Marc Camille Chaimowicz loved ellipses. The artist, who passed away in May, used them liberally in his correspondences. Ellipses ornamented his artwork titles and gave rhythm to his published writing. He would never have put his name to anything as declarative as an artistic manifesto—such things are too pleased with being right, skirt too close to the petrified mindset of ideology—but if he did it would have been simply … A modest ellipsis, a tool for evoking ambiguity … privacy … space … a quiet eroticism. A mark which privileges allusion over assertion. It allows for the possibility that someone or something new may enter the picture. If Marc Camille were to give those three dots a colour, they would not be in childish primaries but in his preferred pastels or greys: “greys that seem to tap a reservoir of nuance and colour,” he once wrote, “… in a sense, not really greys at all … greys that in their handling have become more than a mix of two extremes … have become a new breed.”

I met Marc Camille when I was a student at the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford during the mid-1990s. He came up from London to give tutorials a couple of times each term and had, by then, perfected his uniform: a trilby or cap, a shirt and blazer accented with an elegant silk scarf. Marc Camille took young people seriously. We’d talk in my little studio space, he would sit and roll a cigarette, ask how I was doing, how the work was coming along. Charming and funny, he was generous with suggestions, courteous without making a meal of performing good manners. This was, in subtle ways, a key part of his work. Many artists are good at seeing, fewer are good at listening. He knew how to put others at the centre of conversation. If his art was the subject of discussion, he would treat you as his equal, make you feel as if you had an important part to play in articulating his ideas. As news of his death circulated, variations on the same remark recurred: “he was a real gent.”

We tend to fix people in our minds at the age they are when we first meet them, but I was never quite sure what age he was. I noticed how he would sometimes omit his birth year from exhibition biographies, replacing it with “born in postwar Paris.” It is strange for me to realize now that when I was a student, he was only a couple of years older than I am today. There was always something out-of-time about Marc Camille and his work, simultaneously old world and ultra modern, possessed of qualities, “stored in the future to be exhumed in the past,” to borrow a line from Michael Bracewell’s Souvenir. His careful diction and syntax carried distant echoes of an other era, while his energy and excitement was for the new—or new ways of revisiting old work. He spoke about feeling out-of-place, suspended in-between—those ellipses again—something he put down to his Anglo-French identity, to the wrench of moving as a child in the early 1950s from Paris to the English new town of Stevenage. (In his adult years he lived between London and Dijon.) As he once put it to me, “if somebody in his early childhood is removed from a particular cultural environment and then has to process that relatively brutal displacement, that person is liable, is he not, to fantasize?”

Through his art—literary, romantic, epistolary, equal parts sensual and intellectual—Marc Camille could dream of his artist forebears in interwar Paris or Vienna. Working relationships with other artists kept him grounded in present-day London. He drew and painted semi-abstract forms—hints of flowers and feathers whispering from lines of fluent brushwork and stippled marks, neatly-inked Art Deco geometries. These functioned as drawings and paintings but could also be used as designs for fabric and wallpaper. He made sculptures which doubled as desks and chairs, chairs that could be flipped into chaise-longues, upholstered in patterns derived from drawing. The substance of his work, however, lay in the question of how we use such things to shape our private and social selves.

For Celebration? Reallife, a significant early piece made in 1972 for the inaugural show at Gallery House, London, Marc Camille dressed the floor with archipelagos of beads and mirrors, flowers, candles, plastic tat and copies of the International Times. There was a bust of Beethoven, a photo of Lenin, another of Janis Joplin. Coloured light spilled across the floor. Glitterballs ricocheted the colours around the gallery. It looked like the aftermath of a party. It was excessive, intoxicating. Marc Camille, in jelly sandals, offered visitors coffee and conversation, played records for them by David Bowie and The Who. He tended to the space as if it were housework. This was decades before a certain type of participatory art came into fashion, before scattering objects across the floor became a familiar device in sculpture. (Squinting hard enough, it may have been possible to trace the influence of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings in the piece, and perceive in the work a kind of Situationism for those who distrusted -isms.) Gustav Metzger, who was exhibiting a conceptual work on the floor above Marc Camille, remembered the air, heavy with odours and heat from the lamps. Barricaded into the space downstairs lurked the artist Stuart Brisley, who was painting the derelict rooms black. The exhibition was titled ‘Three Life Situations.’ Martin McGeown, co-founder of Cabinet Gallery, who represented Marc Camille’s work, once described to me that vertical stack of Brisley, Chaimowicz and Metzger at Gallery House as, respectively, the id, ego and superego of British art that year.

Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, and Marcel Proust were Marc Camille’s touchstones. “I’m working more closely to the way writers might,” he told me, “in that they establish certain parameters of sensibility and then elaborate new work to look at different aspects of their central concern.” His work synthesized painting, performance, writing, sculpture, ceramics, and interior design. Combinations of each element were kept perpetually open-ended: a photograph might appear in a sequence of slides for a performance piece, then a year later turn up in a book, and decades on, hung on the wall. This sense of recurrence imitated the way an old memory can surface then dissolve into a new context. He would invite artists to contribute pieces for his room installations, put them alongside works by early 20th century modernists, and offer his own work for others to use. Rugs, folding screens, and movable panels could be rearranged as if to satisfy a change of mood or circumstance. Repeat patterns, such as those used for wallpaper or endpapers in books, suggested a species of idea which could extend beyond the edges of its support, design with an infinite horizon. His work appeared on advertisements, on commercially produced scarves, textiles, wine labels. He delighted in the idea of producing a wallpaper or fabric anonymously, to be mass-produced and sold under the name of its supplier, so that someone might pick out a design for their home purely for the way it looked rather than who made it.

In the 1970s, as Marc Camille’s work began to find its shape and move away from the scatter style of Celebration? Reallife and its sister piece, Enough Tiranny [sic], the applied arts and their expression in the domestic environment became profoundly important to him. He made images of himself at home, doing household tasks, hosting a visitor, or lost in reverie. Marc Camille was attuned to the pop culture of the period: glam rock androgyny, Patti Smith and Lou Reed, the sophisticated art-into-life style games of those Peter York referred to as “Thems.” (By the early 1980s, his evocations of old modernist European sensibilities, sung to the tune of American-influenced pop, would be read as New Romantic.) But Marc Camille’s interest in the applied arts ran against the grain of the macho formalism, didactic politics and dry “critique” which then dominated the art world. Design for the home was regarded as feminine, inferior to heroic painting and sculpture. Colour was suspect. Pleasure was reactionary. I recall him telling me how much he disliked the use of the word ‘rigour’ in art—the way people said they admired “formal rigour,” or used “conceptually rigorous’ as a compliment—describing it as “tyrannical,” an intellectual machismo, a boast of power which left nothing to the imagination or to doubt.

Gradually, Marc Camille was integrating design and art into every aspect of his life, out of a typically understated and quiet refusal to be categorized. To understand what he was doing, wrote Stuart Morgan: “Unlearn “art”. Unlearn “artwork”. Unlearn “closure”. Unlearn “public” and “private”. Finally unlearn “man”. Decoration, the use of cosmetics, most of all an insistence on abandoning machismo as a mode of artistic behaviour, have served to make his desire for universality even more evident.”

It was common then for artists to use their studios as the setting for photos and videos. But where industrial lofts in New York’s SoHo or the disused Victorian warehouses on Bankside in London could double as white cube galleries in the rough, Marc Camille’s studio, a terraced house on Approach Road in east London, resembled a conventional home. “The lease was short term and soon he would have to move,” read the text for his 1977 book Dream, an anecdote, “but he had decorated it to his taste and attempted to keep it tidy, to wash the windows regularly, to water the plants, to house clean … Here he could sit alone for hours, day dreaming and wandering, dwelling on ills and pleasures and on how personalities were affected by inner and outer worlds…”

At Approach Road he shot intimate black-and-white images of people sharing coffee and cigarettes, faces out of frame or turned with diffidence away from the camera. He photographed chairs arranged around a side table. The artist asleep in bed, or looking out of a bay window onto the street, or stood in the hallway calling a friend on the a phone. The figure in the image was usually Marc Camille, occasionally a woman with short hair, dressed in similar clothes. In the background, you might spot one of his designs hand-stencilled onto the wall. At the edge of the image, a sculpture, subordinated to curtains and a vase of flowers, working to balance the elements in the composition. He paired his images with writing. Travelogues, meditations, third-person narratives about an unnamed person who may or may not be Marc Camille. It was impossible to know which came first, whether the words followed the image, or vice versa. The mystery was important; the sense of simultaneity between language and image imitated thought.

Occasionally he would make a more intensely romantic image: in Table Tableau, for instance, he is slumped forward on a dresser, half-naked, make-up on his face, a glass of Pernod at his elbow, a fox fur at his feet. The set-up was based on a story he knew about a man sat alone one night in the Lyons Corner House, Marble Arch, during the 1930s. The man heard a piece of music so moving that he got up and left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Table Tableau existed as a gallery performance. It appeared as a tightly-cropped photograph shot in his home, reproduced on the cover of Studio International. Marc Camille also reworked it as a short video to be shown on television, accompanied by a violin composition by Conal Shields. Each time it was a little different in colour and composition, as if to escape being definitive. There was always the sense in Marc Camille’s work, as there is when trying to get to know any person, that you were only ever getting a partial view of something bigger that was out of frame, and that there was an important element of his art being kept private from the world.

This was not statement art, not a conceptual puzzle to be solved. His images were irreducible and enigmatic. They were scents and suggestions. Today these qualities seem ever more valuable amid the bossy clamour of “aboutism”; of this artwork being “about” that issue, of this “dealing with” that. The violence of certainty. Rigour. For Marc Camille, domestic tasks, enjoying company, making art, were all variables which could be tuned in and out of visibility, in and out of being art or being simply what they were—doing the dishes, dinner with a friend.

From Approach Road he had moved to a flat in south London. Visitors to his home would arrive to find chairs arranged around a small table in the living room, on which would be set porcelain cups and a pot of coffee. The curtains were drawn just-so, to calibrate the atmosphere, letting in enough light to bring out dustings of peppermint colour on the wall and taupe in the carpeting. The situation was in search of an elusive temperance of mood. What was remarkable was how it could feel so informal while simultaneously subtly choreographed. A visitor might, at some point during the conversation, spot an object familiar from one of Marc Camille’s books. They may then feel as if they were in a photo they remembered from in a museum somewhere, pinned to a folding screen, projected in a darkened room. It didn’t need explanation. This was private conviviality and a private act of art, which didn’t need to be proven in public or explained online. A scene in a Gesamtkunstwerk that didn’t need to show-off about being one. But creative industries do not always understand creative individuals. In 2008, The World of Interiors magazine ran a feature about the flat. Marc Camille took the entire issue and turned it into an exquisitely made artist’s book, also titled The World of Interiors, complete with the advertisements and other articles, cut up, collaged, shuffled, recontextualized, drawn and stencilled over, new and old texts added. Condé Nast, owners of the magazine, missed the point and demanded that all copies of the book were to be confiscated and pulped.

When I was a student, I had the (possibly mistaken) impression that Marc Camille’s work had disappeared from view in the UK. It was illegible to whichever version of the 1990s each of the various factions of the British art world was experiencing. Too private and romantic for the brash one sprawled over the tabloids and on the pavement outside Soho drinking clubs; too ambiguous and small-‘p’ political for the if-it-hurts-it’s-good-for-you theory boys and armchair revolutionaries; still too light for the heavy metal sculptors in their big dusty work boots. But the lunar cycles turned and in the early 2000s Marc Camille’s work reemerged as if returning from a quiet retreat. People were excited about performance art again. The relationship between art and design was under discussion. Old back issues of Studio International from the 1970s were being dusted off in order to remember what had been forgotten.

I didn’t see Marc Camille for some years after college. By that time I was working as an editor at frieze magazine. His gallery, I seem to recall, had put us back in touch, for an article I was writing about his work. I travelled to Berlin to see him revive a performance from 1980 titled Partial Eclipse, which he staged again soon after at Tate Britain. A dissolving slideshow of views inside Approach Road. A sense of pale winter light. A female voice evokes interior feelings, describes a meeting. Marc Camille paces the room, interrupting the projector beam and images of his younger self. Kraftwerk then Eno in the background. Curling cigarette smoke. Dust motes. Solitude. The dot-dot-dot. (Curator Catherine Wood, a friend and supporter of the artist for decades, remembers that she had to obtain special permission to allow Marc Camille to smoke inside the Tate galleries for the performance.) Soon after my essay was published, I received a package in the post. Inside was an inscribed copy of Marc Camille’s 1985 book Café du rêve, along with a letter.

Café du rêve is an illustrated travelogue in which an unnamed narrator describes a journey through Europe and north Africa. It is diaristic and reflective, punctuated by occasional ecstatic details about each place. Postcards and photographs of empty squares, parks and doorways attempt to capture emotional events invisible to the camera. These are set against hand-drawn decorative backgrounds and type arranged like blank verse. The letter which came in the package was handwritten. In short, evocative sentences, Marc Camille described receiving the magazine through the mail and looking at the layout of the feature. He wrote that his first impressions felt good, but that he wanted to take a walk before reading it. The letter described the weather and the quiet mood of London in late December, empty of people disappeared home for the holidays. Returning to his flat he wrote that he decided—I can recall the phrases exactly—“to pour myself a glass of green chartreuse” and “retreat to the bedroom,” to read the article. There followed a paragraph about my essay. He signed off the letter “with empathy.”

Private correspondences such as these matter to writers more than anything public. Without the sense that the art has been seen and the words have been read, for artists and writers alike, we might as well be talking to ourselves. Marc Camille was always encouraging to young artists, curators and writers. For a 2008 show at De Appel he chose the title ‘… In the Cherished Company of Others …’ He explained to me how this “hopefully implies that, although we might choose to court solitude to a high degree, we should never find ourselves fetishizing the sadness of isolation, conceptual or otherwise.” The recognition that no artist—nobody—can function in sequestration from the world was baked into his work. One recurring motif was a sculpture in the form of a half-arch, which leans on the wall rather than supports anything. It can be spotted in some of his Approach Road photographs, propped against a bay window frame. In one sense, this thing is asking for company—it needs another pillar in order to stand upright. Yet there is a subtle truth in this half-complete shape. It is an object which is whole in its desire to be whole. None of us can ever be completed, or entirely “understood” by another person. The half-arch stands for both solitude and for sociability.

Our conversations continued. I wrote about his work for a small catalogue published by a German museum. We did a talk together for students at the Royal Academy Schools in London, at the invitation of the artist Kira Freije, part of another, younger, generation he’d come into contact with. He invited me to write the music for a short video he had made based on Genet’s play, The Maids. One of his Approach Road photographs was reproduced in my book Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, and he was amused when it appeared on the cover of the Spanish translation, Pretenciosidad. During Covid we emailed about walking in the parks we each lived next to—his in London, mine in New York—and Marc Camille was, as ever, excited to make his next exhibition and book. I felt seen by him, and understood as a creative person who was more than his day job. The important point is that I was far from unique in this: countless others who knew Marc Camille have stories of his friendship and support which go much deeper than mine.

I’ve never forgotten that letter he sent some twenty years ago. It seems typically Chaimowiczian that a light gesture could carry great weight. Since then I’ve tried, not always successfully, to keep his sign-off in mind as a working motto: “with empathy.” Stuart Morgan—coincidentally another regular at the Ruskin School in the 1990s—wrote that “photography, as Chaimowicz himself remarks in a footnote to Café du rêve, is unable to record certain sensations which seem eminently photographable. Nor can feelings be captured which are apparently very precise. The danger is of restoring the picture badly—of describing a man in a room, rather than a certain man in a special room.” Like a camera I now find that my pictures of Marc Camille cannot describe a certain man in a special room.

dan-fox.com

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A couple of weeks ago, as the news spread that the New York novelist Paul Auster had died, a black-and-white photo of him circulated on social media. It shows Auster in his early twenties, wavy hair swept back, dark crew-neck sweater. He looks off to one side, his fingers outstretched towards something out of frame. He is strikingly handsome, like a French movie star of a bygone era; a young Jean Marais, an Alain Delon.

The picture is a still taken from The Fall, a messy fiction-documentary shot by British director Peter Whitehead in the US between October 1967 and May 1968, and released in 1969. The novelist’s death wasn’t the only reason why this image was doing the rounds. Whitehead had filmed Auster by chance. He was a face in a group of students occupying the Mathematics Building at Columbia University during protests in the spring of 1968. The revolt had begun in March that year, sparked off by revelations about the university’s secret involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a military think-tank. Tensions rose when members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were sanctioned over a protest about Columbia’s relationship with the IDA, which contravened the university’s rules against indoor demonstrations. Students and locals alike were also furious that the university was building a new gymnasium for its exclusive use on nearby Morningside Park in Harlem. The plan mandated separate entrances for students and for Harlem residents—it was nicknamed “Gym Crow”—and the development inflamed the mood on campus. But these were symptoms of deeper anxieties: Vietnam, civil rights, despair at a world run by rich old men.

Throughout the 1960s, Whitehead demonstrated an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. He was in New York working on The Fall when he heard about the Columbia protest. Sensing this was something he couldn’t miss, he decided to visit the upper Manhattan campus with his camera, tape recorder and his assistant Sebastian Keep. There he shot footage of activists H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael speaking on behalf of black students who had occupied the university’s nearby Hamilton Hall. He toured sit-ins at the Fayerweather Hall and Low Library. The students occupying the Mathematics Building had barricaded it from the inside, but with the help of Melvin Margolis—a young filmmaker and member of the Newsreel collective—Whitehead gained entry through a second floor window, intending to stay and film either until the students decided to end the occupation or until the police broke it by force. According to his journals—take with a pinch of salt—he was shortly after challenged by student Tom Hurwitz, the occupation’s “head of defense” and later a filmmaker himself. “Look man I'm sorry,” said Hurwitz, “I know we let you in, but you'll have to go. There's no argument. We have decided.” Whitehead pleaded his case, trying to convince Hurwitz that he was on the side of the students. “My third [film] was banned in Greece only last week […] and my last film was the only film about protesting against Vietnam to come out of England.” Then Hurwitz twigged that he had seen Whitehead’s work at the New York Film Festival the previous year. “Why didn’t you tell us who you were!? I know all about you…”

In The Fall, we see shots of chairs, desks, and card file cabinets piled against the entrance doors, defended by a second line of fire hoses. Whitehead catches Auster on camera at a meeting chaired by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the SDS. Hayden, a little older than the others, sits on a desk at one end of the room with half-a-dozen student representatives, quietly guiding the conversation. Hurwitz is discussing responsibility for cleaning up, mopping spills, sweeping broken glass, making sure that emergency flashlights are where they should be. The group is sat on the floor. One man is taking a nap face down and has a copy of Dubliners by James Joyce sticking out of his back pocket. The camera lands on Auster, and watches him in a tight close-up as he takes a smoke from a woman sat next to him. The shot pulls out a fraction. Her hand rests on his shoulder. She looks at him affectionately. The pair seem to be half-listening to the discussion, half-involved in their own private exchange.

Whitehead had originally gone to the US in September 1967 for the New York Film Festival. He screened two documentaries, Benefit of the Doubt and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, the two films Hurwitz had seen. (Whitehead writes that he later met another student in the Mathematics Building who had also been at the film festival. “She was pretty scathing about my films because she felt I was a depressed, pessimistic person but I was trying too hard to cover [this] up.”) Benefit of the Doubt was a record of director Peter Brook’s anti-Vietnam War play US, staged at the Aldwych Theatre. It featured actress Glenda Jackson speaking the immortal line: “I want to smell the running bowels of fear over the English Sunday morning smell of gin and the roasting joint and hyacinths.” Tonite… was an impressionistic portrait of London under the sign of pop; a blaze of psychedelic colour and clothes set against a backdrop of postwar dilapidation and establishment tradition. It featured actors and rock stars talking about the new moment. Syd-era Pink Floyd drove the soundtrack. After the festival, two theatre producers, Iris Sawyer and Elinor Silverman, put it to Whitehead that he should make another film like Tonite… about New York. They raised the financing to allow him to get started. But as he began work a few weeks later, the director found he was more interested in America’s social unrest than in the New York scene.

In the early 1960s, after a brief stint studying painting, then film, at the Slade School of Fine Art, Whitehead had apprenticed as a cameraman for Italian news television. He learned how to shoot verité-style on handheld equipment and developed a keen eye for the small detail which might tell a big story, for what material would work best in the edit. The techniques allowed him to be nimble, an artist disguised as a reporter. He caught the aftermath of riots in New Jersey and went to Washington DC to film the March on the Pentagon. (The Fall includes a self-deprecating Robert Lowell reading his poem ‘The March’: “I sat in the sunset shade of their Bastille, their Pentagon, / nursing leg and arch-cramps, my cowardly, / foolhardy heart.”) In New York Whitehead’s camera drank in the neon, the skyscrapers, the buzz of radio and glow of TV. He shot countless street marches, filmed pro-Vietnam War rallies attended by zealous young conservatives and scenes of ordinary people arguing in the street about American foreign policy. In one memorable vignette, a respectably-dressed older woman, outraged, tells the crowd gathered around her that the daily cost of military spending could cover two years of rat extermination in the city—a true New Yorker’s take on the war. Whitehead filmed Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail. He captured performances by Bread and Puppet Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a Robert Rauschenberg ballet, and the artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz destroying a piano and dismembering a live chicken in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church.

After returning to the UK to review his material, Whitehead decided to put it to use in a loose fictional narrative. He began to imagine The Fall as a personal film, a psychological portrait of a place. It would be a self-reflexive work about the power of media technology, his big statement about how violence in America was internalized by its people through its communications industries. He would involve a handful of actors and tell the story of a British filmmaker visiting the USA, an underground De Tocqueville, who decides to carry out an assassination. He wrote in his journal that “this must indeed be a masterpiece and can be”—Whitehead was short on modesty and long on bravado—“it really has to be the definitive film at this historical moment in time in world history.” But when he returned to the US in the spring of the following year to continue production, events overtook him at speed, and his confidence began to crack.

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In Paul Cronin’s 2007 fascinating portrait of Whitehead, In the Beginning Was the Image, the filmmaker comes across as a reluctant witness, a man who spent the 1960s trying to dodge the zeitgeist only to keep running headlong into it. For Whitehead, the 1960s didn’t sour with Manson and Altamont in 1969, as the conventional US narrative holds. He believed it was grim from the start. The peace movement didn’t originate with the Vietnam War, but with the horrors of World War II, with the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches and the “angry young” writers of the late 1950s. What held the UK counterculture together wasn’t LSD and Carnaby Street clothes but anger at what Whitehead described as “the institutionalization of imperialism against the Third World […] against the old monotheistic, patriarchal, Tory, righteous, British elitist shit.” He believed the best account of the 1960s was poet Jeff Nuttall’s memoir Bomb Culture, published in 1968, before the decade had even finished, an extreme and complicated book described by the playwright Dennis Potter as “an abscess which lances itself.”

Whitehead said that he disliked pop culture, said that he only rarely went out, preferring to spend his nights at home in his flat reading and writing. But you could easily have mistaken him for the archetype of a Swinging London man. Son of a Liverpudlian plumber and a factory worker, he was working-class and on the up, part of a symbolic reshuffle in British society in the 1960s. Scholarship to private school, then Cambridge University, provided him with self-confidence and the social camouflage of an upper-middle-class accent. Whitehead was handsome and raffish. He had a flat in the middle of London’s West End and seemed to know everybody on the scene. The new, young aristocracy featured in his films: Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Jimi Hendrix, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave, and the Rolling Stones, among others. He had relationships with talented, creative women, including the artists Penny Slinger and Niki de Saint Phalle.

In the early 1970s he went to France and made the bizarre, psycho-sexual movie Daddy with de Saint Phalle (“From the moment I met Niki I was in a surrealist movie. Perhaps a horror movie,” he said in an interview with Virginie Sélavy.) Later that decade he made Fire in the Water with another woman he was involved with, Natalie Delon. But by then he had made sharp off-road diversion from film and taken up falconry. By some accounts he gave, this career followed a revelation in the Egyptian department of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. By others, it was after seeing a man communicating with birds in an Edinburgh square. Falconry took him to north Africa and to Pakistan. In the early 1980s he moved to Saudi Arabia and with funding from Prince Khalid al-Faisal set up a falcon breeding centre at the top of a mountain. There he lived and worked until the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, after which Whitehead returned to the UK and poured his energies into writing fiction. (In Cronin’s film he also adds death threats from the Spanish mafia to list of the reason he gave up falcon breeding.)

He married into the Goldsmiths family. Rumours floated in the margins of counterculture histories about his friendship with drug dealer Howard Marks, about alleged links to the intelligence services, about his interests in mysticism and the occult. In 1998, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair made an experimental film portrait of Whitehead for Channel 4, titled The Falconer, deliberately smudging rumour with fact, which led to Whitehead and the film’s directors falling out. Until the early 2000s, his films were difficult to see. Fragments of them surfaced here and there as anonymous archive footage in other people’s accounts of the 1960s. (Watch Catching Fire, a new documentary about Anita Pallenberg, and you will see Whitehead’s work standing in to represent the 1960s pop explosion.)

The director, who died in 2019, was an expert at self-mythologizing. In Cronin’s documentary he tells his life story to camera, and through his digressions gives away his contradictions. He was a raconteur, prone to grandiose statements, but at the same time, he appeared haunted by doubt about the value of his work. He was self-absorbed, but also curious about other people and by the natural world. He tilted at the establishment while taking opportunities offered to him by “British elitist shit” and Saudi royalty. He spoke with pride about his personal relationships, said he was sympathetic to feminism, but in sexist language little changed since the macho 1960s. He was a decent painter who ended up making pottery. A classical music lover famous for his pop documentaries. An artist who gave up art for endangered birds of prey. A trained news cameraman who distrusted reportage and played with the truth.

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After making The Perception of Life, an inventive short film about the history of science and microscopy, Whitehead’s major break came in 1965, when he was handed the opportunity to film the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall. Wholly Communion captures readings by the poets Harry Fainlight, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Logue, and Adrian Mitchell among others. We see the writer Alexander Trocchi, the event’s MC and shadowy magus of the London counterculture, lurking at the side of the stage and we hear arguments, cheering, laughter, heckling. But what’s most fascinating is its footage of the audience packed into the smoke-filled Albert Hall, their clothing and attitudes catching an inflection point as beatnik London begins to cross-fade into a hipper, but heavier, psychedelic phase. Whitehead somehow makes the auditorium look vast and intimate at the same time; from one angle his restless camerawork gives the impression of the event taking place in a small club, and from another, a cathedral. The energy in the room is prickly, chaotic. There is a palpable sense of something new coming into being that night, of ‘the underground’ suddenly seeing itself in public in all its uneasy alliances and fragmentary, social coincidences, all of which could disintegrate at any moment. Wholly Communion captures a truth about incoherence often lost to the glue of history and nostalgia.

The film led to a phone call from Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who asked Whitehead to follow the group on tour in Ireland. (“How could I tell him I spend all my time listening to Verdi's Requiem,” he wrote, “that I never go to nightclubs, have never danced to pop music in my life, […] the perfect re-creation of hell on earth for a long-suffering sensitive soul like me!”) In Charlie Is My Darling the Stones are musically confident, but somewhat unsure how to perform for the camera, cockiness masking an awkward immaturity, perhaps shyness. Whitehead is drawn to recording the mayhem that erupted at their gigs, to scenes of fans grabbing and pulling at the members of the band who struggle to keep playing or escape off stage. Michelangelo Antonioni reputedly watched a cut of the film at Whitehead’s flat, shortly before shooting The Yardbirds for his milestone film Blow-Up.

Promotional film work followed for P.P. Arnold, the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Nico, and the Small Faces. Then came Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. Whitehead thought of it as a retort to Time magazine’s 'Swinging London’ article, published in April 1966, and the emerging media narrative around the city. It’s his first-hand account of what it was like to be embedded in a particular version of mid-1960s London, the one which would later be mistake for everyone’s experience. We see curious nuns browsing clothes at Biba, anti-war marches, the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream rock concert at Alexandra Palace, Pink Floyd in the studio. He repurposes his Stones footage from Charlie Is My Darling, taking scenes of fans invading the stage and putting them in slow-motion in order to pull out a violent subtext. The film’s interviews capture the inchoate feelings of the time, artists struggling to pinpoint what is happening around them. Edna O’Brien discusses female promiscuity. David Hockney says that he finds two footballers on a new Royal Mail stamp sexy. Mick Jagger almost manages to articulate something about violence and consumerism. An insouciant, self-described “dolly bird” talks about her “do what you like, no one cares” lifestyle.

Tonite… strives to be more than a straight documentary. Interviews are cut with long sequences of blurring light trails and strobed shadows of dancers. The camera ogles a naked woman covered in body paint. We see Eric Burdon of The Animals recording a song in the studio, intercut with aerial footage of World War II bombers and fighter planes. There are jumps, dissolves and non-sync sound. The camerawork is casual and present in the moment. With this film, Whitehead was embarking on an inner voyage, reaching for a psychological evocation of his London, edging closer in style to the work of his French New Wave idols or what glimpses of underground cinema he may have caught. But his artistry doesn’t quite hold together. It’s outstripped by his talent for reportage, his remarkable right-place-right-time luck. Over the years, Tonite… would suffer the fate of becoming its own Sixties souvenir.

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Whitehead flew back to New York to continue work on The Fall in April 1968. He arrived the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and soon after filmed King’s memorial service in Central Park, positioned a few feet away from Sammy Davis Jr. As the impact of King’s assassination sank in, he became horrified with the fictional premise of his project, the filmmaker as murderer. “By this time,” he said in a 1969 interview for Films and Filming, “I had a lot of film. What about?—going out with an idea, and discovering it was a wrong one!” The Fall began to mirror his increasing feelings of personal alienation and preoccupation with his responsibilities as an artist. “I was pretty screwed up, I must confess.”

Whitehead used his camera compulsively, as if trying to satisfy a scopophilic urge. It was a mask to hide behind. In a peculiar novelization of Tonite… published years after that film was finished, he wrote, “I can hold the black mirror up to keep the light from burning out my face.” The bulk of The Fall is a blitz of political demonstrations, rock music, happenings, and naked models, weighed heavy with portent and sermonizing about politics and media. Whitehead plays the filmmaker. His girlfriend at the time, Alberta Tuburzi, is cast as Anna, a glamorous Italian model. Angelo Mannsraven plays his driver, credited only as “Driving the Cadillac.” It is hard to understand the roles they serve. Whitehead mopes around his apartment and obsessively watches the TV news. He speaks to an unseen producer on the phone, rolls around in bed with Anna, films her dancing naked in front of his desk. He stares at his editing table and makes sententious remarks about the nature of objectivity and the media. He fixates on his role as a participant-observer. A raucous cover of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’ by The Nice roars through the soundtrack. There are lengthy montage sequences—protests, happenings, riots, parties, his own face flickering on a TV screen—accompanied by Whitehead’s bossy voice-over. In these passages the film goes slack, as if Whitehead can’t decide what to do with all the footage he has shot but can’t bring himself to lose any of it on the cutting-room floor either.

Whitehead adored the French New Wave. He was the first to translate Jean-Luc Godard’s screenplays into English. (Decades later he would write a prose poem titled ‘Jean-Luc: I Hate You!’) But his influences were his directorial weaknesses. The Fall is missing what critic Marjorie Rosen called the “lightness” of the French directors, with their “goofy and occasionally soaring mix of cultural touchstones, political outrage, and heady romance.” It takes Whitehead the news cameraman to snap his audience to attention. A tense argument in the street about Vietnam. A stump speech by RFK. Dreamlike footage of model Penelope Tree posing on the subway. And then, in the final third of the film, the Columbia University protest.

Here The Fall changes completely in tone. It could be a rough assembly cut from another film. First we see Whitehead’s camera point-of-view as he balances along a narrow ledge towards a bearded young man—I think this is Melvin Margolis—who smiles at the camera, points inside the building and motions for him to keep quiet. The camera turns to look through the window. Students lay on the desks and floors, fast asleep as if a spell has been cast on them. Boredom and anxiety mix with a sense of purpose. There are meetings, there’s dancing in the reading rooms, a couple making out in the hallway. We see a makeshift canteen and handmade signs trying to draw order and responsibility out of the ad-hoc. Kids perched on the upper floor window ledges sing “We Got the Whole World in Our Hands” to passers-by on the street below who wave and smile. Buckets filled with food and supplies are lifted into the building.

On his voiceover Whitehead tries to stick to facts, but he can’t resist the drama of the moment. He quotes Albert Camus: “‘When everyone is guilty, it will be a democracy,’” he says, “but institutions are built to dissipate guilt, and at Columbia, claimed the institution, only the students were guilty.” The complexities of life inside the sit-in go unmentioned, perhaps because Whitehead is too deeply embedded to see them. (For those accounts, watch Cronin’s monumental oral history of Columbia ’68, A Time to Stir.) He gives a thumbnail outline of the background to the protest and explains that Columbia is a private institution with investments from the corporate sector. The students, he says, would be attacked, impugned and patronized in the media, brutalized by the police, threatened with expulsion and financial penalties.

Then the inevitable arrives. A bagpiper plays a valedictory anthem in the stairwell as students clap and stomp their feet on the wooden boards. “Our revolution!” they chant. Whitehead shows piles of furniture at the bottom of the main staircase. More barricades are shoved against the windows. His film slows, its grain thirsty for any light it can find in the gloom. The sequence is both moving and frightening. The cops begin to push their way inside. Whitehead runs out of film and the sound goes dead. In his journal he writes that he knew anyway that “it would have been suicide to try to film them attacking students.” He describes throwing his cans of film out of the window into bushes below, then making his way down the stairs, punched and kicked by the police all the way to the bottom, trying to resist the urge to hit back.

Next is a shot of a young man, his head bleeding, leaving the building. Students are bundled into paddy wagons. Whitehead collides footage from the Mathematics Building raid with the aftermath of another confrontation he filmed weeks later. The timelines blur. A pair of priests, wearing homemade Red Cross arm bands, anxiously speak to someone on a walkie-talkie. Mark Rudd of the SDS—later the Weather Underground—addresses a crowd. Cops lasso a man by his neck and bring him crashing face-first to the concrete. A student is stretchered to an ambulance while chased by a TV news crews lugging lights and cameras. “It was truly the ugliest sight in my life,” Whitehead wrote. “I was terrified. I never guessed it would be like that.”

Robert Kennedy was killed day Whitehead left the USA to return to Britain. The filmmaker had a nervous breakdown. As he tried edit sense into his material, he swore to never make another movie again. The following year he broke that promise and shot Led Zeppelin live in concert. But The Fall remained the pivotal moment in Whitehead’s film career, perhaps because he could not find the shape he was looking for in what he had shot. “I changed nobody by making The Fall,” he later reflected. “I was just adding to the plethora of images.”

He recorded pictures of protest and injustice that would later become the staple of TV documentaries and educational films, the kind of thing which would be chopped into a short clip salad along with other eye-witness film and military footage of bombs dropping on Vietnam, glossed with Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower. But in its lack of resolution and clarity, The Fall offers something of specific value. The film is an example of an artist trying to take something from the world—a story, an image, a substance—and make it reflect their own feelings and stylistic ambitions. But they find that the material is too hot, too big, to be bent into the service of their art. The artist is left with the feeling that history is laughing and heckling them from somewhere near the back row of the Albert Hall.

RECOMMENDATIONS

—Gastr Del Sol—David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke’s band from the 1990s—are being given the reissue treatment. Here’s a song of theirs for these days of weird weather.

—I can’t remember the last time I loved a film as much as I did Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera.

—Criterion is streaming a recently-restored version of Lizzie Borden’s inventive, complicated debut, Regrouping. Made in 1976, it follows a group of four feminists in a consciousness raising group in downtown New York. “The film began as an agreement,” it says at the start. “Gradually, the terms of the film changed: they began to drift away; more and more it became my film; I was using them as raw material… They are, in effect, pushed out of the film… It was, I suppose, what I had wanted all along.” Borden’s subjects objected to her film on its release, and it was shelved for forty years. Until now.

—Dept. of Nepotism: my great other half, Sarah Resnick, has written about Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel for the London Review of Books.

—Critic and novelist Christine Smallwood has written a superb short book about Chantal Akerman’s film La Captive. Everything Smallwood writes is worth your time.

—If you want to know what it was like being a photographer in the early 2000s, when film turned digital, when the art market was infatuated with the medium, when polarization meant arguments between “photography” people and “art” people and was also a filter for your camera lens, listen to artist Matthew Porter’s new podcast Aught Fraught, available wherever you listen to such things.

—Dept. of Vested Interest: for hard cold cash I copy-edited and proof-read a new book published by Chicago’s Soberscove, about the mononymous gallerist and artist Hudson. It’s an oral history of his life and Feature Inc., the gallery he ran. This is essential reading if you work in contemporary art. By these accounts, Hudson was eccentric, inventive, generous, maddening, an enigma. (One of many favourite details: he would train gallery staff to do breathing exercises before hand-addressing envelopes.) The book shows, through example, why the art world does not have to be the way it is today.

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A couple of weeks ago, Rebekah Weikel of Interlude Docs, an online collection of writing dedicated to all things vanished, invited a few of her contributors to submit songs for a playlist on the theme of ‘love lost.’ I chose three songs. Ray Godfrey’s metaphysical soul ballad ‘I Gotta Get Away (From My Own Self)’; 'Behind the Door' by Vernon Green & The Medallions, a doo-wop melodrama of abject proportions and which features near its close a vertiginous, high-wire male falsetto that’s virtuoso bordering on desperate; and Lotte Lenya’s rousing performance of ‘Lost in the Stars’ by Kurt Weill.

Weill’s song is about cosmic loss. It imagines God holding the stars “in the palm of his hand”, letting them run “through his fingers like grains of sand”. He loses one small star and when he finds it, promises to “take special care” not to misplace it again. The next lines observe how people assume God is upstairs looking after everything. Then comes the kicker. “But I’ve been walking through the night and the day, til my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey, and sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away”—maybe God’s gone away, a line for our times if ever there was one—“forgetting his promise that we heard him say, and we’re lost out here in the stars…” The lyrics do not resolve. God doesn’t reappear. All we have in common—”little stars, big stars”—is drifting through the universe, “blowing through the night”, lost, looking to be found.

It is a beautiful piece of songwriting. Romantic, existential, and a touch bleak for a playlist of consolations. But the use aspect of the Interlude Docs exercise—that this was for a playlist designed to do something, to channel a set of experiences—reminded me how practical music is. It’s used for dance and worship. Pageant and poetry. Marking major chapters in life. For rebellion and propaganda, for seduction and play, workouts and sleep, for torture by the CIA, children, noisy neighbours and banks that value the hours they keep you on hold. Music is used to kill time and to time-travel. To distract, to study, to meditate, hype, soothe, provide catharsis. To drive commerce and productivity.

An endless number of playlists now exist to suit every filigree of emotion and occasion. (And still the dull-minded trot out the line that music isn’t “useful.” Still musicians are pushed into penury. Still Spotify gets richer.) I use music all the time. For writing, doing the dishes, jogging, for setting up the day and treating a range of moods and reveries. I use music more than I’d like to, meaning, I’d like to place it front and centre of my attention more than I do.

But last week I listened to Edward George at the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture in New York. Two luxuriously slow and detour-happy hours spent in a darkened listening room buried inside a monolithic university library. George—writer, broadcaster, musician, and founder member of the Black Audio Film Collective—told the story of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn. He took us into what he called “Ellingtonian space”, New York between the 1930s and the 1960s, when Duke Ellington’s orchestral jazz sound dominated the radio, dominated the way jazz organized itself. George talked, he played records. This wasn’t quite a lecture and nor was it the sort of associative, themed radio show that the likes of Time Is Away make for NTS. It was as if we were listening to a late night pirate station broadcasting some miles off-shore from time and Manhattan. He quoted from Strayhorn’s biographers Lisa Barg and David Hadju, from European philosophers and American botanists, all the while remaining attentive to musical detail and texture. The rush-hour bounce of Art Tatum’s piano, Ellington’s thick and dreamy big band sound, the percussive dissonance of Thelonious Monk. And George gave us the sheer pleasure of it all, knowing when it’s important to stop a song part-way through and restart it from the beginning, simply to emphasize how beautiful it is.

Strayhorn grew up in 1920s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a doting mother and an abusive father. He spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in North Carolina, who gave him a love of music and nature. Strayhorn was prodigiously talented and composed what would become one of his most famous songs, ‘Lush Life,’ before the age of twenty. Black and gay, he had wanted write classical music, but the classical world had no space for black composers and jazz musicians were not always accepting of his sexuality.

Yet it was jazz that offered him opportunity. His talent as a pianist eventually landed him a job as arranger and writer for Duke Ellington. He fast became Ellington’s right-hand man—“my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine”—and composed some of the Duke’s biggest hits including his signature song, ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’. Ellington reportedly had an ambivalent attitude to homosexuality, but his orchestra accepted Strayhorn as an out gay man, and the two men eventually became so close that Ellington adopted Strayhorn into his own family. Strayhorn, it was said, could finish the band leader’s thoughts. Their relationship bordered on telepathic.

Ellington knew what a talent he had discovered in Strayhorn. He could be controlling when his protégé received offers to write for other performers. For this reason and others, perhaps to do with his sexuality, Strayhorn remained in Ellington’s shadow. (The clip above includes a few rare seconds of Strayhorn footage, about one minute in.) George pointed out how often flowers occur as a theme in Strayhorn’s music: ’Passion Flower,’ ‘A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,’ ‘Lotus Blossom’. Echoes of his childhood visits to North Carolina. He observed that Strayhorn wrote about love that had been lost in the past or hoped for in the future. Rarely was it experienced in the present, although Strayhorn himself was not without relationships. ‘Something to Live For’ is a gorgeous example. Here it is performed by Lena Horne. She was another Pittsburgh kid. When the pair met in the 1940s, they discovered that they’d even shared a childhood piano teacher. The friendship between Horne and Strayhorn was intense and close. Their romance was chaste. Horne said she would have married Strayhorn, that he was her only real friend.

George’s talk traced the creeping erasure of Strayhorn’s name from jazz after the 1950s and ‘60s, as Ellington’s big orchestral style passed out of fashion, giving way to a new generation interested in more chromatic and modal sounds. Monk, then John Coltrane, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor and others. The rejection was not a complete one: Monk made an album of Ellington interpretations, and Coltrane recorded an album with him which featured a Strayhorn ballad, ‘My Little Brown Book.’ Strayhorn remained a spectral presence in the new jazz. By playing multiple recordings of the same song by different artists, George teased out the innovations that lay inside Strayhorn’s dance hits and torch songs. He got us to hear what the innovators were hearing—the abstractions, the dissonances, the influence of French Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel. He showed how Strayhorn laid the foundations of a new vocabulary for jazz and, in some ways, for black gay artists outside the field. By the time of Strayhorn’s death from esophageal cancer in the 1960s, his name was lost. George was trying to rescue it from Ellingtonian space.

Erudite and measured, George’s voice had none of the forced cheer of the podcast presenter, and nor did it have the flat affect of the essay film which confuses dourness with intelligence. He never spoke over the music and the music wasn’t subordinated to the role of illustration. Songs were played to their full length, no matter how long. The talk demanded a reset to history’s slow turn, to the incremental emergence of cause and consequence. This was a live spin-off from George’s ongoing series ‘The Strangeness of Jazz,’ sibling to his excellent Morley Radio show ‘The Strangeness of Dub,’ an archeological dig into the origins of dub reggae. In ‘The Strangeness of Dub’, George walks his listeners across a vast excavation site, stopping here and there to inspect new finds and unearthed building foundations. Episodes focus on silence and distance. They examine slavery and religion, trace reggae and dub’s connections to Congolese music, to jazz and to European avant-garde composition. Specific historical moments such as Rock Against Racism are put under the spotlight, as are key figures including producer King Tubby and the sound-system operator Jah Shaka (featured above in a clip from Franco Rosso’s fierce, uncompromising film Babylon, made amid the racial strife of early 1980s London). Embracing one of dub’s central characteristics, that of the ‘version’ or ‘versioning,’ George frequently plays sometimes up to four different versions of a song back-to-back, getting the listener to hear for themselves what is being learned and developed with each new iteration, and what has been discarded.

During the Strayhorn session, George would occasionally make an observation and cap it with the phrase “the strangeness of jazz,” as if to emphasize the point, put it into verbal italics. If he gave an explanation of what this strangeness is, I missed it. But I don’t think I want it. That way, the balance can be maintained between information and feeling, between serious scholarship on the one hand, and on the other, the understanding that nobody could ever use music the way music uses us.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Dug through some of my old records the other day and found this solid gold 1972 Latin rock eco-stomper, taken from the old Soul Jazz comp Chicano Power!

—Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition will by now be on your book pile. Elegant author-designed cover too.

—I’d like this Jean-Claude Biraben ‘jacket’ chair from 1975. It looks horribly uncomfortable. When you send it to me I will put plants and rude guests on it.

—I only recently learned of this Ettore Scola film Le Bal. (Discovered via the work of Zenib Sedira.) You probably know it. Made in 1983, with no dialogue, only music and dance, it tells the story of a single Parisian dance hall from the 1930s through to the 1980s. I don’t quite know how to describe it. Art house Strictly? Dennis Potter in mime? The Singing Detective without the skin condition?

—Got to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the new doc about The Birthday Party. Even the animated sections—typically used as visual filler in the absence of archival material—were done well. Being of a certain vintage, they reminded me of the title sequence to Grange Hill.

—The Bailiffgate Museum in Alnwick currently has an exhibition of Steve Goldman’s collection of the world’s worst record covers.

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I first saw Miyoko Ito’s paintings in 2018, in a small show at Artists Space in New York organized by Jordan Stein. I knew nothing about the artist. I’d seen one painting on an email press release and had the caveman thought that I liked the colours and shapes and that I would enjoy seeing more of them because they suited my mood that day.

I couldn’t pin down what Ito’s paintings reminded me of. The sensation of looking at them was like reaching for a word I knew but couldn’t remember. Something like Penguin paperback editions of Evelyn Waugh from the 1970s (think Art Deco on LSD). Peter Schmidt’s Before and After Science prints made in 1977 for Brian Eno. Photographs of postmodern hotel lobbies. The miniature volcanic landscape of the coal fire in my parents house when I was a child. But also none of those things. Often this sort of inchoate response occurs in the first few seconds of walking into an art gallery and quickly evaporates like fog under a warming sun by reading wall captions, learning the titles and dates, slotting it into little mental boxes. But there is a category of artwork which I can’t explain to others nor rationalize to myself. It speaks to a private space for which either the key is yet to be found or it doesn’t exist or it can’t be made. Art critics rarely write about this feeling, partly because it’s boring for other people, and partly because it embarrasses the professional who has been trained to explain. Yet that’s what I love about those kinds of works. They’re an infinite resource to return to, they never drain of energy, because they draw power from a well that is buried so deep within that even I’m not sure where it’s coming from.

The selection at Artists Space (followed later that year by an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) mostly dated from the 1970s, the later years of Ito’s life. The palette was warm, with burnt oranges and browns tempered by dirty, acid yellows, mute greens and hot, petroleum blues. Often these colours were modelled with light to dark gradients. Closer inspection showed them to be built on layers of underpainting which Ito allowed to show through at the edges of the shapes she depicted: a pale mint shade might be bordered with a dark emerald tone, or a white would peek from behind a top layer of rusty reds. The underpainting gave the hard edges of her forms a rough quality, like a piece of carpentered wood that hadn’t yet been planed and sanded smooth.

The shapes the colours described were ambiguous. There were irregular geometric solids and lozenges, sharp triangles and bulbous clouds, the occasional wiggly line. Organic in the way that a crystal under a microscope looks organic. They were abstract but seemed to describe a physical space—that’s to say, they weren’t formal like a Piet Mondrian or an Ellsworth Kelly, with the colours and shapes flattened as if they existed in a vacuum, rather they had a sense of air and depth in the same sense that Helen Frankenthaler’s abstractions possess those qualities albeit in a vastly more fluid and loose way. The scale of Ito’s paintings seemed to shift maddeningly within even a single image. Some looked like close-ups of domestic scenes—a section of a dresser and the corner of a mirror, for instance—while others could’ve been landscapes describing vast, ancient cities. They were both claustrophobically close and satellite-high. The titles—Odyssey, Islands in the Sun, Walls of No Escape, Heart of Hearts—were evocative but didn’t give much away. (Certain paintings, I’d later discover, were direct: Work Bench, Dresser, Egyptian Commode. A pair of paintings named after her children: A For Alan and E for Elissa.) Strangely, some of the canvases were attached to their stretchers with tacks that were not hammered flush and left to stand half-an-inch or so from the edge of the picture. This had the effect, to my mind, of making the paintings seem as if they were defending themselves. Not quite wooden stakes or a barbed wire perimeter, more like a prickly pear or a hedgehog.

Ito died of heart failure forty years ago, in 1983, and although she was not unknown in her lifetime—she had an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, her adopted home, and was long championed by the dealer Phyllis Kind—she was no household name. In the past two years the work has been seen at blue-chip galleries. There was a show at Michael Werner Gallery in 2022, another at Matthew Marks last year. The small exhibition at Artists Space remained vivid in my memory; it’s hard for me to think of another show of abstract work that’s stayed with me in the past decade like this one did, with the exception perhaps of the first time I saw Ron Nagle’s ceramics. (Another artist whose abstract forms hover tantalizingly on the threshold of figuration.) But I’ve been lazy, and my sense of how Ito’s paintings evolved and what the artist’s story was remained foggy to me.

Stein has now completed Heart of Hearts, a hefty, beautiful monograph on Ito’s work, designed by Grant Schofield, edited by the critic Jennifer Krasinski—one of New York’s sharpest art writers—and published this month by artist Matt Connors’ Pre-Echo Press. The book is the first inventory of Ito’s career, comprising over 200 paintings and drawings, and a major piece of detective work, resulting from years spent hunting down paintings in private collections and museum archives. It’s unclear if they found everything and there may still be pieces hiding in a dusty regional art centre or on someone’s living room wall. There is an entire section of the book scanned from transparencies originally taken by Phyllis Kind Gallery, now in Chicago’s Roger Brown Study Collection, documenting paintings that can’t be located, or may not even exist anymore. (On the acknowledgements page, Stein points out something we often forget when we look at art catalogues—Heart of Hearts isn’t a book of paintings, it’s a book of photographs of paintings.) There’s a small selection of ephemera relating to her career, and—something rarely seen but fascinating—a photograph at the back of the book of a half-finished painting, which gives a glimpse into Ito’s process.

The book is framed by an informative biographical essay and the transcript of an interview Ito gave in 1978. We learn that she was born in 1918, in Berkeley, California to Japanese parents. For financial reasons she moved with her mother and sister to Japan in the early 1920s. It was a formative yet traumatic experience. Ito fell seriously ill and for some time lost the ability to walk. They returned to California in 1928. In the late 1930s, Ito enrolled at U.C. Berkeley to study art. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ordered that all people of Japanese descent in the USA were to be interned in remote camps in the west of the country. Before Ito could graduate, she and her husband were sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno. There she would receive through the mail her diploma, learning that she’d graduated in absentia with flying colours.

After being released from Tanforan, Ito enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and made the city her home. In the late 1940s, under the tutelage of Max Kahn, she experimented with lithography, making street scenes which in turn began to affect the way she dealt with light and tone in her oil painting. In Berkeley she’d been influenced by Cubism. After moving to Chicago, this fused with an interest in surrealism and, perhaps more surprisingly, the intimate domestic spaces of Pierre Bonnard. Her work from the 1950s has none of Bonnard’s bright colour, however. They’re heavy and tonally dark paintings, semi-figurative still lifes, with the occasional collaged element. The effect is like looking at objects hiding in semi-darkness.

Ito spent the 1950s raising her two children, isolated from the Chicago art scene. Stein identifies a painting made in 1959 as a major turning point. In Kalamazoo—a name which pops with pleasure on the tongue—rounded, bubbly forms in shades of amber and ochre bounce around the frame against a lush turquoise, the colour of tropical sea. From here, the light seems to brighten in her paintings, her palette becoming significantly richer throughout the 1960s. The Imagists were one of the main games in Chicago from the 1960s through into the 1970s. Ito was friendly with a number of them, and many were part of Phyllis Kind’s artist roster too. Their grotesque, zany style of figurative painting, which pulled from comic books and the commercial landscape, shares a psychological quality with Ito’s work rather than a formal one; a dreamlike, surrealist sense of space, an unusual attention to pattern and shape-making, a bold use of colour. Her paintings evoke a kind of perceptual flux. Ito once said that “furniture never stays furniture, it turns into landscape or into some kind of action.”

It was during this decade that she established her painting’s key characteristics: stacked bars or lozenges, semi-circles reminiscent of mirrors on a dressing table, isometric shapes that teasingly suggest we might be looking at the interior of a room, or a road crossing a vast distance. Stein aligns her mature work with that of Frankenthaler, Arthur Dove and Giorgio Morandi, noting echoes of Paul Klee. He also relates it to the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, whereby imperfection in an image or object is valued for expressing qualities of impermanence and change. The extent to which Japanese art influenced Ito is unclear, as the artist herself said in interview that “content is usually pointed out to me by other people.” Artist Ray Yoshida told her, for instance, that her painting was influence by Heian period work: “And so it was. I recognized it that way.” The poet John Yau posits the idea that the half-nailed tacks around the edges of her paintings related to needing to be ready to pack her bags at a moment’s notice, a nod to her experiences in Japan and the internment camp. Stein points out that the writer Michelle Brandt had discovered they had no such meaning at all. Ito once told a framer to “go ahead and pound them in.”

In her late period, Ito’s colours become duskier. They look like desert paintings. A few works have a gorgeous, pastel lightness to them. Where there is more symmetry in the composition of her earlier works, this is turned over to a complex and busy geography of shapes. But there’s also suggestion of looking through windows or doorways—some almost resemble the reverse of a painting, stretcher bars not window frames—and of gazing into mirrors and empty rooms.

There is an intense feeling of interiority expressed in these paintings. Perhaps what’s attractive to me about them is that they may only be able to exist as paintings, and language cannot touch them. They come close to the condition of music: we can anatomize notes, chords, rhythms, timbres, structural concepts, but that still doesn’t explain the music. Leafing through Heart of Hearts, I noticed something about the development of the work. The early pieces, from the 1950s, look like images made in the first few minutes of dawn, the point of the morning at which the black and blue of night are beginning, ever so slightly, to relent to colour. The paintings brighten significantly in the 1960s: with only a few exceptions they’re have the sense of being made under full sun or something once vivid now bleached out. By the 1970s they hold the temperature of the earth and air at the end of a hot August day. Some blaze like a sunset, others look like they might be cooling in the twilight. It’s as if her body of paintings describe the arc of a day and the arc of a life.

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—I’m looking forward to Truckload of Art, The Life and Work of Terry Allen: An Authorized Biography by Brendan Greaves. Allen is the only artist I know of to have had a successful career as both a country & western musician and as a conceptual artist. His album Juarez, made in 1975, is a spare and haunting narrative about a couple on the run in the American Southwest, but the follow-up, Lubbock (On Everything) has the advantage of containing the song ‘Truckload of Art,’ which tells the story a group of New York City artists who drive to California to lord their superior ideas over the artists of the West Coast, only to get involved in a crash, spilling their art across the road. Its chorus goes: “There’s a truckload of art, it’s burning near the highway, precious objects are scattered all over the ground. It’s a terrible sight, if a person were to see it, but there weren’t nobody around.” (You can read a short essay I wrote for frieze on Allen’s work a few years ago here.)

—You’ve probably heard the disgraceful news that Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art cancelled a retrospective exhibition by the 87-year old Palestinian painter Samia Halaby. A sister exhibition at MSU Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University still looks slated to open this summer. The silver lining is that both institutions—unless the Eskenazi Museum decides to chop the book down the middle—have produced a major new catalogue published by Hirmer and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

—I was sad to hear that the music critic Neil Kulkarni died suddenly last week at the young age of 51. I first came across Kulkarni’s work in the Melody Maker in the early 1990s, when the British music press weeklies were still in a golden age, publishing entertaining, brainy, and passionate new writing. There, and in his subsequent freelance career, Kulkarni championed hiphop, heavy metal, dance music and the most inventive, unclassifiable bands on the fringes of alternative rock. This piece written in 2011 for TheQuietus about the Birmingham band Pram was typical of his approach: passionate, pugnacious, erudite, and in the best sort of way, completely all-over-the-place.

—Finally I recommend this image of Joan Crawford’s assistant biting thread from her dress at the Dorchester Hotel in 1956.

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Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves is best summed up by John Waters in his list of favourite movies from 2023 for Vulture: “An alcoholic factory worker and a lonely supermarket clerk meet by chance and struggle to fall in love. It’s drab, it’s short, it’s beautiful, and it lacks nothing. Just call it Unmagnificent Obsession.”

Kaurismäki has perfected drab, short, beautiful, and lacks nothing across forty-plus years of bittersweet and luminous cinema. “Luminous” because his films glow with empathy and romantic longing despite largely taking place in the same cold blue Finnish dark. Someone once said that if you watch Tokyo Story by Yasujirō Ozu—the great Japanese director is a major influence on Kaurismäki—you will immediately afterwards want to phone your parents to tell them that you love them. Watching Kaurismäki will make you want to put on a sweater and turn up the heating.

He strands his characters outside of time, in a perpetual 1970s peopled with deflated working-class men and women who idolize 1950s Americana. They drink heavily and live in sparsely furnished apartments. They’re exploited at work, they lose their jobs, go to awkward dances and fail to speak to anyone they like. They dream of escaping elsewhere. Their stories are surprisingly uplifting. Perhaps his best-known film is Leningrad Cowboys Go America, a comedy made in 1989 about a struggling band from the Siberian tundra, the Leningrad Cowboys, who travel to the USA in search of fame. But if you want an introduction to pure, distilled Kaurismäki, try Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, from 1994. Only an hour long, it’s a simple road movie in which two shy, awkward men give two shy, awkward women a lift to catch a ferry to Estonia. Kaurismäki crafts this into a tender, funny, and gorgeously-shot story about love, ambition, masculinity, cars, coffee, Europe and America, and men and their mothers. Drab, short, beautiful, lacks nothing.

Fallen Leaves brushes only lightly against our present. Ansa, the supermarket clerk, uses a mobile phone and worries over radio reports from the war in Ukraine. Holappa, her love interest, regularly and reluctantly goes to karaoke. The pair go on a date to see a Jim Jarmusch movie. (Jarmusch and Kaurismäki are old friends.) Yet the film looks exactly like one of Kaurismäki’s works from forty years ago, the clothes, sets, music, all unchanged. You sense that Ansa’s anxiety about Ukraine channels Finland’s long and tense history with Russia more than the current conflict. Her local cinema has posters advertising only old movies.

For all the loss and loneliness he puts his characters through, Kaurismäki refuses to objectify working-class life as unmitigated misery or paint it with patronizing shades of earthy wisdom. His characters’ lives are complex. They endure shit and shine. They’re often exhausted or put-upon, they work hard, deal with poverty, isolation and alcoholism, but small pleasures often take on enormous significance in their lives, anchoring each of them to something that provides self-esteem and hope.

In Fallen Leaves, there is a scene in which Ansa is fired from her zero-hours supermarket job having been caught giving food to a homeless man, then taking an expired microwave meal home in her handbag. Kaurismäki keeps the scene concise. He doesn’t drag out Ansa’s humiliation or spell out the injustice of the situation. Instead he pricks the pomposity of her jobsworth boss and the security guard who dobbed her in. Their absurd cruelty is contrasted with Ansa’s quiet dignity, yet the scene doesn’t feel like an earnest lecture about “quiet dignity.” She returns home to find a huge electricity bill. Her reaction is to unplug every appliance and turn off the lights. The next day she gets a job washing dishes. It’s sad, it’s hard-nosed, it’s also funny.

Kaurismäki and his ensemble should be given a lifetime achievement award for deadpan. Nobody does a hangdog expression better than a Kaurismäki actor. In one scene in Fallen Leaves, a man gets up to perform a mournful Schubert liede at a karaoke bar. It’s set up to make your toes curl. As he begins to sing, Kaurismäki wants you to wonder why the man can’t see how this will only lead to mockery, to loneliness, into the dangerous consolations of drink. And then he shows the bar patrons rapt by the man’s performance. It’s a simple flip— obvious, almost— pulled off with perfect comic timing. What did you expect to happen, Kaurismäki seems to ask, why did you assume the people in this bar wouldn’t appreciate Schubert?

Empathy is a business that some artists choose to conduct using a long-range telephoto lens. Like every optical tool, it creates distortions. These artists talk a big game about “being political,” consider their own art to be an act of service to others while only serving themselves, but find it difficult to talk to anyone from outside their professional circles. Every December I notice the same photograph doing the rounds of Instagram. It shows the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis at an office Christmas party with his colleagues at the Macclesfield Unemployment Office. The joke, I guess, is to imagine that he had a few mince pies that night then went home and wrote Love Will Tear Us Apart. It’s a comedy of contrasts, amusing in the same way that it’s amusing to know that Rod Stewart is a keen model railway enthusiast and that Penelope Cruz allegedly collects coat hangers. (Google it.) But it is mostly an ordinary image, the same as any other office Christmas party snap. I wonder why the photo circulates. Maybe it’s because the idea that a troubled man who sang anthems of existential despair could also be a person who has a laugh at a party confuses those who believe an artist’s personality must exist in a 1:1 ratio with their work. Or, more disturbingly, what people find funny is that he could’ve had anything in common with his colleagues. The assumption is that Schubert was not on the pub jukebox that night. He probably wasn’t. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there in spirit, singing along to Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody in a beautiful counter-tenor.

In ‘Difficult and Bad’, a recent essay for Too Little/Too Hard, Rachael Allen analyses this species of assumption with lucidity and force. She describes her eighty-year-old father—a cleaner who has also worked as a farmer, bread van driver, shop worker, shop manager, and gardener—and his life-long dedication to learning. “He gives himself a summer to read War and Peace, and then all the books around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. When I was younger, he read books to my sister and I every night. I grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees, in Latin, that he’d taught himself over years as an amateur naturalist, botanist, ornithologist.” Allen talks about her migration from a working-class upbringing into the middle-class publishing industry, which she found riddled with the rot of anti-intellectualism and an institutionalized snobbery towards an illusory “general audience” who are imagined to be unwilling or unable stretch their minds. “I find many mainstream popular accounts of working-class life difficult to relate to, or unrealistic, because of the paradox that exists in my father. A working-class man, born to farmers, deprived of any significant or structured education, who has educated himself independently for no other reason than a deep-seated curiosity and desire to learn.”

A few weeks ago my mum (hi mum!—she’s reading this) told me that one evening she was at home watching a documentary on the TV about rural poverty in Britain. An archive clip came on the screen. Something appeared familiar. It took her a moment before she suddenly realized that she was looking at her parents—my nain and taid (grandma and grandad in Welsh, sounds a bit like ‘nine’ and ‘tied’)—walking along the path to their remote home in the North Wales mountains. This was followed by a shot of the family sat around the kitchen table. My taid was a shepherd, and my nain—whose parents died when she was small, and who had to go into service at the age of fourteen—was responsible for raising the family and all the other jobs demanded of a farmer’s wife. Nine of them, my mum being the eldest and a deputized mother to her siblings, lived in a small stone cottage with no electricity on the side of a mountain, miles from the nearest village. You can now rent it for £500 a night from the National Trust. It offers “heaps of Welsh charm,” they say. It sleeps four.

The funny thing about the TV documentary, my mum said to me, was that “we knew we didn’t have money but we didn’t think we lived in “rural poverty”.” The family defined themselves by the work they did, by the people they knew, by chapel and the Welsh language. Literacy and education were highly regarded in the family. My mum passed the exams that got her into grammar school but, like Allen’s father, she did not have the opportunity to go to university. She grew up bilingual, first speaking Welsh, then learning English as her second language around the age of ten. “My mother always complained that I always had my nose in a book,” she tells me. Before my parents met, before I came along, she had spent years working hard, against enormous odds, as a single mother raising my two older brothers. Through everything she has maintained a life-long curiosity about literature and the arts, which she has passed on to all her children, along with a profound respect for the natural world. When I was a teenager the two of us would go regularly to the local theatre to see plays. She encouraged me to read, to make art and to play music. Now in her eighties, that enthusiasm is undimmed. Often the conversation turns to books that she’s seen reviewed in the paper and caught her interest. An avid radio listener, she recommends programmes she’s heard and thinks I might like. We talk about exhibitions and films. My mum possesses none of the complacency about knowledge shown by some people I have met who have degrees.

One of my aunts discovered the above clip on YouTube a couple of years ago. Posted by British Pathé, it is titled “Sheep Shearing (1960-1970)” and captioned “Location Unknown/Unclear.” It’s colour, shot in warm weather judging by the short sleeves and bare feet, and it shows a group of men shearing sheep in a mountain valley. About fifty-three seconds in, you can see a man in a white shirt and flat cap standing at a wooden gate, holding a sheep by the scruff of its neck. He appears again, at one-minute twenty-four, in a close-up. That’s my taid. The location is near Capel Curig in North Wales. My mum and aunt believe that a number of the men in the clip were Australian farmers, visiting on an exchange programme. It’s instructive to read about the anthropologist’s gaze in theory books about film and photography, even more so to see someone you knew as a living, breathing person turned into a subject by the camera, rendered anonymous, “location unknown.” His representation is subordinated to the purpose of the film. If only you were able to climb into the film clip, to introduce yourself to this man in a flat cap, follow him home, sit at his kitchen table and talk over a cup of tea, you would discover a family, a personality, beliefs and opinions, expertise, a life led in another language.

But as W.H. Auden says in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ what is of great importance to one person always takes place “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” No matter how enthusiastically I try and write about it, the Pathé YouTube clip remains something of an abstraction for you, the reader. When I think about the billions of images of other people that exist, I think about how we know so little of the lives captured in them. An interesting exercise is to make a list of those aspects of your own life which would never reach the surface, would be impossible to depict for whatever reasons—practical, personal—if someone tried to make a film about you. It’s difficult to do because we are often invisible to ourselves. This is certainly true for artists and writers. The course all arts careers take passes constantly through landscapes of visibility and invisibility. (Professionally speaking, artistic fame is a record of those who didn’t make it as well as those who did, and if you want to be successful, never be the first to do something: the unfamiliar is an all-too effective invisibility cloak.) An artist or writer’s work always exists for its maker in perpetual half-shadow, partially obscured to them by time and temperament, partially hidden by what other people want to describe it as. You might think you’re writing about your family, the world says you’re writing about rural poverty.

A criticism I’ve heard about Yorgos Lanthimos’s recent movie Poor Things is that it relocates the story away from Glasgow, where Alasdair Gray’s original novel is set. Watching the film in New York City, I wondered how much that mattered. It was an act of interpretation not fidelity. The book and the film can co-exist. Yet for Gray it was vitally important to depict his beloved Glasgow in his work. The writer Liz Lochhead said that Gray “created his own Glasgow for himself to live in.” It was a matter of pride. To capture it in prose, in his paintings and murals, was a way to defy dismal typologies of the city as run-down, gloomy and tough, and instead to elevate its culture and its intellectual life.

There is a famous scene in his magnum opus, Lanark, in which art students Duncan Thaw and Kenneth McAlpin are on a hillside looking across the city. McAlpin asks his friend why nobody notices how magnificent Glasgow appears. “Because nobody imagines living here,” says Thaw:

‘“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films, But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library, and when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now.”

[…]

After a moment, McAlpin said, “So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life.”

“No, that’s my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don’t.”

“I envy your purpose.”

“I envy your self-confidence.”’

Lanark shifts between the story of Thaw, an aspiring artist living in mid-century Glasgow, and his alter-ego, Lanark, trapped in a nightmarish shadow version of the city named Unthank. It hit me like a meteor from space when I first read it. I loved the novel for its imaginative scope and for Gray’s clear, vivid prose, stacked with literary allusions. I liked its mess: the book has an odd structure, and if you can imagine William Blake doing stand-up, it’s funny too, willing to indulge a throwaway gag on one page, then sombre and frightening on the next.

The novel showed me other things too. I discovered Gray’s painting and drawing, and fell for his unique use of line and colour. I was drawn to the model of Gray as an autodidact, and admired the way he moved easily between painting, design, and writing: it gave me permission, in a way, to reconcile parts of my creative life which pulled in opposing directions. Then there was the way he made his politics part of his art through doing rather than talking it up, by painting murals in buildings and homes across the city, by making portraits of local people he knew, designing posters, contributing to its cultural life socially, winding the city into his stories. He did not use a long-range telescopic lens.

Lanark took decades to see the light of day. It’s one reason why the story has such a peculiar atmosphere and structure. Gray began writing it in the 1950s. It wasn’t finished until 1976, and wasn’t published until 1981. The passage quoted above is taken from a section completed in the early 1960s, which was rejected when Gray first tried to get it published. Imagine starting to write a book in the late 1990s and completing it this year. Now think of everything that has happened in the world, and happened to you personally, inbetween. The novel is a monument to patience and to the evolution of an artist’s sensibility.

At meal times, my nain used to call taid in from tending the sheep by blowing a conch shell, like a horn. My tiny nain, five-foot-nothing, making a sound that reverberated across the valley from their house like a bugle from the heavens. If you could translate the sound into words it would have said: “make yourself seen, come home, eat, tell us what you’ve done today, and we’ll tell you the same, in all our complexity and love. Also, there’s a camera crew here and Schubert might join us for pudding.”

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—I’ve been enjoying this new arrangement of Moondog’s Theme by Kronos Quartet and Ghost Train Orchestra. It’s taken from the album Songs and Symphonies, a collection reinterpreting the work of Moondog, the blind composer who used to stand on New York’s Sixth Avenue dressed as a Viking. The album scrubs the music a little too clean for my money, but this version of Theme brings in an astonishing klezmer-like clarinet part halfway through, which is wild and incandescent and makes me want to practice my clarinet more.

—Critic Ben Davis has interviewed the legendary critic Lucy R. Lippard for The Art Angle podcast. If you haven’t already, seek out Lippard’s engrossing memoir, Stuff, which came out last year, an autobiography told through the objects in her house.

—I have recently embarked on a mission to visit all the specialist bookstores of New York. When I say specialist, I don’t mean the genre of used bookstore that will sell you an attitude and a tatty back issue of Interview magazine for $300 but won’t let you touch the poetry books. I mean specialist. My first destination was The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street in TriBeCa. Opened in 1979, it’s the oldest crime and mystery bookshop in the world. (London used to have its own, called Murder One, which closed in 2009.) The decor is dark wood, the lighting moody. It’s like the library of a stately home in an Agatha Christie story. Somehow it is not gimmicky. The store has twenty-foot-high shelves packed with new and classic whodunits, noirs, spy novels and thrillers. They sell their own self-published line of ‘Bibliomysteries’—crime books about book crimes—and regularly publish anthologies of new writing in the genre. Each December they give away a specially commissioned holiday mystery story free with every purchase. On my visit I told the bookseller on duty that I’d read all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts, but didn’t know where to go next. The clerk pointed me in the direction of a noir story anthology, and a stack of cheap secondhand pulp paperbacks in case I wanted a lucky dip. Friendly, helpful, zero attitude, abundant choice, and I bet they’d let you touch the poetry books if they had any. Five stars!

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Lethem’s latest, Brooklyn Crime Novel, revisits his childhood in 1970s Brooklyn, and takes the reader on a tour spanning fifty-years of his neighborhood. It is a bravura act of close reading; of what he calls “the dance” of street lore and games, of crimes and micro-traditions, of race and class and gentrification. It’s also the most funny, scary and tender local history of New York written since your favourite three-legged neighborhood stray cat got bulldozed under a fancy coffee shop.

I talked to Lethem about his new novel. From the off, the interview went in exactly the direction I had hoped: sideways and inside-out.

DAN FOX: We were talking over email about the ways in which ordinary aspects of an artist’s life can illuminate their work. I asked, “why do we not know the lunch preferences of the great artists?” What’s yours?

JONATHAN LETHEM: Typically cottage cheese, sardines, soft-boiled eggs and sauerkraut. But here’s the thing: did it help you to know?

DF: No. It was a terrible question.

JL: It’s strange how unsatisfying the reply was to type out. A few weeks ago I agreed to keep a food diary, for a weekly magazine with a popular feature on What Celebrities Eat. I did my best, worked to make it both real and charming, but there was something about consecrating my food choices into language that immediately drove everything into performance-eating. It quickly got intricately false. I feel a whisper of that same artifice overtaking my answer to your question. Is it just me and my toxic self-consciousness? Or did we just climb into our interviewer-and-interviewee costumes?

DF: Well, the wardrobe department here does have a great range of costumes to choose from. How about something from an old episode of Star Trek? Me: intrepid space explorer, lycra crewneck, boots, driven by a peaceable-yet-heavily-armed curiosity about intergalactic life. You: a purple cloud of gas floating in space, no legs or arms, only pure consciousness and a wise, baritone voice like Orson Welles, one of those highly-evolved alien species they conjured for the show when they’d run out of budget.

JL: There’s a double bind in this game. Either a Wizard of Oz screen erects itself, and we both gaze at the illusion there. Or else I act as though giving the gift of a glimpse behind the curtain, offering up ritual humbleness. Somehow, behind stumblebum cliches like “I have no system, I have to make it up every day” lurks the even more inchoate and awkward truth that the work seems to come out of a parallel life that is impossible to reconstruct by talking about it. It’s disavowals all the way down. Who scurried in and constructed these artworks, while I was out shopping for cottage cheese? Or I could erect a titanic refusal, in the spirit of “If you have to ask what I eat for lunch, you’ll never know!”

DF: Is it possible to show both sides of the curtain? To interview Jonathan Lethem and “Jonathan Lethem”?

JL: Obviously, I’m at the end of a long book tour, wondering whether interviews work or are broken. Somewhere I saw an Edward Gorey quote that I like, where he says, “I tend to think life is a pastiche. I’m not sure what it is a pastiche of—we haven’t found out yet.” I so want this interview to be different, Dan, not only because I’m fond of you. I want, for both of us, to do what Melville proposes in Moby Dick: “Strike through the mask.” That pasteboard mask, the pastiche behind which lies what neither Gorey nor I am certain of. The obvious risk is that I’ll deliver a Mannerist interview in the attempt. But if the risk is pretentiousness, I feel I’ve found my right correspondent in you.

DF: This is a safe space for pretentiousness. What do you hope will happen?

JL: There’s a series of small books from Melville House called “The Last Interview Series.” Featuring, of course, dead writers. And I think about Dennis Potter on Channel Four in 1994, doing his spellbinding “last interview” with Melvyn Bragg, while sipping from a flask of morphine to keep the cancer pain at bay. Yet despite the death-wish this invokes, I keep fantasizing about delivering my last interview, the one so complete or ridiculous or both that it would make a good small book and demand silence forever after. I don’t wish to be dead but for my interviewing self to be dead. Want to try this with me? One rule: we tell the truth: this is a written exchange. Which means it is automatically a lie. One lie it requires is the insertion of parenthetical diegetic sounds from the imaginary transcript. Like this one: [laughs]. You must leave them intact. For I am laughing, Dan. I am.

DF: I believe you. [Coughs, mutters.] What about “first interviews”? Nobody talks about those. They’re embarrassing. Media juvenilia. But that younger artist is still within the older artist somewhere, aren’t they? Does the “first interview” haunt the “last interview”?

JL: For sure. The longer I carry on, the more I’m haunted by all my early public gestures, as they dwindle into the rear-view. But what’s haunting isn’t simply regret or embarrassment. There’s also something more mysterious, when I glance back: wonder at the energy and certainty and ambition, at the scarless un-defensiveness of an artist who hadn’t ever been rebuked for overreach or pretension, or dismissed as overrated. Also, who’d had no notion—how could he?—how many times he’d be interviewed! How the remarks would pile up, contradicting one another, forming permanent heaps of steaming mulch in the fields of self-understanding.

DF: What’s your stage lunch today?

JL: Leftovers, from a Korean restaurant in Buena Park, called Honey Pig. That’s hours away still, since I’m writing from bed, at six in the morning. Envisioning those leftovers in the refrigerator is a secret compact with my afternoon self.

DF: Why do so many interviews with writers involve asking what time of day they write? You know, “I get up at five and write 2000 words before my first G&T at nine.” Why does it matter?

JL: Right, when do painters work? Or, for that matter, poets? Could it be that the only ones subject to this particular ritual curiosity are the novelists? The following may get at some of what you’re nibbling around in other questions, which may or may not get answered here. (And if I don’t answer them directly I’ll trim them out of the document, so then I’ll be alluding to their ghost-presences.) Nobody seems completely sure whether novel-writing is some kind of exalted Parnassus activity practiced by mysterious geniuses, or prosaic and therefore basically a kind of hoax—i.e., anyone could do it, if they just reproduced the material conditions, got up at the specified time of morning, and ground away for a few years, plus were ethically bankrupt enough to thinly-disguise details of their own and their friends’ personal lives. Add shameless disclosure to grinding work ethic, and voila: a novel appears.

It seems to me this never resolves, but just hovers and makes everyone anxious. So we have National Novel Writing Month, where everyone writes one. And, conversely, we have the Nobel, where humans are elevated to godhood. (There’s no Nobel for acting or painting or songwriting. And when the greatest songwriter who ever lived is given a Nobel, it’s somehow a catastrophic affront, as though he’s fine, but he’s no… novelist. He doesn’t even stack up against one of those forgotten Swedish ones.) Earlier you mention (or will mention) Pynchon…

DF: …I did but I had to cut him out for length…

JL: …well, his standard of not-eating-lunch is the one every other novelist is failing to meet, a kind of invisible Kafka starvation-artistry; as well, the shadow of Musil, or Proust, or the Russians is always lurking. These are totems to fail against. Musicians and poets and painters may practice their arts, and participate in their traditions, but novelists are usually betraying theirs. We lunch-eaters are not worthy of our own activity. And yet, as I say, at the same time that activity may only consist of setting one’s clock early enough; anyone might be one of us if they were boring enough. Over this logical gulf, the thinnest of bridges is stretched between contempt and worship. This may also have to do with the fact that we’re not meant to utter a single word in rebuttal of our critics—we’re simultaneously simpletons unqualified to contend with the profound scholarship of book reviewers, and we’re imperial icons not meant to demean our profession by condescending to notice them. Do I rant, Dan? I rant! [laughs]

DF: [Laughs nervously. Changes subject.] I’m fascinated by the way Brooklyn Crime Novel plays off detail against generalization. “We” versus “I.” Barely any characters have names—C. squeaks in with an initial—a few have nicknames, such as The Wheeze or The Slipper, but most are simply Dean Street boys, black boys, white boys, Brownstoners. At the same time you give the reader detailed insights into the rules of street games. (They have such evocative names: “throwing a Spaldeen,” “flicking a skully cap.”) You describe block-by-block demarcations of territory for the locals, you anatomize interior renovations the Brownstoners make to their houses, the names and locations of bodegas and bars and high schools and pizza joints. It’s as if one scale of information is constantly interrupting the other to say “yes, but look, it’s more complicated than that.” Nobody in the book has a name, but many are complex, contradictory, rounded characters.

JL: I like this characterization very much, but I’m not sure I ever thought about ‘scales of information’, so much as I freed the voice of the book to conduct a kind of inquiry that was by its nature obsessive, burrowing, gnawing. Yes, I’m thinking of “termite artistry,” but also that Columbo kind of persistence in investigation—picking up a cigarette butt and putting it in the pocket of a trenchcoat, then going to a bar and putting the cigarette butt up on the bar and staring at it through the duration of four drinks… Digression was built in, and also a kind of spiraling, perhaps even fractal kind of attention; things freeze for close-ups and exploded diagrams. So, yes, it ends up seeming to do with scale – your question gives me the gift of seeing it in those terms.

DF: [Blushes. Deletes mean question from further down the list.]

JL: What I did think about, constantly, was the strange push and pull of what I called “exclusions”—which you touch on in your question as well. Restricting myself against some, or even many, of the usual consolations of fictional prose, and the embrace of narrative conventions: character names, scenes built of thick sensory description. I left out my usual joy in ekphrasis and I tried to exclude citation of songs, or even portray the artistic appetite of any characters—there aren’t talented graffiti artists and budding rappers everywhere, even if in my experience there sometimes were. Excluded too was the surround of plot, or the promise of consecutive and uninterrupted attention—in every case I felt clear I was denying myself and the reader pleasures I might usually want to put in.

DF: And yet it’s not a minimalist project.

JL: The paradox was that the diminishing or excision of certain stuff was in the cause of making the book bigger with some other kind of possibility, or implication—I wanted to open it out from the inside. Sometimes I’ve had the thought that many innovative artists I admire take an interstitial element from earlier forms, and blow it up—like James Brown taking the rhythmic breaks in R&B and dispensing with the rest of the song, in favour of repeating those and building a tapestry of them. What I wanted to push to the foreground was the novel thinking about its own problems in being a novel in the first place. That, and the urgency of the traumatic memories around which it had formed, and for which it was trying to become a machine to contain.

DF: That again brings to mind Potter; his play Blue Remembered Hills, in which adults inhabit the roles of children to get to a deeper, tougher level of truth about the past. Brooklyn Crime Novel also made me think of Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, an astonishing study of the rhymes, laws, games of school kids in the UK. It’s as if you’ve smuggled a collection of Brooklyn children’s folklore inside a novel, or vice versa.

JL: [A week goes by. I travel to Austin, Texas for a book festival. I come home. More lunches pass by, those I make and consume myself, and those I pack into lunchboxes. War atrocities rage in the distant background. Bombs landing on hospitals. Sorry for the grim turn my parentheticals have taken.]

This microcosmic forensic work consumed me for years. That sense that the book was like a ship in a bottle, that if I only could be precise enough with the glue and tweezers and exacto-knife, when I finished, the sails would rise. And then it could be photographed, my little ship, with one of those cameras that blurs the background and makes a tiny miniature appear to be real, if only for the duration of one picture. But that’s all I needed: to enter the past completely again, one single time. And then, strangely, I am also one of the tiny figures on the deck of the ship in the bottle.

I love that Opies book, and I devoted myself to the idea of “Street Games”, which is the title of two different short story collections I kept on the talismanic shelf beside my writing desk, along with all the studies of gentrification and the histories of Brooklyn and the early Gilbert Sorrentino novel from which I cribbed. Street games seemed to be precisely the category of clue I needed to trace, even when those games had no rules, and weren’t fun, and consisted only of language or body language or varieties of implicit threat—they all modeled as versions of game (or “dance”).

But your question speaks of folklore, too—and this was something I didn’t know, going into the project: that I’d become interested specifically in the manufacture of private experience—crime and trauma, mostly—into semi-public folklore, into local urban myth and legend. It began to seem to me that the children of the city, certainly of my part of Brooklyn, had an informal equivalent to the insane tabloid culture that ruled New York in those days. While the Daily News and the New York Post were processing certain citywide stories of violence and disruption into folklore in real time—Son of Sam, Bernhard Goetz, the vanishing of Etan Patz—we children were doing the same thing with the “famous” muggings and abuses of our own terrain. It was a process of hype but also of trauma-management. We processed our nightmares into lore and street cred. This also began to seem a parallel, to me, for so much early 20th-century artmaking: the way the devastation and nihilism of World War One becomes Modernism, and Surrealism, and the Hemingway and Hammett hard-boiled voice. Until, eventually, the soldier in a trench becomes Humphrey Bogart in a trenchcoat. And then Bogart becomes Woody Allen and Bugs Bunny. I’d adopted that style automatically, as a person and as a writer, from the start: the self-ironized endpoint Bogart narrator, who knows that his masculine bluster is a joke and a ruse, one who self-mugs before the mugger can get to him.

This describes the exoskeleton I had to step free of, to get to the truth in this book. And disassemble, and announce that I was disassembling. But then again, after all these years, what am I but a jellyfish, an unformed thing, without that exoskeleton? (If you prick me, do I not bleed Bugs Bunny’s blood?) So, I had to clamber back in at times, and move around inside the old mechanism—the hard-boiled, the street cred. I had to show you its tricks. The legends and lore, the street myths, they are a part of the truth, too.

DF: Is The Wheeze a stand-in for the critic? Barfly local historian, impressed by no one, but who deep down wants to feel seen, recognized for his expertise and custodianship of history and atmosphere. Was there a Wheeze sat at your shoulder when writing the book, a person whom you felt the story was both for but also a defense against?

JL: In an awestruck encounter at age 15 with Philip K. Dick’s just-published VALIS, I was made to understand that one of the ways a novelist can generate an energy-system amidst a group of characters is to split and distribute his or her own attributes among two or more fictional people. Dick makes this very literal with his “Philip K. Dick” and “Horselover Fat” characters, which was good for me as an adolescent, since I was at that time needing to have modernist craft devices demonstrated to me in very literal ways for them to sink in.

Fundamentally, that is to say, the relation between The Wheeze and the implied author/narrator of Brooklyn Crime Novel is a relation between parts of myself that I’ve sorted and distributed and fictionalized. In this way the two are a kind of rhyme for Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman in Chronic City, who were split from myself in similar proportions. Journeyman and Todbaum in The Arrest too. Then again, the Wheeze is a cartoon portrait of my own real-life genius secret-weapon research person, a Brooklyn obsessive of great talent and intuition and capacity with a microfiche archive, named Brian Berger.

DF: A legend. Brooklyn should name a library after him.

JL: He fed and provoked me throughout the work. And, then again, the Wheeze—his physical aspect, his manner of speech—is based on a guy whose name I never knew, a guy who used to hate on me at a bar in Brooklyn. And, then again, the Wheeze is based on The Lorax, from the Dr. Seuss book of that name.

This crazy accumulation of methods—the self-splitting-and-distributing, then the further conflation of different persons from life and characters from others’ fictions—this seems to be the only way I can make a character I can climb into at all. I’d say the same about the boys and the fathers in The Fortress of Solitude, about Pella Marsh from Girl In Landscape, about Rose Angrush and Cicero Lookins from Dissident Gardens.

I never once thought of the Wheeze as a projection of a book critic, however!

DF: If The Wheeze is you, and the implied narrator is you, what then of the other Dean Street white boys? Are they not also you?

JL: Good question. Again: are and aren’t. My strategies in this book take on a special desperation to skirt those traps of “confession” and “self-disclosure” which haunt any autobiographically-enriched characters, even if made indirect by exaggeration, conflation, distortion and omission. Obviously for me the prime example is that one lonely little white boy named Dylan Ebdus, from The Fortress of Solitude. Yes, I split tiny aspects—moments of encounter and consciousness—from myself into perhaps as many as a dozen characters in Brooklyn Crime Novel. But in many cases—confusingly, I’m sure, to the people involved!—I’ve spliced those aspects onto anecdotal “evidence”: stories about other people that recollected, or gathered in my research conversations with old friends and acquaintances from the neighborhood. The virus of my self-wonderment is like a cold that everyone is catching.

DF: The poet Roy Fisher has a lovely line about his home town in England: “Birmingham is what I think with.” Is the same true for you and Brooklyn? You’ve written neo-noirs, thrillers, family sagas and science-fictions and so many other kinds of stories. Are those all, in a way, also about Brooklyn?

JL: I love that line. I hadn’t heard it. Of course I thrum to it. Yes, for me there was a tremendous amount of writing preceding any direct approach to Brooklyn. Four novels and a multitude of short stories. Examined in the light of the Brooklyn books (and perhaps we should include the other New York books, especially Dissident Gardens, which is about identity in a different borough and generation) you can see all kinds of allegorizing of the same material in the science fiction. The mystery of urban sectarian zones, the feral life of children, the issues of race and class and gentrification, the fascination with special vernaculars of the street and stigmatic identities of various kinds. At the time I both was and wasn’t conscious of how the literal material of my life was pressing up against the interior surface of my inventions. Similarly, I find myself now resistant to any reductive suggestion that all the work preceding the Brooklyn books was merely avoidant. As if it was all just a preliminary to something more direct that was trying to be birthed. I’m not attracted to any idea that the writing between Fortress… and Brooklyn Crime Novel was a kind of skirting of my “main” work. If I’m honest, one of the places where I quietly puzzle over my own oeuvre is how much Motherless Brooklyn is taken as some kind of “coming-out” of my true writing self, when I don’t rate that novel as highly as the world tends to. I like Girl In Landscape, the one that precedes it, a lot better. Yet it’s undeniable that Motherless Brooklyn opens the door to the more direct work to follow, partly because among the tics I granted to the Tourettic narrator was a fascination with nomenclature and provenances—streets, ethnicities, vernacular philology—tendencies which were also new tools, to equip the writer I needed to become to write The Fortress of Solitude.

DF: Why do you think the world rates Motherless Brooklyn higher than you do?

JL: Well, this is one of those replies where I ought to remember to insert a lot of [laughs] or [laughs ruefully]. It’s ungracious to refuse love, and I don’t—I soak in it. I don’t find it inexplicable how that book became so popular. Nor why, as I continue to add more to the pile, it remains anomalous—un-followed-up by me, the unrepeatable trick. Two things: I’d just moved back to Brooklyn when I wrote it, and the book became an exhilarated valentine to the place. I rediscovered my zone of origin and wrote it a love letter, at a time when Brooklyn wasn’t so excessively and cloyingly celebrated, and in a mood where the darker undercurrents weren’t my preoccupation. Second thing: I made up this guy, Lionel Essrog, who’s just appallingly endearing. I don’t know why or how, exactly, but I do know that he isn’t me. Despite wearing the hard-boiled detective genre on its sleeve, I see that book as actually functioning within a different genre. One that’s unnamed, and smaller, but quite specific. It’s the “misunderstood sensitive freak” genre. A Catcher in the Rye, A Confederacy of Dunces, Flowers for Algernon, Harriet the Spy. The character is smarter and more sensitive than those around them, and treated badly by everyone, which arouses a protective love in the reader. How dare they? I did this on sheer instinct, not by calculation.

I probably just resent Lionel Essrog for being more loveable than I am [laughs]. I don’t like disappointing people who want me to be him [laughs ruefully.]

DF: Reverse the polarities. Is Brooklyn Crime Novel an end-of-the-world science fiction tale? It’s about a place you knew a certain way, knew its rules, its familiar faces, but which gets changed beyond recognition by forces no one can truly understand?

JL: Yes, of course, I see all my work as continuous in its insistent strangeness, and devotion to bringing something recognizeable but elusive to light—something that for me lies in conflating the prosaic and the surreal. Language is a technology of consciousness, one with strangeness, with dreaming, structured into it. But also, to undertake any halfway serious contemplation of the past—an undertaking which has become more and prominent in my work as I grow older and more of my existence is lived, helplessly, in the past—involves a voyage into the strange particularity of another world. In Brooklyn Crime Novel I felt I was trying to drag the reader back to a realm as distant and impossible as Mars.

DF: Or is Brooklyn Crime Novel a book about men? There’s a chapter in which you talk about how the neighbourhood girls are always “just outside the frame.” They’re mothers, they’re the occasional sister, a local character, but this account of Brooklyn concerns growing up male. It’s about how male friendships are formed, about parent-son relationships, violence, intimacy, fear, brains and brawn, social capital, group-think, sex, straight and gay desire, along with the myriad trivia that begins to clutter boys’ heads when they’re young then rusts there for life, a junkyard of facts about music, books, sports, history.

JL: So much is packed into this question. That’s just a warning about the length and intricacy of this reply.

Brooklyn Crime Novel is, in important ways I’ve tried not to be coy about, a fiction built on the materials of an oral history. The testimony, the memories, of witnesses. Those include myself, and also my brother and three of my best friends from childhood whose conversations helped me create The Fortress of Solitude. But further, in this case, a broad field of what I call, in my acknowledgments, my “rememberers.” Some were people I hadn’t seen since childhood. I sought them out and was fairly systematic about cultivating their contributions.

It happens that I’m a former boy, and so is my brother, and so are two of the three friends who’ve given me so much access over the years. It also happens – genuine happenstance—that this disproportion represented a truth about the immediate space all my rememberers were remembering: it was a boyish street I grew up on. There were girls, but not as many. So, this is one material fact in the matter.

A novel can never be about everything, though it isn’t uncommon for novels to yearn, at some point in their conception, toward “maximum inclusion”—especially multi-character social panoramas covering decades in the life of a place. It’s as natural for them to wish to represent every kind of everyone as it is for them to inevitably fail. This book suffered that same kind of aspirational collapse, to such a degree that it became one of the subjects of the book: the fact that one writer’s empathy might reach out in good faith toward so many versions of “other” and still fall painfully short of encompassing their subjectivities. In some cases, the voice of the book might make a foray, a probe, and then draw back. In other cases, simply cower at the threshold.

At some point, in order to be a book at all, not just a dream of climbing back into the past, I had to accept the circumscription of my material. In the case of this book I opted to talk about it openly within the pages, which is of course certain to be irritating to those who shudder at metafictional gestures, even glancing ones.

Now, the two previous Brooklyn books are both about groups of boys, and about sons and fathers, or surrogate fathers. This seems to be the terms by which I make my engagement with growing up in that time and place. I began to lose my mother to cancer when I was eleven, and she died when I was fourteen. I had a sister, but she was eight years younger, so our childhoods experiences were less overlapped. She became a crucial best friend and writer’s confidante later in my life (and is in fact strongly implicated in some of the material belonging to those girls nagging at the new book’s frame), but my brother and I coexisted in our life on those streets much more.

So, for those who feel my writing really begins with Motherless Brooklyn (see our talk above), I must seem like a very boyish author. This is confusing and irksome to me, since I’ve also written three novels from a predominantly female viewpoint: Girl in Landscape, You Don’t Love Me Yet, and The Feral Detective. And important portions of two others, Amnesia Moon and Dissident Gardens, are done from female points-of-view as well. And other books, like Chronic City and As She Climbed Across the Table present male characters defined by their relation to a strong female character—although those women also tend to be elusive, or to disappear part-way through the tale.

In Brooklyn Crime Novel, one of the everythings the book wished to be about was how one of the wellsprings of violence and despair in the experience between the boys on the street, along with race, and class, was the inadmissible management—the suppression, or projection, or deflection—of homosexual desire. I’d touched on this in The Fortress of Solitude, but incompletely, it seemed to me. My understanding had grown, including my understanding of my own experiences. I’d grown more convinced that this galvanic current ran through so many of the conflicted relations between boys, a panic that lay underneath other panics. It took a long time for me to get all the way there, and some side writing (see: “My Queer Jobs, Parts 1, 2 & 3”) about my own bisexual awareness. But for what it’s worth, I do feel I arrived at this topic completely in this book. It isn’t peeking from around the frame, but centered where it needs to be. Which hasn’t kept the general discomfort at naming this matter from playing a role in the readers’ and critics’ reaction to the book. That’s to say, barely anyone mentions it.

DF: We must soon step out of our costumes. (I fear the zipper at the back of mine has gotten stuck.) A custom at the end of artist interviews is to ask what’s next. But I often think a better question is: how do you move on to whatever is next?

JL: Perfect last question. My struggle to give it a good answer will be metonymic with the struggle that is its answer, which is to say it’s the struggle I’m currently engaged in. Believing that you’re done with a book like this one is difficult, even when it’s not only in the bookstores but on the verge of being returned and remaindered. An interview like this helps. Out of at least a decade of intention, and then three or four years of active whittling and carving and blacksmithing, I have assembled this gigantic and ridiculous trebuchet for hurling a single inchoate feeling out of the castle of myself and across great distances, into the castle of the unknown recipient, who remains permanently out of my sight or communication otherwise. Crouching behind my battlement, I wait to see a tiny puff of smoke go up across that other wall, or hear a faint voice cry “ouch!” Picture this like a Monty Python battle. Perhaps my recipient will toss out a cow or a chicken onto my head, I’m not sure. But questions like yours are the puff of smoke I’m looking for.

Why all the martial and medieval imagery? Well, the way to move on—the only real way—is to become fixated on some next thing, some impossible new confabulation of your deep thoughts and your self-amusement, placed in relation to artifacts beyond your understanding, stuff lying “out there” in cultural or geographical or historical space. An object of words that needs making, but only by your own measure—no one would ever call for it, and most, if you tried to explain it to them, would only shake their heads. I’m assembling thoughts in front of you, Dan. A book set in Southern California, about a castle full of actors who are playing knights in a kind of dinner theater. And then the knights go on strike. A novel. I’ll hurl it up over the wall for your consideration, about eight hundred lunches from now.

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Les Curieux hide above the tympanum of the Last Judgement, at the Abbey of Sainte-Foye in Conques, France. They were carved in the twelfth century, a later addition to the ninth-century church. Fourteen of them peek from behind the outer rim of the tympanum arch, folding it back like paper, or pushing their faces through the blonde stone as if it were a strip of ribbon. They look like medieval ancestors of Kilroy, the cartoon character that US soldiers graffitied around battlefields during World War Two.

One interpretation holds that Les Curieux are angels watching the result of the Last Judgement, making the sky disappear “like a scroll rolled up,” as the Book of Revelation puts it. Sci-fi fans might describe them as beings from another dimension, observing us through the fabric of space and time. Artists will relate to the way they look as if they’re lurking in the back office of a gallery during a private view, stealing glimpses at an audience assessing their work on the tympanum. Perhaps they’re mascots for the age of conspiracy, representatives for those who, like children, believe in wizards hiding behind every curtain, secret grown-up controllers directing every detail of life from deep inside giant stone buildings.

Conspiracists and ideologists love a tidy work space. They apply to their beliefs Marie Kondo’s organizational philosophy: if a theory or fact does not spark joy and fit neatly into a storage drawer, then they throw it out. “When I was a young and carefree spy,” wrote novelist John Le Carré in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, “it was only natural that I should believe that the nation’s hottest secrets were housed in a chipped green Chubb safe that was tucked away at the end of a labyrinth of dingy corridors on the top floor of 54 Broadway, in the private office occupied by the chief of the Secret Service.” A short career in British intelligence during the early years of the Cold War taught him that the chipped green Chubb safe, if it even existed in the first place, was bare. “Somehow,” he says in a new film adaptation by Errol Morris of The Pigeon Tunnel, “we believe there is an inmost room where policy is being conceived. I think it’s being played completely ad hoc, from day-to-day, hour-to-hour.”

Le Carré was fascinated by “the self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves […] Being the opposite of your actual self.” David Cornwell was his real name. His upper-class accent and self-assurance were a costume he’d put on as a child and never taken off. Le Carré’s father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a prolific con-man, in and out of prison, perpetually on the run from creditors and from reality. Olive, his mother, escaped the marriage when Le Carré was a boy. She disappeared one night and severed all contact with her children, leaving them to be raised by Ronnie and a succession of step-mothers and girlfriends.

Ronnie occasionally used the teenage Le Carré as a dupe. In later life, envious of his son’s success, he tried to swindle money out of him. But a lasting lesson he taught the writer was that “life was a stage where pretense was everything […] You polish your act, learn to tell funny stories. Show off. You discover early that there is no centre to a human being.” Ronnie’s children spied on their father and he, in turn, spied on his children, monitoring their movements and correspondences. Le Carré was sent to Sherborne private school, which he loathed. “I learned the manners and attitudes of a class to which I did not belong,” he explained. “I turned myself into one of them, but I was not one of them.” He ran away to Berne to study German. There he was identified as a perfect candidate for recruitment into “the secret world”: severed from family at a young age, self-reliant, but looking for the feeling of belonging that an institution like school and university could provide.

After Oxford and a brief stint as a schoolteacher, Le Carré joined MI5 in 1958, transferred to MI6 two years later, and was posted to Germany under diplomatic cover. In his spare time he wrote two novels under his new pen-name, an espionage story and a whodunnit. He left MI6 after his third, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a runaway bestseller in 1963 (subsequently a major film in 1965 starring Richard Burton). With that novel, Le Carré created the antithesis to James Bond. No gadgets, no guns, no glamour. A drab shadowland inhabited by alcoholics, cynics, dupes, zealots and egotists gambling on “the world’s game.” An exclusive world that spoke an invented argot—the Circus, the Nursery, the Mothers, tradecraft, babysitters, lamplighters—so arcane, so plausibly the kind of slang that British private schoolboys might carry into adult establishment life, that readers took it to be authentic.

(Le Carré didn’t often address class in his books. Early novels by his contemporary Len Deighton—a graphic designer by trade—provide that counterpoint, albeit more knockabout in tone. Beginning with The IPCRESS File in 1962, Deighton’s first four books are narrated by an anonymous working-class recruit to the secret services. Three of the stories were turned into films, which named the agent Harry Palmer and cast a charming, insolent Michael Caine in the lead. In one of my favourite scenes in The IPCRESS File, Palmer discusses tinned mushrooms with his boss in a supermarket, a beautiful distillation of British attitudes to class and food in the Sixties.)

The spy genre gave Le Carré a creative constraint within which he could interrogate his ghosts. Magnus Pym, the agent on the run in The Perfect Spy, was an avatar for the author. Pym’s father, the fraudster Rick, was a stand-in for Ronnie. Le Carré’s most famous creation, the wise and avuncular spymaster George Smiley, was the ideal parent Le Carré never had. Bill Haydon, the mole Smiley hunts down in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was an analogue for Kim Philby, the real-life British head of counter-intelligence who defected to Russia in 1963.

Le Carré was still working in intelligence when Philby jumped to Moscow. He was the third of what later turned out to be five moles passing secrets to the Soviets. Le Carré witnessed first-hand the existential crisis that his defection triggered within the secret services. He didn’t believe that Philby had done it for ideological reasons. At first perhaps it was true that he’d been carried along the rigid tracks of youthful idealism. But his motivations curdled. Le Carré believed Philby was addicted to betrayal. It was the ecstasy of secrecy he enjoyed. “That thrill of stepping into the street and knowing what you know and they don’t,” Le Carré says. “A sensual journey of constantly challenging your luck […] To feel you’re the hub of the universe is wonderful for the vanity.”

Morris opens his film with Le Carré describing the psychology of interrogation. At the end of the movie, the author says that he opened up completely during the course of their conversations. Then Morris cuts to an admission from Le Carré that he’s been holding back, refusing to discuss the reported infidelities in his private life. “I’ll answer any question you wish me to answer as truthfully as I can,” he had said. That careful caveat, “as truthfully as I can,” excused him.

There is a ghoulish pleasure to be found in Le Carré’s work. He puts his readers in the shoes of people who have given over their entire lives to a patriotic cause, and asks what it is to vow oneself completely to a specialist world. To convince yourself that what you are doing has value. To be in a constant state of dissemblance, holding nearly everything of yourself back, even from those closest to you. Compartmentalizing, revealing only enough to make your cover story—your ‘legend’ in Le Carré-speak—seem plausible, enough to hide a great deal more. Here, betrayal and commitment mean much the same thing.

The title The Pigeon Tunnel came from a hotel in Monte Carlo. Pigeons bred on the hotel roof were funnelled down a passage which fed them out above the hotel lawns and into the gun-sights of guests shooting them for sport. The surviving birds returned to their home on the roof, only to be sent back along the tunnel the next day to face the guns again. Le Carré repeatedly used The Pigeon Tunnel as a working title. His writing career, which began as the Berlin Wall went up in the early 1960s and ended two decades after 9/11, appeared to be animated by anger and disgust at those who hold power, empathy for those whose lives are ruined in cycles of cruelty. He wrote with clarity about moral ambivalence.

As with his characters, Le Carré’s allegiances sometimes came under question. His 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, set amid the Middle East conflict, was criticized for both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian bias. He was accused of Jewish steretyping in his early novels, and praised for writing Jewish characters who represented the complexities of postwar trauma and guilt. Le Carré once accepted an invitation to lunch with Margaret Thatcher and much to her displeasure used the opportunity to voice his support for the Palestinian struggle. He danced the conga with Yasser Arafat and asked to place his hand on Arafat’s chest, to feel “the Palestinian heart.” In a much-quoted 1998 interview with the World Jewish Review he said that he was “wholeheartedly behind the nation-state of Israel as the homeland and guardian of Jews everywhere” and that “no nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it.” In the lead-up to the 2019 British general election he signed a public letter of refusal to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, saying it was “steeped in association with antisemitism.”

The ideal spy, he thought, was “someboy who is a bit bad, but also loyal.” I wonder if this could describe the ideal critic: faithful to the cause of art, but never to be fully trusted by artists and their professional associates, never fully trusting them in return. There’s an essay about Louise Bourgeois, written by the art critic Stuart Morgan, which The Pigeon Tunnel put me in mind of. In a way, a piece about belief and loyalty. Stuart was a teacher of mine, and he used to tell stories about his friendship with Bourgeois in New York during the 1980s, championing her work when few others cared. In the essay he describes asking her one day about a sculpture he had seen sitting around her house, and which had disappeared. She denied its existence, and part of the essay hinges around his getting her to admit that she’d made it. In their Guardian obituary for Stuart, published in 2002, the critics Ian Hunt and Adrian Searle recounted how he “cajoled Bourgeois about her self-mythologising, what he called her lies, without offending her.” Stuart fell ill with Lewy body disease in the late 1990s. The obituary described how a carer visiting his home had been impressed by his large book collection and remarked that he must be a deep person. Stuart disagreed, and replied that he was “interested in the problem of describing the surface of things, the difficulty of which he thought had been underestimated.” Paying attention to the surface of things is a skill that both critics and spies share. There are people and things which are what they seem, but there are many more that aren’t. “I don’t think we can penetrate people very much,” said Le Carré, “but we can form imaginings about them, and then relate to them.”

When I was an editor of an art magazine I used to come across the snobbism that too many exhibition reviews were “merely descriptive.” “Merely” was always the attending adjective. It suggested a lack of effort, a failure to meet a threshold that the person complaining would not disclose. Description didn’t carry intellectual valour. It was amateur, vulgar. I could never understand this attitude. It’s hard to know something until you begin to describe it. Description is done for the historical record—reviews are primary sources—and for people who can’t see the show in person. To describe what something looks like involves including and excluding details. Is the artwork bigger than my body? Is the sculpture on a plinth or the floor? What’s it made from? Was it fabricated by machine or by hand? Does it smell? Description demands specifics. Is that painting red or is it crimson? Or carmine? Each word smuggles with it hidden persuaders. By not paying attention to describing the surface of things—because you’re hot for your own prose, busy flashing that PhD around like a backstage VIP pass, writing from the press release not the gallery walls—you might find yourself tempted to redecorate dank dungeons in eggshell white and cover the blood on the floor with a nice knotted-pile rug.

“Draw what you see, not what you know” was a maxim I was taught in life drawing classes. The tilt of a foot or a head might look wrong as you first get it down on paper, but don’t distort your work with the angle you want to see. Instead trust that your observations will make sense as the drawing develops. But describing what you see can cause trouble. You might say something in public or at work about a picture—of the bombing of a hospital, say—and find yourself chastised for failing to genuflect correctly before speaking, neglecting protocols you didn’t know existed. Your inbox and DMs begin to fill with pettifogging advice and exhortations to do the right thing, issued by names—not people who’ve ever looked you in the eye—names who hold power, which is not the same thing as authority. Professional constituencies tow you so far out to sea that your sense of self—what you thought you stood for—becomes a tiny harbour light rapidly extinguishing itself on a dark horizon. Sanctimony is handed round like a cheap and sugary snack. Your sincerity is belittled. Describing the surface of something turns out to be more difficult than you estimated and it gets you fired from your job. You’re told to shut up because the picture is neither crimson nor carmine, it’s “complicated.”

What is complicated is enduring the vertiginous shifts in scale that careen back-and-forth between the tiny dramas of domestic life and the catastrophic idiocies of politics and war. The zoom control that keeps crashing in for a close-up then helicoptering up to high altitude. Where do you put yourself when there is laundry to be done, and your phone is screaming news of hostages, of ethnic cleansing and children trying to mind their own business while adults—so brave, so well-equipped—rain fire on their heads? News of Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine?

Today I read news reports that the Palestinian poet, essayist and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha was taken by Israeli forces in Gaza. So perhaps, as ever, it’s the poets that worry power with their superior precision and ways of describing the surface of things. In his book-length Autumn Journal, written between August and December 1938, the poet Louis MacNeice describes daily life under the queasy creep of war. (MacNeice, incidently, was also friends with the art historian Anthony Blunt. It was revealed in 1979 that Blunt was the fourth member of the Cambrige Five spy ring.) Looming in the background to the poem is the sorry end of the Spanish Civil War, and the Munich Agreement which allowed Hitler’s Germany to annex swathes of Czechoslovakia. Autumn Journal was written as these events unfolded and MacNeice captures the quality of feeling that lies between trying to process the news, wanting to vent about it, yet needing to carry on; between anxious rumination about the future and “a smell of French bread in Charlotte Street, a rustle / Of leaves in Regent’s Park.”

He writes:

“But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered

World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks

And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily

Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’”

Then, a few lines later, he describes how

“we laugh it off and go round town in the evening

And this, we say, is on me;

Something out of the usual, a Pimm’s Number One, a Picon —

But did you see

The latest?”

Lately I’ve kept returning to a passage in the poem’s final canto. Here MacNeice dreams of a “possible land”

“[… ] Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets.

But where both heart and brain can understand

The movements of our fellows;

Where life is a choice of instruments and none

Is debarred his natural music,

Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger

And thought is free as the sun,

Where the altars of sheers power and mere profit

Have fallen to disuse,

Where nobody sees the use

Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,

Where the individual, no longer squandered

In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed

With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,

Where the people are more than a crowd.”

“Buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money.” Individuals “squandered in self-assertion.” Understanding people as “more than a crowd.” It could have been written yesterday. In a sense it was. It was also written the day before yesterday, and every year stretching back to the month MacNeice put it to paper. It’ll be recomposed again tomorrow too because there is no chipped green Chubb safe containing the world’s blueprints, but that’s OK, that might be a cause for hope.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Medical Aid for Palestinians

—Médecins Sans Frontières

—Baltimore’s finest electricians, Matmos—Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt—have released a new album with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Given the run of the Smithsonian’s audio archives, the duo’s new work, Return to Archive, is cribbed and cooked entirely from non-musical recordings of animals, insects, telephones, radios, and science experiments. Featuring collaborations with Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway, it’s typically unsettling and funny, and the above track, ‘Why?,’ is a weirdo banger. I interviewed Drew last year for this newsletter. You can read it here.

—I love this stop-start performance by Dory Previn from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977.

—Artist David Levine’s latest work, Dissolution—currently showing at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York—is a 3D holographic video narrated by a disembodied soul trapped inside a machine, which itself is trapped inside a museum collection. The imprisoned soul’s monologue is self-aware and funny, sharp about the art industry’s conflicted desires to serve both politics and aesthetics. It’s a sculpture that’s also a video, and looks unlike anything I’ve seen outside of a science-fiction movie, yet it rattles and whirrs like an old film projector. (The device uses a sheet of glass that rapidly shuttles up-and-down multiple times per second: it’ll take your fingers off if you get too close.) Dissolution glows like a jewel box. It looks like a message that has been sent simultaneously from the past and from the future.

—Yang Haisong and Sun Xia are the cult Beijing band Dear Eloise. For those who go fuzzy around the edges for lo-fi shoegaze, try this.

—Have you seen Anatomy of a Fall yet? A courtroom drama about writers and alleged murder. Dreamy.

—A new essay by Paige K. Bradley on the musician Judee Sill grapples with the “proximity of romantic love and a religiously tinged fervor” in Sill’s songwriting. Here’s she is performing in 1973, another Old Grey Whistle Test clip, complete with ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris introduction.

—Having earlier advocated for paying attention to descriptive language, I will now be contrary and say that a problem I have with a lot of language around men’s clothing is its monotonous fixation on technical detail and dubious appeals to heritage virtues. Goodyear welted soles and delinquent nubuck uppers hand-buffed with Irish pumice. Bar-tacked triple-stitched belt tabs spanner-tightened with forge-grunted copper donut buttons. Based on a British World War One-era fly swat. Built on lasts originally used on child chimney sweeps in Victorian London. It’s as if men are not interested in how something feels on their body or makes them look, only how often you need to change the oil and check the tyre pressure. Designer Luke Walker’s label L.E.J. makes beautiful clothes beyond my pocket but I recommend their line in descriptions. Examples: “By goodness gracious, this is the way to wear fabric. Tuck it for dramatic drape, or wear it open for a louche couture vibe. I don’t have words!” “It's the kind of hardwearing elegant stuff which might need elbow patches in about 70 years.” “There's a hidden internal drawstring in the waistband, for when you're feeling particularly trim.“ “If you were considering a set of new gold buttons for your birthday, this fella would take them handsomely.”

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One of the many things I admired about the musician Scott Walker was that he reportedly kept his phone disconnected, apart from an hour or two on Wednesday afternoons when he would put it back on the hook. If you wanted to speak with him, this was your only window.

Oh to be so famous that I could become a hermit.

Apologies for dribbing and drabbing Keep All Your Friends for the past couple of months. (If you haven’t noticed the lag, your life is full and rich.) I’ve been away. I failed to take with me enough books to read. My girlfriend travelled with a far better selection. I took a copy of The Skin by Curzio Malaparte with me, because I had imagined, vaguely, that it might be helpful for something I’m writing. The Skin describes the surreal and grotesque conditions in Naples after Allied forces took control in 1943, and is written from the perspective of a slippery liaison officer working with Italian liberation forces and the American military. It was a trudge. Or my mood was mismatched to it. Or Malaparte needed an editor, and I was stuck with a new unexpurgated edition of the book. My girlfriend suggested her copy of Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Will and Testament instead. It’s narrated by a woman estranged from her family, forced into contact with her parents and siblings by an inheritance dispute concerning the ownership of two country cabins. As she describes an increasingly tense back-and-forth of emails and phone calls about the cabins, the reason why the narrator cut ties with her family in the first place becomes horrifyingly clear. (The book caused controversy on its publication in 2016, with accusations from the author’s family that Hjorth had based it on actual events and violated their privacy, accusations she denied, but which in turn led Hjorth’s sister to write a novel about Hjorth’s novel.) Will and Testament turns at a rapid clip. The family is kept in perpetual conflict, the possibility of reconciliation appearing only occasionally on a distant horizon. Apology and forgiveness are talked about, then denied or sabotaged. I had swapped one novel about war for another.

This year is the centenary of the War Resister’s League, a secular organization established in New York City by Jessie Wallace Hughan in 1923. (Thank you to writer and editor Matthew McClean for pointing this out.) What timing. The past weekend, the Judd Foundation in New York hosted an exhibition dedicated to the WRL’s work. Donald Judd became involved in the late 1960s, through his wife, Julie Finch, Hughan’s great niece. The artist helped organize and participate in a number of fundraisers for the WRL, among other political causes, including the Association for the Prevention of Torture.

A book on Judd and one on the painter Philip Guston sit next to each other on my shelves, which is the banal reason why thinking about Judd’s pacifism made me leap to Guston. When Guston’s name comes up, the first thing that always comes to my mind is not his work, but the friendships that ended over his turn from abstraction to making figurative paintings about racism, war and Richard Nixon’s paranoid America. (People have short memories. They shrink further in the wash of ideology. As John Perrault wrote in the Village Voice at the time, before Guston was an abstract painter, he was a social realist. “Wasn’t everybody?”) In 1986, six years after Guston’s death, the composer Morton Feldman said in a talk at CalArts, Los Angeles: “He was my closest friend, and he was also my closest friend in art.” The pair stopped speaking after Guston unveiled his new figurative work at Marlborough Gallery in 1970. “We had no contact at all and then I got a call from his daughter… He died and had a heart attack and on his death bed, I mean, to make matters worse, he wanted me to come and say Kaddish. So, it’s a sad story. What makes it extremely sad is that we broke up because of style.” Avant-garde partisanship is as dumb and tragic as any other.

Judd’s sculpture can leave me cold, but maybe it’s his fans I have the problem with, or at least the ones who like using words such as ‘rigour’ as a term of praise for art. Rigour doesn’t have any patience with doubt, it doesn’t admit to not having answers, and artists who claim to have all the answers both bore and scare the bejesus out of me in equal measure. The other day, I saw a clip from an interview with the artist collective Slavs and Tatars for The Afikra Podcast. “Today so many artists want to be the smartest person in the room,” they said, when maybe “the role of the artist is to be the fool. […] The thing is, of course, if you try, as an artist, to try and convince people that you’re an idiot, there’s a good chance you’ll succeed at convincing some people that you’re an idiot.” Humour can be an image of peace, but we don’t all laugh at the same things. Cute animal videos are an image of peace too, but some of us have fur allergies.

One of the great feats of heroic modernism is often phrased as ‘breaking down borders’ (or ‘boundaries,’ or ‘walls’) to ‘establish new forms’. Necessary, laudable, led to some important pieces of art. It’s also what invading armies do. Of course it’s only a metaphor, but the drama of militarized language—‘challenge’, ‘interrogate,’ ‘undermine,’ ‘confront,’ ‘destroy’—is good for making you feel like you’re doing something important yet bad for the soul. These words crop up every day in exhibition press releases, essays, on museum walls. ‘Peace’ is a word long namastéd into vapidity, spun by religious con-artists and eye-rolled at by people who confuse skepticism with intelligence, but you won’t see it used on many museum didactics. Call me naive and I’ll fight you with a cuddly toy dove, but something has to follow conflict.

The word opsimath is an undervalued one. It means a person who begins to study or learn late in life. I wish I had discovered it years ago, which itself is an opsimathic wish. (Opsimathian? Opsimathicalist? I should learn.) Learning to write, working out what to say, what to make of something that happened to you years ago, it takes decades. In that sense I think all writers are opsimaths, so it’s unfortunate that the culture demands of them immediate opinions about immediate problems. That’s another thing about war, its horror takes all the weight out of language. Still, people try their best to make images of peace. Maybe it’s an infographic, or a link for a place to donate money, or a painting of an olive branch. Or a race for the Know-All Championship Cup: “you don’t get it!” “no, you don’t get it and I’m going to tell you why!” A march and a vigil, silence, a petition, a phonecall to your local political representative, a bloviating op-ed written in the imperative—‘demand,’ ’must,’ ‘shall,’ ‘cannot’—because what else is there? An image of action, an image of a call to action, an image of a screenshot of a finger-wagging admonition against calls to action that aren’t the right calls to action: no matter if some of them annoy us, in a sense they are saying “I’m doing all that I can under circumstances which make everything feel futile.”

The other day, and for reasons unrelated to the catastrophe in Gaza, though it was buzzing everywhere, I read Derek Jarman’s War Requiem. It’s a slim volume published by Faber in 1989, and for all the Jarmanalia that has been reissued in recent years, this one has slipped through the net. (I would complain but it’s better that people enjoy his writing about gardening and colour.) The book comprises the brief screenplay Jarman wrote for his film adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 War Requiem, Britten’s libretto, and diary excerpts from the shoot. War Requiem sets poems by Wilfred Owen within the structure of a traditional requiem. I was struck by these lines, from Owen’s ‘A Terre’:

'Little I’d ever teach a son, but hitting,

Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting

Well, that’s what I learnt, — that, and making money.'

My grandad—a decorated veteran of two world wars, who convalesced alongside Owen after being injured on the Western Front—used to say that the bravest man at the Remembrance Day parade in the town where he lived was the town clerk, who did not have any medals pinned to his chest. The clerk was a Quaker and had been a conscientious objector. My grandma was a nurse in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. She was Catholic, and she treated the injured from both the Irish republican and occupying British sides. “They were just men,” she would say. There was no messing with grandma. After Dublin she spent a couple of years nursing in New York City, where she carried around a revolver in her handbag. The other day I tried, stupidly, to Google ‘films about pacifism’ and quickly realised that it was futile. The ironic thing about anti-war films, even the greatest, is that they have to show images of war for the pacifist narrative to make sense. (Take one example: Elem Klimov’s astonishing Come and See, made in 1985, restored a couple of years ago. It depicts the Nazi occupation of Belarus during World War Two, as seen from a boy’s point of view, and its images count among most horrifying in modern cinema.) A war movie doesn’t need to show peace for its narrative to be coherent: it can plunge you right into the blood and noise and squalor and keep you there for as long as the film lasts. Every standard book about how to write a screenplay tells you that the hero of the story must find themselves in conflict with a person, a thing, a feeling, because that’s how drama works. Peace, say the movies, isn’t a set worth building, so get to the point, start a war.

I follow the Lee Miller Archives on Instagram. The other day they posted a photo Miller took in 1957 of her father, Theodore Miller, and her housekeeper Patsy Murray. They’re shelling peas at the kitchen table of Farleys House, Miller’s home in Sussex. The photograph is colour, Murray’s red cardigan pops out of the left-hand side of the photograph, half-balanced by a bright red standing lamp on the right, behind Miller senior. There’s a nice symmetry with the backs of two chairs in the middle of the image, and there is a cheerful drawing on the wall, probably something priceless given to Miller by a famous artist. It doesn’t have the glamour of Miller’s fashion work. Or, more to the point, the frightening power of the image she took from a balcony window of the moment the citadel of St Malo was hit by a German air strike in 1944. (This turned out to be one of the first times napalm was used in combat.) Or the famous shot of her taking a bath in Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment in 1945. It’s an unremarkable, quiet photograph of two people preparing food; an invaluable image.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Rosalind Nashashibi’s 2017 film Electrical Gaza is available to watch online at LUX until the end of October.

—Cellist and composer Lucy Railton has a new album out on November 10, titled Corner Dancer. You can read a good in-depth interview with her at Tone Glow here. It’s where I learned about the singer Sonia Malkine, and led me to the clip below of Malkine, unaccompanied—though she is holding a mighty looking lute—singing Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. Look at the expressions on the faces in the audience. You can practically see the electricity in the air.

—A retrospective of the filmmaker and playwright Julius-Amédée Laou is touring the US. I caught the first night at BAM this past weekend, which included his debut short, Open-Mic Solitaire, about a young Parisian man who hijacks a radio station after his brother is killed in a racist attack, and his first feature The Old Sorceress and the Valet, a surreal, tragicomic study of old age, love, witchcraft and nostalgia. The next stop for the program is Philadelphia I believe. Steve Macfarlane interviewed Laou for Bomb magazine here.

—Sasha Frere-Jones’ memoir, Earlier, is just out from Semiotexte. I think it might be one of the best titles for an autobiography that I have come across. The book hops back-and-forth through time, a little like sitting next to someone as they take you through an old family photograph album. You can also find his Substack here.

—The NYRB have just published another addition to their list of books by the great French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. Skeletons in the Closet, translated by Alyson Waters, tells the story of a private eye lumbered with a case that the police can’t be bothered to investigate but which he can’t let go. For a snappy and informative introduction to Manchette, I recommend Lucy Sante’s preface to the writer’s ‘years of lead’ novel Nada (also in the NYRB series).

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Friends have heard this story a few times. Back in ancient history, Frieze commissioned an interview with the veteran US performance artist Carolee Schneemann. She was in the UK for an exhibition of her work at Cornerhouse in Manchester, her first show in the country for some time. We needed a portrait of the artist to accompany the piece, but the only time Schneemann was free to be photographed was on a Sunday morning, at her friends’ house in west London where she was staying, and she would have only an hour to spare before heading to the airport to fly home. We lined up a photographer. But on the morning of the shoot, the photographer phoned me to say that she had come down with a nasty stomach bug and would have to cancel. With only hours left, the only solution I could think of was to take the photograph myself, so I grabbed my camera and took the Tube to Ladbroke Grove.

It was a cold winter morning. The house was on one of those large west London Georgian terraces; white stucco, tall windows, steps up to the entrance. Schneemann welcomed me at the door. She was wearing high heels, mini-skirt, a luxurious black coat and a pair of thick, curved bull horns on her head. I was introduced to her friends. I got the impression they had known each other since the 1970s. Schneemann told me that she wanted to take the photographs in the back garden, using an old mirror with a white ornamental frame crowned with two horn shapes. I was to direct her. We began shooting but I found that I was too shy to give direction, so she took the lead. It was fun. She played it serious and dignified, she vamped for the camera, she gave encouragement. After photographing three or four set-ups we ran out of time. Schneemann asked if I’d accompany her to the station to get the train to the airport. I went out on to the street to hail a cab while she said goodbye to her friends.

She came out of the house with two enormous suitcases. Tears and mascara streaming down her face from her farewells. The horns were still on her head. I found a taxi. She had to sit leaning forward at an angle to keep the horns from bumping the roof of the cab and all the way to the station I could see the cabbie eyeing us in his rear-view mirror. We had an intense, serious conversation—the artist bent forward the entire time—talking about the BSE crisis that was then gripping the UK, how distressed she was at the sight of pyres of cattle in fields across the country. She talked about her friends, and how hard it had become to get by as an artist in big cities. I dropped her off at Paddington Station. She waved goodbye, still wearing the horns, a satyr heading to the Heathrow Express.

A few months later, Schneemann returned to London for ‘A Short History of Performance’ at the Whitechapel. This series of events re-staged pivotal works of performance art from the 1960s and ‘70s. Schneemann’s orgiastic happening, Meat Joy, first staged at Judson Memorial Church, New York, in 1964, was included alongside pieces by The Bernsteins, Stuart Brisley, The Kipper Kids, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce McLean, and Hermann Nitsch. (The Kipper Kids and their contemporaries in ‘70s London, particularly Anne Bean and her Moody and the Menstruators, came up frequently when I was researching my film on COUM Transmissions. I’d love to see a solid book or documentary about them.) I remember that year witnessing a lot of hand-wringing about re-staging performance art. Arguments in pubs, fractious panel debates, angry letters sent to the art magazines. Anna Dezeuze, writing about the Whitechapel series for Art Monthly, described a public talk connected to the series at which “devoted fans of performance art expressed their concern that a re-enactment would take away the authenticity, spontaneity and radicalism of performance art in the 60s.” One of them accused the Whitechapel of “commercialism and nostalgia, arguing that historical performances could not, and should not, be recreated.” According to Dezeuze, Schneemann agreed, saying that re-stagings she’d seen were “inane and vitiated.”

All that anxiety now seems quaint. The horse has bolted. Mark E. Smith’s line about “the three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition,” has been repeated to the point of tiring commonplace. We live with a different relationship towards words such as “authenticity” and “radicalism,” used-up labels more commonly used for marketing people and things rather than embodying ideals. Technology has turned context into quicksand. It’s always been the case that repeat performance and re-staging is unremarkable for musicians, playwrights, dancers, and actors. It’s integral to the work and to the pleasure of watching it. (Writers are spared the pain of rewriting after their work is published. Re-reading, however, is an altogether higher order of torture.) The daily job of an actor or musician makes those arguments from twenty years ago against re-staging performance art seem precious, like possessive attempts to claim ownership of memories: “I was there at Judson Church in ‘64, you weren’t.” Performance art, of course, isn’t theatre, it isn’t the work of the concert hall. It has its own protocols, developed during a particular moment in 20th century art, some of which have dried into formal convention, some of which remain liquid. I appreciate that. But respect for preservation, keeping the art in aspic, tending to “what the artist intended,” can quickly shade into idolatry. Earlier this year I was talking to an American museum curator who used the phrase “what the artist intended” so many times during our conversation that he sounded like a vicar consoling a bereaved parishioner over tea and biscuits. (“I’m awfully sorry Mr Blandish, but I do believe it’s what she would have wanted…”)

Interviewed a few years ago by art historian Dominic Johnson, Anne Bean said: “By being a continuum, art includes all the life ‘in between.’ It’s just the truth of it. That’s how the work happens, in among other practices of life. So, those moments in a life that happen to have a photograph or a bit of video attached, they are simply butterflies caught in a net… The work, and the life, and everything in between—the fluidity of it—all of it is equally valid.” It makes me think of that cold morning all those years ago photographing Carolee Schneemann. What was that? Two people doing their respective jobs; for a bit of press, to record a little moment for the archives. Two people making pictures together. It was my nerves, her confidence, a cab ride, a conversation, a bemused taxi driver. We would publish two of my pictures in Frieze, but to my lasting regret I lost the transparencies I took of her that day. The two photos that were printed are all that exists, unless a dusty drawer somewhere still keeps them hidden. It was a Sunday morning that happened to have “a photograph or a bit of video attached […] simply butterflies caught in a net.”

The other day, scrolling Instagram for my daily fix of futility, I chanced across a short piece of video posted from WIELS in Brussels. It was from the exhibition ‘Workers in Song’ by composer Billy Bultheel and artist James Richards, conceived as a kind of chamber music composition, combining live performance with archive film and video. (It sounds good. I wish I could see it.) The Instagram post showed a strobe-lit gallery and a man reading from behind a desk. It was an excerpt from Ian White’s piece IBIZA: A Reading for ‘The Flicker’. Ian was an artist, writer and curator who galvanized film and performance in London during the 1990s and early aughts. In 2013 he died of cancer at the age of 42.

I saw IBIZA in 2008 at The Horse Hospital, London, when Ian first staged it. He sat at a table, behind him a projection screen. Tony Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker played throughout. It assaults the eyes using a strobe effect created by black and white frames on the celluloid alternating at different rates. Ian read an account of a brief relationship with a man he met in Ibiza. It was as if an intense sensual memory were erupting through the formalities of a college film lecture. I remember lines from Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto sewn into the monologue, and a list of dating profile likes and dislikes. I can recall something of the atmosphere of the Horse Hospital that summer evening: the red walls and the tiled ramp leading up into the gallery; sitting at the back of a packed room; Ian’s strong Essex accent; the retina burn of The Flicker; a stinging Rainer sentence against “being moved”—a nod, perhaps, toward Ian’s own distrust of sentimentality—and a crowd going to the pub opposite afterwards.

This is how Ian described IBIZA: “A real life true story and the image-less hallucinogens of Tony Conrad's 1966 film The Flicker are presented simultaneously, like parallel lines in a face-off. IBIZA is a question about the real: an assertion of difference or a kind of hopelessness with nonetheless some good energy, a response to a specific place and a specific time, a personal history and imaginary space. Not Ibiza, but the room we're in.” Art and performance, for Ian, existed not just in the moment between the lights going down at the start of an event and coming up again at the end, but in the way you carried yourself through the foyer after it finished and how you behaved in the pub afterwards and the way you described it to a friend the following morning. Colour, texture, emotion that no museum can ever recreate, that can only exist in fragments, carried in the minds of many, smudged in with whatever else rattles around the head—thoughts of sex, going on holiday, paying the rent, doing the groceries. Things that colour an account of the performance in anecdote, in a book, as part of another show years later at an art centre in Brussels. On an Instagram post that sets the mind thinking about something that happened to you with another artist’s work, in another time and place.

In 2018, IBIZA was restaged as part of ‘Any Frame is a Thrown Voice,’ a show dedicated to Ian’s work organized by Kirsty Bell and Mike Sperlinger at Camden Arts Centre in London. An artist and close friend of Ian’s, Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon), went to see Sharon Hayes and Evan Ifekoya re-enact his work. She said afterwards in Frieze: “An unwavering principle of Ian’s was in making sure there was a choice, and I’m not saying too much if I claim to know that he would have wanted both artists to take liberties and make new space within the work, for this time, the room we’re in.”

The other day I heard a programme on NTS Radio about the British group A.R. Kane, responsible for some of the most dreamy records of the 1980s. The show featured a long interview with band member Rudy Tambala. Modest, warm, thoughtful, he talked about growing up working class in London, about his experiences as a black musician in a largely white alternative music scene, about his love of reggae, punk and Viennese waltz, about the physical power of live music and the life-changing moment when he first heard The Cocteau Twins. Towards the end of the show, Tambala remembered how blown away he was when his bandmate, Alex Ayuli, first sang him the lyrics he had written to their song ‘Spook.’ He likened it to the science fiction novel Arc of the Dream by A.A. Attanasio. The book tells the story of The Arc, a multi-dimensional being that enters Earth’s space-time continuum, an entity so vast that it has to inhabit four different people in order to accommodate itself. Each person carries a fragment of its consciousness, only making the Arc’s consciousness whole when they meet. In the interview, Tambala is unable to express why the words to ‘Spook’ hit home. “I just fucking loved it from the moment he sang it to me. It’s difficult for me to explain. It has an effect on me […] The atmosphere of that book [Arc of the Dream] reminds me of ‘Spook,’ this really innocent, lovely imagery.” He was, I think, trying to describe a moment of electrical contact between two people, fizzing inchoate at an invisible frequency. The arc of the work landing just beyond the horizon of language.

I’m now at the age when I can say “I was there” for one or two things, just like those performance art devotees at the Whitechapel. I have seen how art fragments and splinters the moment it leaves the studio or desk, and so the most I could ever claim is that “I was there, viewing from that angle, in that corner of the room, closer to the left speaker than the right, sight-line partially blocked by a tall man in front, behind me someone whispering to their friend, pins-and-needles in my foot, transfixed but needing the loo.” Books, paintings, songs, they arrive us at different stations in our lives. We might pick up on this or that aspect, overlook things the author wished us to spot, see patterns and symbols that the artist themselves hadn’t noticed. But there is no cosmic force that can reconstitute those fragments, no special art preservation glue. The world has already changed between the moment you play the first note and the instant you hit it again. Butterflies caught in a net, at best.

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—My favourite talks series in New York, nay the world—The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture—is rolling out its Fall season. Included is Chloe Raunet’s documentary I Am Weekender, an oral history of one music video: Flowered Up’s 17-minute long, 1992 club hymn, ‘Weekender.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, Colloquium Chairperson, says “personally, I think it’s one of the great London films of the last sixty years.” Raunet’s doc screens on October 6th at the Colloquium’s usual NYU campus location: check @colloquium_unpopular_culture on IG for details and RSVP.

—Ace Records are set to release In The Light Of Time - UK Post Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992–1998, a bumper compilation featuring Laika, Pram, Disco Inferno, Moonshake, Seefeel and a host of other fantastic, hard-to-classify British bands that I remember losing my Saturday job wages to back in ’92. I will be doing the same again.

—Speaking of hard-to-classify, Tania Pérez Córdova will open her first US survey show at Sculpture Center in New York this month. It’s subtle, sensual work, and according to the exhibition press release, lately curious about “the insufficiency of discourse.” I know that feeling. I love the title: “Generalization.”

—I’ve been enjoying the Animation Obsessive newsletter here on Substack. Their latest is about Art Clokey’s Gumby, and how it was influenced by a now largely forgotten Serbian artist named Slavko Vorkapich. The newsletter highlights an early film of Clokey’s, a delightful claymation titled Gumbasia, dating from 1955, a year before Gumby the character came into being. It’s like watching Gumby as a Platonic solid.

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In my childhood home there is a chunk of carved stone dating from the 12th century. It depicts Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, divided by the Tree of Knowledge. Eve is crouched behind the tree and appears to grip its trunk in fear. The Serpent, coiled as if ready to strike, glares directly at the viewer. The scene is chiselled from coarse, tan-coloured sandstone, letterbox in shape and remarkably heavy. The back of it is worn shapeless, but the carved face is beautifully preserved. A medievalist we met dated the piece and identified it as part of the lip of a baptismal font. He theorized that the font had been vandalized during the dissolution of the English monastaries in the 1530s. Our chunk had fallen face-down into the rubble. Soil preserved the carving for centuries, while its verso, exposed to the elements, eroded to formless anonymity, hiding its identity in the earth.

The carving always makes me think of Rip Van Winkle, asleep for years then waking up to a changed world. England was deeply, violently, religious when this fragment was buried in the ground. When it came up for air in the 20th century, aftershocks from the Reformation could still be detected—in Northern Ireland, in the fact of a state church—but almost everything else had altered beyond imagination.

Sleep is the fate of most artworks. When they’re made, and only if they’re lucky, they receive applause for topicality, spark hearty debate, inspire magazine articles about the maker’s favourite designers and recipes for world peace. If doubly lucky an artwork can make a lasting impression on its period of facture and become one of those paintings or songs that TV documentaries use as shorthand to denote a decade’s upheavals. For most, however, the fizz dies away until only the artist and their most devoted followers care for the thing in question. Years, decades, pass in dormancy, at best spent being taken-for-granted, until something about the artwork begins to appear fresh to new eyes. (Note the excitement, for instance, about the Ed Ruscha retrospective that has just opened at MoMA in New York. I’m excited too. I love his work. But I can’t recall the last time a friend mentioned his paintings in conversation.) Like one of those rare plants that only flowers every few years, the artwork blooms into relevance again. The artist wonders what everyone had been thinking all these years, why the sudden interest, how nice it will be to have a flush bank account for once. (I think here of a Bedwyr Williams drawing which depicts an older artist looking uncomfortable as an ambitious younger curator takes a selfie with them.) The word ‘legacy’ gets thrown about. Claims are made about how those of us with taste and discernment had loved the work all along, about how ignorant our predecessors were for neglecting it.

These days ‘legacy’ is one of those words, like ‘classic’ or ‘heritage,’ that were once used by historians but are now found on egg-cartons and in the kinds of restaurants where they “tell you about the menu.” A word, like many of the kindest and strongest ones, that has been ruined by inflation, that could do with a long rest. Despite the fact that such rediscoveries happen privately every day to a person, to an artwork somewhere in the world, today’s reissue-industrial complex can seem like we are living in an era of historical strip-mining and I find myself getting stuck on easy phrases such as ’lost classic.’ Lost when? How? Never-found-in-the-first-place is often more accurate.

Just like everyone else, I enjoy this kind of rediscovery process only for the purest, most virtuous reasons. Nothing to do with the self-isolating pleasure of ignoring what everyone else is talking about, of wanting to evangelize the obscure. I experienced it recently with the work of director Hal Hartley. When his films emerged in the early 1990s—movies such as The Unbelievable Truth, Flirt, Amateur, and Henry Fool—he epitomized American arthouse cool. His world was peopled by stylish but troubled eccentrics. These characters could seem remote and awkward, but at the same time Hartley gave his films an oddball warmth and anxious humour, as if to bring the audience closer. (Adrienne Shelly, playing a young woman perpetually distracted by her fear of nuclear armaggedon in The Unbelievable Truth, is a great example.) The dialogue was sharp and served in arch and highly-controlled bites of self-awareness. Deadpan. Lots of poignant… space… between each line. The kind of acting which, to those of us watching from afar, could make you imagine that everyone in New York City read Brecht for breakfast and lived in the Wooster Group’s SoHo theatre. Hartley made imaginative use of an ensemble cast of then up-and-coming actors, including Martin Donovan, Michael Imperioli, Elina Löwensohn, Parker Posey, Adrienne Shelly. Occasionally they burst into song and dance. His soundtracks were beautiful, written by Hartley under the name Ned Rifle—hints of Philip Glass, rousing, mysterious—and also featured songs by musicians such as Liz Phair, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth.

When I saw Hartley’s films in the 1990s I liked them. But I only got their mood and not their meaning. Then the times moved on. The movie business changed. Different flavours of filmmaking came into fashion. Nobody was yet nostalgic for 1990s New York—post-9/11, perhaps a little—because they were too busy being nostalgic for 1970s New York. (They still are.) Hartley continued to make films—from the ‘lost’ artist’s point of view it’s the world, not them, that disappears—which were crowdsourced from fans. He kept a following but his name seemed to drop from sight. I didn’t think about these films for 25 years.

This week, the Criterion Channel launched a season devoted to Hartley’s work. By coincidence, I had watched Amateur earlier this summer. It tells the story of Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) who meets Thomas (Martin Donovan) in a coffee shop. She is struggling to write a dirty story for a porn magazine. He has just woken up in an alleyway with amnesia. (It’s the famous Staple Street alley in TriBeCa, which also, coincidentally, opens Chantal Akerman’s News from Home and Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation.) Isabelle attempts to help Thomas recover his identity. Meanwhile, porn actress Sofia (Elina Löwensohn)—seen in the opening moments of the film with Thomas’s unconscious body on the street—is on the run from a criminal group, after she threatened to blackmail its shadowy boss. Their net is closing on her when she crosses paths with Thomas and Isabelle. Isabelle, Sofia and Thomas must now come to terms with the terrible past Thomas is only beginning to recall.

I don’t know why I came back to this film. I had likely seen the director’s name in a book, thought my god I haven’t thought about Hal Hartley for a while, which triggered a memory of the 1990s, which sent me in search of a mood I wanted to feel again. As the opening credits played, I was transported. Donovan and his suits! Huppert the wayward nun! Parker Posey and Dwight Ewell squatting the West Side piers! Pamela Stewart, the over-empathic cop! The mannered acting! That music! Its style and artifice seemed alive again. I wanted its moral ambivalences. I wanted SoHo in 35mm. Nostalgia, yes, but nostalgia isn’t always about wanting to return somewhere. It can be the desire to put something from the past in useful combination with the present. I wanted a film about what happens when the world turns while your face is buried in the dirt.

Dialogue with a Somnambulist is the title of a new collection of short works by Chloe Aridjis. The book brings together stories and essays that date back to her debut story ‘The Kafka Society’ in 2005. Many first appeared in literary magazines or exhibition catalogues, and each has floated alone through time, no doubt changing weight of meaning for the author, disappearing then resurfacing as a new reader discovers them. Sleep is a recurring theme in Aridjis’s work. She suffers from insomnia—one of the stories, ‘In the Arms of Morpheus,’ is even set in a sleep lab—and her writing has a powerful dreamlike quality, a strange yet agile logic, as if yearning to be in a state she cannot quite enter, as if always stuck in an hypnagogic antechamber just out of rest’s reach. Dreaming being able to dream. Insomnia seems to prime Aridjis to notice anomalous events occuring at the corner of her eye, to note what happens in shadow, to speculate about the secret lives of strangers she sees on the street. (In his introduction to the collection, Tom McCarthy suggests that the author’s upbringing partly explains her interest in thresholds: “Born to the Mexican son of a wandering Greek and the expat Jewish daughter of second-generation immigrant New Yorkers; raised in a set of transfers between Manhattan, The Hague and Bern; steeped in French literature in New England and English subculture in Mexico City; writing in English although bilingual”.)

In the book’s title story, ‘Dialogue with a Somnabulist,’ the narrator falls for a wax statue resembling Cesare, the sleepwalker from Robert Wiene’s silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. This somnambulist is “seven or eight feet tall, with jet-black hair matted to his forehead”, eyes lined with “thick strokes of charcoal,” sharp cheekbones, “black turtleneck, black leggings, hips narrower than shoulders […] like a dormant mime.” He decorates a hidden bar in Berlin. The narrator has a friend who buys the Somnambulist waxwork for her as a gift. Like a kind of domesticated golem, the Somnambulist comes alive and performs tasks for the narrator around her home, shares in awkward intimacies, but becomes withdrawn when she and her friend begin a real, flesh-and-blood love affair. The statue is donated to a waxworks museum, with fateful consequences.

The story might be read as a parable about idealizing art. The Somnabulist is discovered in a bar filled with models of monsters and mechanical grotesques. It’s run by a woman who plays gypsy punk music and Einstürzende Neubauten records. Aridjis’s descriptions evoke a Berlin that could be straight out of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, or a romance between the Weimar avant-garde and 1980s West German post-punk scenes. It’s a romance of place that feels familiar to me, a combination of a period that I may have brushed against with one that predates my existence. But the narrator discovers that she can’t inhabit an ideal. She works at a furniture store not in underground punk bohemia. She can’t love a waxwork, can’t live inside a German Expressionist film. Those touchstones only retain their power if she remains awake to her present, lets them live in her imagination rather than tries to force them into being.

A few years ago, thanks to artists Tyler Coburn and Ian Hatcher, I took part in an experiment in remote viewing. A group of us assembled in a room at Triangle Arts in downtown Brooklyn where, using pencil, paper and clay, we were guided through a set of exercises in astral travel. In the 1970s, the US government developed a covert programme, named Stargate, that trained people to develop psychic powers for military purposes. Remote viewers allegedly used clairvoyance to spy on enemy defence sites located thousands of miles away. Their reports were given in the form of written descriptions, drawings and clay sculptures. For Coburn and Hatcher, both ESP skeptics, remote viewing provided an allegory for contemporary surveillance: the ‘black box’ of data harvesting, our sense of always being watched, assessed, categorized. But it also made for a lucid illustration of the artistic process, the back-and-forth between an engagement with the world—gathering experiences and source material—then withdrawal, sequestration, in order to make something from it. (Productivity can come with loneliness: I just finished Steven Millhauser’s poignant novella The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, which tells the story of an artist working in the early, heady days of the animated cartoon, whose devotion to his laborious craft comes at the expense of his marriage and friendships.) I was pleased with the drawing I made during my group remote viewing session—it looked like Los Angeles as seen from an aeroplane—but the real ‘target’ of the session was the group itself, a lesson in constructing and directing truth for each other.

Coburn is always a surprising artist, with each new project conceptually distinct from the last. Earlier this year, he published the book Solitary. It’s the result of an unusual group writing project he staged in South Korea at a facility called Happitory, located in the countryside east of Seoul. Happitory—a portmanteau of ‘happiness’ and ‘factory’ in its English translation—offers visitors a range of programmes that allow them to disengage from the pressures of life for short periods. One of these is solitary confinement: 24 hours locked in a cell, with no electronic devices, only food, bedding, pajamas, yoga mat, tea-set, and writing materials.

The programme affords “freedom through restriction,” as Coburn puts it, underscoring the Happitory founders’ view that “we all live within restrictions,” and that there are psychological or social prisons within us. “For the duration of our stay,” Coburn writes, “we live inside ourselves living inside a concretized version of ourselves. We are doubly imprisoned, trapped inside a redundancy,” inside what has already happened to us. Following his own experience at Happitory, Coburn invited nine colleagues, all based in Korea, to visit, and for each one of them to produce a piece of writing while locked in their cell.

Happitory sounds, on the face of things, like wellness in bad taste. Pay to enjoy the tortures that tens of thousands of incarcerated people experience daily. Coburn acknowledges this. “It would be reckless to call this writing process “liberating,” he writes, “or claim that my confinement felt freeing, as so little of my experience approximated that of an actual prisoner. I chose to enter Happitory’s “prison.” I had the privilege of leaving at any time by pressing a panic button in my room.” Coburn explains that one of the facility’s founders, Jihyang Noh, has worked for many years with the incarcerated, and brings groups of juvenile offenders to Happitory—not, presumably, for solitary confinement—in order to work on positive rather than punitive forms of rehabiliation.

Solitary makes for fascinating reading. Among the contributors is Min Kyoung-Lee, an artist who has made a number of studies of how people seek spiritual enlightement. She treats Happitory as a monastic experience, akin to specific Buddhist methods of retreat. Min goes in alert and vigilant, attempting to observe changes in perception within herself, waiting for a “mental break” with her usual thought structures. By the time the door is unlocked, she has given up and relaxed. Things have become “amusing and light, like in the days of [her] childhood.”

Jaeyeon Chung and Russell Mason, a couple, are locked up at the same time. To pass the time Jaeyeon tries to recall a song she was taught at school. It’s titled ‘Nostalgia’ and her memory of it is hazy. Her thoughts turn to her husband, in a nearby cell, and to what she’s observed of his meditation practice. How it changes him, how he becomes a different person after he goes on meditation retreat each summer. These thoughts lead her back to the problem of her own busy mind. Meanwhile, Russell diarizes his attempt to record the meditation process. He doesn’t mention his wife.

Then there is Kyungmook Kim, an artist, who spent 15 months in actual solitary confinement as a conscientious objector to national service. He found Happitory tranquil. “I felt keenly how much this place was unlike my former prison cell, where I woke up to the propaganda music of the Ministry of Justice” rather than the gentle theme to My Neighbor Totoro, his alarm at Happitory. During his stay he turns to Reflections from Prison, a 1988 book by pro-democracy prisoner of conscience Shin Young-Bok, which Kyungmook had read while behind bars. One sentence in particular comes back to him, a line he had repeated to himself hundreds of times while in prison: “Today is just the day I wait for tomorrow. Today is yesterday’s tomorrow, and tomorrow is just tomorrow’s today.”

My girlfriend and I visited my family in England last month. One afternoon we took a walk with my dad ‘Up Top,’ the nickname we used to give for a farm that overlooks the village where I grew up. I used to walk Up Top regularly as a child. We knew the farmer, who let us walk his fields to look for fragments of roof tile and other artefacts from the Roman-era villa and Anglo-Saxon cemetery that once occupied the hill. Up Top, a narrow, dusty track banded by grass verges, cuts along the crest of a hill. Fields slope down from either side of the path. To the east, the county falls open to lowland fields, smeared brown and yellow in late summer, that stretch for miles to the distant edge of the shire. A tinnitus sizzle comes off the nearby A40 motorway that cuts a notch in the Chiltern Hills on its route to London. In the middle distance are the bright white sails of a windmill in the next village along. On an adjacent hilltop, a bristle of poplars makes the landscape look more French than English. On a clear day, you can see Wittenham Clumps to the south, a pair of tall wooded hills that the painter Paul Nash used to describe as ‘pyramids in England.’

During our walk we scanned the path for interesting stones and for orange-red fragments of tile poking out of the dirt. Dad reminded me of something that happened one summer holiday when I was a child. We had gone Up Top with a packed lunch. Sat on the grass verge, eating our sandwiches, a man approached us along the track. He was wearing old-fashioned hiking gear, carried a rucksack on his back and in his hand a wooden staff. He stopped to say hello and rest for a moment. Dad asked where he was going. The man explained that he was following the old pilgrimage route to Dorchester, some ten miles south, near Whittenham Clumps. Dorchester was the site of a powerful Christian abbey until the Reformation, the same period our carving of Eve and the Serpent was broken from the font it had decorated. Dad observed that our meeting had been repeating itself for centuries along this path. The size of the fields had since gotten bigger. The motorway, electrical pylons, had arrived in the landscape. A light aircraft buzzed high above us. But a pilgrim, a couple of locals eating bread by the side of the road, the Clumps and the Abbey rippling in the summer heat haze: these things were unchanged. Last month I was able to articulate what I had only sensed in that moment as a child. It was like something taken straight out of an Alan Garner novel. The meeting had been the inverse of going to visit an historical monument, a castle, say, or a stone circle. We were the monument. Fragments of something bigger dropped into the earth.

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—Dennis Harte recorded ‘Summer’s Over’ when he was a teenager in the early 1970s. I don’t know much more about it than that, other than it’s a miserably perfect song for September.

—Another teenage curiosity: Shira Small, who grew up in East Harlem, recorded the haunting and metaphysically-tinged ‘Eternal Life’ while attending a Quaker school in Pennsylvania in 1974, with the encouragment of her music teacher. “When I was younger, I could do a great Joni Mitchell imitation,” she said in interview a couple of years ago. “I used to really nail it.” If Shira had become as famous as Joni, we might have been able to witness thousands of people singing in unison, at some huge music festival, the classic pop lyric: “eternal life is the intersection of the line of time in the plane of now (we live forever).”

—New York’s Film Forum is running a season devoted to the early days of 3-D film in 1950s Hollywood. A raft of big name directors made 3-D movies, including Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. Remarkably, two of them—Raoul Walsh and Andre de Toth—each only had one functioning eye, so couldn’t experience the 3-D effect.

—Shout-out to my friend Geoff Cox for putting me onto this short documentary about the great Australian author Gerald Murnane. The film brings out Murnane’s modesty as a writer, and captures his remarkably detailed description of an imaginary horse-racing league he created.

—Sean Howe’s action-packed, head-melting new head-history, Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s, tells the story of the contrarian prankster-activist Forçade, who ran the Underground Press Syndicate in the 1960s before founding, in 1974, the pro-pot magazine High Times. The future Forçade predicted has, sort of, arrived, and Howe is a superb writer, so read an excerpt here or buy the book for your most paranoid friends and that special FBI informer in your life.

—This Kelly Lee Owens and John Cale song came out a couple of years ago, but every time I use a toaster I think of this video:

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As far as I can see—although my eyesight is terrible—many filmmakers believe that artists live in enormous lofts located in the centre of major cities, cities which no longer have either artists or lofts at their centre. In these fantastical real estate spaces—industrial elevator, clawfoot bathtub, room enough to race a bicycle—artists talk about their work in an alphabetti-spaghetti of theoretical profundities, or they emote and grunt through a fog of turps and scotch. The temptation for directors to parody the art life or to romanticize it is strong. And artists are, for the most part, quite ordinary, even boring in some cases. Talking about art isn’t good cinema.

In her movie Showing Up, released in the US a couple of months ago, Kelly Reichardt captures beautifully a plain vernacular a lot of artists share. In one scene, the film’s protagonists—Lizzy, a ceramicist (Michelle Williams) and Jo, a sculptor (Hong Chau)—are walking along the street discussing another artist’s work. “Saw Mike’s show yesterday,” says Jo. “How was it?” asks Lizzy. “It’s good,” says Jo. Lizzy: “I heard he’s doing deserts again.” Jo: “Yeah, I liked his trees better.” Lizzy: “I like the deserts… I always forget Mike’s colour blind. Isn’t that weird?” Jo: “Totally.” The casual evaluations, the shorthand—“trees”, “he’s doing deserts again”—and that pinch of gossip made it one of the more realistic exchanges about art I’ve seen on screen. Reichardt’s 2019 film First Cow also has the most tense scene about milking a cow ever depicted in cinema. Hers is a rare talent.

The other day I started reading Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore. It’s a novel about three friends undergoing rigorous training in trompe l’oeil painting, “accepting the humility of artisans so they might better boast about painting as artists.” Kerangal builds her writing from technical terms. She relishes the names of the marbles and woods the students have to paint, the nomenclature of pigments, powders and tools. I can see why. Fleur de Pêcher, Cerfontaine, Henriette Blonde, veined Zebrano. Imperial black, veinette, Kolinsky sable. It’s luxuriant language. They are the kinds of details that authors, having diligently researched a specialist field, can often over-specify, perhaps anxious to demonstrate that they know what they’re talking about. (Authors of historical fiction are notably prone to this temptation.) Too many technically correct terms can make a scene less vivid in the mind’s eye rather than more. Homework isn’t a story. And one might know the proper name, but never use it. You might be thinking “Alizarin crimson” when it’s easier to just say “red.” But—so far at least, I’m only a few chapters in—Kerangal also has her characters eat chips, drink beer, chit-chat, pay rent, look at their phones, get backache. She describes the physicality of painting, how it feels in the body, something that writers frequently neglect when imagining the lives of artists, as if art has nothing to do with having a body at all. (Sure, maybe you get a fabricator to make your work for you, but you still have to breathe and talk and look.) The mundane, set in chiaroscuro with the arcane, is what seems to bring life to the novel.

(I’m perpetually part-way into a book, a TV series, an article. I’m sure you are too. I might finish it, I might abandon all hope and turn to something new. But the experience of that period of immersion, of being in the work rather than having come out the other end, is rarely deemed fit to print. It lives only in conversation: “I’m reading such-and-such at the moment.” “How is it?” “Dunno, I like aspects of it but…” This is the phase in which the intoxication, surprise, boredom, education, happens. The delicate sensations, the instances of recognition or nodding-off that are not registered in professional criticism. I think there should be a publication in which contributors only discuss works they haven’t finished. It could be called So Far: A Magazine of Mastication. To maintain the integrity of the idea, I don’t plan to do anything more about it.)

Terminology barnacles to art like crazy. It can be useful, and in specialist-to-specialist conversations, it has a certain efficiency. I’ve met people who like it because it signals authority, or because they have mistaken jargon for knowledge. It can be used as a lingua franca. It makes a person feel like they’re part of something special and it can cold-shoulder the unwanted. Still, for all the words at our disposal, there is much in art that goes unsaid, or occupies a space of tacit agreement that exists just short of words. Sometimes the best you can manage is “I like the deserts.”

Showing Up reminded me of something I overheard in the post office the other day. A woman was buying stamps. “I’d like a sheet of those cartoony ones,” she said to the window clerk. She was pointing to a set of stamps, pinned next to the parcel scale, celebrating the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. I wondered whether, in the customer’s eyes, they were simply colourful designs in an attractive old comic book style. Or whether she had seen a Lichtenstein once in a museum and the stamps had triggered a pleasant memory of the visit. Or whether she was a professor of art history in a hurry, using shorthand to save time, assuming that the post office clerk wouldn’t know who Lichtenstein was. And that the post office clerk—having once been an art history student, perhaps even a studio assistant to Lichtenstein in his later years and then through a set of complex circumstances following the artist’s death found herself working for the postal services—knew full well what they were but decided not to have that conversation because the line of customers was getting too long and she simply didn’t have time to discuss the significance of benday dots as a motif in postwar American painting.

Woolly description is all that most of us have got when we’re digging outside our field. After visiting the post office I attempted a list of things that I could only describe in equivalents to “the cartoony ones” or “doing deserts.” I gave up after fish and footballers. Last week my friend Chris Wiley, an artist and critic, wrote an entertaining piece for The New Yorker about U.F.O. photography. “In the world of U.F.O. hunters,” he observes, “the lack of high-quality photographic proof has always been a vexing problem. […] Now with high-definition photographic tools held perpetually in the palms of billions of people across the globe, this problem should give us even more pause.” U.F.O. taxonomy is a vague business. Categories include ‘flying saucer,’ ‘flying cigar,’ ‘flying football,’ ‘black triangle,’ ‘tic-tac’ and ‘boomerang,’ labels as fuzzy as the photographs they describe. Wiley quotes writer Mark Pilkington, whose 2010 book Mirage Men places U.F.O.s in a peculiar zone between official disinformation and folklore: “Ultimately, it’s a matter of taste—whether you want to let the mystery ring or be absorbed by the dull thud of the mundane.” Conversations about U.F.O. photos aren’t that different to conversations about art. They’re both about objects in search of identification (or at least a connection). Even the categories of art history are low-definition, as plain as U.F.O. types. Landscape, still life, portrait. Conceptual, Minimal, Pop. Trees, deserts, cartoony ones.

The issue of what we name people and places—to distinguish, fix in place, make visible, rally around, use against others—has been one of the most contentious of the century so far. I think it’s important, with art, to let a new thing go unnamed, even for a short while, as it cooks in the studio and first cools off in public. In 1970, the artist Robert Barry made Art Work (It Is Always Changing…). A simple text, with the cadences of a riddle, it reads:

“It is always changing.

It has order.

It doesn’t have a specific place.

Its boundaries are not fixed.

It affects other things.

It may be accessible but go unnoticed.

Part of it may also be part of something else.

Some of it is familiar.

Some of it is strange.

Knowing of it changes it.”

Art Work (It Is Always Changing…) was designed to exist in a different form in each person’s imagination. (At the time he was also working with invisible inert gases, radiation and radio waves.) But every artist will recognize something of their process in his words too. The moment when a rough shape begins to form, when go-to methods meet new ones. The way a piece can look great when you leave it in the studio at the end of the day, then seem unfinished on returning to it the next morning. Spotting the link—a phrase, a shape—that tethers one work to another. Suddenly finding the meaning you didn’t even know you’d created until years later. Maybe it’s only then that the name begins to fit.

Finding the right label for your art is hard. Artists want to be recognized as unique, uncategorizable. But recognition, at least in professional terms, often requires being categorized. The 1970s American band Death, formed by three brothers from Detroit—Bobby, Dannis and David Hackney—were originally called Rock Fire Funk Express. They changed their name to Death after their father was killed in 1974. The trio wrote hard rock songs, melodic and tight in form, thoughtful in attitude. According to legend, Death recorded a demo which landed them a meeting with powerful music executive Clive Davis. He liked the music, but urged the group to change their name. They refused and Davis turned them down. Doors closed in their faces. Bad timing and bad luck stymied their career. The band’s name was hardly the only obstacle they faced, but it was a major issue. People lacked the imagination to know how to place a black rock group calling themselves Death. At the end of the 1970s the brothers gave up on the band. It wasn’t until 2009, when a set of extraordinary chance circumstances led to their music being rediscovered, that they found the recognition they had deserved all along. The name became a point of interest.

In a recent interview with Ann Powers, musician P.J. Harvey talked about the pleasure of being in the moment with music, “wanting to tap into that really pure place where you just feel, and you just experience, and nothing yet really has a name.” There’s a scene I like in the fly-on-the-wall documentary Reeling With P.J. Harvey by Maria Mochnacz. Mochnacz is following Harvey on her 1993 tour through Europe and America. Harvey is singing in the toilet. Scales and drills in Italian. Classical exercises to aid breathing, relaxation and range. Her voice is bright and her diction is crisp. Mochnacz is with her in the loo, backstage at Glasgow’s Barrowlands. You can practically smell the bleach and stale beer. The pair get along well and some of the most illuminating conversations between them in Reeling take place in grotty bathrooms, away from the rest of the band and crew; all men, all hostile to Mochnacz’s attempts to film them. (“This is the mark of the decline of civilization, that hand-held camera”, complains one.) Harvey finishes her vocal warmups. “Is this from your singing teachers?” asks Mochnacz. “Yeah,” replies Harvey, “[…] he just said I’d been using my voice like a percussion instrument, which I have, so he was really trying to stop me using it like a drum and start using it like a voice […] It’s like trying to relearn everything.”

The film cuts to Harvey onstage with the band. They’re doing ’Snake’, a volatile song which whips from quiet menace to exhilarating roar. The classical exercises, that which goes unseen by the crowd, are what give her voice its stridency. It’s early in Harvey’s career, between her first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me. Her songs from this period speak frankly of sex, seduction, abjection, and revenge. The arrangements are minimal, just guitar, bass, drums and voice, but the recordings are engineered to sound muscular and tense; even the slightest brush of a snare or finger touching a string feels as if it could explode. Harvey’s voice runs from whisper to scream. She does not come across like a singer “trying to relearn everything.” She sounds, already, unmistakably, like PJ Harvey.

Three decades on, this summer she released the album I Inside the Old Year Dying, which sounds nothing like the music captured in Reeling, but it’s still unmistakably Harvey. Now there are field recordings and synths. Close mics and dry-sounding room ambiences are mixed into wide, reverb-heavy atmospheres. Listening to the album is like observing a garden over different seasons: on repeat listens the textures and colours alter, they thicken and they thin. It’s sung in the Dorset dialect of Harvey’s home, and draws its lyrical imagery from Orlam, a narrative poem she published in 2022. She uses her higher register more frequently these days. Subtle shifts produce narrative effects. ‘Seem An I’, for instance, opens with a hymn-like melody, Harvey imitating a wobbling child’s voice burred with a strong Dorset accent, then moves to a lower range, losing the accent, assuming an adult perspective. She blends her voice with male singers—actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan make cameo appearances—and on ‘The Nether-edge,’ fuses it with a percussive synth to sound as if her voice has been hammered with rivets.

It’s common to talk about an artist’s “voice,” even when the form of the art doesn’t involve speech or words. (See also: what the art work “says,” how it “speaks to” us, or what—if the artist is a certain kind of moral entrepreneur—an artwork “calls for.”) Audiences generally like a voice to be consistent. People, by-and-large, get that an artist needs to change, but like to know what they’re paying for. Therefore it is fun when an artist adopts an entirely new accent, as Rene Magritte did in his ‘Vache’ period of the early 1940s, when he briefly turned away from his signature neo-classical dream-style and began to make deliberately, enchantingly, ugly images. But what if, as a young, aspiring artist, the voice you discover you have is not the voice you wanted? What if you don’t know how to stop making your voice sound like a drum? Ambition has to be reconciled with what the hands and sensibility can do. In my favourite Christmas film—Peter Capaldi’s 1995 short Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life—Kafka, played by Richard E. Grant, is struggling to write the opening to his famous short story ‘The Metamorphosis.’ He can’t find the right thing for his protagonist, Gregor Samsa, to wake up and find himself transformed into. A banana? A kangaroo? After a series of interruptions, a cockroach scuttles across Kafka’s desk. He kills it and finds his inspiration. Samsa turns into a giant insect! But when a sinister knife salesman comes looking for his missing friend, Jiminy Cockroach, the writer is filled with remorse for squashing the bug. Kafka sets about trying to make right, realizing that the cockroach—the thing he despised, the revulsion and horror he felt within him—was to be embraced rather than rejected from his writing.

Lately I’ve been thinking about making a short film on the topic of juvenilia. For some 25 years I had thought that I had lost a pair of VHS tapes which recorded my first attempts, aged 17, at making video art. In 2021, I wrote an essay about the videos, published in Stanley Schtinter’s book The Liberated Film Club. I described what I remembered of the tapes, my regret at losing them, wiping them, whatever it was that had happened. My mum read the essay and on a visit home she directed me to a Sainsbury’s carrier bag buried at the back of her wardrobe. There were the tapes, untouched. I brought them back to New York where they sat in another bag in my own closet for a further year, quarantined by anxiety at seeing them again and lack of funds.

I finally had them digitized a couple of months ago. They’re somewhere between art films and music videos. At the time most of what I knew of artist’s films was confined to descriptions in books, but music videos were what I had actually seen and loved, being an avid viewer of The Chart Show, Snub TV, and Top of the Pops. (I didn’t have access to MTV.) There is a lot of busy Super 8. There are attempts at making ‘scratch video,’ collages of clips taped from the TV. You can see and hear the clunks and whirrs of a sluggish domestic VHS machine stopping and starting, mechanics which give the tapes accidental texture. One piece, which wasn’t too bad, collides shots of me gazing out of my bedroom window with a clip from Un Chien Andalou, which I must’ve found on an arts documentary. Another, which could’ve been a blockbuster this summer, features fragments of Robert Oppenheimer’s famous speech quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death…”, which I recall pulling from the prestige ITV series The World at War. (Way ahead of you, Christopher Nolan.) Thirty years on, I can barely remember what I meant by them.

The most instructive moments on the tapes are the most embarrassing. One, a real wince-inducer, involves my earnest recitation of a Jack Kerouac poem over images of a crucifixion, a target, words scattered on a table in a kind of William Burroughs cut-up style, my face in profile, and a whole load of corny in-camera ‘paint’ effects. It’s excruciating to watch. Yet I made it.

Every artist’s work is shaped what is rejected, cut, tried then discarded, but one of the drivers of that editing process—the one that has nothing to do with rationality, with rigour, training, or any other terms that signal professionalism—is embarrassment. It’s a part of artistic development that is rarely discussed. Sally Bayley, in The Private Life of the Diary, describes teenage journals as “a form of identity practice and self-production, a workshop for our future selves” in which the author can test out “a bad performance of being adult,” and “project all the mess and maelstrom” of adolescence. In an essay on juvenilia, for Gulf Coast journal a couple of years ago, I wrote that “early,” in an artist’s career, “is art school or university, the starting blocks of professional life. Anything before is pre-historic. Formative experiences are validated by the reputation of your chosen institution and the league tables of who-taught-who, on the networking value of a particular postgrad course. […] The languages we are trained in before we are trained to speak art are forgotten.” Early work is as instructive as late period but what artist wants to deal with their own cringe? Still, that work exists, and this would be an unrealistic conversation if we pretended otherwise.

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—Speaking of things you do when you’re young, this is a beautiful recording by the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, of ‘Youth and Love’ from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel.

—On a bit of an Iris Murdoch kick recently, I came across this interview with the writer, recorded for Icelandic TV in 1985. The title credits are superb.

—Dept of Nepotism; Subdivision: Friends Who Paint. If you’re in New York, there is a small painting, in a small group show, in a small gallery on the Lower East Side, which is by Claire Lehmann, and which I keep thinking about. It’s titled Hierophany, and it is, like all her paintings, a technically accomplished piece which evokes an atmosphere I cannot place. (Back to UFOs again…) Luxe, hellish, psychedelic, futuristic, digital, mechanical. (The gallery is Harkawik, on Orchard Street.) Meanwhile, a website called Curator (very 2005), which describes itself in the kind of boilerplate that makes Lorem Ipsum seem thought-provoking (“a contemporary art & design platform dedicated to building a more connected global creative community”) has published a lovely short interview with Tim Braden, conducted by Simon Grant, in which the painter discusses his work, and a teenage epiphany meeting Patrick Heron.

—In 1993, the American musician Marc Ribot recorded a beautiful album of compositions by his mentor, Haitian composer and classical guitarist Frantz Casseus. I learned of it only recently, from this long interview with Ribot on Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM show.

—Finally, a new video for The God in Hackney, made by me and Andy Cooke. The first minute is pre-amble. The cartoon proper starts a minute in. But yes, that’s me tied to a chair with a t-shirt pulled over my head.

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The other night I was at a party, being talked at by an artist. This artist recounted, with the kind of gravity normally reserved for describing the invention of Cubism or the discovery of nuclear fission—she even used the phrase “as you know,” which I didn’t—that she had given up painting on canvas some years ago in order to make experimental film, because painting is bourgeois and panders to wealthy collectors. The oppressed of the world must be grateful, I thought. It was an old tune, one which usually makes me count how many broke painters I know. This time it struck me as funny, since making films generally costs more to do than making paintings, unless grinding pigment from lapis lazuli is your thing. Still, what better way to stick it to the ruling classes than to spend money?

(While it’s true you can make low-budget video alone with a laptop using only clips ripped from YouTube and green-screen of your cat, someone, or something, is paying for your software, internet, and cat food, and it’s not the cat.)

I should’ve told her about a summer job I had as an art student. A famous chef opened an upscale bistro in the city. They advertised for an artist with life-drawing skills to sit in the restaurant every Wednesday afternoon, when they served a traditional English cream tea, and to draw their patrons. I phoned the number on the ad. Big drawings, they wanted. Atmospheric, full of life. Think bohemian Paris. Arty. But not too arty. To help create their dream of Impressionist Montmartre they offered twenty quid an hour, cash-in-hand, and free coffee—from the espresso machine, no less—which wasn’t bad for 1995. I took a portfolio of drawings along to the bistro. The manager thought they were arty but, you know, not too arty, and gave me the job.

A number of problems immediately arose. The first was that they would sit me at a tiny table covered with a crisp white tablecloth, silverware, water carafe and flowers. This didn’t leave much space for working with large-size paper and drawing materials. The maître’d, who thought my job was absurd and made me the target of his irritation, insisted that the table furniture had to stay. After the first week I was told I had to use tidier materials, because I’d grottied the tablecloth with charcoal and pencil dust. The charcoal was, admittedly, a rookie mistake, but it was hard to think of anything tidier than pencil. Breathing would have been too messy for them.

The other, bigger, issue was that the restaurant wanted the customers to see the drawings I had made of them but the customers didn’t want to be drawn. At first I would ask diners if I could sketch them. I would get a “no thank you”—the English “fuck off” when delivered tersely enough—and the dismissive wave often given to caricaturists trying to scrape a living on the steps of major museums. So I tried making the drawing first, then showing it to the customer when it was finished. People didn’t like being stared at during their cream teas. Patrons would complain to the maître’d. Ironically this made him more pleasant towards me because he enjoyed feeling vindicated. Customers would cross the room themselves to ask me to stop. I remember feeling grateful when one nice couple merely said “it’s not our sort of thing.” After a month I was told not to come back. I had made a mess and cost the bistro customers. New Montmartre could not be built. I should note that, in my studies at the time, I had stopped painting in order to make experimental Super 8 films. To épater les bourgeoisie, drawing them eating cake turned out to be the more deadly instrument of class war than lyrical celluloid poems.

These days I have a job in what Simon Kuper, in the Financial Times last week, described as “the world’s worst business.” * I can think of a few lines of work worse than writing. But in a modest way he’s not wrong. Hollywood writers, now into the third month of their strike, would probably agree.

It costs to get a formal education in art, in literature, acting, whatever your field might be. It costs to make art, and to plug into your discipline’s professional social circuits. This, on top of everything else in life; housing, food, health, family. Even if money’s no question, everyone pays with their bodies, with energy, emotion, and time. How artists get by interests me. Deborah Levy, in The Cost of Living, the second volume of her memoir trilogy, writes: “When I was around fifty and my life was supposed to be slowing down, becoming more stable and predictable, life became faster, unstable, unpredictable.” Her marriage had fallen apart, and she was unsure how to continue as a writer. “To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.” A friend offered Levy a garden shed in which to work. She got herself an electric bicycle. Then her mother died and pain at her separation doubled into grief for the death of her parent. (“Sorrow does not have a century,” she writes.)

Many artist memoirs follow standard blueprints. An amusing anecdote leads to a chance meeting with a powerful industry figure; a sad loss inspires a new burst of creativity. What is striking about The Cost of Living is the degree to which Levy builds her memoir from minor key episodes. She writes of her relationship and of her mother’s death, but it’s the moments which on face value seem fugitive, absent of biographical plot, Levy mines for consolation and direction. The book is crisp with small details: enjoying a pom-pom keyring, watching a colony of feral parrots, getting soaked in the rain. The account of a conversation with strangers on a train, of her childhood memory of moving from South Africa to England. The book doesn’t stop at major career stations—a significant literary breakthrough, say, or winning a prize—markers which might be used to pace out a conventional writer’s autobiography. Instead she catalogues the ordinary events that art draws from. These are more valuable creative resources to the writer than medals or praise. “The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living.”

In 1992 the writer Iain Sinclair and director Chris Petit (Radio On, author of the remarkable, frightening novel Robinson) made The Cardinal & The Corpse. It was the first in an esoteric trilogy of films for British TV’s Channel Four. A couple of loose threads provide the filmmakers with alibis to interview writers, criminals and rare book dealers. They track the rumour that Brian O’Nolan, who wrote as Flann O’Brien, also produced penny-dreadful detective stories under the pseudonym Steven Blakesley. In a miniature fantasy they imagine a search for a rare grimoire that will unlock London’s occult secrets. The film’s subjects are mostly men, mostly figures who populate Sinclair’s writings. Hidden connections are insinuated between them all.

There is, for example, the once-notorious book hunter Driffield, who shrouded himself in sulphurous rumours about his identity and whereabouts. In his 1991 book, Drif’s Guide to the Secondhand & Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain—excoriating reviews of used bookshops the length-and-breadth of the UK—Driffield wrote that Raymond Carver’s death had been faked and that the author was now working as his personal chauffeur. In the 2010s, Driffield was charged, then acquitted, for indecent assault. According to Wikipedia he died this year, but who knows the truth. The film provides rare glimpses of the author and human rights campaigner Emanuel Litvinoff, and of David Seabrook, author of the unsettling Kentish travelogue All The Devils Are Here (2002). The avuncular science fiction writer Michael Moorcock admits to the pleasures of autographing books written by other people. Tony Lambrianou—malevolent behind a cracked mask of politeness—recounts working for the Kray Twins. (London gangster fetishism, all that hollow “but-they-loved-their-mum” exculpatory sentimentalism, is something I’ll never understand.) Brian Catling, John Latham and Aaron Williamson are cast as the artist keepers of the grimoire, hunted in the film by Alan Moore, who was at the time part-way into writing his Jack the Ripper serial, From Hell.

Then there is Derek Raymond, pen-name of Robin Cook, an old Etonian who rejected establishment respectability in the 1950s for the seedy London demi-monde. In 1962 Cook borrowed from experience for his debut, The Crust On Its Uppers, an auto-satirical novel about a young toff who joins London’s criminal underworld. With family to support he wrote pornography, he made a stab at dystopian science fiction with A State of Denmark, he waited tables, drove cabs, slaughtered pigs, smuggled paintings, and laundered money. In the 1980s, after a decade spent away from the typewriter, dodging trouble and working as a labourer on a vineyard, he adopted the name Derek Raymond for a series of brutal noirs including He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) and the horrific I Was Dora Suarez (1990).

The Cardinal & The Corpse finds Raymond in an East End boozer. You can practically smell the thick, beer-and-cigs fug through the screen. He is dressed in blouson leather jacket and black beret and his complexion is the same yellow-brown as the pub. Raymond speaks with a refined, RP accent that has been scratched and dinged at the corners, and he has the obliging cheer of a raconteur whose drinks are paid for. His stories are entertaining, tales from another world. But what, exactly, are we watching here? Shadows pass across his face. A smile and a chuckle disguise darker notes in his voice, hints that both his art and his anecdotes came at a cost too bleak to put words to. Payments requiring more than a few drinks in an out-of-the-way boozer to bleach out the memory. Raymond died just two years after The Cardinal & The Corpse was broadcast. Like others in the film, he lived in literature’s margins. (Don’t we all, one way or another.) They don’t run creative writing MFAs there. They don’t award prizes. It’s no place for romance.

Perhaps some artists worry they may be killed by the art they devoted their lives to, like poor Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, the auto-didact crushed beneath a falling bookcase, punished for having ideas above his class. All art costs something. Samuel Beckett wrote of his “dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.” Perhaps he had spotted the economics baked into the vocabulary of creativity. “Spending” time in the studio, talk of “what it takes” to make something, which fills the mind with the love and dread of It, the insatiable monster of the page and the studio. Prudent or generous words such as “saving” or “giving” are second tier terms. They can even mean the same thing as “spending,” as in “giving everything” to a performance, as in “putting everything into” a book, acts of sacrifice to a process or spiritual prostration in front of an audience.

In 1950 the psychoanalyst Marion Milner published On Not Being Able to Paint, the result of an experiment she had conducted on herself using a method of ‘free drawing’ to examine the mind’s creative process. Milner claimed she had only basic drawing abilities, and that she had long wished that she could paint. Her research into child development led her to become curious about her own amateurism. She wanted to know more about the frustration she had felt at not having developed the creative skills she wanted. Among other things, the experiment led her to make the observation that artists often carry the sense that they own their subject, “spiritually enveloping” it with their imaginations. Even for the most egalitarian-minded artist, art always, even subconsciously, involves a degree of symbolic acquisitiveness. It’s reflected in the way we use words such as “possess” to talk about artworks—how something “possesses” meaning or a quality—and how audiences, especially fan subcultures, can feel a sense of ownership over the work they enjoy.

After losing the cream tea life-drawing gig, I got a job waiting tables at a cafe across the street. I was often put on the early morning shift, where I became friends with Anthony, a man who loved playing old reggae soundsystem tapes at ear-splitting volume as we put out the chairs and heated up the coffee machine. (Saxon Studio soundsystem was his favourite. It was a good way to psych up for six hours of slopping cappuccinos.) Anthony had been in the corps de ballet of a major dance company and injured his back, putting him out of work while he convalesced. When I met him he hadn’t danced for over a year. He moved away, I left the cafe, we lost touch. To this day I occasionally wonder if he danced again.

Art extracts a price from artists’ bodies, especially actors, dancers and musicians. Repetitive strain injury, for instance, is one of the most common conditions among professional musicians, and can knock a performer out of work for long stretches of time, even cause them to learn a new instrument. The sculptor Mike Nelson, now in his fifties, has been making enormous installation works since the 1990s. I first met him in 2000, when he built the work alone or with just a small crew. Speaking to Nelson last summer, as I worked on a catalogue essay for his Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Extinction Beckons’, he told me how, nowadays, he feels the strain on his body. He remarked in a recent interview with Sean Burns that “few people would have chosen a way of working like this because the physicality of it is quite brutal.” It could be worse. One of the biggest influences on Nelson has been the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. After shooting some of the most eerie and indelible images for his 1979 film Stalker by the toxic Jägala River in Estonia, downstream from a chemical plant, a number of Tarkovsky’s crew fell sick. The film’s sound recordist, Vladimir Sharun, linked the later deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa Tarkovskaya, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn directly to the Stalker shoot.

Noble and courageous artists have sacrificed their freedom, their lives, on account of their work. But artists can cause self-inflicted injuries, paying the cost for their grudges and vanities. Truman Capote famously ostracized himself with the story ‘La Côte Basque 1965,’ published in Esquire in 1975, in which he aired New York high society gossip that had been entrusted to him by some of the city’s most powerful women. The author Mary McCarthy alienated classmates from her Vassar College days by using their lives as material for her 1963 novel The Group. In 1979, McCarthy was interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, where she declared that writer Lillian Hellman was overrated: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” They had never been friends. The two writers differed fundamentally in their left-wing political positions. McCarthy had been a Trotskyist and wrote for the Partisan Review, Hellman an unrepentant Stalinist who wrote for Broadway. Hellman happened to see the interview on TV that night and immediately filed a $2.5 million dollar libel suit against McCarthy. Incidentally, Hellman was romantically involved with the crime writer Dashiell Hammett for some thirty years. Following the success of his hardboiled 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, Hammett had told his agent that he wanted to write a modernist, stream-of-consciousness detective story. Then Hollywood called, and his plans for a formalist novel were shelved. The success of one art cost him the opportunity to make another.

The members of Pink Floyd kicked their friend co-founder Syd Barrett from the band in 1967. It was the toll they felt they had to pay in order for the group’s career to progress. Barrett had been the band’s creative engine, the one who pushed their sound into new territory. But he had been showing signs of mental health problems and his behaviour was becoming erratic. Rather than dealing with the emotional difficulties of the situation head-on, the band simply stopped picking their friend up for gigs. It was up to Barrett to work out for himself that he’d been dumped. Pink Floyd’s star continued to rise. They signed with new management and a bigger label. Barrett’s health continued to deteriorate. In the early 1970s, after making two solo records, he dropped out of the public eye, and for some years he moved between London and Cambridge, where his mother lived, and where he had grown up. He eventually settled in Cambridge and reverted to his given name of Roger. For some thirty years he lived a quiet life, shunning the outside world, hiding from doorstepping journalists and curious fans trying to catch sight of crazy Syd. In Have You Got It Yet?, a new documentary on Barrett by Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson, the word that stumps the surviving members of Pink Floyd, when asked about the way they treated Barrett, is “guilt.” According to Rob Chapman’s biography, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, a friend had said to the singer, “But you really opened doors for the Floyd.” “Yeah, with cheap keys,” was his reply.

Barrett had given up a promising career as a painter to pursue music. (He studied at Camberwell School of Art with Maggi Hambling, who remembers him as a talented colourist.) In his later years he returned to painting. I can only guess, but I imagine that painting, for Barrett, was not a bourgeois indulgence, it wasn’t a political position. It gave him solace, perhaps a form of truth, payback for what art had cost him.

* Thank you for sticking with Keep All Your Friends. I took a month off from the newsletter in order to work through a few writing-for-hire deadlines. I write in order to make time to write, a situation which I sometimes feel has the kind of absurd circularity that Lewis Carroll might appreciate.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—I love this 1960 Joe Meek track at the moment. Somehow haunting and hopeful at the same time. Sounds as if it were recorded in the bathroom, which it probably was.

—It will take me the rest of my years to work through The New York Review of Books backlist. Coming in August are Diana Athill’s memoir Instead of a Letter (with an afterword by Lena Dunham) and her Bildungsroman Don’t Look at Me Like That (afterword by Helen Oyeyemi). October sees Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Boys Alive, from 1955, translated by Tim Parks, and his 1968 novel Theorem, translated by Stuart Hood. I am sure you’ve seen Pasolini’s film version of Theorem—Terence Stamp plays the mysterious visitor to a wealthy Milanese home, turning family life upside-down by sleeping in turn with each member of the household—but give yourself a treat if you haven’t.

—Publishers Isolarii have resumed transmitting their regular Sunsets series from the Italian island of Alicudi. Sign up with your phone number here for playlists at dusk.

—A few weeks ago I attended The Fifth Place, an irregular, clandestine event organized by artist and performer Michael Portnoy, described as “a room with new rules.” I was given little information in advance, just the address of a midtown hotel, directions to meet in a specific area of the lobby at a given time, and instructions of what to do if hotel security tried to eject us. I was told to dress smartly, and provided with an identity for the night. I was designated the Director of Terms, working for a company called Occlusion, and my job was to generate new jargon to describe all my interactions that night, like a New York Times trend piece on steroids. I had some idea of what to expect—I make a regular radio show for NTS with Portnoy, we once co-wrote a play about a chat show host gripped with conspiratorial paranoia, and his recent short, Progressive Touch, is one of the funniest films about sex I’ve seen—but it didn’t prepare me for the hilarious mental workout The Fifth Place gave me. And all for the price of a subway ticket. You can sign up here to be notified of forthcoming convocations.

—Finally this week, I am also infatuated with this song by Essential Logic, the band formed in 1978 by the saxophonist and singer Lora Logic, a founding member of the group X-Ray Spex. Hypnotic, dreamy, assertive.

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I have a running joke with my friend David. He’s British, like me, and used to live in New York. We frequently get asked the same question: “are you here these days? Or are you there?” That is, are you living in London or New York? (Where the adverb points depends on whether it’s a Londoner or a New Yorker asking.) “Are you here?” David will say to me, out of the blue. “I thought you were there,” I’ll reply. “Really? I heard you were still here.” “So, are you there now?” “Or are you here, but just visiting there?” And so on. The question has turned existential. Are you here? Do you exist?

One evening a few weeks ago, as I was coming out of the cinema, I ran into a man I’d known for many years through the art world. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Pandemic, divergent paths. “Are you still here?” he asked. He may simply, politely, have meant New York—we were doing the awkward dance of small talk—but a note in his voice made it sound like something else. There are people who monitor changes in local professional hierarchies with the vigilance of stock market prognosticators. “Are you still here?” is a question of value and visibility. Are you still an investment opportunity?

There’s a line in the song ‘I Found a Reason’ by The Velvet Underground that goes “Oh I do believe, if you don’t like things you leave, for some place you’ve never been before.” Make your own scene. Or, to quote Frank O’Hara, “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” I enjoy thinking about people who change course in life, who refuse to answer to “are you here?” because they take it to mean “do you belong?” (My next book has something to do with this topic.) Reasons to change direction, to stop, vanish, include: accidents, disillusion, migration, burnout, age, the zeitgeist, crime, money, ethics, health, fear, parenthood, family, love, war, boredom, hunger, mischief, caprice. Not wanting to say “I am this” and have to contort yourself into poses that meet expectations and expert criteria. Or not being allowed to say “I am this.” Juan Rulfo, on being asked why he didn’t write anything for thirty years after the publication of his landmark surrealist novel Pedro Páramo in 1955, said, “it was because my Uncle Celerino died and it was he who told me the stories.” Rosemary Tonks—whose 1968 comic novel The Bloater was reissued last year after spending decades out-of-print—disappeared following a religious conversion and a breakdown. A varied life is not always a sign that someone’s had options and, as the artist David Wojnarowicz put it, “it is no accident that every guidebook in every conceivable language contains the translated phrase: do you have a room with a better view?”

The other day I went to a talk given by Audrey Golden, at The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, about her new book I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records. It’s an oral history that rewrites the story of the legendary Manchester label, Factory, home of Joy Division, New Order, and other deities of post-punk. The book highlights the crucial and—you guessed it—invisible role that women played in running Factory and its nightclub offshoot, The Haçienda. (Of the many remarkable people she spoke about—Golden interviewed over 80 women for the book—I was fascinated to hear about Yasmine Lakhaney, a trained psychiatric nurse, martial arts expert, a person of strong religious faith, and the first woman to work as a bouncer in the UK. “Yasmine was lovely and kind,” said Alison Agboola, a colleague from The Haçienda, “and she also had this core of steel.”) Golden explained that a number of the women she spoke to subsequently left the music industry after the collapse of the label to pursue careers in other fields. Factory Records did not come to define their lives in the way that it did for the label’s male founders and musicians closely tied to its myths. It was just one chapter in a varied life.

This week I saw an announcement for a discussion at The Whitney Museum of American Art, in connection with Josh Kline’s exhibition ‘Project for a New American Century.’ The talk is titled ‘Beyond Art: Artists Making Movies,’ and asks the question why artists who work with the moving image are trying to work “outside of the art world” and get into the film and television industries. The answers will be both obvious (money, ambition) and complex (reach, disillusion, idealism, among other reasons). But it’s that language of locatability and positioning again: “beyond,” “outside.” There, not here. Working from a room with a better view.

A vocabulary of commitment is often used to describe creative people. “So-and-so is committed to a lifelong dialogue with painting.” “Such-and-such is dedicated to a re-examination of the novel.” Of course, these qualities make for good art. (But now I think of Gulley Jimson, the monstrous artist in Joyce Carey’s 1944 comic novel The Horse’s Mouth, who can’t walk down the street without imagining it as an epic history painting. He is possessed by a demonic, exhausting monomania.) Experience accretes only slowly and it takes practice, application, and years of getting it wrong, then right, then horribly wrong, then a little better again, to make work that’s meaningful. And even after all that, the twilight years of a career might yet reduce to a glimmer, unable to match earlier glories, despite continual, daily devotion to the work. But can these virtuous qualities of fidelity, when they become professionalized—fetishized, even—shut a person off from other parts of life? Art is a faith-based system but it’s not a closed religious order.1

Breaking those holy vows of commitment—pushing back against the assumption that making art for a living must make you happy, or at least scratch a profound itch—is one reason why mythic reputations bloom in the gaps left by the disappearing artist. There’s Lee Lozano, for instance, who made a conceptual art work called General Strike Piece in 1969—a refusal to observe professional art obligations—then another called Dropout Piece, which she followed through on and completely disappeared. (According to art historian Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, whether or not Dropout is even a work is hard to say.) Agnes Martin left the city for the desert. Charlotte Posenenske renounced sculpture to retrain as a sociologist. Cady Noland refused to show her art for decades. There’s a line of hers that I like. It’s from a text written to accompany an exhibition early in her career. She makes a list of narrative situations, which among other items includes “a plane trip” and “a ride on a highway between exits.” To the word “meal” she adds a footnote: “If you find the inclusion of “meal” insupportable on a list of narratives, try walking out in the middle of your next dinner date without an explanation.”

The other day I read a piece by Brian Boucher in The New York Times about the artist Darren Bader. He’s just announced that he is looking to sell his two-decade art career, name rights and everything, to the highest bidder. Boucher quotes Bader saying that “the project”—a word suggesting something finite, temporary—“makes fun of this codified notion: When did the term “art practice” even start? […] It was just one of those semi-serendipitous ideas. I think it might have been when thinking about dentists selling their practice.”

Bader says he’s not planning a disappearing act, and the project will be forever tied to him, even if his legal abdication enables another person’s visibility. (Or not: a buyer who wants to make art under the Bader brand has no guarantee of being taken seriously by the galleries and patrons who supported the original.) Enrique Vila-Matas, in Bartleby & Co.—a brilliant meditation on writers who have said “no”—observes that the author Robert Walser “knew that writing that one cannot write is also writing.” Art is geared to being found, and the irony of works about refusals, vanishings, and oversights is that they depend on, even grow, the author’s own visibility. The gongs of prestige don’t always go to those who deserve them.

Visibility is a struggle for countless artists. Too many deserve recognition that will never arrive in their lifetimes. In the early decades of the 21st century, bright floodlights have been turned on the past. This has been the era of the late-career artist who finally receives their dues after years of obscure toil, unjustly ignored because of circumstance, systemic ignorance, or sheer bad luck. Of the lost novel rediscovered and repackaged as a cult classic. Of tape reels found mouldering in a dusty loft and hailed as a forgotten masterpiece of country & western krautrock jazz. We should be happy for the artist who gets overdue recognition. (You never know what turns your own life and career will take.) But even though it seems as if, these days, no good deed goes un-reissued and noble battles are being fought against cultural amnesia, someone, somewhere is always being forgotten. Perhaps that is how it should be. Jorge Luis Borges ends his short story ‘Funes, His Memory’—about a man, Funes, cursed with the power to remember everything—with the line: “Ireneo Funes died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.” 2

American musician Connie Converse never released an album, but a home recording of her performing was made in 1954 by the cartoonist Gene Deitch. Those tapes surfaced almost sixty years later, in 2010, as the album How Sad, How Lovely. She’s now the subject of To Anyone Who Ever Asks, a new biography by Howard Fishman. During the 1950s, Converse lived in Greenwich Village, painting and writing music. She composed beautiful songs, literary and idiosyncratic, somewhere between folk, country, and the Great American Songbook canon. (The refrain to her song ‘Honeybee’ eerily prefigures The Velvet Underground’s ‘Femme Fatale,’ as if the melody had been played, then drifted through the downtown Manhattan air for ten years, hanging near radio receivers, blowing through subway grates and over tenement rooftops, waiting to be netted.) In the 1960s she embarked on a ‘Statistical Study of 1000 Melodies’, an attempt to make a scientific study of what makes a good song. (Fishman writes that she was “essentially doing by hand, ear and an early computer what programmers a half-century later would do on platforms like Pandora and Spotify.”) She wrote poetry and fiction, then later helped to organize anti-war and racial justice protests in Michigan. Eventually she developed a serious interest in studying conflict resolution. One of her innovations from this period of her life was ’Modular Dialog,’ a participatory game designed to model social and political confrontation.

In 1974 she vanished, leaving no trace other than a handful of contradictory clues and a mystery which Fishman, even after years of investigation, cannot solve. “How many more Connie Converses are there out there,” he writes, “marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive? And what price to do we pay […] by continuing to use fame, wealth, property, and power as out primary metrics for success?” Or, in other words, by continuing to use visibility, locatability. Insisting on asking the question, “are you here, or are you there?”

Marcel Duchamp, in the 1920s, declared he was giving up art to concentrate on chess, but he carried on making art in private. For a variety of reasons, personal, religious, cultural, certain kinds of artworks are meant to remain unseen, or only shared among a select community. Sometimes I walk past a house and, being a nosy sort, I look up at the windows and notice a painting hanging on the wall, or a ceramic on the windowsill, and wonder if the resident of the house made it. Do they do it for themselves or do they hope to show it in public? (There’s a practical reason artists put their work in public: to make a living.) I occasionally draw and paint, but it’s strictly for myself. A private activity. Does that make it a hobby, or a serious, if small, part of my creative life? Where’s the line? Some people closely identify with art as their job and their core being. They may or may not be the ones for whom art offers a helpful process, perhaps affords a hinterland, or allows them to access to a state of mind that they need for personal reasons. A part of their identity they prefer, or need, to remain hidden from view.

Artists, like anyone else, need a break. Time out from the studio. Time to spend gathering experiences, observations, material for an as-yet-unknown phase further down the road. Tending to life. Making some money. They might discover that art is just one town they will pass through. It takes a back seat. Other people only arrive there later in life. Here I think of my brother Karl. You might have read about him in my book Limbo. He has, among other things, been a mechanic, served in the Royal Navy, sailed boats across oceans, designed racing car body parts, and worked in materials engineering. Now in middle age, Karl has recently discovered that he has a considerable talent for voice acting. As he says in Limbo, “change is good. That’s what catches most people out. It’s not that I’m not afraid of change, I’m just less afraid of it than most. There’s never an end.”

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Speaking of privacy, Grace Jones, Private Life, from Australian television in 1980.

—The other day I was listening to an old episode of artist Aaron Angell’s excellent show on NTS Radio when I heard a curiosity called For Your Future Entertainment. The tracklist said it was by Clive Oxford. I wrote to Aaron to ask more. He told me that Clive was a projectionist at the Ritzy Cinema in London during the 1980s, running the midnight movie slot, and that he made this 7-inch to play during the intermissions. For Your Future Entertainment was an instrumental, and this, Fading Star, is the flipside, which features a cinephile eulogy by Clive, deadpan, yet full of the melancholy of fandom.

—For the last couple of years, my friend, the artist Anthony Discenza, has been running an artist residency and project space called lower_cavity. It’s located in a vast industrial building in Holyoke, Western Massachusetts. Currently lower_cavity is showing work by André Magaña and Carly Mandel, two projects by March 2023 resident Gregory Kalliche, and I Mist, a project by Philip Hinge for the CHAMBER exhibition series.

—Following the news that Kenneth Anger has, aged 96, crossed the Styx into the underworld, you may enjoy this BBC Arena documentary from 1991.

—Some rabbit hole led me to this clip from Videowave, a public access TV show starting in New York in 1982. The original music has been replaced with muzak, and the effect is… interesting. “These things are quite hot, so might wanna sit back and relax!” as they say at The Museum of Modern Art.

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Last year, in an essay about public art for the National Gallery of Australia publication The Annual, I wrote that “many art works are the wrong size. Often, they’re too big, a small idea turned into an enormous sculpture which gets in the way. There are murals that should be a single line of poetry and enormous abstracts that should not be fabricated from steel for large city squares but made from Plasticine and eventually lost down the back of the couch. By the same token, there are plant pots that could be spectacular railway terminals and seashells that should be sculpture gardens. Sometimes, it’s you that’s the wrong scale, not the artwork. Your mood might be shrivelled, for example, or your head might be swelled with pride. And anything can seem insufferable when you’re hungry; that’s when a plate of pancakes makes for a great monument. ‘Sometimes’—as the artist Ben Kinmont titled his ongoing art project in 1998—‘a nicer sculpture is being able to provide a living for your family.’”

Perhaps all this has something to do with a tug-of-war between embarrassment and ego. It dogs my work. On one side is a team pulling for these newsletters to be shorter and who believe a couple of chapters in my last book should have met the garden shears. Opposing them is the feeling that my band should be playing at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale, not at my kitchen table.

It’s not easy to know what the most appropriate size for an idea should be. How does an artist or writer sense how much is enough? Why do some artists not seem to understand when they should stop, or when to do more, even when we’re all so used to knowing when something is too much of this and not enough of that? When is the wrong scale the right scale, as in the over-the-top, the baroque, grotesque, melodramatic? When should an idea remain just an idea? (Not everything should be made.) Then there’s the problem of people with vested interests pushing an artist to do more. To make it bigger, longer, taller. And when an institution starts wrapping an exhibition in publicity, brochures, catalogues, talks, and late opening wine and nibbles events, when the hype cycle begins whirring, the effect it can have on an art work is like one of those moments in a cartoon when a ten-foot tall thug in a raincoat and hat is revealed to be five small kids stood on each others shoulders, hiding inside adult clothing.

When a work of art is said to be short or small—that is, when it leaves the audience wanting more—it’s often a subtle compliment, an acknowledgement of modesty or poetic restraint or erotic power. But a work that’s come out of the studio too big or too small can equally be described as “thin”, “shallow”, “flimsy.” Often when people complain about the size of an artwork, they’re talking about bloat—the movie that they believe is too long, the book that’s too big—unless, that is, the endurance required in order to make your way through the sheer tonnage of paper, to do a straight five hours in the cinema, is what we’re supposed to be impressed by. It’s a question of haggling over time: how much did the artist give to their work, and how much of yours are you going to hand over?

Just as big can equal dumb, jewel-like miniaturism or poignant fragmentation can seem precious. There are times when an artist says, “here are some clues, you figure out the rest” and inhabiting the space they create can be part of the work’s pleasure. (If there’s no room provided for the viewer, if every comma and brush mark is annotated, it’s like being cornered by an insufferable monologist at a party.) But there are other instances when it really is the artist’s job to do the maths. Gaps and silences aren’t always signs of taste and intelligence.

Sometimes self-doubt, or lack of it, makes it hard to find the right size for an idea. Sometimes it’s blunt economics. Expensive materials, not enough time, no money to pay people to help. Or too much cash and no-one saying no. Or it’s the scale of the subject that makes a mockery of the art: no-one, no matter what they claim, will ever make a work of art that can adequately describe the mystery of consciousness.

One of the problems with talking about scale is that language currently has no sense of proportion. It’s the Age of Hyperbole. The vocabs have been cranked up to eleven. Politics and PR have run-down once powerful words through overuse. ‘Radical,’ ‘urgent,’ ‘essential,’ ‘subversive,’ ‘devastating,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ and other terms once saved for love and war are now applicable to sourdough scented candles. The language of revolution is the language of the middle-brow: pietistic, unimaginative, self-serving, spouted by men on podcasts sermonizing about politics and drizzled over every new sneaker drop. If you think the word ‘interesting’ is dull, think about how empty the term ‘revolutionary’ sounds. In neglecting the control of mid-range words—good, solid, workaday words which help tug life into perspective—every sentence has become a spectacular son-et-lumiere on ice, a Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission, a Frank Gehry-designed museum. Awesome, meaningless.

This week, the Metrograph Cinema in New York announced that they were going to be showing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster film cycle. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, the nutshell is that it’s five films composed of spectacular and surreal scenes—of extreme duration, often involving the transference of various fluids and oozes—that allegorize the human body. Their iconography is occult, built from layers of modernist reference and Masonic Americana, the kind of symbolism which, if the films were made today, might accidentally give birth to an ugly new conspiracy cult. On seeing the announcement I thought back to the hours I spent watching them when I was in my twenties, fresh out of art school, how seriously I took the experience. (The series totals about seven hours.) Now in my late forties—all other considerations about the films aside—I wonder if I would give that time over again. For the time being, I don’t need opera. Scale—the film’s duration in relationship to where you are in your life—is sometimes right for only a moment, not in perpetuity. I once spent two days watching all thirteen hours of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 at the National Film Theatre in London. I wouldn’t do that again because I doubt I could ever replicate the intense feelings it left me with; the uncanny sense of intimacy, of being deeply involved in the lives of the actors on screen. It felt so surprising first time around, and would be ruined by expectation with repeat viewing.

The Barney announcement reminded me that in the late 1990s I went to a late-night screening of Cremaster 1 at what was then the Metro Cinema on Rupert Street in Soho, London. I was sat on the front row. About halfway through the film, the fire exit doors, which were located next to the screen, burst open. A man ran in wielding a fire extinguisher and drenched everyone in the first few rows in foam before running back out into the night, laughing hysterically. It happened so fast we were left in shock. But then a cinema full of people wiping white foam and gunge from their faces and clothes struck me as a Barney-esque image. Perhaps this was the most brilliant pairing of a prank with a movie, the right sized joke. It became my favourite memory of the Cremaster experience.

I also once spent six hours stuck on a barge drifting down the Detroit River, in subzero temperatures, part of a group invited to watch the making of Barney’s film River of Fundament some time around 2010. The experience was both miserable and fascinating. Maybe one day I’ll write about why, but not for now. Every so often a memory or minor anecdote like that springs to mind, and I note it down, with the idea that it could be fitted into a piece I’m working on, or developed into something bigger. Scaled up. It’s like finding a nice ingredient you think might work in a meal. Maybe you’ll throw it in the salad that night, or perhaps you’ll pickle it and find a use for it months later. I keep a list of those ideas—often they’re minor facts I’ve come across in a book or magazine, something odd that I can’t shake from my head—and the one thing they have in common is that I have no sense of their potential scale. Will this be a book or a sentence? Essay or song? Documentary film or text message? Should it be a picture instead of words? Is it best made by someone other than me?

When the director Nicholas Ray began writing a screenplay, he would give it the working title “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” It’s a good starting point. I rarely know what the size and shape of a project will be until I try working it up—I’m a stranger to it. Only then do I discover that an idea will not stretch, or is too capacious to give it coherent form, or—best case—will lead me somewhere completely new.

For instance, I once read that on George Harrison’s 21st birthday in 1964, the Beatle received some 30,000 cards and gifts. These included a pair of doors sent by a group of fans in Hove, to accompany the traditional symbolic birthday keys they assumed he’d be sent. Allegedly a warehouse had to be rented in order to store Harrison’s unopened presents. I’ve long wanted to write something based on the image of a warehouse full of neglected gifts, but I suspect that once I get going, I won’t have much to say. Similarly, I recently read a magazine feature about women working in the upper echelons of the British intelligence services. A sentence leapt out at me. It mentioned that MI5 employed retired theatre professionals to advise on disguises. Surely that’s a sitcom, I thought, but would I ever get around to writing it? There was also a period when I wanted to make something—a short story, a script, again I’m not sure—titled ‘The Day Jobs of Philip Glass.’ It would imagine an average working day for the composer in the 1970s, before he became famous, when he worked as a removals man, a plumber, an artists assistant, a domestic house cleaner and as a taxi driver. But then I read the account he gave of those jobs in his memoir, Words Without Music, and the idea felt superfluous.

In the 19th century, medical staff at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, would cover the floor of their operating theatre with sawdust to absorb blood that spilled during surgical procedures. The surgery fell into disuse and was boarded up in the 1860s, where it remained intact and undisturbed until it was rediscovered in 1956. In 1962 it opened as the Old Operating Theatre Museum. By then, the congealed blood and sawdust had become so compacted underneath the floorboards that a cement cutter was needed to saw through it. My friend, the late artist and writer Brian Catling, once told me—and this is possibly apocryphal—that the rectangular, hollow space beneath the floorboards had molded the dried blood into a perfect geometric block, like a grisly minimalist sculpture. I want to put this image into my next book, and I don’t think its form—a couple of sentences at most—needs inflating. It’s already the right size. It doesn’t need to be a five-screen video installation. By contrast, there’s something my grandma said in passing to my Dad many decades ago. It’s a remark no more than a sentence long, barely an anecdote, concerning an incident that occurred when she worked as a nurse in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence. With time and effort put into research, it could easily grow into a play or a novel.

If you’re talking about scale, you have to talk about perspective: how one object appears in relationship to another. There’s a photograph made in 1936 at the The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by the photographer Edward Steichen, then the highest paid commercial photographer in the world. It depicts a neat white gallery, in the middle of which sits a young woman wearing a dark short-sleeved dress and hat. She’s perched elegantly on a set of low, stepped plinths, the sort museums use for displaying large ceramics or design classics. Surrounding her are vases filled with long spears of delphiniums, rocketing high over her head like fireworks, threatening to riddle the room’s clever blankness with petals and sticky pollen. The photograph records MoMA’s first and only exhibition dedicated to flowers, and it was Steichen—President of the American Delphinium Society, Société Nationale d’Horticulture de France gold medallist, later Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA—who had organized it. He cultivated the plants on his farm in Connecticut, and had them transported to New York City, where they were displayed for one week only under the title ‘Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums.’

One room, one week. The right size. ‘Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums’ doesn’t exist in a museum collection. Only a couple of photographs and pages of publicity material remain as evidence that it happened. But it triangulates people, art and nature to provocative effect. It leaves me wondering whether one day botanical museums will be valued more than art museums. Because art can look after itself. There will always be someone to come along and make the stuff. But delphiniums? Once they are gone, unable to survive, destroyed by humankind’s vandalism of the planet, there will be no more delphiniums. Only photographs and paintings and drawings of delphiniums, and no matter how many of those artworks you have, none of them could match the scale of one single flower.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—I heard this on the radio the other day: The Superfly Bros. of St. Martin covering Another Star by Stevie Wonder. Gorgeous.

—A few weeks ago I recommended Ian Penman’s essay on Baudelaire for the London Review of Books, and mentioned that he had a book on Rainer Werner Fassbinder coming out. Well, now it’s here. Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors opens like this: “The very first thing to proclaim is: the absolute impossibility of summing up Fassbinder. I have no desire to be some kind of amiable, reasonable, encyclopaedic curator of the archive.” There’s a critic who understands scale. But in this short book is writing that does something all too rare in criticism: it makes you want to see/read/hear the work it’s talking about, and not only that, it makes you want to go out make something yourself.

—On May 23rd at Light Industry, NYC, Lisa Cohen is presenting A Provisional Account of Some Clothes On Film, “to show some of the ways clothes have mattered in moving pictures—and see what emerges.”

—The wonderful Bridget St. John is on a small tour in the northeast US, from the end of this month and into June.

—Last week I had a sneak preview of the compilation The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972. It’s compiled by artist and musician Paul Purgas from a newly discovered archive of music at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and features tape and synthesizer words by little-known composers including Gita Sarabhai, I.S. Mathur, Atul Desai, S.C. Shama and Jinraj Joshipura. Strange Attractor Press are publishing a book to accompany the album, both of which come out later this year. In the meantime, there’s a superb documentary on the back story to the album, made by Purgas for BBC radio last year, which can be listened to here.

—Optimo Music have just released Cease & Resist: Sonic Subversion & Anarcho Punk In The UK 1979-86, a major compilation devoted to a seven year period of truly underground, economically independent, politically uncompromising anarcho-punk music. All proceeds will be donated to Faslane Peace Camp and the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Optimo say: “Not so far from Glasgow Faslane Naval Base is home to Britain's abhorrent Trident nuclear missiles. The camp has been there, protesting since 1982 and is still active to this day. We hope in our lifetime we will see those missiles leave Scottish soil. We have so much respect for those who have dedicated their lives to protesting these weapons and it seemed an obvious choice that the proceeds from this release should go to help them, and the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.”

—I am excited to learn that Cathi Unsworth has a new book out: Season of the Witch, a social and political history of goth. A future newsletter might come of reading this. Speaking of goths, Siouxsie Sioux went back on tour this month after a long hiatus, and The Cure began a tour of North America. Here’s Siouxsie and the Banshees, with The Cure’s Robert Smith on guitar, on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1982.

—RIP Rita Lee of Brasil’s great tropicalismo psychonauts, Os Mutantes.

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Recently, while memory dredging for a book I’m writing, I dug out my old human anatomy sketchbook from art school in Oxford. Along with life drawing, anatomy classes were compulsory for my first year. We worked from the life model, from an anatomical skeleton on casters that could be waltzed around our large drawing studio, and from a flayed cadaver kept at the university physiology department. My life drawings weren’t bad, nor were my diagrams showing how muscles attached to bones. But I struggled to depict the cadaver clearly, to distinguish one muscle from another. It was as if my pencil were blunting before it scratched the page. My drawing became vague, fuzzy. To draw a plastic assembly model of a human torso, one in which all the organs snugged together neatly, no mess, was one thing, it was another when I looked along the cross-section of a leg on a dissection table. The mystery of the body asserted itself and brought a fog down over my eyes. My interest in pursuing anatomical art stopped there, but the experience of making those studies in the physiology department—the sight, the smell, the temperature of the room—was indelible, and now returns to me through writing fiction.

On the walls of the drawing studio were hung prints of écorchés—images of body showing the skeleton and musculature— taken from De humani corporis fabrica libri septum (The Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books), by the 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Published in 1543, the book revolutionized the understanding and teaching of human anatomy. De humani corporis fabrica contained over 200 woodcuts, made by a team of artists who, it is thought, may have included a student of Titian. They imagined the medical body in classical ruins. A man standing contrapposto, skin peeling from his limbs, a beautiful town nestling in the hills behind him. (The countryside is said to be that around Padua, Italy.) A skeleton leaning against a stone plinth, resting its head in one hand, bored, the other hand placed on top of another skull, as if it were idly rolling it around under its palm like a massage ball. Surreal images, to modern eyes. This quality of strangeness, for me, was what made De humani corporis fabrica such an apt title for Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s latest documentary film.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica (titled-cased for the movie) was shot inside a group of Parisian hospitals over the course of some five to six years. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor initially planned to make a documentary composed entirely from images taken inside the body, but as the filmmakers got to know the hospital medical staff, they began to work using a combination of sources: medical imaging (such as ultrasound, X-ray), scialytic cameras (those installed directly over the operating table to record procedures), microscopic cameras that can travel inside the body, and a miniature camera the directors had specially-designed, which produced images that echoed the texture and depth-of-field of medical lenses and gave them freedom to shoot fly-on-the-wall around the hospitals without too much intrusion.

To describe De Humani Corporis Fabrica as intense is an understatement. Near the start of the film, we see a close-up on the anxious face of a middle-aged man talking to a surgeon. They’re joking about playing with Meccano as children. The doctor is asking him if he feels any pain. He winces a little, but says he doesn’t feel much. Then the camera moves to the top of his head and we see that the surgeon is screwing a metal aperture into the man’s skull. At that point, every person sat in front of me in the cinema covered their eyes or looked away from the screen. You could sense everyone asking themselves the same question: how am I going to get through the next two hours? Then it cut to inside of the man’s brain.

I am squeamish—if I must see gore on screen, I prefer it to be unrealistic, comical, like rubber and ketchup—but I suspect even people with strong stomachs might find De Humani Corporis Fabrica hard to watch. Partly this is because there is no way to abstract the experience of the film from the experience of having a body, and of knowing illness and pain. It is not like watching a film about a tree and wondering what the tree feels when it loses a branch. Here there is no escaping empathy, or at least a little somatic recognition. (I noticed that I found the footage of anything to do with the head, eyes and genitals the hardest to watch. The lower intestine, less so.)

The hard, metallic textures of video are both beautiful and unsparing. We see plastic tubing sucking fluid out of cavities, blades cutting skin like knives into butter, metal tools gripping internal organs and shuffling them around. We observe internal sutures being made, rods and screws being fixed into bones. In one scene, a device is inserted up a man’s urethra. “Try the ballistic setting, see if it’s better,” we hear the doctor say. There is a sharp rat-tat-tat and the device jerks back and forth like a gun. “Kalashnikov,” his colleague jokes. The squelch of flesh mixed with the whirr and punch of precision-milled machinery only heightens the sense of the body as something delicate and permeable, or as Castaing-Taylor puts it, “by turns divine and utterly profane.” Talk cyborg theory as much as you like, but these procedural images of observation and repair make the fusion of flesh and synthetic material look no more than a question of mixed-media sculpture, of simply one material stuck onto another, of armature and pipes and cautery welding.

After sitting with incisions and endoscopic probes for a while, you begin to adjust. Scenes of security guards patrolling the basements and peripheries of the hospital, like antibodies, seem to emphasize its role as a place designed for protection. Much of the imagery is beautiful. Sometimes dark—an oncologist examining cancer cells marbled in vivid red and violet whorls—and sometimes miraculous, such as the extraordinary scene which captures a cesarean section, and the first minutes of a newborn’s life, as they’re being cleaned and inspected.

Rarely are the faces of the medical staff seen. The framing keeps close to the body, both inside and out. One of the most harrowing scenes is shot in the corridors of a geriatric psychiatric ward. It’s a tight close-up on the faces of two elderly women walking, one holding onto the other. The stronger of the pair speaks in a low voice, repeatedly telling the other to “shut up” and “hurry up.” In the background a woman cries in pain. Another can be heard saying “I want to die.” A man peers out from a locked room, knocking on the window. The filmmakers hold on the two women for what seems like forever, one bullying the other with short repetitive orders. “Depeche vous! Tais-toi!” It’s like watching a nightmarish Samuel Beckett play depicting two characters trapped in an eternal, dreadful limbo. The unfathomable, unknowable pain of mental distress becomes much harder to witness than the plumbing and engineering issues of internal organs.*

Throughout the film are the voices of the medical staff. Often their remarks are muffled, overheard from inside the body. One talks about the cost of rent in Clichy while maneuvering a camera along someone’s intestine. Another, working on a patient’s penis, complains about how exhausted he is, because of cost-cutting layoffs. During a prostate operation that seems to be going badly, a frustrated surgeon asks his colleague if he knows what he’s doing. (“This guy is put together really weirdly,” he jokes, as he tries to get the prostate into a specimen bag inside the patient’s body.) Tools are dropped on the floor. They need fixing. A doctor doing a spine operation tells his colleague that he has ruptured his bicep lifting a heavy box and jokes that he’d never let a surgeon near it. A neurosurgeon makes a quip about being a hairdresser as he washes down a post-op brain surgery patient. A midwife chats sweetly to a newborn as she counts its fingers and toes.

Expertise meets contingency in these remarks. Ordinary chat underscores the dexterity with which they use their tools, yet you can also sense them thinking on their feet, trying to cope with unforeseen accidents and complications. Paravel says that “these attitudes and conversations are not anecdotal, nor is it even some dark side of the act of caring: it’s also thanks to this that we are able to be cared for. Without the possibility of creating distance or creating some banality in the acts that they perform, it would be impossible for them to sustain this work.” Castaing-Taylor agrees. “Their work is so intense, so engaging and so exhausting, that our presence changed the routine, afforded them some moments of relief, and even humor. We were pretty clueless, made many mistakes, and there was a lot they could educate us about. We soon realized that they were also interested in our point of view, in how we would observe them, and how they appear to outsiders.”

In a final, surprising sequence—shot during a leaving party for one of the doctors—the camera tracks in semi-darkness across an irreverent pornographic mural of the hospital’s doctors. Staff dance and drink. Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ blasts loudly, then ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. (“How does it feel? / To treat me like you do / When you’ve laid your hands upon me / And told me who you are.”) It’s filmed in a hospital dining room, according to Castaing-Taylor, “the so-called ‘salle de garde,’ a very specific space in French hospitals, a place where all day and all night doctors and interns gather, and not the other care-givers — it’s very hierarchal. They go there to eat and to rest, but it’s a space controlled by rules that may seem like folklore but are very strict.”

As in the rest of the documentary, there is no information—no title cards, captions, voice-overs—to explain what we’re seeing. Context allows you to figure out a little of what’s going on—everyone knows what it’s like to let off steam—but to the untrained eye is hard to understand much else. The difficulty of being able to identify anything within the body seems symbolic. It reminds me of the way my mind races for imagery when I feel ill, but can’t depict what’s happening inside me. No matter where the cameras probe, existence and consciousness remain profoundly unfathomable. De Humani Corporis Fabrica is a science fiction tragicomedy, a moving and mystical film.

* The filmmakers discuss their subjects’ consent and other topics raised by the film in this interview here.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Venceremos (We Will Win) by Working Week has been my springtime song. Released in 1984, featuring Claudia Figueroa, Tracey Thorn (of Everything But the Girl) and Robert Wyatt on vocals, and produced by the late Simon Booth. Dedicated to the Chilean protest singer Victor Jara, a classic of the 1980s new British jazz-dance scene.

—The video to Venceremos, directed by Julien Temple, featured the dance collective IDJ, which led me down a rabbit hole of watching jazz-fusion dance battles, filmed in London sometime in the ‘80s. Almost completely forgotten by most pop histories.

—My reading, as usual, is all over the place. This week I’ve been getting into The Gamekeeper by Barry Hines (author of A Kestrel for a Knave, best known as Ken Loach’s film Kes). Published in 1975, it tells the story of George Purse, an ex-steel factory worker, who leaves the city for the countryside to work as the gamekeeper on a duke’s estate. It’s a piece of vivid but unsentimental nature writing following Purse from season to season, describing his work and relationship to the animals he watches, but it also tracks its protagonist’s isolation, policing private land, confrontations with working people of his own class, negotiating the tensions this brings to his marriage and the school life of his children. I have a new edition with a nice, tasteful black-and-white landscape on the cover, but I do like this TV tie-in one from 1980, which seems more mail-order catalogue than gamekeeper.

—Teacher and poet (and old friend) Jeremy Noel-Tod has a lovely newish substack called Some Flowers Soon, featuring close readings and thoughts on poetry. He wears his erudtion lightly, writing with warmth and—as is probably right for a poet—refreshing brevity. Recent topics include the perennially difficult J.H. Prynne, an appreciation of Stevie Smith, and a beautiful counterweight to all the recent AI-worrying, in which Noel-Tod demonstrates his love of amateur poets and why a New Yorker writer who recently claimed that AI could mimic Philip Larkin clearly hadn’t a clue about Philip Larkin.

—Self-promotion corner: I have a new album coming out this Friday, 28th August, with my band The God in Hackney, titled The World in Air Quotes. We—that is, me, Andy Cooke, Nathaniel Mellors and Ashley Marlowe, with guest players Eve Essex and Kelly Pratt—began work on it in the first months of the pandemic, writing, recording and mixing in isolation from each other. Three years later it’s finally done. You can download or order it on vinyl via the group’s Bandcamp page (or if you’re a record store, via Kudos Distribution in the UK). The cover art work features a painting by Tala Madani. Video above by N. Mellors.

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2. The producers behind The Great British Bake Off had a big hit last month with The Piano— described as ‘Bake Off for pianos’—a show in which amateur pianists were invited to perform on public pianos in major train stations, watched in secret by the singer Mika and classical maestro Lang Lang.

3. The Ethiopian composer, pianist and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbru died last week, aged 99, at the Debre Genet monastery in Jerusalem. Her compositions are graceful fusions of Ethiopian and Western music on themes of family, nature, religion and homesickness. Gentle, waltz-like pieces, decorated with sparkling, cascading runs and trills. Her sense of timing— idiosyncratic, almost bluesy—made her melodies sound like murmurations of starlings. Occasional hesitancies in her playing tinted them with melancholy. (Kate Molleson, in her fascinating book Sound on Sound, published last year, points out that the Ethiopian scale ‘tizita’ major “is usually used to convey longing—the word literally means “yearning” in Amharic.”) Once heard, her music is unmistakable.

Guèbru was the daughter of a wealthy political family in Addis Ababa. As a child she was sent abroad to be educated in Switzerland with her older sister. She began her music education on the violin but it was the piano that captured her imagination after being taken to a concert by a blind pianist. In her twenties—after the turmoil of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and World War Two—she was offered the opportunity to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her career dream was dashed when her travel visa was mysteriously denied by the Ethiopian authorities. Heartbroken, she slowly began her religious journey, and gave up music for a decade. It wasn’t until the 1960s that she returned to the piano and began composing her own music and releasing records.

4. Guèbru once said that “the piano has been my best friend since the age of eight.” I think I know what she meant. I began learning the instrument at around the same age, on a turn-of-the-century John Spencer & Co upright, with a beautiful wooden casing, cracked soundboard and buzzy strings. Despite the patient ministrations of a local piano tuner it was terminally out-of-tune. Almost a century of damp British weather and central heating had turned its sound permanently avant-garde. John Cage couldn’t have imagined a prepared piano as peculiar sounding as ours. But it had character that I got to know deeply. I learned to read music on it, I learned Bach and Beethoven and Bowie on it, I learned how to improvise and play by ear on it. (In no small part this was thanks to the endless patience of my family and our next-door neighbours whom I tortured through the walls with my playing.) I loved opening up the casing to look at how the mechanisms of hammers, dampers, strings, pedals, and levers worked. It fascinated me that it was a piece of furniture as well as a musical instrument, an object you could put a photo of grandma and a vase of flowers on top of, a thing both enormously impractical—you can’t carry a piano on the bus to rehearsal—and useful for home furnishing tasks it wasn’t designed for. To paraphrase the artist Mike Kelley, I got “more love hours than can ever be repaid” from that thing.

5. At best I am an average piano player, and because I don’t own a piano, I’ve dipped to a below-average standard. Yet I think about the instrument a great deal. I often visualize a keyboard when I listen to music—sometimes a music stave, but usually piano keys—trying to imagine where the notes are, how it’s constructed. This is a strange thing to say, but for me the arrangement of black and white keys is as much a fundamental form as a tree, a wheel or a sentence. I can’t imagine a world without it, in the same way that I cannot imagine my life outside the English language. If I were to take a psychedelic voyage into the inner reaches of my consciousness, I’d probably meet an ancient cosmic god shaped like a vast Steinway. When I play other instruments—the guitar or the clarinet—I find myself mentally translating what my fingers are doing on the fret board or tone holes to the piano keyboard. This probably does nothing for my guitar or clarinet skills, in the same way that English hobbles my French.

6. Before Nam Jun Paik became a pioneer of video art, he had a promising career as a classical pianist. In Amanda Kim’s new documentary about Paik, Moon is the Oldest TV, the young Paik is seen performing a complex piece by Arnold Schoenberg. After witnessing a concert by John Cage, he felt an increasing desire to tear down the Western classical music tradition. Later, he and other Fluxus artists would smash pianos, set fire to them, torture uprights by shoving them onto their backs. Potent gestures, if Franz Liszt and Jerry Lee Lewis hadn’t already beaten the avant-gardists to it with their own violent, pianopocalyptic performances.

As a child, many years before I heard of Fluxus, I was horrified to learn that piano smashing was a competitive sport in 1950s Britain. After the war, as the television and radio began to take over the home and the social space of the pub, people no longer had any use for the instrument. (As the piano began to vanish from the home, it disappeared from representation in visual art: I find it hard to think of many paintings or sculptures that depict the instrument after the 1960s.) The market for used instruments became non-existent, and so piano wrecking became a popular activity at local fairs, fetes and university rag weeks. It now seems to me quaint, childish. But it’s striking that documentation of Fluxus artists destroying pianos, and old film of people pulling them to bits at country fairs, look almost identical, yet they carry such different weights of intellectual and class value.

7. Here’s an interview with the American pianist John Browning, talking about physical technique. He was a protégé of Rosina Lhévinne, the famous Russian musician and teacher. In the interview, Browning—debonair, elegantly dressed—talks about the importance of a straight back, angling in to the keyboard a little, “rather than an arrogant attitude of [leaning] back.” He demonstrates how to practice playing octaves with books tucked between the arms, how to “bounce the thumbs” and keep them from getting “tight,” in his opinion the main cause of tendonitis.

8. I’ve never understood the appeal of the self-playing piano. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

9. Like any instrument the piano demands coordination of the body and the intellect and makes use of the brain in your hands. When I’ve not played it for some time, I’m always suprised at how much muscle-memory I carry for certain pieces. There are compositions I learned aged fifteen that I can still summon—if shakily and with all the nimbleness of a three-legged dog climbing a mountain. I can enter into a state of mind when playing the piano that I can only compare to drawing or walking. It’s one in which I can shift between different levels of attention. There’s the task in hand: awareness of when a piece needs a bit more detail here, more definition needed there, looking ahead to where it might go next, making adjustments, chancing a new technique. And then there is another state. A memory might appear out of nowhere, something completely unrelated. Plans, fantasies, anxieties, and feelings bubble and churn. Deep thoughts sing to banal thoughts. I can find myself imagining who else the music might please and who might find something in it to criticise. I can lose myself in this state for hours. Eventually I’ll be interrupted by the need to pee, to eat something, my phone pinging, and the world is spared my plunking and clomping.

10. On a trip home last year, I ran into my old piano teacher. I did not know that she was originally from New York, and had left for England, ending up in the small town I grew up in. The reverse course to my own. One of my favourite pieces she taught me to play was ‘Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum’ from Claude Debussy’s Children’s Corner (1908). It was a play on a set of musical exercises, and dedicated to his daughter Claude-Emma, nicknamed Chouchou. For a long time I believed I had quite a good command of it—especially the fast runs that bookend it—until I finally heard a recording played by a professional and realised that I had only learned it at half-speed. It was like discovering I had been mispronouncing a word my whole life.

Debussy apparently told his publisher that ‘Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum’ should be played early in the morning. Something to get the blood flowing. I doubt I could reach the breakneck early morning speed Debussy intended. I like my slow version, which sounds like it should be played late at night.

11. Browning notes that the Russian school of piano technique taught that the fleshy part of the fingers should be flat on the keys, rather than the hard, bony part of the finger at the tip. It produced “a slightly slower, less speedy attack on the key,” that made for a more melodious sound. This was how Thelonius Monk played too, but with completely different results. Looking at clips of him performing, his hand was even flatter against the keys, almost paddling them. Monk—also the subject of a new film, Rewind & Play, directed by Alain Gomis—had a forceful and percussive style, defined by space and deliberative gaps between phrases. His playing was like hearing someone think aloud, argue with the piano. Monk’s approach to harmony was incredibly inventive, using unusual tonal colours that sometimes clashed—notes slipping and clanging next to each other—and yet always at the service of the melody. He could add deep complexity to a simple tune in the right hand by making idiosyncratic harmonic choices in the left. But no matter how strange things got, there was always a groove to whatever he played: “make the drummer sound good” was one of his rules.

12. Guèbru described the piano as “a full instrument.” You can play a simple melody line, you can play chords, you can mix them together and act as both lead and accompanist. A piano can sound small or it can sound enormous. It can support a soloist, or blend into an orchestra. It’s also a percussion instrument. Because pianos are stupidly big, expensive, so heavy with history, they make great props for comedy. A lone piano on a stage can signal that you’re about to witness an act of virtuosity, or a heart-on-sleeve weepie. Six of them together creates a sound like no other. Its sound is ubiquitous: you can hear the piano in a church and on a house music track in a club, you can hear it in the corridors of a conservatoire, on a ringtone, imitated by a child’s toy.

13. Here’s Oscar Peterson giving Dick Cavett a lesson in jazz piano.

14. There’s a clip of Glenn Gould recording a Bach bourée—classic Gould, crisp articulation of notes, hunched and low at the keyboard, humming along to his own playing—in which you can see Gould stopping himself, asking for a new take, thinking through all the possibilities. “That is too boring, let’s try it again…,” or “Too crazy. Again.”

Someone—I cannot remember who, perhaps Monk, or maybe it was Liberace—said that when you play one note on the piano, you’re playing them all. Another one of Monk’s maxims was “a note can be a small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.” The piano is a capacious instrument, with such scope for invention and variation to keep you occupied for a long time. If I were to be stuck on a desert island, a piano would be my luxury, not writing tools. What I enjoy about Monk’s playing is that it constantly offers suggestions for how to put sound together, how to juxtapose odd flavours. He encourages the musician to ask themselves the question, “have you thought about doing it like this instead?” On Instagram, I like watching a niche category of video in which pianists demonstrate how to achieve certain kinds of chord voicings in jazz or pop music. It’s basic bread-and-butter stuff for first year music students, but for an amateur like me they represent possibility—“next time you’re at the piano, try this”—or simply being let into the secret of how to get a sound with a particular feel. I concede that animal videos are probably more entertaining.

15. In his book Rough Ideas, the concert pianist Stephen Hough writes about the increase in anxiety about playing wrong notes. “It’s partly the sanitized perfection of edited studio recordings […],” he writes. “We live in a world with straight edges, with spell checks, with on/off switches.” Hough describes a conductor once stopping a rehearsal to vent his frustration at the violins: “‘I wish some of you would play out of tune for once. Everything’s so tentative, so cautious. Let go, for heaven’s sake!’” Hough gives the example of Alfred Cortot as a performer who didn’t seem too worried about making mistakes, yet “he still soared higher than most.” I remember once seeing Philip Glass play a selection of his own solo piano pieces. He fumbled a few notes, and his playing seemed a fraction rough to my ears, but it gave an emotional edge to the performance that a recording would have killed.

16. Hough talks about people’s fascination with difficulty, with the pieces that turn his hands into a blur on the keyboard, blizzards of notes flying everywhere. He points out that the flashy stuff is easier than it looks, but something soft and slow can be harder to get right. It reminds me of a passage in the novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) by Jean Rhys, in which the narrator is fired from a ghost-writing job for using words that are too short. “Don’t you know any long words, and if you do, would you please use them?” […] “Long words. Chairoscuro? Translucent? … I bet he’d like cataclysmal action and centrifugal flux […]”

I love the way The Stooges use just one high-pitched repeating piano note on ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’—it’s dumb, like a menacing sleigh bell, yet it propels the song along. Similarly, the insistent two-note piano riff on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ gives the track swagger. The piano solo on Isaac Hayes’ ‘Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic’ is long, sparse and barely moves at all, but it packs a punch. (Round about the seven-minute point you can hear the little clustered squibs that Public Enemy sampled for ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.’) Duval Timothy, whose music I enjoy, is not a flashy pianist. His songs often have the quality of sketches, but his approach results in something hypnotic and intimate, a little like observing someone lost in thought in the middle of the afternoon.

17. You can detune and retune a piano according to your own system. You can reach into its guts and pluck, hit or stroke its strings. You can wedge objects inside it or stick things onto the hammers that will mess with the action of the keys and alter its timbre. All of which is more or less quite interesting, but it seems histrionic when you consider how many ways there are to articulate just one single note.

18. Speaking of simplicity: ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ by the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed away last week, a couple of days after Guèbru.

19. Some of my favourite musicians are technically bog-standard pianists, but it’s what they do with the instrument that’s powerful. Take, for example, this clip of Robert Wyatt playing his ‘Sea Song’ on French television in 1975. He’s solo at the piano, a full-size grand on a vast, empty soundstage, a couple of sad looking party balloons lolling on the floor next to him. Wyatt plays a thick procession of chords all at the same, steady pace. But he is in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. He can’t operate the instrument’s pedals, which would be used to sustain and blend the notes. Rather than sounding clunky and plain, as it might do without the helpful gloss of the pedals, the naked and vulnerable sentiment of the song is enhanced.

20. Nina Simone originally aspired to be a classical pianist, but her life and circumstances led her into jazz. She was an admirer of Bach, and would take her songs on flights of baroque-style invention. The clip above is from the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1987. “I have suffered,” she says, “but there’s a Bösendorfer here, so we’ll see what happens.” She starts playing ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me.’ You can hear her foot tapping along. (Another Monk-ism: “pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.”) At first her playing sounds crisp but firmly in the jazz idiom, as if she may simply turn out a straightforward rendition of the song. Then she she starts to extemporize, augmenting the song’s 20th century swing with 17th century stylings.

She begins to sing, a little tentatively, as if to herself rather than the audience. After the first round of lyrics, her hands begin to fly. You can see her thinking, planning where to take the song next. Yet there is also such assurance in her invention. She knows exactly how the baroque form should go, how counterpoint works; moves which are by this stage in her life completely embodied her hands. (That old muscle memory again.) Here and there a note slips, but the mistakes give the performance an exhilarating quality. It starts to become like watching someone playing on a cliff edge, on the brink of losing control. Just past the five-minute mark she moves her head to the mic as if to sing, getting part of a word out, but she decides against it—“no,” you can hear her say—and she pulls the energy right back. She tamps down the volume, lets air into her scales and runs. Then she starts to sing again, and the playing takes off. Her hands wail on the keys. Her fingers drown out her voice. It’s triumphant and yet almost anguished too, as if the whole song has become about the piano itself, her ‘baby,’ a reckoning with all that it has brought her.

‘A full instrument,’ no question.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—I am keen to see Kelly Reichardt’s new film, Showing Up: the latest stage in my elusive quest to find a film about artists that actually captures what being an artist is like.

—If you can find it, and you’re a fan of the British writer Alan Garner, seek out the 1979 ‘Play for Today’ adapation of his novel Red Shift. Like many of Garner’s books, it’s about the ways in which history collides with the present, a kind of literary quantum physics in which multiple time periods co-exist in the same narrative frame.

—The new novel by Michael Bracewell, Unfinished Business, came out last month. It’s his first work of fiction in over 20 years, picking up with the lives of characters he introduced his readers to in 1992 with The Conclave; then upwardly mobile, aspirational products of Thatcher’s Britain, now at vastly different stations in life. It’s funny and tragic, each sentence a pithy distillation of British culture and the run-down condition of nostalgia: “What do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?” (I wrote about his last book, Souvenir—a beautiful, oblique memoir of 1980s London—for Frieze in 2021.)

—‘Brussels Pout’ is Ian Penman’s new essay on Charles Baudelaire for the London Review of Books: “seedy and prematurely middle-aged, sparse hair brushed forward, a dandy with water damage.” Penman also has a new book out on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as reviewed by Christine Smallwood last week in 4Columns. And have you read Smallwood’s novel The Life of the Mind? You should.

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Photography books about music culture seem to be everywhere these days. Large-format hardbacks of sumptuous black-and-whites capturing sweaty ravers at the Shoom club in 1988. Oversize publications with gorgeous wraparound dust-jackets depicting the ways Shibuya-kei kids dressed in 1990s Tokyo. Here, nostalgia meets anthropology. The books are hybrids of performance and street photography; shots of bands on stage and fans in the crowd, catalogues of haircuts and shoe styles. You can find them on the display tables of a certain kind of specialist bookshop—the ones that also sell third edition Kathy Acker novels and dog-eared back issues of Interview for the price of a pedigreed puppy—and in menswear stores placed next to a single pair of $200 Argyle socks. “You saw Nirvana play in 1990? Amazing. You must try on these tobacco-suede tasseled loafers from Italy.”

The proliferation of these books is relatively recent, a marker of 21st century nostalgia culture and its hyperbolic assertions of ‘classic’ this and ‘vintage’ that. But as a photo genre it’s as old as pop music itself. Images of mid-century jazz and rock musicians could probably fill the Mariana Trench. Among my favourites are Karlheinz Weinberger’s wild, erotic photos from the 1950s of teenage rebels in Switzerland (see above). At art college I owned a photo book about mods in 1970s Britain, which I loved, lost and subsequently forgot the title of: if any readers out there can suggest to me what it might have been, I’d be grateful. Hip-hop and punk books are hardy perennials. Back in the Days, Jamel Shabazz’s chronicle of the early New York hip-hop scene, published two decades ago, is an eye-popping and essential collection. (The first run of the book apparently sold 35,000 copies.) Sheila Rock’s Young Punks from 2020—front-line images of the 1970s London scene—is one of a seemingly endless number of punk-era photography books, most of which are far less compelling than hers. Now 1990s club culture has come into focus. There’s Dave Swindells’ Acid House as it Happened, for instance, or Tony Davis’ UK Rave 1991 photo-booklet for Cafe Royal Books. (Cafe Royal’s little publications are a fantastic place to find documentary photography at an affordable price.) I enjoyed Seana Gavin’s Spiralled (2020), a fascinating and raw account of her life travelling across Europe with renegade free party soundsystems.

At best, these publications have sociological value. They’re records of fashion, demographics and behaviour, capturing the energy and anxiety that can surround an emerging youth subculture. At worst they’re repetitive and nutrition-free. Double-page spreads of graffiti-covered basement clubs you never attended, of sweaty, gurning people you don’t know and whose mythologization you fear you’ll never hear the end of. Other people’s hedonism is boring in the same way that at a stranger’s holiday photographs are. (Art world photo books, a real niche genre, slide along a similar full-to-empty scale of historical value. Johnnie Shand Kydd’s fly-on-the-wall book about the Young British Artists, Spit Fire, from 1997 is interesting up to a point, but photos of artists boozing get tired quickly. Ugo Mulas’s New York: The New Art Scene, from 1967, is good for candid portraits of artists at work in cold, grotty lofts. One of my favourites is Snowdon’s 1965 Private View—genteel subtitle, The Lively World of British Art—which collects striking colour images of artists in Swinging London. It’s recommended if, like me, you enjoy looking at photos of a young David Hockney’s outfits.)

Two titles by Sam Knee take a different tack. A Scene In Between: Tripping Through the Fashions of UK Indie Music 1980–1988 (published in 2013, reissued last year), and its sequel A Scene In Between USA (released at the end of 2022) cover a period of the 1980s that falls between the tail-end of punk and the paradigm shifts of rave and grunge. These publications are modest and appealing, little bigger than paperback novels, avoiding a trap that huge art books can fall into of over-inflating the importance of their subject. The images in them are crowdsourced from fans. These are mostly amateur snaps taken at gigs and rehearsals, awkward publicity shots made by friends. They have the soft, cheap fuzz of a point-and-shoot camera, but free of the mannerisms that developed in the 1990s when that style became a fashion photography contrivance. They’re haphazardly framed. The colour balance is off—too orange, too blue, too green—and faces are blanched by camera flash in ways that no iPhone could imitate. These photos were taken as personal souvenirs; the only way they might’ve been shared was by being Xerox’d into a local music ‘zine. Images made not in a Cartier-Bresson ‘decisive moment’ but in a rush of enthusiasm; camera in one hand, a drink pinned in the crook of an elbow, one eye on the stage, the other making sure that drunk gig-goer wobbling a few feet to your right isn’t about to tumble into you.

Knee is a writer, musician and vintage clothing expert. He runs the @sceneinbetween Instagram account, one of a number that collate photos from the 1980s indie era, including @theindependentrepository and @facingproblem. (@facingproblem is the work of Abidzan Hermawan, based in Jakarta. For the past two decades, Indonesia has been home to a music scene influenced by 1980s British alternative music.) Back then, the word ‘indie’ signalled a practical, economic independence from the music industry. It denoted alienation from mainstream music, and sheltered a wide range of guitar-oriented music styles. The term wasn’t just another synonym for mainstream rock, as it is today.

The mid-1980s was a time of rich regionalism for kids into that sort of music. In the US there were the fast and angry sounds of hardcore in Washington DC. California had the ‘paisley underground’—a jangly, melodic style influenced by their contemporaries R.E.M. in Athens, GA, and 1960s records by groups such as The Byrds. In Olympia, WA, you could find the first stirrings of grunge and riot grrl. Texas gave the world the Butthole Surfers, a group of acid-addled absurdists. In the UK, there were The Jesus and Mary Chain from Glasgow—their pop melodies lost in a blizzard of feedback—and the gentle sounds of Tallulah Gosh from Oxford and Dolly Mixture in Cambridge. Spacemen 3, from Rugby, declared that they were going to sit out the Thatcher 1980s and “take drugs to make music to take drugs to.” McCarthy, who came from Barking, wrote catchy songs about overthrowing the banking system, while Birmingham’s Felt made elegant, wistful records with titles such as ‘All the People I Like are Those That Are Dead’ and ‘Don’t Die On My Doorstep.’

Knee’s books are valuable documents of clothing styles. In A Scene In Between USA many of the looks hark back to previous decades. By-and-large they are modest and plain, oriented around workwear. You see 501s, denim jackets and plaid shirts layered over band t-shirts. (Always current groups and worn out of support, not irony or to signal hipster connoisseurship.) Sometimes these are customized with preppy items such as old varsity sweaters, sports blazers and baseball jackets. Hair is kept severe at the start of the 1980s, and grows long by its end. Almost everyone wears Converse.

In the UK at the time, it was harder find American clothing like this—Hawaiian shirts, baseball shirts and so on—and you would have to have visited a shop such as Flip, which opened at the end of the 1970s in London and specialised in American styles, or the warren of booths in Kensington Market. But second-hand clothes of other kinds, dating from the 1950s and ‘60s, were cheap and easy to find across the country. Knee points out that “Vernon Richard’s book, Protest Without Illusions, which documented the CND marches in the UK throughout the late ‘50s to early ‘60s was a key fashion influence”: corduroy blazers, chunky wool sweaters, desert boots and anoraks. And so one of the defining ‘indie’ looks that developed was part-punk, part-nerd, part-Beatnik. But there were other variations, such as sharp mod-influenced styles. On both sides of the Atlantic, a popular look was leather trousers and jackets worn with striped t-shirts, bead necklaces, and black suede Chelsea boots. Lots of polka-dot and paisley shirts, turtlenecks, bowl haircuts that covered the eyes; a suburban take on the Velvet Underground and The Byrds, copied from record sleeves and books.

The majority of books about music subcultures frame their young subjects as agents of scorched-earth modernist attitude, rebuilding the world anew. The truth is that all subcultures wrestle with the past. It’s easy to understand the 1980s indie throwbacks to the 1960s as a reaction to the glossy conservatism of that period, to Reaganomics and to free-market Thatcherism. But so too were hip-hop, goth, hair metal, or ‘80s neo-soul, and they all had vastly differing stylistic responses. The past, where it surfaced in early hip-hop, for example, was through the old jazz and funk records used in sampling. Clothing styles were fresh, not retro—in Jamel Shabazz’s photographs you don’t see anyone dressed in 1960s styles—but the clothes were worn by mostly working class youth, and, just as with the charity shop indie looks, they were sourced cheaply and the details were customized by the wearer. Similarities between subcultures, where they existed, were structural rather than aesthetic.

The kids depicted in A Scene In Between were almost all born during the 1960s. The look of that decade, its slow crossfade into the ‘70s, was baked into them, part of their formative visual experiences of the world. In the 1980s, reissue compilations of lost and obscure garage and psychedelia—the Back from the Grave series, or Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets collections—were driving an interest in guitar music of the period. TV re-runs of 1960s cartoons and shows such as The Monkees and Batman fed a general textural feel for the era. I suspect that the retro looks were more a way of dealing with something personal than opposition to the political conservatism of the time—though that too.

A few days ago, as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, I saw James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ new feature Still Film. It’s a dense and funny meditation on the way cinema acts on our sense of the past, told in the form of an imaginary legal deposition about the movies. Wilkins suggests that our personal memories of films, especially of those seen in childhood, were not always created by consent. A ticket may have been bought, a TV switched on, but what we got in return was unpredictable. If it were powerful enough—scary, sad, joyous, funny—then we would find ourselves grappling with that memory for years to come.

We rarely ask for the things we become nostalgic about. “My childhood bends beside me,” wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. Then, in 1922, Joyce would have dressed the same as his father did, in a hat, suit and tie, perhaps haunted by strange dreams of a future in which he would wear black suede Chelsea boots, leather trousers and a bowl haircut.

Steve Mackey 1966—2023

My friend Steve Mackey passed away last week following an undisclosed illness. He was 56. Steve was a talented musician and producer, an accomplished fashion photographer and filmmaker, and best known as the bass player for the band Pulp.

We were introduced in 2003 by Frieze co-founders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who were about to launch the first edition of Frieze Art Fair in London. They teamed us up to program Frieze Music, an off-site, two-day music festival to run the same weekend of the fair. I would quickly learn that I was not one of life’s natural born concert promoters, but Steve and I became friends.

We would meet in the mornings at a greasy-spoon cafe in Clerkenwell, where we’d brainstorm lists of musicians we wanted to invite to play. Conversations would drift from the job in hand to music we’d been enjoying and exhibitions and films we’d seen. He was curious about the world and his knowledge of music was deep. He loved the heaviest, the most beautiful, the funkiest, the poppiest, the most soulful, gentle or absurd music in a given genre. Anything with heart and an original voice. On one occasion, stuck for inspiration, we made a trip to the Rough Trade record shop in Notting Hill in search of something to prompt ideas. I remember how he pulled out Jah Shaka dub records, an Ennio Morricone film soundtrack, a Paul McCartney solo album, and had something insightful to say about them all. Steve was self-assured yet easy-going; he knew everyone in the store, both behind the counter and in front of it. His charm and enthusiasm were infectious.

For the inaugural Frieze Music we hired the Victory Services Club, a military veterans club next to Marble Arch. It had a ballroom with a sprung floor, and a large mural on the back wall of the stage depicting fighter jets flying over a pair of Chelsea Pensioners. Steve seemed to have a mischievous streak—I remember his frequent use of the word ‘wrong’ as a term of approval—and he believed Victory Services would be the perfect ‘wrong’ venue because it was so at odds with the music we wanted to put on. For one of the shows we invited the conceptual artist Rodney Graham to play an acoustic set of his funny and bittersweet songs. I remember the look on Rodney’s face when he arrived and Steve told him he had a backstage dressing room and a food and drink rider. Rodney seemed tickled to be treated as a professional musician would be. Steve put tables out in the ballroom, each lit with candles, and invited Bob Stanley and Peter Paphides to DJ old British folk records as the audience assembled. The atmosphere was electric.

In 2006, Steve and I teamed up with the promoters Upset the Rhythm to put on a concert by Sunn0))). We somehow managed to rent two nights at the Hippodrome in London’s West End, a Victorian water circus turned music hall turned sleazy nightclub with an illuminated dancefloor. It was just the right ‘wrong’ venue for Sunn0))), who performed wearing monk’s cowls and had a reputation as the loudest, heaviest metal band on the planet. The night was dramatic to say the least. Too many incidents to list here, but it involved the police, multiple artist tantrums, furious fans stuck outside (the venue had ‘misinformed’ us about the capacity so Steve started sneaking people in through the stage door), thousands of pounds in cash stuffed in a rucksack I had to carry around all night, a fog of purple dry ice so thick that you could not see your hand in front of your face and music so loud that it shook the bar to pieces and sent the owner screaming blue murder at us for “undermining the structural integrity” of the Hippodrome. The event had a sense of excitement and danger to it that Steve loved. At the end of the performance, as I sat shell-shocked on the edge of the stage, he emerged through the dry ice, grinning from ear-to-ear. “What an hilarious night!”

Steve and I stayed in touch after we finished working together on Frieze Music. I wouldn’t hear from him for a year or two, then he’d phone out of the blue to enthuse about something new. It might simply be a music documentary he’d seen, or wanting to share his excitement about ‘Call This Number,’ the series of pirate TV-style music videos he made with Douglas Hart and Jeanette Lee. Steve frequently worked in fashion, often in collaboration with his wife, the stylist Katie Grand: once he called to tell me that he was directing the music for a Gucci show, which had led him to wonder if I could recommend to him some good avant-garde organ music. I loved the specificity of his question. Whatever he was enthusing about, his refrain would always be the same: “Seriously Dan, you’re gonna love this.”

In an Instagram post the day Steve died, Jarvis Cocker wrote that “Steve made things happen.” It’s true. I admired his energy and Steve’s early departure has left me with a sense of urgency. Make the most of your time here, it will disappear faster than you think.

RECOMMENDATIONS

I have just one recommendation this week: a song by Lonnie Holley from his new album Oh Me Oh My.

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Being in a Place, Luke Fowler’s portrait of the filmmaker Margaret Tait, had its New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art last week; part of Doc Fortnight 2023, organized by Sophie Cavoulacos and Julian Ross. Following the screening, Fowler remarked that it felt incongruous to see Tait’s work on a big screen in Manhattan. Her films were mostly shot on the Orkney archipelago in Scotland, where she grew up. She worked on 16mm film, using a clockwork Bolex camera, depicting the landscape and the rhythms of Orcadian life. For Fowler, Orkney is a place out of time. By comparison, New York feels like Blade Runner. He said that there are people living on the islands who have never been to the mainland, then joked that this is not so different to some people in Manhattan.

Tait’s films are allusive and braided tightly with the poetry she wrote. They’re also hard to place a date on. MoMA paired Fowler’s feature with Tait’s short Garden Pieces. It’s series of loose, rotating shots, the frame thick with greenery, strafed by low sunlight and a stern breeze. The camera picks up weeds and flowers, the front end of an old car, and well-used pieces of furniture scattered around the garden. A jet-black cat prowls the undergrowth. On the soundtrack are spare and unsettling piano phrases, the kind of music you might hear on a mid-century European art house movie. Not much happens in Garden Pieces: it’s a mood not a manifesto. It looks as if it could’ve been produced in the 1950s, when Tait first began making and showing films. Or it might have been made during the 1970s, when her work was circulating through London FilmMakers’ Co-Op distribution catalogues, being screened in the company of younger experimental film artists. But Garden Pieces was shot in 1998, a year before she died. Tait made ordinary subjects appear timeless.

People either seem to know a great deal about her, or nothing at all. (During the MoMA Q&A session, one audience member—there’s always a show-off at these things—asked for a straw-poll of who had heard of Tait and the Orkney Islands before the screening. About half the crowd raised their hands. A few might have seen the museum’s 2005 retrospective of her films, organized by Peter Todd. The man in the audience seemed surprised. Perhaps he’d never left Manhattan.) Tait was born in 1918 and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. During World War Two she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. After the war she enrolled in a language school in Perugia, Italy, but in 1950 moved to Rome where she spent two years studying film at the Centro Sperimentale di Photographia. “It was a good time to be there,” says Tait at the start of Being in a Place. “There was a lot going on and we had the chance of following the work of directors working in Rome at that time. In fact, some of them used to turn up at the Centro […] I remember one day Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman appearing to show us Stromboli, which was just ready for release […] I worked with fellow students at the Centro making short films there and when I returned to Scotland I continued making short films by myself.”

She moved back to Edinburgh, living frugally and renting a small studio on Rose Street. There she wrote poetry and started a production company, Ancona Films. Tait got to know a group of local writers, the ‘Rose Street poets.’ It was a macho scene, but she would later shoot a playful film portrait of one of its key figures, Hugh MacDiarmid, then in his seventies, filmed balancing along walls and street curbs like a small boy.

In the summer of 1954 she organized her own DIY film festival in her workrooms. “Any evening that suits you,” read the flyer, “at 91 Rose Street, up two flights of the stone stairs and follow the smell of coffee.” Here she screened Portrait of Ga, an intimate, beautiful film of her mother, along with work by friends from Italy and the US. She described the experience in largely positive terms. “Some of the most appreciative members of our audiences were practising artists in other fields – architects, musicians, a few painters, one poet,” she wrote. Local children came, as did curious teenagers, dressed teddy boy style. “There were only very few who had the upside-down sophisticated state of mind which I associate with a certain type of suburban film society member, hack reporters, and the sort of smart alec who must always be in the know and in the fashion. […] They said they were ‘hoping for something more experimental’ or ‘WHY did I make these films?’ as if they couldn’t understand anyone going to any trouble to make a film that is quite lucid. […] It is as if they had difficulty in understanding anything straightforward and clear.”

The 1960s saw her return to Orkney. “Speak the things you know,” Tait said, “make films about what you really feel.” There she evolved her avant-garde vernacular style, training her camera on the rugged, island landscape, on friends and family. She shot handheld, using the camera as an extension of her body. (I used to have a Bolex not dissimilar to Tait’s. If you’ve ever tried holding one of those cameras for any length of time, you’ll know how quickly your arms will start to ache. It changes how you shoot.) The films have a diaristic quality, reminiscent of Jonas Mekas, although in Orkney there were few opportunities to visually name-drop famous artists and musicians, as Mekas did in his New York film diaries.

Tait brought animation into her work—Colour Poems from 1974 is a good example—scratching and painting directly onto the celluloid, like Len Lye did in the 1930s with his films for the GPO (General Post Office). Titles were made by hand, painted on wood or stone, or spelled in cut-out letters arranged on the ground. Tait rarely appeared in her films, although she used her voice to narrate or read her poems. (There’s a brief cameo of her in The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo, from 1955, a gorgeous setting of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.) She spoke in slow, carefully enunciated cadences. Background audio—domestic clattering, street noises, wind—can frequently be heard in the background. Sound was treated separately, rarely synced to the images. Almost all her films were self-financed—she struggled to get funding, despite being the subject of two British television documentaries, despite her work showing at film festivals at home and abroad—and travelling to dubbing sessions was often too costly. Instead, she would send instructions to the production facility detailing which pieces of sound or music where to be placed where. (Fowler likens these notes to a doctor writing prescriptions.) In 1992, aged 74, she released her first and only feature film, Blue Black Permanent, starring Celia Imrie, Jack Shepherd and Gerda Stevenson. At the 1993 BAFTAs, Stevenson won the award for Best Actress, and the movie was nominated for Best Film. Tait’s ideas for the film originated as far back as the 1950s. Who knows how her films would have evolved if she’d had that opportunity earlier in life.

Being in a Place is shot in Orkney. There’s a nice double meaning to the title: ‘being’ as in a living thing, or ‘being’ as in an experience. It’s based on Heartlandscape, an unrealized project Tait proposed for Channel Four, an experimental travelogue that was to trace a heart shape around Orkney. Fowler shoots handheld, snapping together short fragmentary sequences of local people—the work of fishing and farming, of shepherding oil from the North Sea—and putting these sequences in conversation with Tait’s film work. There are shots of low hills and rain-slicked roads, often layered as if to suggest likenesses and circularities. He switches between his own hand-made titles and Tait’s. Fowler echoes her techniques, speaks her film dialect, which in the first minutes of the movie can make it hard to distinguish his footage from her own, but once the eye settles in, it becomes easier to see a delicate and respectful distinction he makes between their work—she didn’t like her films being extracted or edited for documentary use.

For all its contemplative imagery of Orkney’s wide-open spaces, Being in a Place has a busy, sparky rhythm. This is partly dictated by its extraordinary source material, a ‘fugitive archive’ that was found in the garden shed at the house Tait shared with her partner, Alex Pirie. Recently restored, the haul included editing offcuts, test shots, sketches, rushes and alternative cuts; tiny fragments and little bursts of energy that weren’t thought worth keeping for the official Tait archive in the National Library of Scotland. Fowler combined these with rushes from an unfinished documentary on Tait by Margaret Williams, and audio from the Orkney Library and Archive. These are ways around making incisions into Tait’s films that she may have disliked; ways, also, of reflecting how she recycled her own images and footage.

The film is filled with close-ups on her notebook pages, just long enough to give a sense of Tait’s working methods, her budgets and attempts to get her work seen. Fowler keeps flash frames, tape sounds, pops, bleeps and clunks, reminding you how physical the film is. The sound is non-sync, composed of tufts of conversation—information about Tait, Orcadian life—and passing electronic tones composed by Lionel Marchetti. We hear passages from a beautiful, valedictory piobroch—a traditional form for bagpipe—and we hear wind and water.

Fowler has no interest in giving a straightforward account of his subject. Being in a Place instead directs attention. He draws the eye to Tait’s methods and to the ways people affect the landscape in which they live. You can feel the grind and frustration and enchantment of making single-person films, of being ahead of your time, of not being in London, New York, Paris or any other professionally useful place. It’s easy to sling words such as ‘gentle’ or ‘poetic’ when describing Tait’s films, to get woo-woo about the Scottish landscape and the quiet power of the domestic. But Being in a Place left me with a sense of Tait as a hardcore artist, autonomous, completely committed to her imagination and singular way of making work.

There is a scene at the end of Fowler’s film that shows a woman stood outside a London cinema. The sun is bright but the cinema and the woman are in shadow. We hear Tait’s voice. “Can’t think of any British directors who really sort of touch one.” She lived in a remote part of the world—making cinema in shadow, you could say—but her outlook was broad. Her influences included Luis Buñuel, Yasujirō Ozu, Jean Vigo and Satyajit Ray. She admired Jerry Lewis, Billy Wilder and, of all people, Sam Peckinpah. Film, for Tait, was about poetry, wherever you chose to make it. “There’s a whole world at the foot of the stone if you care to look.”

In her poem ‘Now’, published in 1959, she describes being a child, waiting to watch clover open, “but never saw it / I was too impatient / Or the movement is too subtle / Imperceptible.” She writes how “Cinematographically / I have registered the opening of escholtzia / On an early summer morning / It gave me a sharp awareness of time passing / Of exact qualities and values in the light.” But she didn’t see the flower open, her camera did. “Later, on the film, they seemed to open swiftly / But, at the time, / Although I stared / And felt time not so much moving as being moved in / And felt / A unity of time and place with other times and places.”

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Decca are about to put out a collection of unreleased recordings by the late, great opera singer Jessye Norman. Although it’s being done with the permission of her family, predictably it’s sparked Kafka-Brod debates about the ethics of releasing work an artist didn’t sign-off on during their lifetime. Then again, Norman was a perfectionist. Here she is in 1979 with the Orchestre de la Suisse, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, performing ‘Im Abendrot’ from Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, a couple of years before she made her famous recording of it with Kurt Masur and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig.

—Thank you to my friend, the artist Mick Peter, for sending me this odd little film. Presented by John Lloyd, it begins as a clunky comedy satirizing London media yuppies, then slowly turns into a film about the rise of the graphic novel in the 1980s. Features Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) and others, barely out of short trousers.

—I’m part-way into reading Joyce Cary’s 1944 comic novel The Horse’s Mouth. All I can say so far is: Jesus Christ. It’s narrated by artist and con-artist, Gulley Jimson. He’s a rude, reprehensible, sexist, scurrilous, sordid, sponging, William-Blake-quoting jailbird; career-obsessed and completely, unwaveringly, dedicated to painting and to harrassing his art dealer with anonymous, threatening telephone calls. Gulley is a truly appalling character. Cary’s descriptions of London are over-the-top, sublime. I take no responsibility if you decide to read this.

—Leigh Ledare’s 2017 experimental documentary film The Task is now on Criterion. Two hours of remarkable, excruciating tension.

—In 1970, my grandad was made honorary mayor, for one year, of the town of Rochdale in the north of England. He passed away before Rochdale Art Gallery put itself on the map in the 1980s, showing the kinds of art that spaces in other parts of the country were then ignoring. Alice Correia and Derek Horton have now put together a show that looks back at that decade. I think grandad might’ve approved.

—World of Echo in London have just reissued the dreamy 30-something-year-old, self-titled debut of Movietone, originally released by James Webster and writer Richard King on their Planet Records label. Movietone were Kate Wright, Rachel Brook, Matt Elliott and Matt Jones, part of a still undersung scene in 1990s Bristol that included Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation. These days the librarians of pop culture would file Movietone under ‘slowcore.’ Back then, the only ‘core I’d heard of was ‘ardcore rave, and this was in the category of ‘something heard once, by chance, late at night on John Peel, unlikely to be in a record store near you.’

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All last week I kept thinking of an anecdote involving Irish playwright Brendan Behan. He was invited to Oxford University to participate in a debate about the differences between prose and poetry. The first speaker took two hours to present his argument. In response, Behan recited a short poem: “There was a young fella named Rollocks / Who worked for Ferrier Pollock’s / As he walked on the Strand / With a girl by the hand / The water came up to his ankles.” “That is prose,” said Behan. “But if the tide had been in it would’ve been poetry.” *

I had been reading Rick Rubin’s new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and wishing for thoughts on the artistic process as irreverent as Behan’s. Or anything, really, that would leaven the unrelentingly pious tone of Rubin’s writing. Rubin, for those unfamiliar, began his career in New York during the early 1980s, playing in punk bands. He went on to run the Def Jam hip-hop record label with Russell Simmons, releasing records by artists including LL Cool J, Run DMC, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, along with metal band Slayer. After leaving Def Jam, he produced big acts including Dixie Chicks, Metallica, Tom Petty, and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. He produced Jay-Z’s ’99 Problems’, found enormous success working with Johnny Cash on his final stretch of solo albums, and was briefly the co-head of Columbia Records. Now he’s the author of a creative self-help book, just published by Penguin.

The Creative Act (written with the assistance of journalist Neil Strauss, author of books including pick-up artist bestseller The Game and Mötley Crüe: The Dirt) is a 400-plus book of advice for artists, divided into 78 short chapters or “Areas of Thought.” It is written in short, limpid sentences. These have the ring of a man trying to sound as ancient and wise as his beard makes him look. Rubin’s gnomic affect evokes the gentle tinkle of wind-chimes and the sound of Pacific Ocean waves crashing on exclusive beaches in Malibu. It’s a little like listening to a mindfulness app, or having Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ explained to you by a marketing employee at Goop.

Rubin introduces the reader to concepts such as ‘Source’ which he liberates from the shackles of the definitive article, making it sound like a cosmic deity enountered on an ayahuasca trip. “Source makes available. The filter distills. The vessel receives. And often this happens beyond our control.” That or a character from a children’s book. “It may be helpful to think of Source as a cloud. Clouds never truly disappear. They change form. They turn into rain and become part of the ocean, and then evaporate and return to being clouds. The same is true of art.” And punctuating the book are pithy profundities which made me wonder if my money had been better spent on a nice scented candle instead. Each is given its own page, surrounded by blank space, and

typeset like this,

for no discernible reason

other than

it makes them look like

a Zen kōan;

full of gravitas.

Rubin tells us that everyone is an artist. It’s that old Joseph Beuys canard, superficially well-intentioned but which comes off as aristocratic condescension rather than democratic levelling, because it doesn’t value being, say, a mechanic, or a nurse, for what they are, but for being disguised forms of artistry. (What makes life interesting for me is precisely the fact that not everyone is the same, that not everyone is an artist, even if imagination, broadly speaking, is a facility everyone makes use of.) Rubin suggests his readers embrace states of joy, gratitude, even ecstasy, in the process of making art, and yet the aspirational guru tone of the book is so unyielding throughout, so colourless, as to absent it of all those qualities. It reminds me of a paradox found in the religiously pious, or in certain stripes of political artists, whereby the louder someone shouts about doing good or being on the right side of history, the more those principles seem to recede from view, and the more the person seems to be asserting their own goodness or personal place on the right side of history. (Rubin would possibly distill that observation to “Righteousness fertilizes ego” and give the sentence an entire page to itself.)

The Creative Act is, in certain respects, an update of Julia Cameron’s bestselling self-help guide The Artist’s Way, written in 1992. The authors speak the language of self-empowerment and encouragement, suggest daily exercises to help keep the imagination limber, and garland their advice with insights of cosmic numinosity. The Artist’s Way isn’t for me, but I appreciate that it works for others. And even if The Creative Act barely acknowledges that having a job, or feeling knackered, or raising kids, or having health issues, or where you live are all factors that shape creativity, it does contain useful advice. There are passages about dealing with self-doubt, about creative constraints, momentum, scale, openness, the value of mistakes, and other aspects of making things that ring true from my own experiences. Rubin offers solid, counter-intuitive, Eno-ish methods for getting around problems and shaking old habits.

Being an artist is hard. It’s even harder if you want to make things—music, writing, art—and don’t have anyone to talk to about what you want to do. No mentors, no creative friends or family, none of the professional accreditations that might open a door. Like practical how-to videos on YouTube, books such as The Creative Act have the potential to be helpful. Problems arise when they’re mistaken for ‘life hacks’, on the same level as little get-arounds to make your workouts or time management more efficient. Art can’t be gamed. (Its professional systems might be, but that’s another subject.) A great song might be written in an hour. A great novel might require fifty years of living on the part of its author before it can be written. Rubin, to his credit, is clear about that. But there is a metric of success in these sorts of books that’s set by the author’s own career. No matter how many times Rubin advises his readers to follow their own path, it’s hard not to think that some may be reading his book in order to find out how to make millions of dollars as a music producer. How to be like Rick Rubin rather than be like themselves.

A similar thought struck me recently as I read Patti Smith’s short book Devotion, published by Yale University Press and Windham Campbell Prizes as part of their ‘Why I Write’ series. It’s billed on the jacket blurb as “an intimate account of her own creative process.” Smith’s book couldn’t be further from Rubin’s. It’s short. She has a sparkier prose style. Her writing feels alive rather than wellness influencer flat, whether you care for it or not. In the chapter ‘How the Mind Works’, she manages to capture something of what happens in her imagination during the early stages of an idea taking shape. This, the gut feeling of inspiration, is difficult to record, as it’s made up of too many fleeting moments and chance connections to be codified into advice. Yet as I read Devotion I kept thinking how nice it would be to pack a small bag with a notebook, camera, leather jacket and a spare shirt and head to Paris, as Smith does in the book. There I would drift through Saint-Germain-des-Prés thinking of Rimbaud and Verlaine. I would enjoy a little breakfast at the Café de Flore, jotting in my notebook—doesn’t matter what, so long as I’ve got the coffee and the leather jacket and a nice pen—before going to meet my publishers at Gallimard for lunch, where I would stroll through their hallowed gardens thinking of Camus and Genet… The lifestyle details she describes make it hard to see past the romance and discover what drives her, but perhaps the romance is the lesson. (I’ve been around the block enough times to know that its supposed opposite, ascetic ‘criticality,’ is its own delusional romance.)

Rubin’s prose is vague. There are few concrete examples of anything in its pages. Perhaps it is trying to be open enough in its language to welcome a broad range of readers. But as someone once observed—I can’t remember who, though I think W.H. Auden’s poetry was their subject—the most resonant love poems are usually those made from specific experiences, not generalizations. I’m often looking for advice myself, reassurance that I’m not alone in my creative anxieties and career doubts. (Occasionally, when confronted with an artistic problem, I simply think of the title of a friend’s essay collection: What Would Lynne Tillman Do?) I turn to biographies and interviews with artists. The detailed ‘Art of Fiction’ and ‘Art of Non-Fiction’ interviews in The Paris Review are where I’ve found some of the best practical advice about writing and riding the vicissitudes of creative life. I love music and movie memoirs for the same reasons. They all teach the same lessons through example. That no artist’s career can be mapped onto a perfect rising curve of success. That there will be good years and bad years. That some people catch a break early in life, and others much later and many not at all. That not everything you make will be good. That you can’t make work in order to please other people. You’ve got to trust in your own voice and just get on with it.

If you do so, you may one day find yourself meditating on the deck of an enormous beach house in California, dictating a self-help guide for artists. Please include dirty limericks.

*Ferrier Pollock was the name of a haberdashery company in Dublin. Other accounts give the poem as: “There was a young man / Called Christopher Hand / Who worked in Ferrier Pollock's / He walked on the strand / With his shoes in his hand / And the water came up to his ankles.”

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—Starting next month, Chris and Cosey are releasing remasters of their 1980s deep cuts, some of which have been unavailable for a long time. The first is Elemental 7, from 1984, which was made in collaboration with video artist and musician John Lacey. (When I was making my film about COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, I got to spend a day with John, exploring his archive and interviewing him about his time in COUM. He’s was fascinating and generous. One scene, which didn’t make the final cut, showed John operating a large kinetic sculpture made from an old iron lung, and which produced the most soulful drone sounds.) Elemental 7 features the incredible ‘Dancing Ghosts,’ a song too far ahead of its time for its own good.

—I like this image, spotted on the medievalist instagram account @enclosedwithin.

—If you’re in New York, visit Peter Freeman Inc. and see their small exhibition of drawings by British artist Paul Anthony Harford, selected by his niece, the painter Cecily Brown. Harford refused to exhibit his work in his lifetime, and this is the first time it has been show in the USA. (The only previous exhibitions have been at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, and at Sadie Coles in London). They depict disquieting dream versions of the coastal towns Weymouth and Southend, and seem one part Stanley Spencer and one part J.G. Ballard. (Maybe even a little Beryl Cook.) It’s only up until 25 February. And while you’re out, visit the delicate, lyrical show of sculptures by Mexican artist Tania Pérez Córdova at Tina Kim Gallery—made from strange combinations of materials, such as plant leaves, jewellery, and glass. I find them difficult to evoke, perhaps the strongest recommendation for seeing them. For the opposite effect, the cramped exhibition of enormous Richard Avedon ‘mural’ photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is worth a look, especially for the outtakes of Warhol’s Factory crowd and the architects of the US Vietnam War trying to assemble themselves in front of the camera.

—Filmmaker Eva Aridjis has recently launched (Screen)Play Press with Christine Vartoughian, dedicated to publishing unproduced screenplays. It’s a beautiful idea. Their first six releases are out now.

—Ignite films has just released (after some delay) a restored version of William Cameron Menzies 1953 science-fiction movie Invaders From Mars. This film has stayed with me ever since I saw it as a child: it’s a haunting mixture of ‘50s Cold War pulp and nightmarish, almost Expressionist, cinema. A young boy is the sole witness to a UFO landing in his small town, and struggles to convince the grown-up world of what he’s seen, as the alien invaders gradually take over the bodies of his family and neighbours. The sets are painterly, abstract. (There is a strange recurring shot of a wooden fence on a dirt track hilltop that seems to find a later echo in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He saw the movie five times as a kid.) It uses exaggerated camera angles and ghoulish lighting. Even the wooden acting underscores the film’s unnerving atmosphere. It’s an A-plus B-movie.

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It’s been said that the painter Lam Qua, who lived and worked in 19th century Canton (now Guangzhou), was a student of the English artist George Chinnery, who taught him to paint in the Western style. Chinnery had deserted a marriage in Ireland, then fled debtors in India, before ending up as a portrait and landscape artist in Macau. The pair knew each other, and Lam Qua expressed admiration for the Englishman, although as Lam Qua’s star rose, the compliment wasn’t returned. What Chinnery could have taught him is unclear. Lam Qua came from a family of artists adept at painting in both Chinese and Western idioms, which were big export business in the first half of the 19th century. Lam Qua was a sophisticated artist with a successful commercial career. He was acclaimed in Canton for his Western-style portraits, he produced likenesses for important Western and Chinese dignitaries, and exhibited internationally, including at the Boston Athenaeum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in the USA, and at the Royal Academy in London.

He also produced an extraordinary series of paintings that, even by today’s standards, are disturbing and moving to look at.

In 1834, an American medical missionary, Peter Parker, travelled to Canton with a plan to set up an Opthalmic hospital. Parker was an expert in treating cataracts and other eye diseases, and he wanted to use his work as a way to convert the Chinese to Protestantism—to show them the light of God by repairing their eyesight. But his hospital was inundated with patients—thousands of them, from every sector of Canton society—requiring treatment for debilitating tumours and severe skin conditions, and surgery soon became the mainstay of Parker’s work at the hospital.

Soon after arriving in Canton, Parker was introduced to Lam Qua. He commissioned the artist to make a series of paintings of his patients, for display in the hospital waiting area. Lam Qua produced over a hundred portraits, depicting people afflicted with the most terrible deformities. Patients young and old, men and women, from across the class spectrum: the son of a tea merchant, a gardener, a shoemaker, a civil servant, a stone cutter. People suffering from gangrenous skin peeling from their legs, from enormous tumours and pendulous goiters growing from their heads, arms, genitals, breasts. Tumours so big as to almost be second torsos. Growths like enormous bags of rocks, veined and angry with red and suppurating black colour, the skin stretched pale and glistening across pustular eruptions that seem ready to burst out of the patient’s body.

The paintings are skillfully made. They’re as eerily beautiful as they are hideous. These are portraits of both people and pathologies, and Lam Qua depicts the patient’s deformities with care and detail. (They are accurate to the extent that, even today, student dermatology specialists at Yale New Haven Hospital are given diagnostic training exercises using Yale University’s collection of Lam Qua paintings.) Most of his subjects are presented against plain ochre backgrounds suffused with a dark and atmospheric light. Some are shown in simple interiors, while others are placed in the foreground of natural landscapes. The worst cases must have presented logistical challenges to both artist and sitter: the weight of the tumours, or their position on the body, would have made posing in one position for any length of time uncomfortable.

Oddly, only one example of a post-operative patient exists. In Portrait No. 31, a young man named Po Ashing sits on a wooden chair in gloomy light, naked from the waist up, staring directly at the viewer. His upper left arm is consumed with a fiery-looking tumour, which developed after the patient had twice broken his humerus, and it failed to heal properly. Parker decided to amputate the arm at the shoulder. Portrait No. 32 shows the youth stood on the shore of a lake or sea, blue-grey mountains in the distance, the slightest hint of pink dawn light emerging above the horizon. He gazes off to the left of the composition and he wears a hat and coat, open at the side to show his amputation scar. The serene landscape seems to suggest that Po has become a part of the world again, no longer isolated by his medical condition; the loss of a limb, ironically, making him whole again.

Lam Qua’s subjects appear disconcertingly calm. He never displays expressions of pain or discomfort. It’s a strange disconnect between persona and body that makes them appear almost like Surrealist paintings from a century later. Ari Larissa Heinrich, who has studied Lam Qua’s work extensively, suggests a few reasons why the sitters might have been presented this way. “One possible explanation,” writes Heinrich in the essay ‘Handmaids to the Gospel: Lam Qua’s Medical Portraiture,’ “is simply that in the English grand style or contemporary styles of portraiture, it was not customary to portray a subject’s emotional state.” Feeling was expressed through clothing, props, and setting. Another theory is that medical portraiture in the West at this time was developing an approach that “portrayed individual patients who bore their stigmata with curious detachment.” Disassociation suggesting a kind of extreme Stoicism, a kind of visual dispassion which in the 20th century became conflated with objectivity in both art and medical photography.

Heinrich also offers a third reading: that Lam Qua “strove to portray the vision of the Chinese patient that Parker wished to communicate to his Western audience, the vision that Parker himself had of what it meant to be Chinese and to suffer from what seemed like horribly inconceivable pathologies.” Parker used Lam Qua’s paintings on return trips to the USA and to Europe to help fund-raise for his missionary work and for the hospital. The paintings helped reinforce North American and European ideas about the Chinese, and notions Parker felt might further his own cause: whatever his medical or theological misconceptions were, for instance, about Chinese tolerance for pain, or that their resistance to Western surgery was analogous to their refusal to accept Christianity. Clearly, Lam Qua was in a complex position. He was creating medical portraits, which have a different purpose to conventional portraiture, yet he imbues each of his images with subtle emotional qualities. (These days, medical portraiture might be used as part of a patient’s therapy.) Furthermore he was making work for a client, and had to square the brief Parker gave him with his own sense of identity and position as a portraitist, a genre which is all about the relationship between artist and sitter. There is evidence that Parker paid Lam Qua for his work, but it’s thought that the artist largely provided his services pro bono, because he appreciated the fact that the doctor did not charge people for the surgical procedures, and because his nephew was studying under Parker at the hospital.

The largest collection of Lam Qua’s medical paintings is now at Yale. A number are also at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, Cornell University, Ithaca, at Guy’s Hospital and the Wellcome Collection in London. These are difficult paintings to look at. Difficult because of the history, yes. Difficult, more importantly, because they’re images of suffering. And difficult because this sort of imagery is so rarely seen in art, or in everyday life outside the medical profession. While there has been a wave of writing over the past decade or so about illness, images of pathology are not so common. Essay books theorizing the sick body are seldom, if ever, illustrated. Those kinds of images are rendered invisible for practical reasons (not all disease is visible to the eye), for reasons of ethics—where are they being seen? Who is being looked at and who is doing the looking?—or because more conceptual forms of art tend to occlude them, address them only obliquely. (The AIDS crisis of the 1980s was possibly the last major period in which images of illness were produced. But I’m also always struck, for instance, by the way British artist Jo Spence’s photographs of herself, following a diagnosis of breast cancer in the 1980s, remain not just unflinching but relatively rare.) The kinds of tumours that Parker’s patients suffered in the 1830s are now uncommon—they’d be treated before they ever reached the state seen in Lam Qua’s paintings—but they remain powerful reminders of what the body is capable of doing to itself. Repeated viewing makes it less difficult to look at these pictures. The spectacle of the disease starts to retreat and, importantly, the person comes to the fore.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

—“What brings you here, from England?” “‘Cos I heard New York’s where the money’s at.” “Haha, that’s what you think.” Keith, Kat & Blondie, Gotta Get Some Money, from 1988 on Nu Groove Records. Superb old school house track about New York, subway trains, fake English accents and the eternal question of how to get some cash.

—Jennifer Higgie, art critic, editor, novelist, screenwriter—and my long-time colleague at frieze—has a brand new book coming out on 2nd February. The Other Side is about women artists and spiritualism—from Hildegard of Bingen to Georgiana Houghton, Agnes Pelton and, of course, Hilma af Klint—and it’s a follow-up, in a sideways kind of way, to her study of women’s self-portraiture, The Mirror and the Palette. Pre-order it from the beyond here.

—Launched in the USA a year ago, these McNally Editions—reissues of lost gems, brought to you by the McNally Jackson bookstore people—are pretty great. (Has the bug for obscure reissues which has gripped the music world now been caught by publishing?) One of the first out of the gate when the series launched last year was They, Kay Dick’s long-lost sci-fi novel about artistic censorship, which you must read. Gavin Lambert’s The Goodbye People, about Los Angeles in the 1960s, is the next on my list, and yours too if you like Eve Babitz I’d imagine.

—This is beautiful. Peter Pears, accompanied on the piano by his partner Benjamin Britten, sings ‘O Waly, Waly,’ an adaptation of the folk song, ‘The Water is Wide’. Filmed for the BBC in, I think, 1964.

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