Limeraiku

There once was a man
from Crete, who got limericks
and haiku to meet

He said it was mad
And also quite sad to try
the unlikely feat

The cup of tea

The cup of tea I left beside the bed
is cold. It was too hot when I first put
it to my lips; it stung me with the lash
of adolescent rage, and so I put it down
to wait. But now this milky vapid
charmless brew is good just for the earth.
Its potency can never be restored

Four poems

1

The poet's not talking bout
something that needs explanation
The poem is the explanation
It's the best they could do

I haven't got thoughts of a poet my thoughts
are entangled with the weeds trapped
clutched in the undergrowth where
metaphors come handy

The poet has higher thoughts
a mystery even to themselves

2

And now it's like
the lights have
lowered
and we're all
cowering before

the smack
and yet this was
always my anxiety
now written upon

the world
and so I'll send my time
ensconsed
wrapped in headphones
cloaked in Sarah
Davachi and German
abstract techno

and see people sitting in cafes
like the lady in Hitchhiker's
Guide who suddenly
realised the meaning

of life
Are we nearly there yet?

3

The world is Weimar
slipping
unease turns to tension
and anxiety and all of that
Caffeine's not helping
But still things are
Better than ever
Can still enjoy the sun
and the thrown off
froth as we suck on
our blood
and choose from 15
types of coffee filters
and eat peasant food
on reclaimed wood tables
and listen to poor people
singing about hardship and want

4.

Poets grab stardust and elemental gas and froth
and throw it together by means of their pen
great gas clouds are trapped
vapour is trailed

from out of the clear
undifferentiated sky
a bright spray of water
lands fresh on your face

Me, I lurk in the earth
my fingers are black with scientific concerns
ethereal coalescence is not my agenda
The dirt in my nails makes my metaphors stand

The sky and the air escape me
I grab only the solid
gruff material of the
earth

Bring down ink like rocks
from Mount Sinai
Stuffed in my pockets
Bring it down to my level

Where great poets will
write with ink
sourced in the skies
I'll plod on

perpetually on the verge of disappoinment
forever failing to understand
even the basics of
what I am trying to do

William Howard: Bach, Schubert and Skempton, Kings Place review – piano is not my forte

Let’s try a little piano recital again. I thought I’d try and make use out of Kings Place, seeing as I’m there all the time, and they have concerts on four or five nights a week and there’s me, you know, trying to be cultural, or at least find things to do that aren’t Twitter. So, a piano recital it was, this one given by William Howard, playing some Schubert and Bach spliced between two modernist sets from the composer Howard Skempton. Howard the lads, as they say up north.

I wasn’t in a great mood when I got there, an hour early, and sitting in the art gallery reading about Kierkegaard didn’t really help, so my first impression of the crowd waiting outside the hall was a) Christ, everyone’s so old; old people should chop all their fucking hair off so they don’t look so fucking old; and b) Lord almighty everyone’s very, very posh. Horrendously posh. So posh it made me want to go and vote for Brexit.

But anyway. Once the music started, my alienation abated and I enjoyed the first Skempton piece, a set of sketches called Reflections. The first few were quite ambient, using the piano more for its sound-design qualities than its melodism, then it turned a little plinkyplonky, more like Philip Glass. All the pieces were very short, and would stop abruptly, as if someone had lifted the needle off a record.

It turned out that Skempton was in the audience and Howard got him up to take a bow, and they had a conversation that I read as Skempton saying: “Marvellous playing, William, magnificent.” I don't know what else he'd have been saying, unless they were arranging to buy drugs.

Following that he played Schumann’s Four Impromptus. Up to now, Schumann has only been associated in my mind with the moody pianist in Peanuts, but it turns out he’s a lovely romantic with impassioned, rolling, playful music that put me in mind of a cat toying with a ball of wool. Somewhere between Chopin and Debussy, I’d venture, if I was feeling cocky; the heart and emotion of Chopin with added impressionism. But I might retract that, when it inevitably turns out that Schumann was before Chopin, and way before Debussy. (Quick Wikipedia break: they were contemporaries.)

After the break it was three of Bach’s prelude and fugue pairs, which were, obviously, great. I can't really say anything about them; it would be like critiquing the psalms. And then on to the second Skempton set, a London premiere of his attempt at 24 preludes and fugues. Most of these came in at the 30-second mark, so we were back to the abrupt stopping. In fact, even more abrupt than with Reflections, where the pieces were at least able to get out the blocks before being ruthlessly cut down. These were more like listening to the radio on a very windy day. Just as you were beginning to get into the mood or texture of the piece, it vanished. I know that Satie was adamant you should never bore your audience, but this seemed extreme. I began to resent the fact that I knew when I gave my ears up to the pieces (which were all lovely) they would too soon be snatched away (the pieces, not my ears). It got to be like going on Tinder knowing that everyone you connect with will immediately ghost you; it becomes difficult to allow yourself the emotion. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure why they had to be cut. It wasn’t obvious to me what was so great about outlining a lovely melody or rhythm and then yanking it from under you. I’m sure there’s a very clever reason, but frankly that was part of the problem. Brexit again, you see.

There was an encore, after a pronounced bout of bowing (do they teach them that bowing at the conservatory, I wondered. It's very precise, and always exactly the same). He played another Skempton piece, some kind of song of the Highlands, which he introduced as "one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever played”. I mean, that's just setting it up for a fall, really – and it wasn't helped by the fact that he’d played more beautiful pieces that very evening. Especially by that Schumann. One to watch, him.

Jerry Sadowitz, the Betsey Trotwood review – extremely versa-bile

A thinly attended (he had apparently reservations for the whole place but without taking money, so only half the people turned up) warmup show from the patriarch of scabrous comedy, the progenitor of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and a heap of other hugely more famous close-to-the-knuckle comedians. An antihero of the alternative comedy scene – and also a world-renowned closeup magician – who made his name skewering the sacred politically correct cows of the 80s to audiences of right-on lefties. Sadowitz flirted with telly, flirted with some degree of success, but has in the end stayed true to his self-image as a chronically inadequate and underachieving figure, a better place from where to launch his rancid, bitter broadsides at literally all and sundry.

I had dimly wondered whether, in this so-called ‘woke’ era, at a time when fascism and the far right are on the march, when laughing at unfortunates has stopped being ironic and returned to a move of the powerful, Sadowitz’s comedy would still be funny or whether our new awareness of the victims of abuse – and perhaps of our increasingly perilious reality – would make the always unpalatable into the utterly unacceptable.

I suppose it is difficult to say, but from my perspective, Sadowitz, as energetic at nearly 60 as I can remember him, rolled back the years to when it was indeed acceptable to make jokes about pretty much every group in the world, from the most deserving to the least. Despite the fact that some of it could have found itself in the worst Richard Littlejohn columns (in fact, there was a riff on how Boris Johnson had stolen his line about Muslim women looking like letterboxes), somehow – and this was probably the most extraordinary magic trick that he performed – it (mostly) was, while despicable, extremely, outrageously funny.

I think it must be something to do with his unlikely charm, and perhaps the way that he performs it all from a place of extreme vulnerability, so none of it comes over as punching down. (Sadowitz himself claimed to have no truck with that distinction, saying that punching down is as acceptable as everything else; and there were bits that just didn’t land, although it was hard to tell whether he had overstepped a line or just not finessed the humour enough.) While he still looks like a Victorian scarecrow that has been Frankensteined into an imitation of life, he remains an extraordinary performer just to watch and I would have happily snapped photos throughout if I hadn’t thought he might smash my camera and boot me out.

Obviously I was bringing my privilege, as we say nowadays, but it was a refreshing experience to chuck all that neurosis out of the window and just watch someone unilaterally smearing the entire human race with bile. He made it, in his own words, a safe space for bigotry, but somehow the bigotry, being both universal and unconnected to any power, was joyous instead of vile.

It might be also the way that he point blank refused to admit the especial awfulness of our era, which while maybe nonsense, was at least a relief from the unrelenting rainfall of bad news. I guess your mileage may vary.

Outside, one of the few punters noted: “It’s not for everyone.”

In actual fact, it's not for anyone.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker review – death becomes them

The swirl of reviews and is up, opinions swooping and swarming, crashing into each other, firing their laser vigour out into the deepest galaxy of internet space; many keen to shout “It’s shit!” as loudly as possible, others to go “It’s fine, I don’t know what they’re on about,” none yet that I’ve seen to say, “Really great, necessary addition to the canon.” I don't know why I feel obliged to add my tuppence; I wouldn't really call it a review as much as to say I guess I've got observations and you, you lucky reader, are good to get em. Merry Christmas!

Put it this way: I might watch it again, but not so much for pleasure as to see whether my opinions hold over a second viewing. And I won’t be doing that for at least, oh I don’t know, maybe 40 years. No, maybe I will, but probably not, because the chief impression I had watching this was that they have sucked the franchise dry, sucked it completely dry, reanimated the corpse through some incredible film-making sorcery, and then sucked the whole fucking thing dry again.

I mean, Emperor Palpatine. Are you having a fucking laugh?

So yeah, the storyline was fucked. I mean how much emotion are you supposed to invest in the question of whether the heroes will kill the dude that was already fucking killed three films ago. Now, he’s being kept in a state of seemingly undead, on some sort of afterlife support system and it turns out he’s been propelling the bad guy (who’s not really a bad dude, just a bit upset) using his ability to psychically talk to anyone in the universe and see what’s going on, sort of like God then, and more than that, while in hiding he’s conjured, apparently out of his undead arsehole, a gigantic fleet of about a kajillion star destroyers that all zap planets like Death Stars. Like get the fuck out of here.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to be worrying about whether our young, considerably-more-posh-than-I-remember hero Rey is going to be able to resist the entreaties of the bad dude and the undead bad dude who happens to be her grandad to become a superfucking real bad girl and let her friends die and all this jazz, storywise it fucking stinks no two ways about it.

(Seeing her as much posher all of a sudden might be something to do with a newspaper article I read about Daisy Ridley showing she understood fuck all about her class privileges, but it also might be the film-makers up-poshing her for her royal reveal, because it turns out that in 2018, they produced a book championing Rey as evidence that anybody could make it, no matter how humble their origins, in the Star Wars universe; only now it turns out, as before, that the whole thing is basically a spat among princes.)

Furthermore seeing as the bad dude is basically a god, and the story hinges entirely on whether Rey defeats him or not, why do all these other people have to die? The other films (not the prequels which don't count) seemed to find a better balance between the interfamilial drama plotline and the swarming armies of imperial and rebel fleets. This had just as much laser blasting, but it was never clear why any of it had to happen, seeing as Rey wanted to get to the emperor and he wanted her to come.

My feeling is that previously the story might have been hookum but the charm carried it over, but the charm has been clinically and expertly sucked the fuck out. They played around well in Eps 7 and 8 between the new characters and the old, especially keeping Luke back and seeing Han get appendectomied into the next life, plus there was just a huge sense of relief that someone who really loved the originals was in charge after the aforementioned unmentionable prequels, but here it’s just all too much, the nostalgia has worn off and seeing Luke’s family home, for example, or the Emperor’s Death Star throne room, or Billy Dee Williams, it’s like yeah we get it, past references, no one cares any more; and then you’re just left with a storyline that doesn’t engage you.

In place of an engaging story, they do a lot of heartstring tweaking. Here they have got something going on that might bear a second watch, because there were a lot of moving moments, especially to do with Carrie Fisher. I was uncomfortable about the CGI Carrie Fisher mainly because it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful that when one of your actors dies, instead of writing around it, you resurrect them and have them cavort about pretty much as if you were pushing the cadaver around the stage – and in a film where more or less the same thing has happened to literally the most evil character in the universe. I did not like it one bit, but at one point when Rey goes to leave Leia and they have a loving hug and you sense this is the last time they will meet – you kind of hope that maybe this is the last time you see Leia cos it’s so uncomfortable, but it wasn’t – and then there’s a moment when Billy Dee Williams says something along the lines of “Tell Leia how much I love her”, and you get it: they really did love Carrie Fisher and she died and they’re really fucking sad about that. I think, but maybe that's what they want us to think.

And for the first time ever, I was suddenly worried by the question: does Star Wars have a race problem? There’s been some chat about how Kelly Marie Tran had barely any lines in this episode; this after her bigger part in Last Jedi drew a load of internet grief from couchfucking types. But for me, it was something about the way they portrayed the gap yah posh white girl visiting the Indian-looking festival and getting a necklace off the friendly local that gave me the shivers; something about the way the rodent who tweaked C3PO’s brain seemed to be another jolly foreigner type. Both as if they were using aliens to get away with some pretty carefree orientalism. And then there was the way that Finn found his soulmate, another ex-stormtrooper who just happened to be played by a black girl from London, as if they were saying, don’t worry that he seems to fancy the royal big potatoes, he’s going to end up with someone suitable. I dunno, I’m no race theorist, but there was something off key going on there, even while there's progress that they did have some good roles for black people and they don’t even have to die.

The other interesting thing they seem to be getting at is that they keep saying to each other: “Stick together, if we stick together we’ll be able to beat this all-powerful enemy” and I couldn’t help imagining maybe they mean us. Maybe they mean if we stick together, remember our friends, try to work together, we can beat this fascist menace, this far-right monster growing in the black darkness, steadily getting stronger and more confident, coming on ready for its big reveal. Maybe they’re trying to indoctrinate the kids to believe that they can take this thing on. I hope that they did – and I hope that they do. That would be one good meaning of A New Hope, I suppose. But it seems just as likely that they are telling us that we the plebs can’t do anything about the fascist onslaught and have to hope a royal princess takes up the challenge.

It was a film seemingly very preoccupied with death. Lots of people died, lots of supposedly main characters as well, but for most it was time to die (plus they can all come back as fucking ghosts any time so it’s not much of a hindrance). And the truth is that for Star Wars, too, it is, I’m afraid, time to die.

Joker review – origins of specious

About half way through Joker I wondered what I would say if someone asked me what I thought of the film.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” was what I considered my response would be.

Doesn’t bode well for a review, perhaps, but I think it stands up. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to burden you what I did think; only that, as there are as many Joker origin stories as people to invent them, nobody else’s is ever going to be on the button. The most important element of Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story is that he got it made. I haven’t got mine made; I haven’t even got one to get made, but I do have a clear idea of who the Joker is and most of us, when we are given an end point, can have a stab at getting there.

By which I suppose I mean that Joker is a kind of fan-fic; it’s hardly canon; it’s more a riff or two or three on what’s gone before. No one who comes along to reimagine the Joker or Gotham is going to feel beholden to this film, unless, I suppose, they make a sequel. Joker 2: After the Laughter, perhaps.

There’s a lot to like in Joker. Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing especially. The grit of a trash-strewn Gotham Bronx. Just the very idea of dragging the supernal Joker down into the dirt of having an origin story in the first place, especially one as scrawny and craggy as this one. The violence was satisfyingly authentic. The cinematography, the choreography, the acting were all great. Atlanta’s Paper Boi pitched up in a great scene. The plot twists were – sometimes – effective, while the fears of incel inspo and hand-wringing about Gary Glitter seem wide of the mark.

But there’s a lot not to like. It’s a very confused film. It’s confused about mental illness. It’s confused about protest movements. It’s confused about abuse victims. It’s confused about how old Joker even is (it implies he’s 30, but Phoenix is 44 and looks and acts it; in any case even if he was 30, could the Joker really be 20 years older than Batman?). It's confused about what happens when you suddenly stop taking seven different types of medication.

Its cake-and-eat-it attitude to psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination, child abuse – that these real, actual real things that happen to actual real people can somehow be juggled in such a way as to give us a plausible origin for something as implausible as a fucking superhuman killer clown – was undignified. It had little or nothing to offer about the world as we find it today, when the killer clowns are running the fucking show. Even its take on Taxi Driver-era New York amounted to no more than saying funding cuts in mental health provision are bad. Not an awful message, but thin.

Of course it’s a comic book, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for more. But of course, it’s not a comic book at all; it’s real, real, realism, not even magic realism, and certainly not comic book. The crux of the film is that the Joker is brought down to earth, explicated in terms of what might happen to any of us; the unreal made real by the force of plot. And it fell well short of managing the lofty goal, although there was plenty of fun on the way.

And the less said about the strand with Bobby De Niro the better – in terms of script anyway, although the joke at the end was pretty good.

Visions in Meditation, Sarah Davachi, Philip Jeck, Darkstar, Union Chapel review

 

Philip Jeck

This happened in October, but I forgot to press go on this until today

It was a strange one at the Union Chapel, an odd Friday night. A screening of four films by Stan Brakhage – the programme had him as “a non-narrative film-maker, the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century” – called Visions in Meditation. These were abstract footage of a journey through the US in the late 80s, filmed on 16mm, and set – with the exception of one film – to a soundtrack of silence. Interspersed between the showings was music – minimalist, experimental, electronic, ambient – commissioned specially for this show, to respond to the films. And that’s what I was there for.

All three pieces were performed by the composer seated at a desk, twiddling nobs on a synthesiser, accompanied by a string trio, two violins and a cello from the London Contemporary Orchestra. The first to go up was Sarah Davachi, a Canadian composer who specialises in “disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces” – this means drones – and who has made some great albums that I’ve enjoyed listening to on YouTube.   

The wafting smoke, pentagram candle holders hanging from the ceiling and most especially the general ambience of grinding discondant drones gave the whole thing somewhat more of a Satanic ritual vibe than your average Friday night in Upper Street – unless you count the Slug and Lettuce, obviously. It would be harsh to call Davachi’s output “anti-music”, but being as it dispenses with rhythm, harmony and melody, it wouldn’t be unfair. In much the same way as in jazz you can play anything except the wrong notes, in this kind of music you can play anything as long as it’s not musical. But I’m a great fan, because by dispensing of all the usual techniques, you get music that is free of the manipulations, end-seeking and confinement typical of most performance*. 

This focus on means rather than ends gives ambient, experimental music a refreshing, egoless and what I am going to call “dis-rational” character. The benefit of disrationality is that by offering nothing for the ego-mind to hold on to, it points to the reality beyond experience. But of course, when we dispense with rationality, it becomes difficult to say whether things are pointing to reality or just stealing a living. It’s one thing to listen to this on YouTube, but something else to pay actual money and spend your actual Friday night doing it in public. There was definitely an emperor’s new clothes/Arts Council funding/#WhitePeopleTwitter about the whole thing; as though at any moment, someone sensible might walk in, turn on the lights and go: “What the fuck are you lot doing?”

The second composer was Philip Jeck, an avuncular-looking figure with white hair, pate shining in the purple light, wearing a blazer. I did enjoy watching this grandfatherly character conjure some extremely dark horror soundtrack on his go. The third was Darkstar – or at least one of them – who played the most “musical” music of the three, which was actually a relief by this point, and gave the string trio some actual playing to do, which was nice. But I was never close to an insight in how the music was responding to the films. 

As for the films, the lack of narrative was challenging. I was struck by how much I craved some – any – narrative. I took to reading the programme by the light of my phone: Oh! He’s travelling across America. Oh! He’s the most famous experimental film-maker of the 20^th century. And these little titbits of narrative did in fact make the experience more compelling. I was left to wonder how much more I would have enjoyed them had I known more about the story of why he had made them, but that did seem as if it might defeat the point of non-narrative cinema.

In fact, I realised, my need of narrative was mostly to justify why I was watching them. If I could tell myself a story about why I was bothering, I’d happily sit there, even if I didn’t “enjoy” the experience. 

It seemed a form over content kind of thing. The films were of the American landscape, but whatever it was they were trying to say – their narrative, for want of a better word – seemed to be carried more by the arrangement of the shots than the shots themselves. There were moments in the films where the rhythm of the cuts and the repetition of shots did come together to offer something like a visual music, but those moments soon passed. Many of the shots were dark, dim or blurred. I was left feeling that if you are going to have no soundtrack and no narrative, the least you could do is have some decent pictures, but that is clearly something else I have to learn about.

A strange one, then. I would have liked to have asked someone who did enjoy it to explain what I was missing, but that’s probably cheating.

* Can you see I’m struggling to explain this bit?

May's poem

Your face to the mace
You may grimace

You’ll be a-maced
following when

Thou mayst read
Of Mace and Men

What do all these new emojis mean?

 I am smiling

 I am smiling but I am also tired

 I am still smiling despite being so tired that i am crying

 I am a dog

 I am a winking dog

 I am a winking dog that doesn't understand what winking is

 what do all these new emojis mean?

 i have no idea, but i'm cool with that

 ugh i just hate them so much why did they have to complicate it

 There is a bead of sweat on my brow

 Now it is on the other side of my brow

 It seems to be stuck around my nose

 Phew got rid of that one .. oh no another has appeared!

 this is just what life is now

 i am blowing a kiss

 i was blowing a trumpet but I've just dropped it

 I am still blowing the trumpet despite the fact that my grade 5 exam is now ruined

 I am blowing the examiner to get my certificate

 what is all this trans stuff?

 Christ i'm sorry i asked

 i'll never open my mouth again

 my cat is sweet

 my cat he laughs

 my cat he laughs and cries at the same time. Is that normal?

 my cat has stabbed his eyes out with a heart-shaped cookie cutter

 my cat has doubts about you

 you are boring my cat

 my cat is about to puke on you

 my cat is bored of whole idea

my cat wants you to stop talking about it

 I have painted my head blue as part of a stag weekend prank that has gone wrong

 I think the paint is leaking into my brain

 I am now on the wall of the National Gallery in Oslo

 I have taken some great acid

 It is suddenly going badly

 why are you dressed like that?

 please tell me

 OMFG

Simon Armitage, Tabernacle review – not a review

This is not going to be a review. Nor am I, though it did briefly occur to me, going to do it in a Simon Armitage-like poem, thereby making my comments in the form of his form, a probably more interesting and insightful (I just spelled that 'inciteful') piece of work than what is hereby going to transpire. But, no.

I like Simon Armitage. I recommend you read his poems. His poems are fresh, live, lyrical, steeped in performance but also in the history of poetry. More accessible than many, he carries the faint hint of the frustrated indie musician about him, which is preferable to musicians carrying the hint of the frustrated poet, imho. He's interesting, down to earth, real, speaks with a lovely Leeds plaint, something like a streetwise Alan Bennett, or at least as streetwise as a professor of poetry gets. He's not Leedswise like, say, Mik Artistik, but he was a probation officer once, so you know, he's been about. Got insights from the other sides, if you know what I mean, although his life nowadays is mostly writing poetry, teaching students, making TV and theatre and doing readings for Guardian types, as this one was, on a tour to promote The Unaccompanied, his latest album, sorry, poetry collection. Doing a reading, then a chat with the Guardian books editor and then Qs from the audience.

So he read some poems. Lovely voice he's got, that soft Leeds burr, gentle and fey but not foolish; read some poems and my attention span being what it is, I drifted. Some kept me locked on: the first one, which was more or less a standup routine, worked well. Others, I drifted. I was thinking that the definition of an artist is that they're more interested in what's in their own head than what other people are doing, but maybe it's not the definition of an artist, but the definition of a narcissist; anyway, I had to battle really to focus at times – more Debussy than Chopin. I find a lot of poetry could learn from standup anyway, the thing about standup is you can't lose the audience, even for a moment, you have to keep them with you all the time, because you've got this feedback in standup that's unlike more or less anywhere else, you know when you're losing them because they stop laughing. You have to be tight. Of course if you're not going for laughs, it's not a helpful feedback mechanism, but it keeps you honest, and you can say a lot even while making people laugh, it's not like you can't say everything in the world.

So this is not a review. It wasn't really a show. The audience asked questions and at first they were shy, and then when they had stopped being shy, they asked weird questions. The public are an odd bunch, even at poetry readings, consumed with odd obsessions that come out in their weird questions. And Simon tried to answer them, really, he tried, but sometimes he just didn't, despite trying, because the question was just too bloody odd.

I wanted to ask a question but I was too shy. Well, shy's not the word, but I kind of thought I might just be asking a question that everybody else would already know the answer to and therefore it would be a waste. But never be shy, that's my top tip. Because other people will always be less shy than you, and have stupider questions.

Prison: From the Inside – transcript excerpts

I suffer from mental health problems
I have to take antidepressants and antipsychotics
Because it's just

I used to self-harm, and it's hard not to
It's very hard not to

For the hurt and the pain that I've caused
You feel guilty
You feel like, when you're on these courses
Why do I deserve this?

Especially when you hear a lot of prisoners have took their lives in here
And you think to yourself, like,
That should have been me

Kids that are in for nothing
You hear kids outside hanging themselves

Why is the Lord taking them?

Why is he not taking me,
for all the bad things I've done?

You know, for all the people we've made suffer
Whether it be a small crime or a big crime
People do suffer through our actions

And that's
It's not easy to live with

...

Something happened in my life
I was raped
That's neither here nor there at the minute
But I became
Like
All hurt and closed up
And full of pain, full of emptiness
You could have drove a bus through the emptiness
And it was bad
It was really bad
But I kept drinking the peace in and the peace out
To kill this pain and to kill this emptiness

Prison: From the Inside (BBC1)

Scottee: Bravado, Camden People's Theatre review – Blimey, Scottee, fucking hell

I first came across Scottee in Edinburgh 2010 I think. I wrote in this blog at the time that he was unquestionably a star, immensely likeable, frolicking about in outrageous outfits, compering a cabaret show with supreme camp confidence. Since then, I've kept a rough eye on him, from time to time, and it has turned out over the years that he's not only a star, but also an artist.

Now, stars are easier to take than artists, especially performance artists. Artists have all this challenging shit to get through, all this art to make, whereas stars just want the glare and the lights. More importantly, stars are focused on entertainment, because they need your satisfaction to keep their lights up, but artists are mediating their own needs of self-expression/self-indulgment. I haven't always really checked for everything Scottee has done in those intervening years, but he's always interesting and challenging and truthful and he's growing and developing all the time. So, when I saw his new show was on, I booked.

The ad warned that

This show is not for the weak hearted - it includes graphic accounts of violence, abuse, assault, sex and love. 

So, not yer standard drag miming queer cabaret type of thing then. Instead, an exploration of Scottee's surprisingly rough upbringing.

The stage was pretty bare, a couple of TVs on flight cases and some fluorescent bulbs that flickered on and off. The TVs played fuzzy VHS recordings of 90s era programmes – Gladiators, Strike it Lucky, Arsenal v Man U's 1999 semifinal – the sort of things, I guess the teenage Scottee was watching on video in his council flat in the Queens Crescent. 

Now, that's my manor. When I was born, my mum lived in a flat on Queens Crescent, though we swiftly moved up to Kentish Town; I went to primary school on the border of the sprawling estates. The two worst bullies in my class were both from the flats; the Crescent was infamous as a den of thugs, thieves and drug dealers. Many of the kids who lived there – even, or especially, my class bullies – were terrified of the bigger kids who lived there. 

It wasn't just the Crescent. My friend lived on the periphery of an estate up in Kentish Town and sometimes we'd fall under the purview of the local bully. Once, when he had us cornered, he told us he'd beat us up if we didn't knock on this Indian girl's door with our cocks hanging out and when she answered ... well, I can't remember the rest. Nothing came of it; I guess he lost interest. But for me, that incident crystallised the idea that the big, sprawling council estates were inward-looking nests of sexual shame and bullying.

Scottee's tales started with stories about his alcoholic family; his uncle bottling someone outside a pub, and his first, pathetic fight on the estate. But he went up a gear with stories about friends who turned on him, first humiliating him, later forcing him to 'perform a sex act', as the police have it. And then there was brutal tales of his drunk dad strangling him of a Friday night. The climax of the show came with a description of when he passed by two of his friends/abusers on his bike, years after moving away from the estate.

I was still fiddling with my phone as the show was starting, and missed exactly what words flashed up on the screens, asking for a volunteer to come up and do the performance. But that's what happened – a game bloke got up and read Scottee's testimony off a screen in front of him. For most of the show I wasn't really sure what I felt about this – I guess I wasn't supposed to. It was certainly a bold move from an artistic point of view – keeping the audience off balance, toying with their expectations. But it was hard not to feel ripped off at paying £12 for a show in which the star didn't show, was probably not even in the building. Was this art or some self-indulgence? Had Scottee risen to such an Arts Council-funded ivory tower he didn't even feel the need to turn up? 

The question nagged at me throughout, even after I'd accepted that we wouldn't catch sight of the great man himself. It added to the discomfort of the whole thing: the uncomfortable chair, too close to the bloke next to me; the uncomfortable side view I'd ended up with; the uncomfortable material. 

And when I left, my first word, as I hit the air of Hampstead Road was: "Nah". Nah, did he need to not be there; I didn't feel it needed the distancing that the clever ventriloquist manoeuvre provided. Because I thought I wasn't shocked by the tales. I wasn't surprised – that is what it was like. Not for me; I mean, I had my own problems, but nothing as bad as this, but that is what it was like for some of those I grew up with. I wondered if perhaps Scottee had been hanging around with too many middle-class Arts Council types, and lost his perspective.

But I was wrong. The full force of the show was yet to hit. As I stood there, watching the crowd leave, I fell into a kind of shock. It took me half an hour to move on, and then I went to a pub and took an hour to drink one pint. I don't think it was the tales, although they were in retrospect pretty shocking. In the end I decided it was the final section, where Scottee faced his mixed feelings – his rage, his hatred, his low self-esteem, but also his lust, his desire for his abusers, his desire for their love – that set me off. It was where he tied together the show's themes, bringing out thoughts about sexuality, masculinity, childhood, violence, abuse, shame, victimhood and survival.

I don't think I've been so affected by something for a long time. It left me deep in thought. I've barely been able to articulate much here of what it churned up in me. The irony was that as I left, they handed out flyers with phone numbers of people you could get support from, if the show had left you 'triggered', as they say. I took the flyer thinking I'd never need anything like that. But an hour later, I was beginning to wonder.

It was incredibly impressive and, in the way Scottee faced and embraced those mixed feelings, it was – that old cliché – fantastically brave, even without his being in the building. In its power to truly affect me, to truly disrupt and upset me, to, yes indeed, trigger me – this was the real deal, proper fucking art.

Leroy Hutson, Union Chapel review – sweet but short

Back on more familiar ground for me, with soul legend Leroy Hutson in town. A cult name on the rare groove scene of the late 80s and early 90s, his 70s soul-jazz hits, such as All Because of You, Lucky Fellow and Lover's Holiday, encapsulated the midtempo soul style known as two-step, before UK garage gratuitously stole the term in the late 90s. More melodic than funk, but less muso-y than jazz-funk, two-step got its sound from the likes of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield (a mentor of Hutson in Chicago) and carved out a niche of smooth, lovers-friendly music that you could both dance or smooch to depending on how your night was working out. Hutson himself wrote and produced a good few tunes for other people, including stone-classic The Ghetto for his friend Donny Hathaway.

It was a nice gathering of the blue-eyed soul tribe at the Union Chapel, a few more pairs of loafers than you see on an average night out, and that suburban London twang that you don't hear so much of any more. A room full of Robert Elms-es is basically what it was, lots of people dressed like they were going out to Dingwalls in 1987 – and everyone I spoke to was very friendly and relaxed.

A post shared by Sandra Roberts (@mrchoops) on Feb 24, 2017 at 4:42pm PST

The band came on and launched straight into All Because of You, and, sporting a spectacular blazer and sunglasses, on came Mr Leroy Hutson, as the MC kept referring to him. The soundman took a while to get a hold of the levels, and the band took a while to find their cues. "Can you believe we only rehearsed for the first time yesterday?" said Mr Leroy Hutson at one point, to which the only answer was: "Yep." Still, he didn't mess about, giving us three of his best tunes straight off the bat, before leaving the BVs girl to sing a couple. Then the band did a funk workout, at which point the suspicion began to arise that we were going to hear more of a London session band than we had necessarily signed up for. A decent band, obviously, but, you know, not £35-a-ticket decent. But back on stage Mr Leroy Hutson came, twiddling from time to time at a Korg keyboard at the front to no obvious effect, to do a few more classics.

The sound improved, and you got to hear a bit more of his vocal, which sounded in pretty good shape. The band did another funk workout, this one more impressive as they found their feet. Things cut a bit looser after the encore, when the soul massive clambered out of the chapel pews to dance happily to the finale, after which Mr Leroy Hutson cut loose himself, getting off the stage with indecent haste, the clock barely hitting the hour mark. It's been a while since I've seen someone do the absolute bare minimum at a show, and it left me a bit cold, I'll be honest. I know he's 71, and has an earned a few easy paydays, but it's always nice when they give you a little extra. Especially as the sound had been sorted, and the crowd had warmed up and was right for it. I'd have been content just to hear All Because of You again, but it weren't to be.

Truth is, we're lucky he's still alive, cos so many of them aren't – this the day after another soul legend, Leon Ware, died. And, at 71, Mr Leroy Hutson can still hold a tune, and what great tunes they are.

Maurizio Pollini, RFH review

If you ever, as I once did, discover a love for Chopin's piano pieces, you will inevitably find yourself listening to Maurizio Pollini. Along with Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Martha Argerich, he'll turn up in your YouTube searches soon enough, although, it turns out, he ranges farther and wider in the classical realm than good old Fryderyk Franciszek.

Anyway, I was surprised to hear that he is still alive, and booked a ticket for a recital at the RFH, exactly my cup of tea, just a piano and an audience, and someone to play it, in a nice room. No microphones and all that modern jazz. Not modern jazz, modern ... stuff. But not modern jazz either. Chopin, my favourite.

Since I haven't, in the few weeks since the Daniil Trifonov concert, added anything to my threadbare understanding of classical music, my critical insights remain no better than mundane. This guy has the knowledge, if you're interested. But still, you know, I'm having a crack.

My friend, my resident classical music know-it-all, had warned me that Pollini was now too old and it was likely to be a bust, because who can really perform at 82 or whatever he is, and he'd seen him before and it had been terrible. But it turns out that Pollini is only 75 and, so far as my limited critical ability could tell, can still tickle those ivories in a roughly congruous manner. As I strolled up to the South Bank, feeling all cosmopolitan because for once I'm actually going out in London somewhere not the pub at the end of my road or some overpriced twat citadel in Hackney; as I walked up I was thinking, well, I know Chopin quite well, so it'll probably just be him playing Chopin and how transcendent can that be? I mean it'll be what it is. No surprises, I suppose, is what I was thinking.

And I was right, but also I was wrong, because there were surprises, and they weren't just related to having nowhere to sit in the bar beforehand, or how they made you buy a programme to find out what he was going to play, which you might have thought would be included in the price of the ticket, if you knew nothing about anything. No, the surprises were that despite listening to what I thought was quite a lot of Chopin, I didn't know Pollini's choices very well. So I got to enjoy fresh Chopin, while still enjoying Chopin, because Chopin is Chopin and whether nocturne, ballade or scherzo, operates in the same lilting, gorgeous register, streams of ethereal melodies and an endlessly interesting colour chords. Of all his choices, I most loved the Berceuse in D flat, a short, playful nursery-like dream that manages to combine meditative stillness with gobsmacking pianistic athleticism.

The thing with Chopin is that the tunes are so clear and well-articulated that it holds your (my) attention much more effectively than, say, the Debussy that Pollini played after the interval. It's possible to hear what's going on with Chopin, even as he illustrates and elaborates in all directions. With the Debussy – or some of the things Trifonov played – while it's all very nice, beautiful, spectacular, dripping with imaginations, whatever, I find I start to drift; the storyline is submerged, and my mind begins to wander. But with Chopin, I'm held, able to follow exactly his beautiful, lyrical, aching forays into romantic delirium. Towards the end of the Debussy, by contrast, I began aching for him to finish.

Pollini himself seemed in good health. He did look like an old man, with the beginnings of a stoop as he padded to the piano, and perhaps Trifonov's fingers were more emphatic, but there was nothing I could hear that suggested he wasn't up to it and he played more or less consistently well through two hours. He did take a lot of bows, for an old guy. Up after every piece finished and bowing round the great hall, which had added rows behind him on the stage. After the Debussy he padded off, then padded back on again to take more bows. He got a bit of a standing ovation at this point, but it was hard to tell if it was a real standing ovation or if people were just trying to get out ahead of the crush. Then he padded back off again, then back on again – possibly trying to get his Fitbit numbers up – and finally settled down to play an encore. He played three encores, each separated by a good deal of padding to and fro; by the third one the guy next to me was exasperated that he had to stay to listen to more music. But it was some more Chopin, so I was happy. And by the end, everyone joined in the standing ovation.