personas and deliveries and the arrangements do likewise, cinematic jumpcuts that juxtapose, undercut, gather and playfully debate, ironise — “ironise” in an important way, that’s so common in 40s and 50s film, that doesn’t necessarily have a jargon term, at least when it’s deployed in non-film music, where the “soundtrack” amplifies the emotion of a scene or an action or a section in a story by being its exact opposite.

(The classic example comes from Hitchcock: the circus music rising to a loud climax during a nasty murder at fairground’s edge: the sound obscures and distracts from the material nastiness of the story, and — one step back — foregrounds the unconcerned happy world as it carries on having fun only yards away, which of course means that as viewers — two steps back, as it were — we’re complicit in these two clashing worlds, and thrown doubly hard against the pathos of the victim by sharing the last sounds she hears, and recognising her solitude…)

The layered, lush, learned irony here is an invocation — as much as anything else — of the ugly side of a woman’s success in this kind of world: and this is the use of irony I want to stress here — the conscious, amused, wise adult alertness to the fact that every one of us is embedded in conflicting worlds and roles and perspective, torn between loyalties and obligations we agree, for the sake of moment-by-moment social enrichment, to share and acknowledge. This is where the intensity and horror of Hitchcock’s irony arrives, because it demonstrates how often we fail to negotiate a settlement between clashing worlds; but this is also where the release and dark joy of Eartha Kitt’s irony operates, which insists that sometimes we can, and it’s thrillingly and heartening when this happens — just look at her!

Let’s get back to to ‘Old Fashioned-Girl’, a song that meets the contradictions of past and present head on, and playfully explores the way role-play suffuses our response to both. Or we can dig sideways a bit more — noting for oblique confirmation that René’s White Heat, made for Imperial after he left RCA, includes a version of the Woody Woodpecker themetune: and actually this (of all things) brings us back . Because the best comparison I can make for the image stream in “Fashioned” is decadence-era Tex Avery: as he eased himself away from the nihilistic anarcho-libidinal energy of his earlier cartoon shorts, the director made a group of animations that seem somehow to predict (and tease) the Bachelor Pad set, even though they’re not more than streams of quickfire visual puns, each at once cutely witty and instantly forgotten, an affectionate giggle at modern market culture as pure silly cornucopia: The House of Tomorrow; the Car of Tomorrow; the Farm of Tomorrow; and TV of Tomorrow

“I want an old fashioned car, a cerise Cadillac/
Long enough to put a bowling alley in the back”

“I like the old fashioned flowers, violets are for me/
Have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany”

“Our little home will be quaint as an old parasol/
And instead of carpet I’ll have money wall to wall“

The arrangement’s terrific: a dense harpsichord clatter bouncing behind her, as speed-read gesture at the “olden days” (and at more recent craft-enclave opulence: Wanda Landowska playing Bach on harpsichord had been released as an album of 78s in a pioneering subscription issue before the war, the cognoscenti paying upfront for a quality document that would never have received mainstream release). She sings the words bell-clear, enunciating like a guide to elegant ways to speak, as the words spool out, relentlessly, into an impishly self-mocking cartoon of material-girl cupidity, Avery-style images as sung sight-gags (“I’m just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel/Watch me in Las Vegas while I’m at the spinning wheel“). The fold-over irony of the role she plays not so much straight as a wide-eyed and coolly understated innocence, holding your gaze, challenging you to call her on it all. As emphasis on the elegance there’s even just trace of a mimicked accent when she sings “Old” — and it reminds you how hard it is to guess or hear her own real accent anyway; her default mode isn’t not quite as wildly mutable as Nicki Minaj, say, but nevertheless they’re soul-sisters.

Eartha was hot and she was witty and quick, and her voice darts across backdrops of cartooned identity; a knowing actress flickering between roles, momentarily sketching them, chuckling about them, chuckling at you so fascinated by the growling codeshifts, as we’d call it today. “Old Fashioned Girl” is a portrait of a type — impishly material-girl in the way it mocks cliches of piety — but it’s self-mocking too, mocking the type, mocking the performer sketching the type, mocking the audience the performer has in the palm of her paw, mocking the need for the relationship we’re all in, in contrast to… what?

Mocking cliches of piety — maybe this is why Kitt seem to sit so resolutely outside the legacy of “soul” as a singer, and only somewhat overlaps with jazz (I have a rather nice 1991 LP with a stupid title, Eartha Kitt: Thinking Jazz), no more part of its canons than (say) Louis Prima. Anyway, as we can see — to return to particulars from airy and confusing generalities — Kitt’s sensibility was never about the fetish for some idealised cultural home-space blessedly free from roleplay or powerplay or the erotics of hierarchy. Nor (of course) should anyone’s idea of soul or jazz have been, but somehow the UK factions in the post-punk critical generation worked together to effect exactly this: perhaps the single greatest failure of this era was our collective inability to open up a language and an ethos that encompassed the new music in front of us, the post-Elvis tradition, and a grown-up non-symbolic understanding of soul, of jazz-as-ethos… and of everything Eartha seems to carry about her, on this LP above all.

RE/Search were attempting with this particular collection and its 1994 follow-up to re-purpose several lost strands of music, from electronica to what became known as loungecore, and venturing in the process a little clumsily through the usual stages of a re-evaluation: between a forgotten and a rediscovered pleasure lies an awkward stretch of ambiguously evolving attitude, easily tagged (and dismissed) as “ironic” or “guilty”. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kitt fell into this area for them: as a collective RE/Search had travelled from old-skool west coast punk-rock ‘tood (the zine was then called Search and Destroy) via Ballardian Industrial Culture (which was fascinated with celebrity and mediation and muzak and such figures as Martin Denny) to its not-very-clear slightly self-congratulatory 90s identity, which embraced tattoos, scarification, circus freaks, and the “Angry Women” project (which Kitt fairly easily belonged in, truth to tell). The “irony” this kind of project risks having imposed on it is a feeble ghost of the mode that Hitchcock or Kitt are so confidently deft within and so unsettling deploying: you see the generous motive behind a title like “Incredibly Strange Music” (to recast something seemingly over-familiar and uninteresting as utterly weird), and yet it’s fairly tricky not also to be feeling that much of this music is really only “Incredibly Strange” if you start from an “Incredibly Self-regarding and Parochial” viewpoint. Which perhaps RE/Search felt its readers mainly did?

(Actually there’s a lot to be written about 90s attempts to resolve the 80s impasse — but I’ve already written quite a lot, and don’t intend to pursue that issue here.) (Phew! and indeed Hurrah! cry the long-suffering FT readers…)

To follow every hint and glint of this music, we have to be drenched in a world that’s gone: I can laboriously patch in some of the relevant backstory, but the labour drags down away at the intended effect. We’ve forgotten too much, if we ever even knew it. Examine the label credit — to chase up the provenance of the songs, which were at some point very deliberately selected and agreed on, even before René’s arrangements were written, and work on the sense of conceptual unity begun — and you’re instantly embrangled in a tangle of typos, long-dispersed modish approval, forgotten events and musicals and names: George Shearing (‘Lullaby of Birdland’) and Marvin Fisher (‘Just an Old-Fashioned Girl’) were well enough known in some circles, as perhaps are Mack David (co-composer of ‘If I Can’t Take It With Me When I Go’) and Murray Grand (co-composer of ‘Thursday’s Child) — but Jean-Piere (sic) Moulin? Who was Mesi Julian? ‘Oggere’ seems to be by the Afro-Cuban composer Gilberto Valdés (the label credits just say “Valdez”), and the “Tabares” of the ‘No Importa Si Menti’ composer-credit may be Baz Tabranes, but who was “Tore”, the sole fragmentary indication of the identity of the composer-author of ‘Fascinating Man’? And has no one else ever sung this song? Really? (Don’t say Falco — only the title’s the same… )

(None of the above is actual real proper historical research, mind you: I didn’t even hunt through my own books, just set off on a few lightning google-trips across the internet — I wanted to out the post up before the actual end of time — so any clues others turn up or already know are very welcome. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” and cast her as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr Faustus: she also crossed over into semi-highbrow Broadway appearances, such as a musical based on archie and mehitabel, called Shinebone Alley, one of the first with an all-integrated cast, which I want to know more about. I’ve gone nowhere near her role as the third Catwoman, as nuttily perfect as Sun Ra’s Batman project, or the free shows she gave to East Londoners, one of which I saw in the very early 80s… )

Which all brings us back, the long route, to the ‘prevarication move’, and how it was I had something I could baffle the older kids with in 1975-ish, even knowing none of this. Something happened in the late 50s and early 60s, a cultural ruin of sorts, and whether you blame Elvis or “rock” or Vietnam or perhaps even the Vegas swing culture that was one victim of the ruin, that’s allowed songs like to be artefacts that hide more than they reveal, and escape more they connect; for performances like this to be mysteries more than they’re windows. Gather together nothing more than the languages Kitt sings in on this LP — Spanish, French, German, some kind of apache street pidgin in ‘Mademoiselle Kitt’, whatever Cuban patois is featured in the sinister and magnificent ‘Oggere’ — and the scattered dance styles that René unifies into his own orchestral voice, and you’d faced, in the end, with the masked pain, which is also very much the mastered pain, of a performer who never had a home to go back to her; whose family are the multicultural band of outsiders of the Josephine Baker orphanage; a smart, highly political girl-pirate, a feminist Vegas showgirl, who made the stage her best trusted place.

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up, as another old-fashioned left banker once wrote.

(Note link also includes MATHEMATICAL FORMULA FOR POP SUCCESS, and other reliable christmas cracker filling material…)

As I gave Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” an easy ten on Tom’s Popular thread I’d probably better expand — as usual, other people’s comments help me think this through, especially when they’re subtly wrong in ways that nevertheless seem self-evidently right. I think Lex is right about the bludgeoning, for example, but not the bludgeonee: and I think wichita lineman is right about the unconvincingness, but entirely wrong about any insincerity. punctum is absolutely correct about the performance as an evasion; the deep question — impossible to answer, essential to explore — being how much of this effect is conscious, how much an unconscious matter of singer’s identification with role.

I’ve alread tied this into the aria in the film Diva: I haven’t the slightest idea whether that film was in Whitney’s head, still less anyone else on the production team, but I think it has useful explanatory value all the same. To prove this I’m going to triangulate it with (i) John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band LP (though haha the two Unfinished Music LPs also totally fit, just go look up their titles when you’ve finished reading this), and (ii) Queen Elizabeth the First of England and Scotland.

So, capsule Bodyguard synopsis: famous (black) singer has affair with (white) agency bodyguard; falls for him. From sense of professional duty, bodyguard ends it — angry singer acts up; finds self in overcomplicated mortal peril, involving jealous unhelpful sister, too many stalkers, and BORING HIJINKS ENSUE (it’s basically an interesting, timely concept — more in a moment- — wrecked by needless misdirection and KEVIN COSTNER). Diva, by contrast: a (white) fan (owner of the only ever tape of the never-recorded (black) opera singer of the title) achieves fantasy of a lovely day’s dalliance with his idol; there’s lots of engagingly flashy business with Parisian and Korean cartoon gangsters chasing him for the tape, and a decidely pervy multiple denouement, in which (among other things) the fan acknowledges his betrayal — recording a woman who repeatedly and publicly said no to all such offers — and makes restitution.

At the heart of both films, the impossibility of love between a royal and a commoner: the black/white element plays very differently in the US (where it was still kind unspokenly taboo) and Paris, where it has the urgency of sanctioned exotica — but in both contexts it’s a figure for potentially unresolveable complexity; a get-out clause, from the categorical imperatives of the romantic happy ending, if you like.

And both films play across the ten-12 years after the murder of John Lennon by a jilted, very genuine (which is to say insane) fan: the decade-plus when the institutionalised rejection of the implicit politics of 60s pop culture — we’re all in this together! — manifested as quasi-political assassination, of arguably its most political face/voice, albeit a face/voice in adamant retirement. This song — whether we take the hater’s reading or the admirer’s — is about the crushing of the pleasant possibility of sustainable dalliance between those of unequal status/attainment. The mechanism delivering this crushing is a rigorously achieved utterly regal monumentality — a monument as a vast, implacable, immoveable acknowledgement of the fact of divine right: a cat may not look long at a king; a commoner may not step out with — because can never comprehend — a blood-royal princess.

Now of course, Whitney — or rather the character she plays, in and out of the film at this point — is only in fact a princess by selection and election, despite the facts of her birth and upbringing (her mother the legendary gospel singer Cissy Houston; also Dionne Warwick’s cousin and Aretha’s god-daughter). Clive Davis signed her to his label (note the name) Arista: this was the election. And millions upon millions of pop fans loved her records more than records by others: this was the selection. Born into the 80s soul aristocracy, she is nevertheless not royalty at all — fast-tracked to the audition, she didn’t simply get a lineage pass through it. She’s a high-end pop-star (or was) by virtue of what she was able to do herself. And of course by virtue of what people believed she would go on to do…

The chart love song is always directed at the star’s lover and/or significant other: the audience. The 60s utopia — and Aretha and Dionne were as caught up in, albeit for different reasons, as ever John Lennon was — was a radical equivalency of its stars with its masses; its leaders with its footsoldiers. By 1970, Lennon was singing “I don’t believe in Beatles” and “The dream is over” and “I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality” — attempting by superstar force radically to scale down his affect, to ordinary-guy freedom and intimate in-bed-together domesticity, shut away from the world and its ten million cameras.

Attempting — absurdly — and of course failing; failing catastophically; failing fatally. The door — opened in the imagination if not in the world — could not be closed, even if Lennon had actually really ever wanted it closed. Dumping and denigrating the Beatles, he was also dumping every one of his fans: and some clung to him all the more passionately for this, and some, maddened, spun off into eternal attack. He managed a brief semi-holiday, a brief househusband pseudo-anonymity — it seemed an age at the time, it was a little over four years — and then in December 1980 the door was forced violently open, forever.

The pall this cast, the social facts bursting through the utopia, was starting to deliver, by the turn of the 90s, a mushrooming of songs, from within the bubble of celebrity, exploring the pathology of celebrity — the pathology of the impossibility of finding equals. Post-punk discussion of pop had meanwhile become extraordinarily crappy at analysing any of this: it had moved from a necessary suspicion of the words and attitudes of the star (“imagine no possessions,” yeah, right, John) through a disdainful kneejerk mockery towards a literal inability to see or hear what was before you, if it emerged from this upper layer. The poster-child for this critical incompetence is the actual former poster-child of winsome 60s trans-racial possibility and escape from the prison of class, Michael Jackson, whose entry to the black pop aristocracy had been marked by a precocious harbinger of this mushrooming, 1982′s “Billie Jean” — by the 90s MJ was really singing about little else but the stupefying crippling diorientating terrifying isolation not just of fame and success, but of the ideals and idealism that genuine fans invested in them, on his up-by-his-twinkling-bootstraps behalf.

And of course, when it came time to find a partner, the only guide — in this unhappy world of manufactured royalty — was the dynastic manoeuvring and politicking of actual old-school royalty in the dying years of Divine Right: to cement who knows what imagined alliance, he married Lisa Marie Presley (if only the Lennon-Onos had had a daughter…) The best alliance a monarch can hope for is with peers — and that always means geopolitics first, helpmeet companionship maybe, possibly, a long long way behind. And we’ve finally reached (ii), and Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth: Cate Blanchett, gradually self-zugwanged after all the masques and parties, into refusal (sometimes execution) of any would-be-consort, the acceptable continental dynasts all giggling idiots or creeps, the sexy risky local not-quite-royal boys all dunderheaded ambition-distortion: any choice will make matters worse, until — for the bitterest reasons of state — the only solution is no choice. In the closing scenes, scenes of grindingly dreadful (old meaning) awe-ful (old meaning) grandeur, Elizabeth self-imposes Jackson-esque mummy-like whiteface, to emerge as England’s Virgin Queen.

The closing scenes of Elizabeth: youtube has actually disabled this embed

Not made for six years, this film can’t have been in anyone’s head: still, Elizabeth is the movie the song best illuminates, prefigures, matches. It’s a song about intense loneliness and devastated renunciation — it’s not, however, really a song at all about the renunciated. (Perhaps this is why it’s become popular at funerals? Those left behind are the ones who have to cope; the dead take care of the dead…) Reasons of state, divine right — these claims to pitiless duty, the necessities imposed from outside — are not available to pop-stars, of course, as pretexts or excuses or evasions. But what Whitney — and any character Whitney is playing — can call on, in the name of self-exculption, self-justification, self-protection, self-delusion, is her talent; her technique. This is what has shaped her life and set her apart; this has burdened her with duties and demands others simply don’t have.

All this last is here: the sense of regality, of dreadful awful majesty of style and skill as a weapon, the sense of renunciation, the sense that her role leaves her the loneliest person of all, that her suffering — thanks to her superior status, thanks to her superior gifts (the latter inevitably, in so ruthlessly meritocratic asocial niche, a figure for the former) — is monumentally vaster than anything you or I or even Kevin Costner might suffer. Of course there’s a sense in which this is a repellent, even (yes) onanistic belief: but WH (playing a role in a film, playing a role in a song) is not (after all) straightforwardly announcing her own political philosophy. It’s easy enough to denounce this as bad behaviour — it’s nothing but a shouty tantrum! — but this doesn’t even slightly make it a bad song or a bad performance; on the contrary, it admits what it purports to refuse, that the magnificent self-denying trolling exactness of the delivery of the character and the character’s self-view is precisely what conjures up such resistance, such seemingly inexplicable pervasive unexamined hate.

The Arrangement:
It’s in fact entirely appropriate that it’s vestigial, like the post-coital existential role of the male deep-sea angler fish (the female semi-absorbs its tiny mate after sex, so that the latter becomes a sad little nubbin on the former’s deep-sea arse). Any arrangement that threatened to matched Whitney for power or technique, or even expressive understanding of the situation, would offer a challenge to the concept of solo majesty. (Music, more than any other, even acting, is the collaborative art; the art that implicitly explores a local collective equality… ) Of course the actual real Whitney was — if not now, then soon — actually casting around for a less horribly tormenting and entrapped self-projection. 1992 is the year that Mary J. Blige arrived, to fashion a far looser, loucher, post-rap model of the soul diva, as a princess of glittering self-manufacture — and Whitney very surely wanted in on such freedoms from princely care, if we only judge by her subsequent real-life travails.

The Bludgeonee:
I don’t at all hear someone joyfully demolishing an inadequate suitor here, unleashing her great and terrible talent at his hopeless uselessness. First this doesn’t really fit the film’s logic at all — Costner after all dumps her — and second, the rigorous formalism of the performance strikes me as the opposite of joy, though I’ll acknowledge a certain nerveless sabre-tooth pleasure in supple-strength-for-its-own-sake. (Brief diversionary explication here: opera is a genre of similarly rigorous formalism, which many many many pop music-lovers are incapably allergic to and baffled by — and no one sane would claim joy is unachievable in opera: but it’s certainly never a consequence of snapshot method acting; the vehicle in opera of mood is the dance of the written harmonies and orchestration, the voice considered as a mastered tool inset within the work as a whole, as a cog in the form… ) (and yes, there is a contradiction here, it’s the basic tension within opera — that the achievement of expressed freedom within the work must be reached at cost of the freedom of its many parts, vocal or instrumental…) (Joseph Kerman wrote a great book about this: Opera as Drama.) I actually think, in his flippant threadpost, that Mr Mark G has most tidily identified the bludgeonee: “I’m off, and it’s not you it’s me. OK thx bye” — it’s a song of high-end, self-involved self-flagellation. The declared bludgeonee is the singer herself. And while Mark’s flippancy deliberately ignores the conscious point of the scale of the tone, I think he exactly hits on the head the distrust many will feel towards such a declaration, however dressed up it is.

The Bombast:
To reiterate: everyone’s who’s using this as the explanation of their dislike is getting turned about, unconsciously recasting the reasons for their impulse to recoil, switching the poles of vulnerability, if you like. And they’re doing this because WH is also doing this; it’s no surprise at all she unleashes a flood of it in those who feel threatened and targeted (because they ARE being targeted). The extreme widespreadness of this reaction is a consequence of the song’s effectiveness, not a consequence of its flaws. It’s a reaction, certainly, against flaws in the singer’s persona’s worldview — monarchists (and monarchs) are wrong about what’s best for the world, and thus ultimately themselves — but a violently dislikeable character is not therefore a badly acted character, or a sign that the drama is ill-conceived (ffs). Anyway, this is NOT bombast, it’s POWER: not raw power, but frighteningly, almost inhumanly controlled power. Power from technique, of course — phenomenal technique — but power also from conscious awareness and deployment of the status this technique has conferred. Power that says I am something you can never be; so “us” shall never arrive… (but I-I-I will always etc…); noblesse oblige or onanistic delusion (maybe these are always the same thing), but what isn’t a delusion is the utter rejection and obliteration of a human-scale possibility, in the name of… well, gimme some truth, as a disenchanted utopian once said. And look, I love Dolly and so should you — she’s enormously shrewd and witty about the faux ordinary-person egalitarianism that structures country music’s ideology of itself, and many many MANY country songs old and new are PRECISELY about fissures in the supposed class continuum, albeit inflected personally, and personably, etc.

The Insincerity:
This critical call (based on oddly conventional assumption about what pop-songs can be about) is simply a mishearing of what’s being declared — which isn’t love at all, but its absurdity. Maybe the persona is telling herself that yes, she actually would be capable of a nice kind of love were she not a queen, in which case she’s fooling herself. Not to adduce it as an error anyone in the thread is making, of course but — just as “black/white” creates a fuzz of problematic excitement and blindness in Hollywood and among Parisian intellectuals — it’s not exactly a borderland where rockwriting has covered itself in perceptive glory, either. A character like Marilyn Manson, a group like Killing Joke, are allowed all kinds of leeway, in respect of books we imagine they’d sorta kinda read, high-end ideas they can plausibly be claimed to be playing with and around, despite exceedingly evident limitations as performers. The idea of intellectual content not only makes up for a lack of musical content: it’s sometimes actively deployed to drive it out. And true, yes, this is not an issue in all rockwriting, but after punk (with its apparent fatwa on the craft of music) it has very much threatened to become the mainstream default. Black performers like Whitney or Michael Jackson or — with more learned grasp of tradition and physical grace and capability in the tips of their fingers and toes and noses (well, OK, not necessarily noses) than any of those they’re ranged against, find this exact wealth of knowledge, understanding, craft and intelligence deployed against them; treated a badge of shame, a sign of — of all things — cultural ignorance and allegedly absence of any speck of adult agency. As if all that black pop — accused, all too often by the professional concern troll, of deserting its roots in soul, old-school R&B, jazz and so on — has ever really been fit to deliver is some ignorably smooth bourgeois adjunct to the happyclappy entertainment diversion dept.

The Intolerable; the Implacable; the Inhuman; duty as ineluctable force of destruction
We are indeed the territory of Joy Division… except where Curtis’s frailties as a person and deep limitations as a singer allow the ordinary unmusical listener a vicarious way into a dabbling feel for these concepts, Houston’s confusions (between her role as a star and the roles she undertakes as a performer, I guess) force us up against a reality; that communication is only sustainedly possible between equals, and that inequality exists. Perhaps unavoidably: small wonder many find it horrible, or some kind of blunder — it’s far more ruthless with utopian pop-culture pieties than anything on Factory ever was.

‘And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’

Saw the John Martin: Apocalypse show at Tate Britain yesterday. Oddly mixed feelings: not disappointment exactly — I think I childishly wanted the big end-of-the-world canvasses to be three times bigger — but a mild sense of deflation alongside the enormous enjoyment. I don’t mind AMAZING SPECTACLE and I don’t mind ACTUALLY QUITE SILLY, and of course (like lovely progrock) JM is very often both, and the astonished ooh! of phantasmagoria is very often followed by a slightly shamefaced giggle (I expect someone can work this up into a critical “symptom of modernity (in a bad way)”, but I think both responses are good critical practice, to be honest… ). But this is the Tate, and I suppose I did want more of a sense of why and how this more-or-less self-taught Northumberland working-class artisan was caught between Big Public Extravaganzas (the large paintings went on tour, this is how he gathered and entertained his public, alongside a good deal of diligent print-making; mezzotints are the spookiest liminal medium) and urgent unreciprocated interest in social works and social spaces. He drew up meticulous blueprints for improving London’s sewerage system and planned its railway systems — but others got the gigs, perhaps because his projects were considered “unrealistic”. In fact if the show had been called John Martin: London’s Parks it would have been just as accurate, on the numbers, even if less people would be visiting (to be ambushed by unexpected armageddon).

And of course he drew some of the first well known dinosaur pictures, in 1838 and 1840: this was vanguard science, whatever it looks like. I’ve long had an obsession when the first dinosaurs entered literary popular culture — Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth wasn’t published till 1874 — and this seems like an important clue.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

Right, 1989′s near-eve of cancellation, in which Eeevil McRe-Incarnate Fenric plays games with the bloodlines of all (local amateur) history until a rematch with the Doctor goes AWRY, but at WHAT COST to TRUST? A hyper-timely-wimely ketchup this, given actual current Nu-Who (apparently: I’m writing this up before I watch last week’s) (and after I watched this week’s). And also anyway an epochal, prescient, witty and fascinatingly and unexpectedly complex and emotionally provocative ep, say some (others: “it’s incomprehensible c0ck”). On hand PLOOS it has Vikings, vampires, vicars (well, Nicholas Parsons as a vicar), cosmic chess, companionly fambly biz, WW2-era computers, code-busting Bletchley Park rehoused near legendary Gothavore bathing spot Whitby, un CURSE LOCALE and AMAZING SOVIET LOVE INTEREST <---- :o :o :o :o On side (so-called) MEEEN00S = Ms Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane; SIR SYLVESTRE McGURNSALOT; fx budget of 15 and one quarter pee. And so, since the plot claims to untangle itself by working backwards, backwardsly let us trip and troll through these claims

i: emotionally provocative — i refer readers to this ancient post, and the claim that grown-up emotional complexity was only achieved in Nu-Who. Well, NOT SO, and yet — in another more accurate sense — WAY SO. The ambition of the tangle here — of Ace not only decoy-acting but then getting somewhat slightly horny-broody for/with IVAN SORIN THE SECCHSY and TOO-SOON-DEAD RED (or was this horniness a routine Ace feature?) plus the double loop of her being manipulated (along with everyone else) by McGurnsalot and her aw-so-cuet encounter with her estranged (and unrecognised till too late) mum as a babby — is leagues ahead of the competence of anyone present to realise it, apparently. BUT it’s a strong enough concept, however badly executed, to sit there waiting to be done properly thru all the long sad dusty and yet pre-dusty years of CANCEL.

ii: fascinatingly and unexpectedly complex — see above, re the concept of ruthless ep-long Doctorly untrustworthiness in a good-ish cause (saving the world; being cruel to Ace); the plot as a kind of chess problem for the viewer to solve retroactively (and in my case unsuccessfully: this show was made in the age of video but was it yet the age of being aware that a show could be rewatched multiple times and decoded? Certainly I did not watch with this in mind, and as a consequence think I missed a lot ofr what was going on. viz I assumed the Soviet soldiers were Scands (ie modern vikings) for half the show (tbf their accents were fkn drettful). Actually there are a lot of forces being moved around: three rival armies, no less, and the Doctor and Ace provisionally in allegiance with all of them at some point (when the Doctor was even in allegiance with Ace).

iii: witty = characters that are somewhat topsytuvy: a Good and Brave Red vs a WW2 Brit who works in a replica of Hitler’s office, and — when that turns out to be a bit of a misdirect — helps re-embody FENRIC himself, who fashions bloodlines to make the world evil; the narrowly dogmatic landlady who is QUITE RIGHT THAT SWIMMING IS DANGEROUS and will send maidens to hell (the hell of being goths with long fingy-nails); the namby-pamby am.historican vicar who delivers a trite biblical text which reveals as KORREKT MILITARY SCIENCE in terms of the narrative (the codeword is love and the cure is faith); and the Oldest AND UGLIEST Haemovore who sacrifices himself (and i think the rise of his entire race to earth-prominence) to off Fenric. And poor old Ace discovering that her being helpful and trusting is a catastrophe, planwise.

iv: prescient (see ii re multiple video-rewatch as a modality); see i re McGurnsalot the ice-cold manipulator (and hence hullo Matt…)

v: epochal… is this true? Does it in fact signal the shift to the idea of Nu-Who, right there on the eve of the “Michael “Fenric” Grade shut-down. Is it the nearly botched birth of a nu-concept, a decision to go for grown-up and morally shaded, with approximately none of the tradecraft machineries required to achieve this, actorly especially? Not to mention a long-game time-villain story salted with jigsaw-piece elements from all the ages.

vi: syl and dotty are, i’m afraid, lifelong contrarian tho i be, quite hard work to watch. Sophie Aldred is, I’m told, incredibly charismatic in person, the obvious star of any room she’s in IRL: and it’s true to say and fair to say she has terrible script-material to work with (brilliant bolshy teen nerd misfit who is koolest in skool, and — more to the point — out of it)… the grisly attempt at a seduction scene (ok, it’s VERY FUNNY and i LARFED, but it is funny for cheeky daring in the face of eddie-the-eagle technique i ph34r)

vii: fess-up time, I watched this a bit tired and distracted just the once, and despite 14 pages of notes, think i missed a lot of the most relevant material (hence clue: it was HARDLY EVER THE DIALOGUE!!): and this is my first ever propah ep-length encounter with Ace or McGurnsalot, and so i have no previous work of theirs to compare them to (except that SM plays Lt Birdie Bowers in the TV version of The Last Place on Earth, the Scott of the Antarctic story) (which is kinda no help in any direction). And my Tardis-esque jumping-about-the-broadcast-order approach is unhelpful here too: I felt (after I had dispatched it back to LoveFilm) that there’s been a conscious effort to work in elements from the adventure-feel of EVERY Doctor. I can check off Pertwee/ Troughton (sea-beasts and the military), Hartnell (historicals), and Davison (raveled moebius time-conundra): but I feel less confident summarising the Bakers (let alone Whiggy McGurnsalittle), to check them off too.

All in all, I strongly felt I did not get out of this all I could — but equally felt no huge impulsion to rewatch particularly soon.

7 Sept 9:13am: yes i am rereading the book (again): i don’t much like the thursgood stuff, it’s too cutesy, and the encountering martindale scene is an incredibly clunky exposition move, smiley spends the whole chapter being “i am annoyed at you telling me all this stuff i already know (but too polite and sad and lonely to say so)”

7 Sept 10:28am: a few pages further in, i’m prepared to forgive him the martindale exposition stuff, it’s a kind of a graceful sacrifice of the novelistic high ground to ensure that the guillam/tarr sections that straight away follow aren’t tainted by too much necessary backstory that isn’t directly tarr-related

7 Sept 10:37am: inc. a nicely blunt bit of lampshade hanging: “an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with martindale in the club, now again with guillam in a dream”

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

7 Sept 12:56pm: halfway thru the tarr inquisition which is terrific — except maybe the stuff that irina’s is sposed to have written on toilet paper, which is a bit [insert plot-point here] [using lady] [consults manual of lady-fashioning]

7 Sept 3:16pm: went on a hunt to discover when exactly the story is set — irina says the “ultra-reactionaries” are back in power in westminster (= ted heath presumably!) and smiley notes that the war is 30 years ago: TTSS was publiushed in 74, so that makes it 1970-73 i guess anyway what i found instead was suggestions who characters were likely based on, which i’d never pursued before (caveat: i think jlc was always stayed coy, which is fair enough)

connie = milicent bagot <-- oddly sad about this, it diminishes connie not to be made up, somehow
smiley = maurice oldfield <-- unconvinced by this claim, think smiley is organically a fictional evolution
haydon = kim philby <-- this is interesting, and maybe more plausible, but it does strange things to the time line, basically extending/ shunting a mid-50s story into the early 70s

but actually one of the strengths of the novel is the sense of stuff spilling from an earlier era into a later time: of half the characters as weird left-overs in an era they totally don't understand (jlc is always a bit hopeless actually depicting the modern world, less so at depicting the flailing melancholy of the middle-age not knowing how to negotiate it

7 Sept 11:43pm: after the school opening and the martindale exposition, the three successive actual-real thriller sections are pretty flawless: the tarr debrief, guillam cases the circus, and smiley visits connie — there’s a lot of storytelling going on in the first and the last, the only time this falters, as noted, is when tarr’s reading irina’s journal, he tells his own story well but jlc can’t find a plausible written voice for her; and the connie section is probably one of the best things her ever wrote (maybe why he tried to top it in smiley’s people); guillam in the circus is actually really a way to introduce the opposition as real people, the mcguffin to get him there is negligeable, and meant to be i’m halfway through smiley’s research-and-memory binge now, less successful i’d say, though it pulled one stunt of “reading so deep you forget where you are and being reminded of your surroundings with a start”, where smiley does this and jlc causes you to as well, that was neat — the setting, the crappy little hotel near paddington, is two notches too cartoonish and mimsy

haha i am actually sick of the ann counter-plot already

7 Sept 11:48pm: “there’s a lot of storytelling going on” — haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

8 Sept 10:44pm: TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we’re meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you) (albeit largely as cover): we know that something happened to him, not exactly what yet [as of p. 162] except he was shot in the shoulder in czecho <-- smiley doesn't really know much of it at this point [p.162] either one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is: obviously i've known for something like 30 years -- jlc treats him with kids gloves AND lampshade hangs wildly all about him; that's to say smiley is overly bothered in effect by how the story is treating gerald (this is largely what bothers me about the ann stuff i think: the extent to which it's ONLY distractional sleight- of-hand -- one thing guinness manages no better than jlc is making the smiley-ann marriage remotely believable, actually, even tho siân phillips makes ann believable; in a sense we keep reading i suspect because we want to crack this mystery, but are left basically clueless) (as clueless as smiley, yes, DO YOU SEE, but that's a bullshit move, really )

the entire novel is smiley's atonement for the death of nan [= liz in the book], yes: a long and elaborate proof that nothing nasty he ever formerly had responsibility for was actually really his fault, it is all totally at karla’s door

8 Sept 12:51pm: haha one of the suspects (…) refers to the relevant americans as “puritan fascists” = a pretty good description of the deeply lunatic angleton

8 Sept 1:10pm: just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW — this is even better than the first one, because it’s all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn’t meant to know i’m not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute- playing hippie gf — perhaps bcz the gap between michael jayston’s version and jlc’s renders his inner life somewhat wonky (this is much less true in smiley’s people, where jlc had once again adapted the character to its on-screen portrayal, and guillam is married with a kid in paris) — but these scenes are tremendous for nerves, tension, not knowing what will happen next etc, someone interloping in a very familiar space, having to seem who he ordinarily is when he no longer is, being himself (very aware that he’s out-of-the-loop and appropriately testy about it, yet at the same time not so capable they spot he knows something he oughtn’t) (a modelled microcosm of Gerald’s inner life, in fact; nice work)

the section before, smiley plunging deeper and deeper into the files, woke up towards the end when he moves off reminiscence into parsing actual secret files he’d never before viewed: finally being a desk- bound research agent, intelligence office as historian-critic, if you like, picking up clues via finance, location and his target suddenly becoming human and throwing a long-ago-and-far-off tantrum

8 Sept 1:22pm: during his reminiscences, smiley actually develops a THEORY about hayden, who will turn out to be the mole, not that smiley realises this yet (OR DOES HE?) and how he relates to all those around him — that they’re all botched copies of him, and that he can only be himself jigsawed out of all those round him… and actually guillam, in thought and behaviour under foe’s gaze in the circus, seems to attest to the accuracy of the theory, at least re situational judgment and self-handling and stance (he’s being very junior squishy smiley inside, re his gf)

again: nice work, there’s a lot of “hall of mirrors” stuff art work here, which is the intelligence world philby and angleton created

8 Sept 1:59pm: one of the oddities of jlc’s approach is that you never actually learn about ANYTHING concrete a network achieved in the real political world: i realise there’s a fiction-reality problem here, re claims he can make and maintain plausibility, but the effect is to keep the entire back-and-forth hermetic, as if actual real-world politics is left entirely untouched by anything anyone here, karla, control, gerald, smiley, has ever done…

which to be honest i believe it was: it’s like advertising, you have to do because everyone else does it, but its net effect is zero

[comment from noodle vague: "well in that intro above he says that the service shd've been dismantled after Philby, a view he sort of expresses in the Smiley books too iirc, so maybe le Carre agrees with that"]

8 Sept 2:06pm: i was surprised by that actually: i seem to recall him saying something along the lines of “you can take the moral temperature of a country by reference to its intelligence services”, and this does seem to be more or less what smiley believes — but connie certainly says something more along those lines, that this is all an absurd post-imperial indulgence, the little boys with their little toys (she loves her boys and she loves the game but she has no deeper moral view of it)

his view may well have evolved a little though, over the ensuing 35 years!

8 Sept 3:04pm: the idea of a secret service as a nation’s — or that nation’s ruling class’s — dreams of itself is great, i think: and jlc intermittently gets this on the nose — but (like hare) he’s totally bamboozled by thatcherism and murdoch and america and “the 60s” (all connected without going the full carmody), and his dream is set (in his ifction) like ten years after its (irl) sell-by-date

smiley’s people — which is in most ways way more of a fantasia — actually grips this better, because its central characters are actual- real baltic exiles, so “isolates trapped in the amber of loss” is always going to be the Real they’re battling

9 Sept 10:30am: ok, quite a chunk to roll out here: runnng order of larger sections is tarr, karla, sam collins, max, jerry westerby, haydon recruits prideaux

the reinterrogation of rikki tarr and smiley’s tale to guillam about his one meet with karla are the book’s plateau of moral-highgrounding for smiley: there’s a small element of plot advancement and backstory infill but they’re mainly given over to smiley’s technique as an interrogator, at his best now in the approaching evening of his life, and not at his best trying unsuccessfully long ago to persuade karla to save his skin and defect — key to both, his success with tarr and his failure with karla, is smiley’s kindness and humanity (implication: our foes are ideologues and fanatics and this is the flaw that will end them) (a prayer more than a fact, you might say: certainly not immediately relevant to what actually ended the USSR, though this hadn’t yet happened in 1974 and jlc was hardly alone in not seeing it coming)

(and yes, it’s true that tarr gets thumped some more — morality is messy! — and also true that wily smiley is more approving of tarr’s canny self-interest and truth-witholding than callow guillam)

then there’s a bit with little bill roach having nightmares and being ill ftb the divorce-bogey is a-comin for jim and a section where smiley and lacon meets the minister (which is irredeemably borng necessary tale-business and i have to clap my jaw not to skip: it’s extremely short so jlc feels the same, obv)

collins/max/westerby: again, minor elements of plot advancement and backstory infill in all three — basically smiley seeks them out and quizzes them, the first two as per info discovered in his research — but the real point of the three encounters is moral colour, i’d say… to give a live sense, as supplied by outsiders to the story, of the chaotic feel inside the circus during control’s last project (collins); of the feel of prideaux’s operation, max (a czech DP) being with him for the early, less troubled reaches; and, most likeably (jlc likes alkies and writes them pretty well), the feel in the world immediately beyond and outside the circus at the crucial time (westerby is a jobbing sports journo who supplies the service with information he happens on, less an agent than a sympathetic conduit)

you very much feel with all three that they’re present in this story for the one scene, to tell their tale and supply their colour- perspective and depart our necessary attention. collins and westerby are arguably the better characters, certainy more memorable, if not especially deep — max is a bit exile-by-numbers (there’s an incredibly similar character in smiley’s people whose name i forget: the max in smiley’s people being smiley himself!), tho his role is largely to impress on the reader how a non-communist czech might feel about all this stupidity (=very pissed off); westerby of course also goes on to be somewhat rebooted in (and as) the “honourable schoolboy”, which if i recall accurately wears the character beyond thin in a context jlc isn’t well-suited to portray (post-colonial hongkong and south east asia in the late stages of the vietnam war) — collins is also brought back, for smiley’s people, in a faintly demeaning role

and then there’s the trip back to old documents, and a reread of the young hayden introducing the young prideaux to the service: interesting little bit of spite and uncharacterstic semi-virtuoso tradecraft on jlc’s part — the young hayden writes (i) like a posturing fey student, and more ambitiously (ii) like a clever young man very infected by kipling’s sense of rhythm and irony and pseudo- cynical masked self-certainty. The kiplingism is good — pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling’s kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

Seems to me by the end of the collins section, one of the main suspects has begun to scream out at the reader. But it’s very hard indeed at this late stage to reconstruct virgin-reader status.

9 Sept 10:44am: ^^^spite bcz this is the first time we see hayden clear — ie not through a haze of hero worship and/or hurt fury — and there’s no way he pulls either trick on the reader, with the prose we get to read; except you can’t help also thinking “no fair, d00d was still a student! hope no one ever judges ME on stuff i wrote as a student ect ect”

also there’s a nice little sketch of the boho-bolshevik student party hayden and prideaux, lifted wholesale as far as i can tell from a similar one in dorothy sayers’ strong poison (i’ll look this up)

9 Sept 11:430am: (ok it’s less like the sayers than i remember — the actual phrase i thought he’d lifted was :”a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun” <-- i'm certain this is from sayers somewhere, it's very wimsey-ish, but it's not in this particular scene)

(and again, the idea that it's hayden doing the lifting is astute: sayers a very popular novelist in the 30s)

9 Sept 4:02pm: i’ll say more on the prideaux debrief in a bit — think i want to reread it, as it’s point where backstory and current narrative finally get in step with one another — but here’s a note on jlc’s tradecraft as regards location (mise en scene theory/pathetic fallacy alert)

the various tale-relating conflabs smiley has had have been in very different places — some directly emanating from the person being quizzed, like connie’s jericho flat or the casino sam collins now works at — but in almost all he’s been in effect the authority figure: the actual interrogator for tarr, callow guillam’s guru when it’s the karla backstory, the returned agent with ministerial backing… and the places do their work amplifying the way this inflects, from tarr’s cramped hotel room (where he’s more or less a prisoner for the time being) through to the curryhouse where he gently pumps jerry w (where in a sense they’re equals — smiley gives very little away — and it’s really only westerby’s puppyish semi- lachrymose need for approval that undergirds the power relationship

but with prideaux, the setting is not a built room, public or private, furnished or functional-anonymous, but the wild hilly outdoors of the south west: as — in effect — demanded by prideaux; and smiley has no power he can really seriously bring to bear… prideaux could basically snap his neck with a single blow and hide smiley’s body and who’d really be any the wiser?

jlc is good at compact and evocative descriptions of places: his london streets are very often real streets he’s accurately portraying, and i imagine his countrysides are too (it’s not a part of the UK i know); but he’s also good at letting the sense of the space be a felt manifestation of the encounter — the strength of the main part of the smiley-prideaux scene is that it’s the first (and last) point in the book where things feel almost open-ended, so that you judge that prideaux chooses to spill

9 Sept 4:08pm: adding: it’s not just that everyone’s equal outdoors — whereas indoors is always indoors somewhere, a building structure unavoidably embedded in an extant power structure — but that prideaux the sporty man of action is more than smiley’s equal here, and both know it, and placing himself here is the gesture of total vulnerability by which smiley elicits prideaux’s trust

10 Sept 10:42am: anyway, the prideaux hilltop debrief:

it comes in three sections, first the circus where control laid out the operation, last the various cells where, operation blown up in everyone’s face, hajek aka ellis aka prideaux tried to screen as much/ many as possible for as long as possible, before he was (inevitably) broken; and in the middle, one of the climactic passages in a book full of wary spies moving through dangerous places: a seemingly utterly english agent rendering himself effectively invisible in czech streets stiff with watchers who know he’s there

once again the sense of place is ever-present: jlc’s tradecraft is, in effect, to heighten a character’s watchfulness by a kind of transferred descriptionalism — as if his own gift for conjuring up locale swiftly and effectively is a manifestation of the character’s heightened observational level… to be told you’re a “watcher” is a compliment of the highest order, so naturally jlc allows the reader to get to share this quality, or to feel they’re sharing it

prideaux is described, physically, as “crooked” and even “fanged” — as a jaggedly palpable, noisy presence in the world — yet (like smiley) his deep gift is to become invisible in plain sight; invisible, moreover, to his professional peers/foes when they’re most expecting it… this middle passage of his tale is a guide to this, a guide to the superb level of detailed observation and anticipation it requires… and, also i think, to underscore that the core being of this seemingly brusque military sporty type is an uttertly gentle quietness: watchfulness is the centre of his being (ditto smiley; ditto smiley’s little child phantom bill roach)

there’s a weird passage early on, put in the mouth of lacon and thus easily overlooked as point-missing blather: lacon raises the notion that “method is morality” and then projects onto smiley the assumption that smiley can’t and won’t accept this idea.

well, for starters it’s an ambiguous formation: and it’s easy to just assume — this is lacon speaking, for one thing — that’s merely the situational ethos of the high-end civil service (“i do my job to the best of my ability, to aid my political masters, through every change of government: hence even if they’re utterly in the wrong, i can be in the right”)

but it might also mean “your morality emerges from the method you choose” (as contrast smiley’s interrogation technique from the evil soviet one: smiley deploys far less thumping, if not none, and no electronic probes, hence is “better”, as far as moralists are concerned)

and there’s a third meaning, much subtler and in a sense subversive, i think, of the book’s stated sense of good and evil (which does function as an argument between these first two readings): this is the notion that to be true to your method (your technique, your skill, your craft, the still zen of your art blah blah) is to be true to the world

and in this central passage — when prideaux is being the best street agent in the book so far — he is truer to the world than any of the botched or confused reasons why his operation has been set in place (by control, or though the deceived control by the mole, or by the clashing forces of world history, or what have you: every other level is botch, compared to prideaux in the middle passage of Operation Testify, its failure notwithstanding)

the point is, i don’t think jlc dares put his trust in this reading: whether this is cause or consequence, he’s just not that strong a writer — he’s a writer with strengths, and with flaws, and the flaws always muscle back in (one of his strengths, though, is that he can often deploy his flaws as masks; just as a good spy — or more to the point a good thriller writer — must be able to)

[i've actually finished -- the sections following this one are "unputdownable", his sense of pace and momentum at its best -- but i'll try and pace my blogging in haha homage]

10 Sept 4:46pm: as noted, the prideaux sections sees the backstory and the current story slide into consonant lock-step, which means that everything that follows derives its momentum from (i) waiting for that actual whodunnit reveal, and (ii) events and activity caused by the consonance of backstory and current story, and what it impels people to scurry about doing

so far so ho-hum, this is a spy thriller with a whodunnit theme — the value if you like of what remains of the story is how (ii) can screw around with (i), to make it more than routine poiroteesque grandstanding, the brilliant detective explaining how everything fits and pointing the quiveringly melodramatic finger at hans redacted moleman

jlc does this very neatly, by moving the “explanation of how everything fits” early, to scare a suspect he appears already to have cleared into switching sides: i have to say despite close rereading i don’t quite get why this particular suspect has been cleared, mind you — which i think is a mark of jlc’s own very cunning knot, whereby EVEN THOUGH SMILEY EXPLAINS HOW EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER it doesn’t make it much easier to go back and intricately re-examine any given plot point from the new perspective… because of course it’s always a double-perspective, a hall-of-mirrors everything-pulled-inside-out- perspective, where such-and-such a cover-story as supplied by yr bosses in london (or moscow) is actually the REAL story

anyway, this particular scene features toby, who as i say is easily my favourite character: and one of the things i love is how smoothly he adjusts to this catastrophic new understanding, and switches sides: smiley’s mastery of the story in more detail than most readers quite grasp — meaning that we cede smiley and jlc an element of trust as to the precision, which we feel more than we apprehend — is enough to turn toby; and — even tho he’s kind of victim of the scene, toby is actually granted a lot of professional respect, and not just for sleight-of-hand… it goes without saying that he’s a mastercraftsman of lamplighting, babysitting, pavement artistry etc etc, whichever side he’s being run by, or duped by. (Except not in fact “without saying”: bcz it’s relentlessly acknowledged and stressed.)

There’s a term used in Smiley’s People — by toby descriptively of smiley’s tactics after a certain point — which it claims is untranslateable, and then translates faintly dodgily. It’s from German military phraseology: flucht nach vorn — and literally means “flight to the front”, but in military context means something more like “escape via the Front”, ie a defence against attack that consists itself of unexpected attack. But it also has more than a smidge of “leap into the unknown”, again as a tactic.

Anyway, that’s relevant to this scene — smiley is getting things going by making his completed theory an engine of events — but with the proviso (not yet filled in with clarity) that someone/something else is also active in this unknown. We’ve had as many hints — just as we have with the actual identity of the mole — but they’re still masked, at least to careless and semi-careful reading. The giveaway is a single word.

11 Sept 1:00pm: So now — at quite a lick — we pass towards turning the molerunning system against itself to unmasking denouement to aftermath, as the events set running by the coming into consonance of the backstory and the present-times narrative intrude on smiley’s intended conclusion

waiting in the safehouse for it all to kick off is good strong anticipatory mood-music — including a nice turnabout scene where mendel watches the actual circus itself from across the road at cambridge circus (i once spent 20 minutes wandering around there trying to decide which building he can have been watching from, as he needs simultaneously to be able to see the circus itself, including the roofs above and behind the pepperpot tower over new compton street AND the theatre)

the unmasking that follows is a pretty effective portrayal of anti- climax; serious as the implications are, the action itself is borderline farce, powerful men reduced to flapping nobodies, petulant or stunned or totally withdrawn or (in percy’s case) apparently just clueless. except for toby, the secondary suspects — who turn out just to be dupes — were never fleshed out beyond cartoon level; roy bland especially remains a cipher. And gerald/haydon retreats into stoic bored passivity: this above all i suspect shapes the sense of anti-climax; he doesn’t act like a villain, or protest innocence; he doesn’t act like “himself” as we’ve watched him throughout the tale, so we’re robbed of something, even if it’s hardly clear what (perhaps routine poirotism)

smiley debriefs haydon and discovers — more or less nothing: turns out, denuded of the various stages haydon has fashioned for himself, there’s nothing at the heart… the final russian doll turns out to be hollow: haydon gives a cliched political speech one day (jlc doesn’t even bother giving it all, on the excuse that smiley isn’t really listening — treated as craft and deliberate style decision, you’d have to note that any mid-level brit stalinist on the stump in 1970, when there were still a LOT of them, could have given a less crappy account of the ideals haydon claims to be upholding; we also get to find out that his lovelife is mean and lame; that his paintings are no good any more; that’s there’s nothing there

(talking about moscow, smiley says that they won’t humiliate great britain over this, because it’s in their interests to allow their foes to seem worth taking on: so what does this observation say about smiley himself, and the lifefacts beneath the molereveal?) (i’m reasonably sure jlc is aware of this irony of course: indeed that it fits into his whole OH THE HUMANITY litany, which smiley tends to ventriloquise for him)

and then, in the last few pages, the basically horrid and squalid surprise conclusion: when jim p kills bill h: as i saw the TV version before i read the book, this was no kind of shock — i’m interested in how it comes across to virgin readers (even though we are somewhat in CHRIST ON THE CROSS SPOILERS territory here surely)

Another very deliberate irony: a key consequence of this conclusion ensures that prideaux loses moral high ground firmly established (over Smiley et al) as Smiley heard his tale earlier in the book. (The post-it note sentence here having been: “Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.”) <-- ans = because they were more of a rigmarole than we at the time supposed; as now at last emerges... final very bitter irony; also final OH THE HUMANITY thumb- on-the-scale if this is an element yr allergic to...

Which it may well be: I don't want to belabour it, but my threefold reading of "method is morality" seems to me finally to hover over the characters we're encouraged at the end to be thinking of, and through: haydon obv, now forever an enigma; prideaux, broken and betrayed, and back at thursgood's, learning to forget; and smiley himself, also much betrayed (tho honestly ann's behaviour is NOT a parallel with bill's if yr actually sane)... and of course, since all three are characters jlc has put a lot of time and love (and some hate) into, which is he saying is most him also? He far too obviously hopes smiley; he far too obviously fears haydon. And Prideaux is masked when visible; and most himself when not? Are novelists street agents or desk agents?

11 September 1:02pm: footnote: as per discussion far far above [i.e. in a section not included here], suspect SOLDIER, roy bland, is a miner’s son who became an academic, and thus the closest to a non-middle-class contributor to the central tale

11 September 12:12pm: Haydon “also took it for granted that secret services were the only measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.” <-- actual quote on p306, 11 pages from close

So I was wrong above, it's not JLC saying this, and nor is it his oft-times pained and sententious mouthpiece smiley, it's the defeated villain in his rambling foolishness. So does this mean JLC absolutely does NOT think this, and indeed thinks it ridiculous to think this? ah-hum: well that is the conundrum really... how much does JLC see himself in the villain as yearning wish fulfilment ("AT LEAST HE HAS A BELIEF SYSTEM!") and how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

Of course we can all be right here, since a novel is not a maths problem: it doesn't have an "answer"

[comment from history mayne: 'well, im pretty sure jlc-the-man isn't a communiss. but i think he probably agrees with gerald about 'the state of britain' today a little. the pigs-in-clover society, sucking up to the US -- that stuff (...) 'a small town in germany' is really hard to fathom, politics-wise. one of the villains, karfeld, is a populist german nationalist politician, but i don't think jlc ever calls him a 'neo-nazi', and there's even some business about him wanting to make an alliance with the SU? in a totally non-communist way. many of his supporters are young people, though, and they don't seem to be particularly nazi neither. wonder if they relate to the hippies in 'smiley's people'."]

12 September 1:48pm: tbf i don’t think this is about politics-as-grand-narrative-ideology, it’s about national and individual praxis: which the individuals and nations grab at labels for, of course, but what interests and concerns him is how people treat other people, not so much how they tribalise this <-- so far so wishywashy liberal maybe, hence his constant flagellation that he can't lay hold of an aggregate formulation, and conflcted envy of those who can

gerald's self-disclosure at the close is intentionally a chaotic unself-aware adolescent mess: even if gerald would describe himself as a marxist or whatever, JLC doesn't allow him the dignity of passing the description on to the reader...

Two threads run though my friend Marcello’s The Blue in the Air: one’s a fear, rarely directly stated; and the other’s a trust, a implicit confidence, a gamble. Between them, these oblique stances, very different but very connected, lure or impel us through an astonishing maze of music, much of it very likely unfamiliar, from radical free improv to one-off novelty pop, via every imaginable sheeptrack or rat-run or scenic bus ride…

Blue collects Marcello’s commentaries on 50 records, written over 12 and a half months in 2007-08 (or actually 150-odd records; or — truthfully — 150,000 and counting): it’s also (in its sly, understated way) a map of the last 50 years in music (or actually 150, or truthfully…). And I imagine a map of this map could be devised by citing Carlin’s writerly forebears, if that’s a way you like to establish value. Here’s the GMarcusian close-reading, for example: as when he takes us phrase-by-phrase through vocal and arrangement of Kevin Rowland’s 1999 version of ‘This Guy’s in Love with You’, a song written for (but never performed by) Chet Baker, which builds to its final phrase, “if not I’ll just die…” — undiluted melodramatic, of course, which is exactly the kind of melodrama Rowland knows how to unroll in unexpected ways. And there’s the deft Morley-esque deadpan: as when, via the Doors-alike song ‘Endless Tunnel’, the long-forgotten Serpent’s Power’s same-name debut LP is adjudged not the “28th best album of 1967′ but instead the “37th best”.

In this second mode, some silly touchstone of rockchat (the yearly best-of list!) lets us fuse significance with the idiotic, while playfully hinting that in pop (and thus in all of art) they ought never to have been deemed entirely unfused. While in the first, the Marcus-ish close reading, you’re receiving an empirical masterclass in critical observation; how music works, at the level of the phrase, the hinted echo, the drum-beat, the sigh — the puncta, you might almost say, where the praxis of and fissures in an artist’s technique meet the listener’s own often secret story. (The semi-veiled backdrop to this project being profound personal loss, and the rediscovery of the possibility of love; as some know — but it’s worth stressing you don’t need to know this in difficult detail, and nor is this aspect ever more than fleetingly adverted to.)

Also at NME in the early 80s, and one of one of the quieter critical architects of Marcello’s beloved New Pop, was my own subsequent mentor at The Wire, the late Richard Cook — and there’s much Cookian scholarship in Blue, too, including authoritative hinterland exposition of the terminally unfashionable, of forgotten sessions and impossibly minor sidemen, and strange sideways moves from the wilds of free jazz into the bargain-bin bubblegum basement and/or TV comedy-wasteland cash-in cul-de-sac, and (yes!) back. And actually, you know, maybe there’s even a trace of me here too. Marcello’s distrust of cultural parsimony is certainly something I share, and we both reject the cull as any kind of route to understanding; the unwieldy sprawl produced by lack of cull is potentially a world of sudden unlikely but exacting juxtapositions, and this too we share a love of. Though as much as anything it’s just that he cracks jokes I wish I’d thought of (Tight Fit or the New Seekers should INDEED have recorded a version of Stockhausen’s Stimmung… ) (the joke being that this really ISN’T a joke).

At which point I should obviously reiterate my disclaimer, that I know Marcello well, and his wife Lena too, and am proud to have been now and then on hand as they built their current life together, and am exorbitantly delighted that someone’s had the vision to turn Marcello’s tireless blogwork into a book at long last, and a bit sad it’s been overlooked so far by reviewers. And if such attachment and such allegiance are ways you dis-establish and discount value, then actually — probably — this book will be gifting you nothing of enormous consequence anyway: it really really isn’t a great deal to do with any of the myths of cultural objectivity.

Natural as it is, stressing these various writerly comparisons, valid or not, is an easy way to mistake the nature of this project. Blue really doesn’t stands square or simple anywhere in the ordinary line of popwrite. Not least because it cadges no grand historical importance out of claims made for its contents — as most such books must, of course, to sell. Song no.16 in Blue is sung by British popstress Dorothy Squires, her 1970 version of ‘My Way’, released as her lovelife and career began a last long downswing into thrown-over and resentful (not to say litigious) obsessiveness. Very easy indeed for the winners in this life — the young, the smart, the ambitious, the reasonably self-aware — to chuckle a little as they assign quasi-Nietzschean pop-typologies that amount to nothing to hear here, folks…

What’s the importance, after all, of importance? Why do we need things that matter to us to matter to all? And — the real question — how much does it matter how they matter? To grasp the point being made about it in Blue, you almost certainly have to come in, sit down and read Carlin, and then up and track down and go hear Squires, deluded naff loser though she may seem: to shortcut is to shortchange yourself.

Though they’re not at all the same thing, criticism largely currently exists in the exact same space as reviewing, primarily because reviewing is a paying proposition within consumerworld where criticism very often isn’t. “I undertake this so YOU DON’T HAVE TO”: and yet the pre-emptive cull is far more a consumer-driven response to time-poverty under current conditions, than any species of grown-up intellectual response to the material at hand. The critic, with a mortage to pay, internalises the reviewer-pretext, the two disciplines inextricably confused everywhere. Result: a half-and-half practice that most-times battens on and extends excuses for ignorance, bigotry, complacent semi-informed parochialism.

The problem isn’t the instant response-at-the-time — that’s reasonably easy to justify, and has some benefits — so much as the way a certain aggregate response congeals over time into habit-of-certainty. Certainly far too much reviewing — from the high-minded belle lettriste essay or politico-polysyllabic quasi-philosophical long-form study across and down to the conveyor-belt leisure-processing of each new week’s routine of new releases — is essentially supplying its specific public with short-cut excuses NOT to read a book, see a film, plunge into a song or a show. This excuse requiring an armature of discernment, the practice manifesting as the production of the factitious generalised ideal, the critique as quasi-intellectual pre-articulated checklist: the role of outsourced labour-saving sensibility-minion requires you be seen to bin stuff, in quantity…

So jump to No.18, which is Britney’s ‘Heaven on Earth’. Again, the Morley-esque perspective on the value of a chart is at work: 18 isn’t two UP or two DOWN in this list, it’s two ALONG. A gnomically personal narrative is unfolding here, partly via chart-maker’s reason for selection (which may or may not reveal itself: if it does, it arises out of the relationship readers make for themselves with the writer). But there’s also the elaboration of a diagram of juxtaposed values; an extended model of difference, of contrast, of connectivity, of quality arising out of exquisitely positioned plurality.

Let’s unpack this a bit more bluntly. The buried part of the specific juxtaposition-but-one is that the Britney Wars are long won; that she triumphed, actually quite easily (‘Heaven on Earth’ is off the rightly lauded Blackout); and that the commentators who refused to address her seriously on what they imagined was a principle came off looking like idiots, as some of them no doubt ruefully now see. Nothing wrong with being wrong, of course: not least because you get the invaluable opportunity to know what to it feels to be Squires, scorned and forlorn, angrily belting out your prefabricated vindication. For the Britney nay-sayers it wasn’t ‘My Way’, exactly: the preferred standards (off-the-shelf ideas about other people’s reasons liking things they oughtn’t, well or poorly wielded) have names like or fall into phrases like “poptimism”, “post-modernism”, “guilty pleasures”, “music for people who don’t like music”… And the value of the Marcello-Morley approach to a chart placing is that it can point up the weird and subtle mirror-circle at work here. Obviously things they oughtn’t can include waxings by half-forgotten demi-stars in the twilight of their careers; performances irrevocably out of step with “their time” (whatever this means); non-ironic interpretations of quite obnoxious past-times stand-bys… But once you’re furiously mocking people for this reliance on stand-bys, this borrowed authority, well, you sometimes ruefully get to see that this is just what you’ve just been doing. The prickly stubborn defensiveness of the defeated (or the undefeated, if you prefer) seems suddenly shared, by the people who once hurried most to register how they deplored any attention paid to the second-rate. And yes, it’s a horrible corner to find yourself suddenly standing in, as fashion turns, and not everyone is well-placed to power their way back out. Certainly Squires wasn’t.

So, yes, this is just one potential guesswork deep-reading in Marcello’s 50, considered as a frozen narrative of change, of highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, loss and release, and the abrupt jags or gliding jumps between these states; considered as a conflicted field: … and of course to read it this way, to grasp the dispersed intellectual-artistic geography, you have to be patient and generous indeed with records “made the wrong way” (and by extension, with commentary “thought in the wrong way”).

Not that a context of chaotic cultural abundance is at all easy space for a career critic to operate in — having an accurate feel for a very wide range of very different types of things is a hard gig to fashion for yourself, let alone to sustain as a paying career. If we suggest that there’s a formal cultural democracy that recognises that every act or idea deserves its day in court; and — the element almost always denied almost all art — the very best, most cunning, most daring advocate available, certainly it’s always easier to get hired to denounce due process, and to deny, sight unseen, sound unheard, that insight, which is a consequence of encounter, can arise anyway. I don’t know if it’ll make MC’s fortune, but Blue is superbly attentive to the wrong-path craftsperson, broken or damaged by life (their own bad choices in act or style, or just miserable hurtling luck) — and to those fashions in techniques the world has agreed to scorn: and thus to unravelling the rhetoric that seamlessly associates micro-traditions with failure, feeling lame, in seeing ourselves as losers, as confused failures, as victims of the successful enthusiasms of others…

All of which perhaps says more about my passions than Marcello’s. And is an extremely roundabout way of saying that that this is by no means an over-familiar 50. In at least a couple of cases (Floyd’s ‘Apples and Oranges’; Blur’s ‘Popscene’), the artists themselves have attempted to consign their own contribution to oblivion. And because you have go listen as well as read, this book, as an exemplary guide to the art of criticism, is above all about opening yourself; about trusting; more exactly about catching yourself as you distrust, and recognising how pervasive and corrosive that well-nurtured kneejerk can be.

Of course, a more-or-less ironised awareness of the pre-approved quality checklists of others can certainly double-down on the punctum-as-gag: a Gallagher brother’s comments on Jay-Z at Glastonbury constitute the easiest of targets for this book’s likely readers, but this celebration of Mr Shawn Corey Carter’s version of ‘Wonderwall’, cast as rising, raging comedy dementia, recalls some of Marcello’s funniest entries on early-doors ilx… a lovely and innocent pre-lapsarian era to recall, actually.

At other times, he glides off into the delirious disconnect-reverie of images invoked by a song or a voice or a lyric — I’d describe the closing reach of the pages on Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song” as inarticulate speech of the heart, if it didn’t seem a bit of a cheek, given his self-aware rigour as a self-editor. Whatever the untweaked serendipity of an entry, this is an enormously carefully selected sequencing, and not just as an elegantly miniature entry-point to the daunting profusion of his daily output as a blogger (for some time now of course supplemented by his wife Lena; to whom this book is also a tribute and a happy mashnote). It picks a very subtly destabilising way indeed into a deep grasp of the eras he’s lived through, as broader conflicted fields more than narrow snapshots: the fading 60s as a delicately knowing revision-reconfiguration of the early Beatles (the Zombies’ ”The Way I Feel Inside’), Motown (Mari Wilson’s ‘Baby It’s True’), Stockhausen (see above) and of course Free Jazz (a track from John Stevens and Evan Parker’s The Longest Night); the 80s very slyly indeed, given how central it is to his own aesthetic and ethos, and how poorly understood it remains (of course he has a great deal more he’ll be saying about Nu-Pop soon enough, and besides, *I* have not yet spoken on this topic sternface winkyface…)

And as for the decade of his loss, his desolation, his rescue and self-rediscovery… the tale of all this last sketched very lightly indeed; largely kept private; the opposite of self-indulgence. Riding all the way from Al Bowlly, a ghost in sepia and witty crooned beige, to T.I. and Jay-Z and Kanye West and Li’l Wayne being hilarious teenage street-corner nobs-plus-ultra in ‘Swagga Like Us’, and the irreducible obnoxious life-affirming yawp of this becoming, as he himself writes, “a towering babble of voices.. where the greatest improvisers of their age take their choruses in succession, … akin to hearing Bird, Rollins, Trane and Ornette soloing, one after the other..”

Fear of music is as prevalent in modern culture — mainstream or dissident — as its simple embrace is deprecated. Avant-garde ears pour nervous scorn on any sign that we’re all more or less the same at root; that we all share feelings and failings; that under the gestures, vanguardists are contradictory mopes and dopes like the rest of us much of the time. Pop-wired ears are all too often primed to guffaw at all ambition, all risk, all departure, all experiment, scoffing at any impulse to settle anywhere but safely within the compound. Common as they are, these dismissive kinds of fears are precisely NOT the dread that haunts Carlin; not at all the unstated unease that gives this book its deep charge. Which is something more like the following: what if the wound is just too deep — not just his own wound, the immediate personal grief and shock that drove him to begin writing in public, but the wound of all the world, the social separation, the deep-embedded ever-aggravated ugliness and will to hate? What if — even if Marcello has perhaps shouldered his way through to a healing — it’s too late and too little for the rest of us?

If this is a book about discovering that love is always still possible, it’s as much a book about about learning ways to listen — delicate, uncertain, stubborn, conflicted, often as thick with resignation as curiosity — which are also ways to trust: unlearning half the anti-listening habits salted into standard lines and critical dismissals, certainly, where trust and generosity are verboten, and despised; where cynicism is endlessly confused with acuity. It’s about elements in music and listening that good critics certainly use, but very often fail to pass on — elements present in music inside and outside fashion, music facing backwards, music facing forwards, music sadly hunkering down in some soon-to-be-razed-and-developed locale, music blithely drifting through the foolish heroic amazed unawareness of new love. Elements musicians recognise in the skill of their bones, from every background and tendency, but decline to discuss, because there isn’t the language — because if there was they wouldn’t be musicians…

When you’re literally fighting for life, you can’t always be checking over your shoulder for how the people in the comfier seats are reviewing your responses: the backwash of even quite small waves of devalution may swamp; may drown. It’s an extremely difficult lesson for the professional reviewer — shrewdly surfing and evaluating broader movements, to cater to the comfortably off, materially or emotionally to internalise: that their casual column-completing quip, the observation their chums and suck-up comments crew all instantly decare “spot on”, may be the ruin or death of someone they’ve never met…

And (just to slot the dragon’s tail back in its mouth) the confidence, the trust, the gamble? Well, it begins at his own sensibility, his (I believe justified) sense of his ability to make transformative connections within musics, small and large, and to exactly express the social and personal import of any given, forgotten recording, or other music-drenched moment. Where he travels with this gift is the journey of this project. Some insist music-writing is pointless, secondary because parasitic: “dancing to architecture” the notoriously philistine phrase. Why not just let the song speak for itself? Well, here are some answers: because we do not know the song; because we do not know where any given song lives; because we fear where any given song leads, and mock at the need to leave our favoured hard-won comfort zones, radical, popular, all safe spots in-between or beyond. The author has a quiet, an almost old-fashioned delivery much of the time, but if this tricks the unwary into underestimating the scale of the daring here, nothing here can ever fully mask or efface or dodge the huge wild gamble at the book’s heart: What will all this avail him (or us)? maybe NOTHING? WHAT IF IT’S NOTHING?. Carlin has reason to mistrust the world at large: it has not always been kind to him… But his trust challenges the fear, all the fears, because it’s his gamble, in the end, on us: his readers; which is to say, the world….

Mark Sinker

Set aside what you know of his politics for a moment; and what you’ve assumed about his primary readership at this time, 1894-1910, the period of his “books for children”. Set aside too the Disney Kaa, the Disney Mowgli, the the Disney jungle. Almost casually, in the sense that it wasn’t particularly his life’s main project, Kipling established a type of modern cinematic body-horror that’s all the more startling for being so offhand. This nightmarishly exciting scene, of the teenage wolfboy running across the Bee Rocks, to lure the dhole, the marauding Dekkan Red Dog pack, into a fatal trap as the bees wake in vast swarming numbers, and go to war — the dhole who survive bees and river being ruthlessly mopped up by Akela’s wolves downstream — was my favourite Mowgli story as a child, I think simply because it’s so sustainedly descriptively intense and vividly grisly; the sense of the ground itself clouding volcanically up into aggressive life; that terrible image of the falling “things”, dogs become lumps of pure bee. And, you know, just the idea of MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF UNTAMED BEES!

This particular anecdote, set near the Strand, is from 1889 or just after, when RK was just 23 and already pretty famous — and it reminds you, more than a bit startlingly, that he arrived in a Victorian London bookended, as it were, by Jack the Ripper and Oscar Wilde. However dated Kipling seems to us (and he was already considered a fossil in the 1930s), he was an amazing modernist monster to his contemporaries, a child prodigy bringing news of a potently unsettling world — the colonies before him being little more than occasional exotic noises off now and then, in literary terms — and riding the waves this news made until the Great War, when everything he believed in went smash.

Anyway, the shock of potential recognition here — by the middle of the story’s third sentence, and the phrase “of Burgos” — is that it was Kipling’s short tale that inspired Eco’s much longer one. And the somewhat unsettling realisation, just 20 pages later, is that Kipling really had anticipated most of the subtext and deep subject of the successor work, in his compact, allusive way: both are about optics, science and medicine, the relationship of faith, the church, reading, writing and libraries to wisdom and knowledge, their propagation and their suppression; and the society of senior monks at work, and relaxing socially afterwards; about where the rules lie and what may happen when you challenge them. Both have a point to make, Kipling’s the more layered in ironies intended and unexpected…

The first I actually unleashed on tumblr a few weeks ago:
“The rain had turned the pith of his huge and snowy solah topee into an evil-smelling dough, and it had closed on his head like a half-opened mushroom.” (From ‘The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly’, in Plain Tales of the Hills, 1888)

The second is from the children’s story I remember most fondly (so the fact that I’m issuing a MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING about what’s under the cut perhaps signals the wtf-ness of it): “Then 10 or 12 men, each with an iron-bound club three or four feet long, came up, and Kerick pointed out one or two of the drove that were bitten by their companions or were too hot, and the men kicked those aside with their heavy boots made of the skin of a walrus’s throat, and then Kerick said: ‘Let go!’ and then the men clubbed the seals on the head as fast as they could. Ten minutes later little Kotick did not recognise his friends any more, for their skins were ripped off from the nose to the hind flippers—whipped off and thrown down on the ground in a pile.” (from ‘The White Seal’, The Jungle Book, 1894)

And the third, for now, is Kipling’s these-days startling (and upsetting) use of the (mainly other-way-round) swastika as his personal symbol. He adopted it (along with Ganesha the Elephant God) as a Hindu sign of good fortune, and dropped it, decisively and angrily, when the Nazis made it theirs–but several of the editions I have are my gran’s, published before WW1, and so still display it (v.awkward for book-handling on buses etc). I doubt it’s entirely random that the seal who rescues all his kind from the seal-clubbers, who discovers safe beaches that man can’t invade, is a WHITE seal, though I didn’t at all notice this as a kid (I read it as a sign of interesting fluffy cuteness; and RK does state that this is the only white seal there ever was). Kipling’s worldview was of course unremittingly racialised, but it was never exterminationist: if anything, he was aggressively multicultural, believing (correctly) that the jostle and tumult of difference was good for everyone; that gated communities are always stupid and boring communities. Anyway, that’s enough wtf and er non-commentary for now.

There are female visitations aplenty, of course, and female servants and relatives and bystanders, and a wife or two, and of course the witch in The Ash Tree: but Mrs Anstruther is very close to the only time in 30-odd in M. R. James stories that a woman is protagonist-victim; and when it’s not what he considers manstuff that gets the demon’s motor running. The other — that I’m aware of — is a rarely anthologised fragment called The Experiment: and we never actually meet the woman character in that.

But we very much do meet Mrs Anstruther — she’s the one strong character, and everyone else (such as her husband) we only really recognise in terms of their relationship with her. At its simplest, the story is this: Mrs A wants to convert a neglected corner of her small estate into a rose garden; orders the gardener to remove the decayed garden seat and uproot an old post attached to it; something is disturbed, which brings unpleasantness…

Which is to say, this is a structure he used many times in a manworld context; and it’s the manner of the retelling which matters, not the meat. (Or more accurately: the meat is the manner.)

It opens with a wife-husband dialogue, a to-and-fro that’s mild and rather dated domestic mini-comedy; she’s a bit of a no-nonsense termagent; he’s a bit henpecked. So far so stereotypical, maybe: women be gardening, men be golfing (if they’re allowed). But it’s easy to be misled if this seemingly throwaway scene isn’t to your tastes in humour; or if the world it depicts isn’t to your taste in lifestyle, the upper-mid rural middle classes of a hundred years ago, as they interact with their equals, their servants — and others. The comedy scenes are amusing enough, in an undemanding way: but the purpose of this opening scene is not, I think, structurally different from that fierce block of untranslated Latin that opened The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. James is describing a world he belongs to or near, with a mixture of precision and amusement; and, whether or not he approves of the ordering of this world, he wants to get you comfy enough in familiarity that when the trouble starts…

I was 14 when I first read it, and we’d just moved into the first house the family owned — in a small very rural village, with a big garden. My dad had told me I might enjoy these stories, and I’d found a Collected James in Shrewsbury library. I reached this particular story in a silent reading period at school. The English teacher was catching up with his marking, with other readers absorbed all around me in their own written worlds, when something rustled in the shrubbery and that pink sweaty face loomed out, giving me the single biggest yikes-eek shock-thrill-shiver I’ve ever had while quietly reading. I had to bite back a vocalised grunt of fright — and doing so brought me back to a sense of the room, and the crowd of day safely sat about me in it, if anything only rendering more acute the sense of solitary peril, of images and fears unleashed, in your own head alone, by the wrong sentence on the wrong page. That face – MRJ even likens it to a Guy Fawkes mask, the better to underscore the horror of its not being — stayed with me for wakeful weeks.

Why was the fright so intense? It’s more than a just a good boo-moment, though it is of course that. The lulling effect of the setting — including the deftly controlled soft music of rising alarm — has a particular character: partly of familiar, slightly stuffy stolidity (the social world it depicts lingered on in the sleepy Shropshire of 40 years ago); but also — for a 14-yr-old — of something at once all around me and quite alien. Which is sex. The main characters in this story (and only this?) come in gendered pairs: Mr and Mrs Anstruther, the gardener and his wife; the former owner and her brother — and their parents. And there’s also something uneasily and veiledly dual also about the haunting: different people are bothered and/or invaded by different personality elements; read carefully and you realise there’s a dominant ghost and a secondary, eternally bound to him.

Which is why the backstory is confused, or anyway confusing. The dream that gets into some bystanders’ heads seems to be from the POV *not* of the waked and walking whoever-it-is, but of one of those he oppressed when he lived. He being “Sir ______ _____ , Lord Chief Justice under Charles II”, who retired in disgrace to Essex and there died of remorse. This last fits the historical facts of neither of the historical judges it resembles — Sir William Scroggs and the horrible Baron Jeffreys of Wem, the latter a figure we’ll meet again in a James story. Certainly the dreams that Mr Anstruther and the former owner’s brother (when a boy) seem to agree on this: that the dreamers are seeing OUT of the eyes of someone arrested, put on trial, harassed unjustly by a sarcastic and hostile judge, and led out to execution. Seeing from inside the Guy Fawkes mask, if you like. Yet the face is that of Judge _______ himself, or so we’re later told. How does this cross-wire leakage work? Is this figure troubled because he can’t get his own victims’ last days and terrors out of his head, and putting it into nearby sleeping heads, as he wakes and walks? And WHY are the heads in question both male?

Alongside this, there’s the classic understated undercurrent of “panic” fear: “The terror induced by forests and darkness was called by the Ancients, Panic fear, or the fear of the great god Pan,” to quote a favourite passage from another book I liked at that age (Dorothy L. Sayer’s Murder Must Advertise). There is absolutely something queasily quasi-sexual about this particular spectre’s manifestation to the women: one of its victims — the house’s previous owner (when a young girl, many years before) — hears it whispering “I’ll push, you pull”. And Mrs Anstruther has to endure the round pink hairless face emerging out of the bushes, sweating, eyes closed, lips parted, and somehow receding as threateningly as it appeared. Not that James’s ghosts aren’t often just this intolerably tactile, for their bachelor victims… anyway, intended or not, these kinds of shadowy psychic elements helped spook me as a kid.

As always there’s also the curious Jamesian undercurrent, where the lower orders are somehow in better contact with and smarter about the forces of the unseen: the gardener ordered to to pull up the offending stake is rendered bed-ridden and contrite by whatever he reluctantly sets free; and others in the village seem aware of something the Anstruthers are very much not, though they’re oddly reticent to tell their betters about it. The vengeance of the uncultured dispossessed on both the learned and the comfortable, at once justified and wildly out of proportion, is the heart of so many of his tales. If MRJ seems a little outside his expected territory, of libraries and tombs and the dusty sediment of lawless power long ago, the fact of the private English garden is nevertheless built on a multitude of forgotten enclosures acts down the centuries, and Mrs Anstruther encounters a mobile residue of the same unresolved injustice her nerdy or greedy bachelor professors do in the other stories, a bent judge kept from rest by inchoate unwritten, perhaps unwriteable will to right.

Add to this the continued evolution of the technique we already saw in A School Story, that he’ll refine subsequently: the half-revealed backstory as gathered from several semi-independent sources, whose incompleteness is most elegantly filled in supernaturally. The unclarity is central to the effect; we have to construct the story ourselves, and are thus made complicit. And if the social-domestic satire is a flimsy cartoon at best, this only amplifies the enormity of disproportion which makes for the horror. The comedy staple dialogue — in which Mrs A somewhat bullies Mr A — at the outset is balanced by the trial in the dream, in which the (male) dreamer is seeing through the eyes of the bullied defendent; that the ghost of the judge goes on to terrify Mrs A is perhaps a sort of comeuppance for her lack of self-awareness, which we somewhat anticipate enjoying early on, but we too are ably punished for our little schadenfreude, because her terror will also of course be ours.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

Rider Haggard meets Mary Shelley this time, a well (and deservedly) loved tale from 1974– just two stories on from the last one I watched (LOVEfilm is letting them cluster somewhat). SJS and 4 aka BB battle to stop someone incomparably eeevilTM being fully embodied and wrecking the universe forevHANG ON this is the exact same story as this and this and this really and even kinda this… Except in this story there’s many-roled whospian and magnificent experimental surgeon/renanimator Philip Madoc, plus an all-female cult guarding 1 x Eternal Flame + 1 x Elixir of life. So can BB stop the reunification of Headless Salad of all the Galactic Bodyparts with SPACEHITLER’S SPACEBRAIN? NOW READ ON

i: Begin with the sidekick, named CONDO, presumably bcz he is built like an apartment block with a monobrow. Pretty much from the first time we hear him speak (always in two-word phrases: “Master promise?”/”Girl pretty!”/”HULK SMASH!“) we know where we’re going here. Condo will very belatedly realise his master despises and will casually betray him; will be sweet on SJS; will do useful battle with his now-former master; and will not survive to the end of the story. As does he not, BUT — despite being Morbius’s smarter minion’s dimmer minion — he does correctly rename BB: he refers to him as “BIG HEAD”, and so shall we.

ii: SJS doesn’t have much to do besides grimace, huff, puff, snipe, snark and squeak. She does save BIG HEAD’S bacon at one point — he’s got himself tied to a berni steak burning stake, by his usual method, of not explaining anything to anyone, and being huffy and rude when people ask him questions. As a result she is BLINDED — and so for an ep-and-a-half grimaces, huffs, puffs, snipes, snarks and squeaks with her hands stuck out in front of her like a mummy, till the blindness gets better ON ITS OWN. This is an excellent set-up for the funniest cliffhanger: “I can SEEEEE!” Turns and SEEEEEEES hideous and bizarre monster with ONE GIANT CLAW three feet away and closing…

iii: Oh oh I love Philip Madoc SO MUCH!! This role is his tribute to the YOUNG JOHN PEEL. Solon is a misunderstood genius who can achieve just about anything in a surgical theatre but can’t actually think on his feet. And plus Eeverything that goes wrong with his plans goes wrong because he’s so much more eager to shaft everyone around him than he is to let his masterscheme come to careful fruition — presumably this is because he LOVES MORBIUS AND WANTS HIM ALL FOR HIMSELF! (There *is* a bit of a Torchwood-agenda undertow to this tale: here’s a ruined planet with only two organisations operational on it; one ALL-MALE, one ALL-FEMALE… The arrival of BIG HEAD — who Solon clearly rather fancies, in a chop-his-bonce sort of a way — and SJS, who Condo falls for, screws up all the existing dynamics!)

iv: BIG HEAD spends a surprising amount of his time shuttling between the two main buildings actually unconscious. He cleans the sisterhood’s chimney — shut up mr freud! — and kindasorta does the exact opposite at Solon’s house, by turning a vent into a poison-deliverer. His schoolboy chemistry is handy enough, and he only actually cold-bloodedly murders one person — because it turns out that Morbius’s new body can breathe cyanogen. Interesting reveal: when he has a BRANE-BATTLE with Morbius, the screen shows a whole slew of pre-Hartnell doctors, dressed up all Edwardian and the like. (Though apparently fandom decided they must all be earlier Morbius-bodies, apparently terrified of the idea that 1 ≠ 1.)

Backstory sidenote: has anyone ever spotted the doctor reading a book? He claims he did once, in this story: Solon’s book. (Odd one to be the only one…)
This-story sidenote: why does Solo even have the BRANE-BATTLE app set up ready? Does he tussle with CONDO now and then to keep his lobes in?

v: The landscape — the mise en scene if you will — is claustophobic and schematic, and all the better for it: basically two buildings, one a semi-ruined place which doubles as Solon’s lab and flat, one an all-girl temple, and the no-extensive hilly and rubble-strewn pathway between them (complete with dozens of downed ships). We see a lot of it bcz abt 9/10ths of the action consists of BIG HEAD and SJS going from one bulding to the other, one often blind, the other dead to the world.

vi: MORBIUS is at least a three, although — and I smell a bit of a corporate rat here, courtesy Marvel — this name has no wikipedia disambiguation page. Executed and dispersed bodily for being SPACEHITLER — except for his brain, which Solon sneaked out of the building somehow — he ends up so hapless in this story that it’s hard not to feel sympathy with him. First: because “even a sponge has more life than I!” — a great line much-quoted. Second: because when Solon is persuaded to go back to the experimental plastic braincase he had rejected as flawed and too risky (correctly it turns out), we see him retrieving it FROM THE WASTE PAPER BIN! Third: anyone who cooks will recognise the agony of this one, when you drop the roast at a super-dicey moment — and it CRASHES onto the dusty floor and is visibly misshapen and bent when you pick it up and brush it off and hope yr guests didn’t notice. Pleased to see Chef Solon does not clean up the green goo the brane slurries all round; it’s left as a warm-meat-juice floor-hazard. Fourth: when Morb is his rubbish body and blundering around clicking his claw, he catches sight of himself in the mirror. There is genuine dramatic irony here — we the viewers have known for some time that he’s going to end up in this body. If the brain-damage wasn’t incurred at step four, the self-worth trauma at step four can’t have helped. Fifth: to be fair, he may have been SPACEHITLER, but Morb’s bodycount is only two, and would have been one if fellow timelord BIG HEAD hadn’t failed to poison him FAILED BY THE MEANS OF BLUNDERING. Last, when Morbs does peg it, it’s because he falls off a cliff — he isn’t really pushed even. (Certainly not telekineticised in any way: the sisterhood seem to have forgotten they can do this: they could eg have popped his brane out of its box and into the Eternal Flame, on gas mark 9…)

vii: forgetful or not the sisterhood are FAB; they look fab — actually in a carnaby street kind of way, all gold-red garb and face-paint — and they have all these tics and hand tremblings and and flickery camera effects and ritual gestures. The top sister, MAREN, wends an intriguingly pragmatic way between the LAWS and let’s-suck-it-and-see (for example over the execution of BIG HEAD: she’s hardline for convenience at the start, then happy to see what his actions will do for her). Her deputy/successor, OHICA, has terrific starey eyes — you don’t notice this straght away, bcz the make-up somehow obscures it. They’re a bit jumpy at the start — which BIG HEAD doesn’t help, in his usual wind-up way — but they are GOOD face-painted EGGS and eventually deliver accordingly.

I enjoyed this enormously. It’s standard twit-not-nature Gothic at one level, but the gendered segregated counterpoise of the Coded Male Domain — driven solitaries undone by their own asocial nerdiness — with the Coded Female Domain — temple of max-factored sirens grounded by shrewd political practicality — stands energetically away from its own potential swamp of stereotype.

ps also ahem MORE DISAMBIGUATION needed:

And inevitably, in among all this, a lot of people of all classes, right across pop and rock and soul and jazz and reggae, were washing themselves in the imagery of the Revelations of St John the Divine. Which is not to say that all more modern use of these passages trace back straight through Paris 1968 — when Enigma’s Romanian-born Michael Cretu was after all only 11, and likely still living in Bucharest — but, well, look, if the seventh song on your LP (“The Voice and the Snake”) is a recitation, however diffidently rewritten, of the pouring out of the seven vials, with the Scarlet Woman and the Great Beast just a page away to anyone suitably versed, then you must look to all the gods being invoked, however inadvertently.

B: welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
In response to the discussion of Enigma’s No.1 with (timid UK title) Sadness, on Popular — my theory (which is mine) is this: that 1991 was for a wide variety of reasons the YEAR OF THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED, of genres and stances and attitudes that the 80s had caused to be sidelined within the Conversation. Or better — and to put it in a way that rubs Tom less the wrong way — insofar as commentators still chose to convince themselves that a Central Non-Niche Discussion did and should exist, these various strands had been excluded, the sacrifices necessary to realise the countercultural cull, and the collapse from an inchoate dream of revolutionary unity to something a great deal less daring and more self-congratulatory. And thus, for whatever proximate reason — post-xmas lull, larger confidence wobble — here were Maiden and Queen and [SPOILERS] and [SPOILERS] and [SPOILERS] (actually well on into the year), restating their robust continued presence within the market at large. Reminding the many newer, smaller niches that had so effectively colonised (and also semi-balkanised) the non-niche attention industry that they had once been major players within the all-for-one countercultural fold. And still counted for quite a lot, counterculturally — however NAFF they were now taken to be, as mere past-sell-by holdovers — because, if only on a units-sold scale, they dwarfed the presence in the world of all the newcomer microgenres…

Which leaves Enigma where? There’s really no consensus on the thread, anything but — but there IS something of a shared assumption that Enigma were somewhat chasing the fans of what I’m calling a “newcomer microgenre”, although no agreement which microgenre: those cited include New Age, fag-end Balearic, Ambient and Chillout and (not quite by name) Sampladelic Quiltpop. (Another, which went unmentioned on the thread , is the beyond-Genesis P wing of “Industrial”: quasi-sinister David Tibet territory, all folk and pervy whispers and cheeky sonic pseudo-magick.) Certainly if Enigma belong anywhere here — or even in some sort of intersect set — they CAN’T be part of the “return of the big-beast repressed” that I’m outlining.

Now Cretu is nothing if not a journeyman chancer, and I don’t doubt his music was very much tweaked to trend-conform — but for the purposes of clarity I’m going to set aside the opportunistic evolutionary convergence for a while, and drag you back into the early 70s hinterlands, on a quest across the forgotten marches of PROG EUROTICA.

By which I mean: such works as 1976′s The Story of i by keyboard maestro Patrick Moraz, and, 1972′s double album 666, by Aphrodite’s Child. Moraz, you will recall, briefly supplanted R.Wakeman in Yes (on Relayer, by SOME WAY their best record): before this he was teamed (as Refugee) with members of The Nice left bereft when Emerson joined ELP; later he worked with the Moody Blues (later still he took the MBs to court). Aphrodite’s Child, meanwhile, are the legendary Greek psych-prog group that introduced us to both Mr Demis Roussos (bass guitar and vocals) and Mr Vangelis Papathanassiou (keyboards) — the same Vangelis who would go on, not irrelevantly, to work with apocalyptickal ecstatician Jon Anderson, and of course compose the post-cataclysmic 1982 soundtrack for Blade Runner.

C: the story of phwoar
So far so prog. The word you have nervously been eyeing is “Eurotica”, isn’t it? Well, it’s retro-fitted, it’s true (it actually comes from the world of comicbooks): but I wanted a term that drew a tidy line between Metal Hurlant and the Emmanuelle novels; because these are the tributaries that flow into the particular local swamp within Euro-prog fusion that I want to draw attention to.

So here’s Wikipedia on The Story of i, to do my groundwork for me free of charge: “The concept album is based around a romantic story of a massive tower in the middle of a jungle. The tower lures people from all over the world to go inside it. Inside the tower, people are able to experience their wildest desires and fantasies. The only rule is that the people inside the tower may not fall in love with each other. However two people inside do so and decide to escape since the tower acts also as a prison which inhabitants are slaves of their own desires.” Which of course puts as squarely and clearly in the lineage of De Sade’s isolated fortress in 120 Days of Sodom and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and all kinds of kneejerkily anticlerical stuff in-between, from Lautréamont to Carl Orff. The LP comes complete with Moraz’s own callow musings on lust, love, possession and liberty etc etc.

In all the length and breadth of Merrie Brit-Prog (“Sir Stephen” not withstanding), sex was a topic largely avoided: the punters didn’t fancy it; the artists did not deliver it. By contrast, continental fusion was actively interested in porn, as emergent cultural issue and sales device. Aphrodite’s Child — the name is not un-germane — had apparently already done a soundtrack for (also Romanian-born) Henry Chapier’s softcore movie Sex Power. On 666, they crossed the streams: celebrated Greek actress Irene Pappas makes orgasmic noises across all of the track “Infinity”, her contribution towards Vangelis’s um conceptual examination of countercultural teleology, good and bad. (AC were in Paris in 1968.)

D: monk time
The point is, at least as much as any subsequent mini-genre Cretu cannily nuzzles, THIS is the repressed that Enigma were obliquely signalling a return to. FEATURING: somewhat underpowered post-Floyd guitar rock, washed in with chants, choral music, recitations “as from” De Sade and Revelations, ethnic instruments and percussions, found sound, hints of softcore erotica, and the classic prog/metal handwave at conceptual commentary. Where concept means — just as it does in UK prog — a cover image doing 90 percent of the intellectual heavy lifting, combined with thudding DO-YOU-SEE nudges from song titles.

Now as noted Cretu is a chancer, who found himself with a surprise hit and very much mined the formula as it was understood by the massed fans. He was not so implacably wedded to his own semi-realised concept — meagre as it will seem set out in words — that he minded it being turned on its head, by the unplanned vastness of the listener response. Including the apparent fact — and I haven’t the slightest idea how to confirm this claim — that, like Dark Side of the Moon before it, people were buying it in vast numbers because, ostensible themes notwithstanding, they found it nifty music to shag to.

(Where he’d been before the tide turned: co-production work on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells II, a project that presumably mattered a great deal more to Oldfield than Cretu; and — closer to his own heart — taking his wife Sandra’s releases Into a Secret Land and Paintings in Yellow to the mid-teens of the Norwegian and Austrian charts. And Top Ten in Germany! Just!)

OK, let’s skip the rest of the context and dig into the disc itself, and the main elements in its mix.

E: the principles of list
1: There’s a posh lady’s breathy voice introducing us to the world of “music, spirit and meditation”: it sounds like a yoga tape, perhaps for meditation or exercise.
2: There’s Gregorian chant, lifted (apparently without permission) from Paschale Mysterium.
3: There’s Gregorian chant backwards!
4: There’s a man and a woman discussing or enacting erotic etiquette, sometimes in French.
5: There’s panpipes, so-called (I don’t in fact think they are panpipes; see below).
6: There’s rock guitar, some it extremely Pink Floydy.
7: There’s various heats of discoid erection-section machinebeat, each on a single one-bar loop (OK I haven’t really checked the single bar bit).
8: There’s various naturish SFX, and instruments imitating nature.
9: There’s other stuff, too (bells, marching, drums, Maria Callas maybe…)

And before this there’s these three quotes on the cover:
i: “The path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom.” William Blake (a Babelfish misquote that handily reminds us of The Story of i)
ii: “The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.” Sigmund Freud (also seems a bit Babelfish, but I haven’t checked).
iii: “If you believe in the light, it’s because of obscurity, if you believe in happiness it’s because of unhappiness, and if you believe in God then you’ll have to believe in the devil.” Father X, exorcist, Church of Notre Dame, Paris (I am unconvinced this is a non made-up person!)

F: dialectabolical mystoricism
If the comments on the thread are a guide, these all simply mulch down into a glutinous sameness, a kind of murky broth of no-longer-distinguishable aspirations and energies. But if we take the liner quotes at face value, the effect SHOULD have been quite the opposite. Blake in particular is the prophet of the non-resolution of conflicting impulse as the spirit of love and life. Instead of blurring into one another, the various elements should have been playing off one another — the contradictions in our make-up, our hopes and needs and fears playing off one another in a kind mutually upending joke, a dialectical dance of wisdom out of teasing.

And so this is how I think we’re meant to be processing the first few minutes.

i: the presentation of a project of “spiritual education”; of somewhat cliched “new age” declamation —
ii: — is coolly elided into a sound that anyone of a certain upbringing will instantly recognise as the OPPOSITE of “new age” — this is a choral sound that calls forth the unchanging ages, and you don’t need to hunt far to find papal anathemas against “new age spirituality”, as being in effect devilworship…
iii: … but wait!! because any member in good standing of the European anti-clerical avant garde knows IN THEIR VERY BONES that what monks MEAN is hyprocrisy, greed and lust (this is much less urgent an association in England, since Tudor usurper Henry VIII angrily drove such foax orff of his royal lawns…)
iv: [INSERT BIRKIN-ESQUE BREATHING HERE]
v: for is not the truth eternal that ALL projects of so-called spiritual ennoblement, from Catholicism to crystals, are just about wanting to cop off? See Jungle, see jungle! Go bang your gang, yeah…
vi: and so on and onan… and let’s cut into the close reading just halfway into the first track, to observe that Enigma’s LINE in all this is intended (see name of band) to remain utterly wide open and un-pin-down-able.
vii: And jump sideways, into something that official Surrealism was pathologically — which is to say tellingly — hostile to: music. Music was worse even than monks, to the art-elite spawn of Lautréamont. So let’s take all this to the level of the music, and the contrary meanings coded there.

G: quilty pleasures
Superficially the common denom of Windham Hill-style New Age and Gregorian Chant is the power to soothe, to calm, to induce a bliss of no-event peace. But this really only happens if you’re predisposed to turn off your mind, relax and submit: it’s BY NO MEANS a bad thing to still the mind periodically, and indeed daily, but it’s a pretty tricky magic, and where genuine magic is needed, all kinds of cheats are found gathered.*

But is Enigma even meant to be de-stressing, as New Age and Chill-Out really are? Does it remain in the background, as Ambient should? Isn’t it a sequence of gags and irritants and arousal stimuli? Even the single — which runs through the same elements as the LP in rather different permutation — is strangely full of little-noise event. In its oh-so-low-key way, it’s all about expectation of engagement. It’s intending your attention to snag on these near-subliminal juxtapositions and expressive contradictions and shifts of perspective.

Is it claiming to be enlightening? Only teasingly: because it’s all tones and hints to mock the very concept of enlightenment — it’s quietly chuckling at how an uncarnal spirituality will always be disrupted by the call of the body. Except of course It really IS an old-fashioned concept album, fleshing out — as they so often did — an idea already largely exhausted by the LP sleeve. It’s a programme-music sequence of tone-poems and mood pieces, copping amused attitude at every philosophy it dips into, the Sadean philosophy of the bedroom, especially as this soft-offs down towards the sex-without-consequences me-generation idyll of the idle semi-colonial pretty-thing rich depicted in the Emmanuelle books and films.

It’s not at all the fag-end of Balearic: all its tropes except the beat come from Prog-Fusion, and even the beat is simply a shrewd looped update of the kind of late-nite robodisco that gets onto soundtracks for “sexy” TV movies.

And Sampladelic QuiltPop? Well, here’s the thing: quilting was always — and this is the crux — the VERY ESSENCE OF PROG. Quilting is pretty much what the term “progressive” actually means: progressive jazz was jazz quilted into classically composed structure; progressive blues was blues admixed with jazz and rock; progressive rock was rock and blues salted with, well, everything to hand, from the Shangri Las to Stravinsky, raga to Riley, folk to Coltrane to clavé…

H: GORmato
And actually — at last — we’ve come to the heart of the Enigma problem: the question of the [hunts round for grand-sounding word] ETHOS OF SUTURE. Or in non-poncey English, how stuff is joined together, and why this matters. The age of the digital edit makes all kinds of splice really easy — and as everyone who’s ever read a fairystory wll recall, magic always comes at a price. Shortcuts make long tangles. Pretty quilting comes with a payback; and so, in fact, does merely deft quilting.

Enigma may arrive from the tradition I’ve outlined: but it emerged in the age of a great starburst of newly easy quilting — some deft, some beautiful, some smart — and the realisation of its potential. And it emerged a success — such a success, in fact, that it isn’t one bit held back by
(or even anywhere else associated with) all the earlier stuff I’m linking to it. So hurrah! exclaim their accountants.

The downside is this: by sidestepping all the stuff that makes its precursors a problem for us now, it isn’t doing what they did, but better. It’s really just sidestepping what the ancestors were struggling with. The joins they were making; the leaps they were attempting; the unities they were imagining…

Listen again to those panpipes. Which they aren’t, of course — they’re a keyboard setting of some sort, maybe Fairlight-samplings, maybe just a synth register that’s tweaked to resemble them. It means whoever plays them — Cretu I assume, but screw it, THEY opted for anonymity — gets to play a what amounts to a connoisseur’s game with himself, deliberately inventing a little figure that you physically COULDN’T play on panpipes, pushing the unusual sound-envelope (with its very percussive and de-tuned startsound) into an odd and grabby little anti-Peruvian keyb-solo wriggle of modern techno-sound.

But it’s almost a private joke (as is, I’d happily insist, the easy-mimic Floyd-y guitar): and as such highlights the overall self-cancelling dynamic of the Enigma project: the way ethos and realisation get in each other’s way.

Now it’s easy to get the tone wrong at this point: I’m saying ethos, and that can sound like I’m merely proposing some factitious ethic of best practice, a moralism of dated technique: KEEP MUSIC LIVE, NO SYNTHESISERS, or what-stupid-ever. No: what I’m getting at is that Enigma’s glue, courtesy the era of the simple digital edit, presents everywhere as invisible mending: all its contradictory elements glide seamlessly into one another.**

But if solace are genuinely achieved this glitchlessly, via this gleaming new technology, you begin to start to doubt the emotional reality of a woe so easily and swiftly soothed. And while there’s always the light sly crackle of naff blasphemy in the jump-cut from posh yoga-girl to monks chanting “in nomine Christi“, this element — that there are actually inconsolably stressed people in the world, too — has somehow also been jumpcut out of the story. Or muffled, under these gloopy long-hold synths, these carefully smooth diatonic chords, these tidily looped neverchanging break-beats.

But as with every other instrumentality and technique, it’s not the how that’s the issue, that worry is always in the end a silly fetish. It’s always the why that matters — or more accurately the tangle of the many contradictory whys. To conjure a mood, to unlock a world, to woo, to wound, to show off, to shrug off, to describe, to describe yourself describing…

Why — from around 1967 — did music-makers start to cluster round the will to quilt? Just because they could? It’s NEVER just that: the new thing you can do gathers an energy of meaning beyond novelty the moment a community gathers — the twin communities, to make a faint specious but convenient distinction, of prog and fusion, flirting and fighting.

I: 120 days of sodcast em
I’ve explored this at some length elsewhere — but it’s not published yet*** so I’ll try and restate it swiftly. Rock and jazz are both group musics, but the latter is primarily about group encounters of adult individuals, publicly exploring their differences, and the former about teenage collectivity: gangs, if you like (in the Bash Street rather than the GoodFellas sense). Prog and fusion represent the moment when the two wings each began to probe the aesthetic antipode — I orginally wrote “tentatively”, but really it was anything but.

The social context was of course the suddenly newly imaginable utopia of a post-segregation-world: where black, brown, white and etc are equals, free to co-mingle, and so are jazz and classical and rock and roll and all the rest…

Fusion swapped the jagged encounter of individuals, in self-consciously temporary immediacy of togetherness, for the bruising head-on encounter of whole genres and styles: Afro jazz, jazz-funk, Third Stream… fascinated and semi-appalled by rock, Miles Davis pretty much invented this — just, no accident, as his producer Teo Macero slipped the invisible tape-splice into jazz practice — and you can trace ita line through early, rock-inflected Mahavishnu, Marcello C’s beloved Escalator over the Hill, and beyond, into what came in the 80s to be called Harmolodic Collision…

(Not that this is fusion is how remembered — because most of the musicianly professionals in that wing of jazz baulked at rock’s inexperienced teenage tactlessness, swerving instead towards trans-stylistic politesse and diluted diplomatic compromise, sutured by glib pseudo-spiritual polymorphism into over-smooth, self-abnegating piety jams. It was very passive-aggressive, fetishising — and paradoxically de-libidinising — that achieved serene cultural one-ness it claimed to illustrate and exemplify.

Prog, by contrast — well, let’s get to particulars, it’s clearer. King Crimson quilted unusual and disparate modes of performer, each writhing round the angular iron frame of Fripp’s signature riffs. Yes spliced together barely related bright fragments of proto-NuPop semisongs into extended sequences of pretty but highly variable meaningfulness. In ELP, Emerson himself was the quilt, with his thuggish yet oddly characterless mastery of every kind of modern keyboard style…

The glue in prog was almost always over-excited virtuosity: the carnival excitement of dextrous fingers and stamina and dazzle got you past the more abrupt shifts. The effect — given the context — is, at least over the long haul, of massive anxiety, displacement activity — and the obstacle course of often quite ugly riffs — radiated chaotic unease about its own coherence, and thus doubts even about the possibility of the lovely new unbarriered world it yearned for, this radical countercultural oneness. The unity of all was no balm of easy commonality: it was a state of peace that had, paradoxically aggressively, to be fought for, by all involved…

Jump-cut now to 1991, and the portal through which the big-beast repressed actually came back. Which we’ll call Sampladelic Concept QuiltProg: Frankie with Trevor Horn (and Steve Howe!), Malcolm McLaren juggling opera and hiphop and township and voguing, and of course the KLF… all working with a smash of elements — styles and genres in glittering precast fragments, hurtling across one another, in a whirl of irony and profusion and barrier-crashing and the epochal fleeting dream of oneness, out of all these elements distinct and driven and contradictory, glued now by well-practiced digital means and excellent ears, and also — just to emphasise what was so central — a RADICALLY slippy way with self-declaration. As if to say: haha you won’t catch ME being unequivocal about my allegiances; my position on all and any of this remains elusive, because your enlightenment emerges out of CATCH AS CATCH CAN….

Which is to say — massive DO YOU SEE nudge — “ambiguity” and “mystery” and “enigma”… and MCMXCad as another project in this precise tream, countercultural anti-clerical concept handwave against new age yearning that nevertheless itself dreams of the serene endorsement of same, and the cynical marketing, and ________ and __________ and _________

A failed project? It’s not as if much of the above gets through into routine understanding of McLaren or the KLF, either (or Queen, since I think I talked myself into including them…). MCMXCad gets drearier the more you listen to it — to “see through” it is not to redeem it — and that’s what it’s taken me longest to explain, to myself as much as anything. In the last part of the last song, in “Back to the River of Belief”, a godawful rock-ordinaire vocal lays itself open: (“I look inside my heart, I look inside my soul/I’m reaching out for you, let’s hope one day/We’ll rest in peace on my rivers of belief“). (“My” rivers, note: not “yours” or “ours“.) And there’s a drop-in — jump-cut non-surprise surprise — of a posh English voice reading from (course) Revelations (the lamb and the seventh seal), then massive rising Floyd-chord and keyby pipes and everlastingly looped eroto-beat … But here’s the thing, in all of this. Where their prog-fusion predecessors and NuPop rivals (sometimes) could and can tweak and challenge and ensnare us, confront us in their thrilling flaws and delusions and utopias and contradictions with our own, shared or opposed, Enigma, mocking or promising unearned solace, bliss-on-a-stick, never dare to step beyond cover to engage the riverlike complacency of our resolute UNbelief. “Mah friend” sings the smarmy voice — but it’s the passive-aggressive and pro-forma “brother” or “sister” or “comrade” or “citizen” of the interlocutor who doesn’t trust himself to talk as an equal — to Pope or to puritan or to prostitute — without a mask. “My rivers“, remember: despite the fact that nowhere, in this entire project, does he un-pin-downably declare his beliefs. He should have gone with “fuckbuddy“.

FOOTNOTES
*I’m actually inclined to be fairly approving of yoga, since a friend taught me entirely to transform my asthma management via yogic breathing exercises. If it’s associated in the west with unearned leisure-time, the fault is a world-system that denies most of the world the time or cash-space for any type of leisure. And one of my allergies has long been that species of shallow and cynical pseudo-critique that, having “decoded” the “signification” of native American chants in this or that throwaway western tosh, then proceeds to accept this as the WHOLE of their meaning ANYWHERE. It’s the kind of lazy shortcut that ends with Jeremy Clarkson sniggering at the death of the last whale, just because it will upset some earnest silly hippies somewhere.
**Yes SHUT UP I know you don’t really glue quilts. THIS METAPHOR IS ALSO IN THE FORM OF A QUILT!
***Relevant essay to be published in Afrofuturism: Interstellar Transmissions from Remix Culture, ed. Tobias c. van Veen, 2011. Detroit: Wayne State UP. YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T WAIT.

hank williams is a THREE

andy taylor is a FOUR

james/jim morrison — it tiresomely turns out — is a FIVE

luckily michael/mike/mick/mickie/micky/mickey jones is a TEN!

MIKE JONES the RAPPER
MIKE JONES the JAZZ MUSICIAN
MICK JONES of FOREIGNER
MICK JONES of THE CLASH
MICKEY JONES of ANGEL
MICKEY JONES that drummed for JOHNNY RIVERS and etc
MICKY JONES late of MAN
MICHAEL JONES the NEW AGE PIANIST
MICHAEL JONES the FRENCH/WELSH MUSICIAN
MICHAEL JONES of WHALEFEATHERS

Can we do better? Also: these are all BOYS which is a bit lame.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

Lovecraft meets Von Daniken in the (ok quite long) shadow of the 1972 King Tut show at the British Museum (which my family went to London to see, but didn’t bcz the queue was so long): in an isolated Victorian folly in 1911, surrounded by excavated Egyptian relics, a MITEY and EEVIL ELDER GOD WHO HATES ALL MORTAL LIFE (viz SUTEKH aka SET aka SATAN aka the TYPHONIAN BEAST) has been semi-unleashed, and is attempting via minions to complete the process: only 4 aka BB and SJS can save the universe. Will they succeed? Now read on…

i: i believe this is the first follow-on adventure — on the way back to 1980 from the far distant and the planet of evil, the inteprid pair are hijacked by radiopulses from the Edwardian era and have to stop ANOTHER all-powerful alien escaping its prison; a meme-repetition that perhaps explains why they are so tetchy with one another — BB is in a foully sarcastic mood throughout, nearly as contemptuous of sentimental human frailty as Sutekh, and SJS twitchily goads him and snipes: since this means NO JELLYBABERY this is a plus; actively and deliberately dislikeable BB is an improvement on the DR SuPERTWEE of relentless memory…
ii: as in the later Fang Rock, the planet/universe may be saved, but none of the locals are. Egyptologist Marcus Scarman is an animated corpse from the very first moments, when we see him open a tomb and encounter some AWFUL; also unsaved are his butler; his befezzed organplaying sidekick; his friend Dr Warlock; his boffinish brother Lawrence; a local poacher; and the house itself.
iii: Lawrence is an excellent and unusually sympathetic character, by turns stunned by events, excited by future technology and time-travel, and confused and unhappy at what’s become of his brother, which he refuses quite to believe (creating at one point an unused set-up: he gets his zombie brother briefly to recall who he was before he died; you assume when BB is later mesmerised — tho not killed — by Sutekh that he will be reminded of his true self by SJS… which doesn’t happen
iv: nice moments = mostly relating to the poacher, really — he has to watch out for mantraps and stores unstable gelignite in his shed!; the sonic screwdriver is FOR ONCE used non-magically, to unlock a forcefield by overriding an ultrasonic signal; there’s a brief slightly hurried appearance of the “truthtelling guard, lying guard” logic puzzle when they arrive in the martian pyramid (singular not plural, despite storytitle) — nice if goofy idea that the Osirians would leave the health of the future universe guarded only by a sequence of Crystal Maze-esque puzzles…
v: for the thousandth time we learn the hard-won easly-lost wisdom that MINIONS AREN’T THAT BRIGHT! Sutekh himself is held in some time-locked pyramid chamber in egypt, controlled by a radiopulse from mars. He has a certain amount of mindpower — can control zombies and suppress bomb explosions — but essentially they bumble around failing to get anything done right. This is why democracy is better than tyranny DO YOU SEE. (Actually it is and since Sutekh has been stuck in a companionless hole for millennia without television, it’s maybe fair enough that HE hasn’t discovered this…)
vi: And so to Sutekh, who is rather terrific, courtesy (a) the mask and (b) Gabriel Woolf’s voice-performance, all quiet-spoken casually sadistic malice and suppressed rage. Terrific as long as he doesn’t take his mask off — the Osirians may have cerebra in the shape of spiral starcases, but they are not a daunting race to look at :(
vii: Besides well-worn horror-tropes, S has forgotten anything he knew about physical form, apparently — possibly because thought-control isn’t relativistic, timewise, where radiowaves and just plain walking are. BB nips across space to convert the short timetunnel into a fatally long one; Sutekh will die before he gets to the exit. In a way, this is as deflating, after the epic techno-mythic nonsense, as Wells’s Martians being defeated by germs — but it too is a long-established TV/Who notion: that it’s the small things that count.

Plot-wise, the victory of the forces of good is a matter of luck — the TARDIS was deflected to the scene; the poacher has SWEATY GELIGNITE — as much as strategy, but when this is combined with the edgy bad temper of our heroes, it’s a weirdly potent mix. It’s scrappy, inelegantly structured, cliched, and not exactly profound. But I did enjoy it.