[Editor’s Note: On the occasion of the 2010 Glastonbury Festival being held in the UK this weekend – the largest music festival in the world, with an estimated 170,000 attendees and 500 music acts – LFM contributor David Ross looks back at the Anglo-Celtic folk revival.]
By David Ross. From Lady Gregory to Lady Gaga … it’s been a depressing hundred years. Let us turn, for momentary solace, to the folk chanteuses of the British Isles, keepers of a tradition “as cold and passionate as the dawn” (Yeats, “The Fisherman”).
Sandy Denny (of Fairport Convention), “Reynardine” and “Tam Lin”: see here and here.
Tríona Ní Dhomhnail (of Skara Brae and the Bothy Band), “The Maid of Coolmore”: see here.
Jacqui McShee (of Pentangle), “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”: see here.
Anne Briggs, “She Moved Through the Fair”: see here.
Anne Briggs was the first. A protégé of Bert Jansch during the early sixties, she went from pub to pub playing music that looked back to Queen Elizabeth far more than it looked forward to Sgt. Pepper’s. The old men in tweed drinking their bitter must have been pleasantly surprised. For whatever reason, she did not pursue a recording career in earnest and retired early in life to become a market gardener – which activity, I understand, she pursues to this day. She released three albums, all of which have a stark beauty. She plays an odd syncopated guitar, which at moments heralds Nick Drake. I have no doubt that he listened to her carefully. Continue reading She Moved Through the Fair: British Folk Music
By David Ross. Has there ever been a good film about a writer? Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) was respectable enough, as I remember it, but generally film has no idea how to approach lives that are largely interior, with driving purposes that are inconveniently invisible and inscrutable. In consequence, film tends to emphasize the gossipy and scandalous, dwelling on the externals of sexual deviancy, alcoholism, and nervous breakdown.
Film has been particularly clumsy in its attempts to deal with the romantics, in whose case the temptation to sensationalize is enormous. Percy and Mary Shelley receive the star treatment in Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), while Wordsworth and Coleridge feature in Julien Temple’s Pandaemonium (2000), the latter starring the diminutive Scotsman John Hannah, last seen being chased by mummies, as Wordsworth. Both films are creative disasters and intellectual insults even by the debased standards of Hollywood. Pandaemonium is to literary biopic what Plan 9 from Outer Space is to science fiction: a film so unbelievably stupid that it becomes incredible in its own way. The less said about these films the better. The BBC production Byron (2003) is far more respectable, but suffers the reverse problem: its fidelity to historical and period detail is almost pedantic, and it maintains a studious emotional distance from its subject. It is a live-action encyclopedia entry, the only mildly boring film ever made on the themes of omnivorous sexuality and incest.
Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), which tells the story of Keats’ doomed romance with Fanny Brawne, is surer of itself and sounder in its approach. Where Russell and Temple indulge in shuddering ejaculations of mayhem and mania, Campion recognizes that the challenge is to contain and compress the intrinsic melodrama of her story. She smartly attempts this work by shading her film in muted browns and grays (the true colors of England by the way); by utilizing all manner of strategic occlusion and interruption; and by interjecting into nearly every scene the acidic and not entirely endearing personality of Charles Brown, Keats’ friend and companion. When the syrup begins to bubble over, Campion knows exactly how and when to turn down the heat.
Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in "Bright Star."
Even more importantly, the film feels psychologically and emotionally consistent with the poems. Campion’s Keats inevitably becomes a favorite playmate of the younger Brawne children – and he does perform an annoying Scottish jig at Christmas dinner – but he is neither the ethereal and evanescent sprite (the Keats of Shelley’s “Adonais”), nor the paragon of innocence and good cheer (the Keats of Yeats’ “Ego Dominus Tuus”). Played admirably by Ben Whishaw, this Keats is tough in his way, self-controlled, decent, decorous, and private. Where Russell and Temple insist on the correlation between insanity and genius, Campion underscores Keats’ self-awareness and his understated but powerful and consistent intelligence: in short, his fundamental sanity. I consider this a convincing thesis about the kind of personality that produced the poems.
Campion’s Fanny Brawne, meanwhile, seems the kind of woman who might have appealed to the man who wrote the poems. She is a woman not of passion, but of passionate character: character qualifies and directs passion, making her far more interesting and believably Georgian than the stereotypical melting or bursting damosel of romantic cliché. Abbie Cornish plays the part superbly and instantly establishes herself as an actress who can project a degree of intelligence and literacy in the tradition of Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightley.
I’m not enough of a Keats scholar to say whether the film is minutely correct in all its details, but the advisory help of Keats’ biographer Andrew Motion suggests that it is at least roughly correct. The film tends to downplay the alleged flirtatiousness and dress obsession that made Fanny unpopular among Keats’ friends, but this is within the bounds of reasonable interpretation, it seems to me. The film does engage in at least one petty deception. The closing credits inform us that Fanny “kept Keats forever in her heart” (or something to this effect) and that she never removed her engagement ring, implying that she spent the rest of her life faithfully mourning her lost love. In fact, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes:
After Keats’s death, Fanny remained in Hampstead and mourned him through the 1820s, befriending his sister as she had promised him she would. After her mother’s death in 1829 Fanny became financially independent and, on a visit to France in 1833, in Boulogne met Louis Lindo (later Lindon; 1812-1872), whom she married on 15 June 1833. Of Spanish or Portuguese extraction and from a wealthy Jewish merchant and banking family, Louis Lindon seems to have held a number of positions, including working as an officer for the British Legion in Spain and as a wine merchant in London later in life. Until the 1850s, when they settled in London, the Lindons lived on the continent, especially in Germany, where Fanny gave birth to two sons and a daughter. Fanny died at 34 Coleshill Street, Pimlico, London, on 4 December 1865.
By David Ross. The sight of pelicans trudging through the black crud of the gulf may particularly resonate with parents. This is rather what it’s like to raise a kid these days. You try to fly above the mess, but you wind up covered in muck and drowning in sludge. The difference, of course, is that BP’s gulf catastrophe was accidental, while the engineers of the kiddy culture execute a conscious and cynical plan. With all of this in mind, let me – vigilant father of a four year old – share a few of our happier experiments in what my daughter calls “watching.”
The live-action children’s films and TV of the last thirty years are largely moronic and corrosive. They militate against the values and mores of the adult world (discipline, delayed gratification, respect for legitimate authority, etc.), and acclimate kids to a norm of cliché. I wonder how many of the missing kids on the back of milk cartons we can attribute to the cliché of would-be adventurers sneaking out the window and climbing down the vine trellis? The best bet is simply to write off this swathe of cinematic history, the manipulative cultural politics of E.T. and Sesame Street included (see Kay Hymowitz’s classic essay in City Journal.)
My chief counter-recommendations are Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), both starring Elizabeth Taylor and a roster of outstanding British character actors. I’m tempted to call these the best live-action children’s movies ever made. Both films are morally sophisticated without crossing the line into adult difficulty, and there is enough suspense at enough different levels to rivet the whole family. Other live-action gems are Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), starring the eternally charming Myrna Loy, and The Trouble with Angels (1966), starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.
From "The Trouble With Angels."
The Trouble with Angels – which may be my very favorite kid’s movie – tells the story of a teenage troublemaker (Mills) who is sent to a convent school run by a formidable mother superior (Russell). Mills engages in various subversive high jinks – powdered soap in the sugar bowls, etc. – but gradually comes to respect the nuns’ example of quiet dignity and selflessness and in the end decides to join the order herself. What’s striking about the film from our twenty-first century perspective is how firmly and confidently it’s on the side of adult authority rather than teenage rebellion. The film takes for granted that Mills and her fellow students are ignorant and immature and that they require adult guidance; so too the film takes for granted that adults have something to teach.
The Trouble with Angels is no masterpiece, but it reminds us how radically the culture has changed. Far from teaching what it means to be an adult, today’s kiddy fare ceaselessly sounds the trumpet of revolt against parent and school, commitment and discipline, anything that thwarts the impulse of the moment. Practically, such films do the bidding of a trillion-dollar advertising-entertainment nexus that sees in every emancipated, impulsive child an emancipated, impulsive consumer. The contemporary American adult, meanwhile, submissively accepts the dismantling of his own authority, having absorbed over a lifetime the Baby-Boomer doctrine that the stern adult is always the bad guy. It occurs to me that an entire counterrevolutionary parenting philosophy is contained in the simple injunction to behave more like Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels and less like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame. Continue reading Discovering Good Kids’ Movies
By David Ross. I notice that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is slated to appear in Woody Allen’s next film, Midnight in Paris, due out in 2011. For the first time in about twenty years, I feel a genuine impulse to eavesdrop on the suffocating repetition and solipsism of Allen’s once great, now moldering career.
I keep my eye on Carla Bruni not only because she is one of the most beautiful women in the world and it’s hard not to keep one’s eye on her, but because the hint of wit and personality makes her beauty fascinating. Who can resist the Cleopatran glamour of a comment like this:
“I grew tired of rocks stars. I wanted a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger.”
Musically, she has been tasteful but not timid, turning, for example, an obscure Yeats poem, “Those Dancing Days are Gone,” into a creditable shuffle. Yeats delighted in beautiful women. I’m sure his shade is amused and gratified.
For the full effect, however, Carla must be experienced in French. Her first album, Quelqu’un M’a Dit (2002) is particularly fetching (you can see her perform Raphaël here). She delivers the entire album in a breathy purr, as if whispering in your ear.
Bruni is not a weighty or ambitious artist, but she is a completely feminine artist. In the American musical tradition, by contrast, even the most demure maidens – Norah Jones, for example – have inherited at least a suggestion of the old blues salt, a certain existential bone to pick in the gruff tradition of Robert Johnson. I would not trade this blues sinew for all the kittenish purring in the world, but Bruni makes for a delicious change, as well as makes clear what, in part, it means to be American.
In related news, widely reported rumors have it that Bruni’s marriage to the French president has become, shall we say, modern. Only in France could the first lady and the president simultaneously carry on affairs while the nation watches in a mood of mild titillation and amusement.
[Editor’s Note: rumors of the Bruni-Sarkozy simultaneous affairs remain unsubstantiated – although the folkloric appeal of these rumors seems potent to the French.]
By David Ross.Here is Guitar World’s list of the fifty greatest guitar-oriented albums. Any list that prefers Blizzard of Ozz to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland is, to say the least, mentally and emotionally defective.
We have still not caught up with Electric Ladyland. The twin monuments of “Voodoo Child” (the long version) and “1983” are markers of rock at its farthest extreme of creativity, expressive freedom and jazz-like virtuosity, but I am equally stunned by what seem – at first blush – the album’s more modest tracks: “Crosstown Traffic,” “Long Hot Summer Night,” “Electric Ladyland,” “Gypsy Eyes,” “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” “All Along the Watchtower.” Each of these tunes is modest in comparison only to others on the album; on their own terms, they exceed in intricacy and originality and exuberant power just about anything ever done in the history of rock. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who never achieved anything like this dizzying, preternatural mastery.
In response to the stupidity of Guitar World, let me offer a brief list of guitar-related movies and concert films that are bound to interest the aficionado:
• Wes Montgomery: In Europe 1965 (1965) • Devil Got my Woman (1966), featuring Skip James, Son House, etc. • The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey (1967) • Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1969) • Jimi Plays Berkeley (1971) • Jimi Hendrix (1973), the standard biopic • Joe Pass 75 (1975) • John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Paco De Lucia: Meeting of the Spirits (1979) • Leo Kottke: Home & Away Revisited (1988) • Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: Live at the El Mocambo 1983 (1991) • The Search for Robert Johnson (1992) • Paco De Lucia: Light and Shade (1994) • Led Zeppelin (2003), featuring a mélange of concert footage • Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (2003) • Jeff Beck: Live at Ronnie Scotts (2007) • Les Paul: Chasing Sound (2007) • It Might Get Loud (2008), featuring Jimmy Page, Jack White, and the Edge • Remember Shakti: The Way of Beauty (2008), featuring John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain
Here is Jimi Hendrix in a unique performance on an acoustic twelve-string, from Joe Boyd’s 1973 documentary Jimi Hendrix.
I should particularly mention Meeting of the Spirits, which offers more or less undigested footage of Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary are in for a surprise: imagine instead a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed. Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely. During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason. Meeting of the Spirits leaves no question that only Jimi Hendrix has more deeply plumbed the possibilities of the guitar, and that McLaughlin belongs with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in the starriest pantheon of post-bop jazz. Meeting of the Spirits, by the way, was merely preparatory. There followed an even more impressive McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration, captured for posterity on the classic concert album Friday Night in San Francisco.
Thematics of emptiness: on the set of "The International."
By David Ross. I believe that we are witnessing Europe in its death convulsion. I have in mind Europe’s economic situation, which is worse than ours insofar as there’s no pro-growth, free-market, small-government solution waiting in the wings – but even more I have in mind its spiritual situation. Vastly admiring Children of Men (one of the most moving books I’ve ever read), I’ve been reading some of P.D. James’ mystery fiction. She brilliantly evokes the symptoms of spiritual decay: empty churches, childless couples, bureaucracies people dislike but nonetheless accept as faits accomplis, monuments and traditions that lurk as depressing wraiths of former glory. While living in the UK from 1996 to 2000, I remember picking up on this funereal aura and finding it very unfamiliar and unaccountable. Americans are simply not used to thinking of themselves as occupying the dying embers of history.
James, however, is detached from this dynamic: she observes it without embodying it and understands it only in terms of its external manifestations. She is like H.G. Wells’ Victorian time traveler, puzzled and appalled but in no position to philosophize the finer points of the situation she encounters. In his unnerving novel Elementary Particles (titled Atomised in the UK), Michel Houellebecq provides a full theory. In his historical scheme, the rational impulse arose as a kind of mutation in the cultural DNA of the West; rationalism promulgated scientific materialism; scientific materialism dismantled the structure of religious faith and negated all systems of meaning that transcend the self; the spiritual vacuum was filled by – could only have been filled by – an ultimately unsatisfactory and self-destructive hedonism and social atomism. If this scheme is familiar to the point of being trite, Houellebecq has a subtle feel for the texture of this reality (its brittle intellectualism, its flatness of affect) and a rigorous, dark instinct for the equivalency of all actions once they have been drained of anything except physical meaning. He is also particularly good at demonstrating how his philosophical premises play out in the individual case.
Juliette Binoche in "Cache."
Fancying itself on the cutting edge, film has institutionalized the post-modern manner, but its dabbling in glass and chrome set design, in the spectra of blue-grey, in fractured narrative, is usually nothing more than window dressing. Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009) is typical: a bland thriller involving the usual corporate conspiracy dressed up as post-modern statement. Far more to the point is Michael Haneke’s Caché (English title Hidden, 2005), in which a French literary pundit (on television, of course) suddenly begins to receive cryptically threatening letters and surveillance video of his own house. The film is an intricate cultural puzzle, but its most basic comprehension is that the post-modern bourgeoisie is resourceless to defend or even justify its existence – and that history, far from having ended, increasingly threatens the equilibrium of Europe’s culture of weakness and indulgence.
