The Condition of Music

This from a novel that has much to say about music, among other subjects:

The music hammers at him; he feel it at the back of his throat. Steely Dan, their best album. Full of angular licks and slick changes, lyrics that peck at you. But he doesn't want to hear it. Music unstitches him now; he can do without it.

Irritatingly Steely's best album is never named in the narrative. Not one of the early ones, I'm guessing. Angularity is there, but not a startling feature of Can't Buy A Thrill. I'm thinking Aja, on which the changes are at their slickest in the catalogue. Though it's a bit of a trite choice for Lu Fox, the male protagonist of Tim Winton's Dirt Music, the novel from which I'm quoting here. But people make trite choices and see their preferences as part of the fabric of things. Winton's particularly good at that.

It's been easy to enjoy Winton's narrative, as you might guess from the deployment of hammers, peck and unstitches in the above. He combines the cerebral and visceral to impressive effect. His characters communicate and resonate - even though he's often grappling with extreme states. I've got around 130 pages to go and I really, really want to know what happens. Childish but a good sign.

It looks like I've acquired a new favourite, well, favoured, let's say, writer.

Stop Making Sense

Idle thoughts on a busy day: Always consider the dictates of reason. Always question the dictates of reason. Sometimes ignore the dictates of reason. Maybe often.

State of the Union

Boon leant me a copy of Barack Obama's Dreams From my Father the other day. This was oddly fortuitous as the book had just gone from being a possible read in 2010 to a must read by April, the result of my tuning into an excellent interview with Seamus Heaney on the World Service in which the Nobel laureate and greatest living Irishman extolled its virtues. That's just about as high a recommendation as one can imagine for any book but especially intriguing when the author happens to be the President of the United States.

And now he's losing some, if not most, of the popularity necessarily attendant upon the essentially untried, Obama has become, in my eyes, even more fascinating a figure. I'm sure he knew it would happen since I knew it would happen and he's a lot cleverer and more politically aware than I am. This is the period when greatness may emerge, when it's all running against you. Think Lincoln with the Union falling apart - a thought I know the president shares.

I love a mess, what life essentially is.

Third Thoughts

One last thing about Day-Lewis's performance (in There Will Be Blood) that I liked. Monumental as it was, it always felt like it was serving the ends of the movie rather than stamping itself on otherwise recalcitrant material. In that sense, selfless - as well as in the sense of the actor losing himself completely.

In the final scenes he looked like he'd been sweating oil.

Second Thoughts

Just watched the last twenty or so minutes of There Will Be Blood, and mighty glad I did. The last two scenes - well, more encounters I suppose - are uniformly excellent and go a long way to justifying the whole narrative arc of the film. Day-Lewis's extraordinary creation descends into a kind of madness (but I suppose he's been there all along really) disowning his 'son', H.W., in a powerfully, painfully emotional sequence, and doing even worse to Eli Sunday, his sort-of nemesis throughout the movie. It's all very horrible and entirely inevitable in this mythic world. I made the mistake of trying to watch something I thought was trying to be realistic when I should have been thinking Shakespeare.

So now I've come to the conclusion I was probably wrong-headed in all my criticisms of what I watched yesterday. The problem, and possibly the reward, is that I'll need to view the whole thing again. But this won't be soon. I need a bit of distance. And a whole movie in a couple of days is a big thing for me.

Catching Up

Spent a fair portion of the day dealing with the sort of business that simply needs dealing with - quite a bit of it related to the car. Had to take it to pass an inspection, a mandatory requirement, and rightly so, now it's three years old. It passed without fuss so now it remains to spend oodles of cash just to ensure I have the right to drive it. Again, rightly so in my estimation. I regard driving as a privilege and perhaps one that I should seriously consider for-going in view of the wear and tear it exacts on our environment.

I also have been reminding myself of just how bad I am at watching films. I've been having a go at a DVD I bought around about this time last year, at an iffy price, when I was in Medan in Indonesia. I'm off there again in a couple of weeks and I suppose it was that which made me aware of the need to ensure I'd actually watched all the DVDs I came back with last year.

The movie in question was There Will Be Blood and, sad to say, I've yet to finish it. It's obviously got a lot going for it. The cinematography is seriously good, the sense of period spot-on (the oil-fields of California around 1902) and the acting very fine, except for Daniel Day-Lewis who goes well beyond that into his usual stellar territory. But I just couldn't get into the thing on the level of story somehow. I wasn't too sure of what was going on most of the time and when I was I wasn't too sure of why anyone thought it would be good to make a film of it. I think I've got about twenty minutes or so left and I'm not looking forward to it, though I will watch out of a sense of duty. And I mean that seriously. I know the film-makers involved have got something valuable to say, it's just that I'm too deaf to hear it.

Shifting Paradigms

Duly, but, happily, not dully, completed reading last year's November 5 issue of The New York Review of Books with Bill McKibben's In the Face of Catastrophe: A Surprise, a review of a book by Rebecca Solnit about communities that arise in times of disaster, generally, though not exclusively, the natural sort. I've yet to find anything quite as gripping in the other two mags I'm now embarked on, the December 3 edition of TNYRB being an especial let-down after the giddy heights of November. In fact, it was my third reading of the McKibben piece which seems to me extraordinarily thought-provoking - though perhaps it's slightly more accurate to say that it's Solnit's book that's doing the real provocation.

McKibben says of her work: A Paradise Built in Hell is an 8.5 on the intellectual Richter scale. It opens a breach in the walls of received wisdom that one hopes many other thinkers will rush through. I'm not sure I'd be classified as a thinker in McKibben's sense - I think he's referring to those movers and shakers at the cutting edge of thought, as it were - but I must say, what I read of Solnit's ideas certainly made me question some of my deepest assumptions about human nature. Essentially she questions the whole Hobbesian package regarding the law of the jungle governing the deepest roots of our behaviour. It seems that in instances like the Hurricane Katrina saga people's essential instincts were to help each other - despite the story the mainstream media felt necessary to spin, possibly because it was felt to be what should have happened according to our models of human behaviour. The lawlessness set in when the authorities decided some law was necessary.

Now all this sounds suspiciously utopian in its drift. But it chimes with a few things I've learned and noticed over the years. At the very least, it's a reminder that the world and those on it are often a lot more complicated than our mental models of them can allow for.

Periodically

I'm trying to finish the November 5, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books. That makes reading it sound like a bit of a pain, but the quality of articles in the issue in question is excellent and I'm thoroughly enjoying the read. I bought it originally having read Jerome Groopman's enlightening article Right & Wrong Diagnosis on-line (here) and decided I wanted a 'proper' copy, as it were. I then discovered the issue to be full of unputdownable stuff - John Carey on a new biography of Robbie Burns, as just one example. The problem has been that unputdownable as it is I have had to keep putting it down.

And this problem has been compounded by my puchase of another, later issue when we were in London along with a tasty-looking London Review of Books for the month of December. Both were a lot cheaper than they would have been in Singapore. Fortunately, I managed to avoid loading up with piles of other worthy magazines - this being made easier to do than in past visits to the UK by the relative dearth of items of interest on the shelves of places like W.H. Smith. I assume the business is moving on-line by some mysterious process. Or perhaps it's just symptomatic of the general cultural dumbing-down for which our species has opted. Or perhaps it's my fault for simply not reading enough.

Anyway, part of this weekend is being dedicated to cutting into my backlog of reading. I'm also intending to try and view all the DVDs I've accumulated recently - not many in terms of what other people have got (about 5 to watch) but tricky for someone as resolutely movie-averse as myself.

Satisfaction

Very satisfying said the missus, just five minutes ago, of her banana and walnut cake, as we munched several choice slices. Accompanied as we were by Dylan's Together Through Life and lashings of tea I'd venture to suggest she was not wrong. As highlights (of life) go, this is a strong contender for the year's list.

Retrospective: Odd Harmonies

It was back in the little apartment we rented in Paris, in the Marais - great place to be, by the way: right by the river, lots of halal eateries. Basically it was a one-bedroom flat, but there was a sturdy sofa bed in the front room for the girls and they enjoyed having the living-room to themselves, with tv, DVD player and the like, once Noi and I had taken off to the land of nod. I suspect our nieces had a few late night sessions.

I was the first to wake in the morning, to do the dawn prayer. Then I would use all my powers of persuasion to get Fafa up to do the same. Noi and Fifi weren't able to do prayers for the few days we were there. Once Fafa had prayed she took herself back to her bed for a few extra zzzzzzzzs. (That kid can really sleep.) So I'd be left with a bit of time on my hands and not much to do except read and listen to a bit of music. I'd start with some fairly tranquil stuff so the girls could sleep on, but gradually put on some more lively sounds as the morning truly arrived. Still it took a long time to stir the troops.

After I'd bought the Fripp and Eno Equatorial Stars album that became the first choice in the earliest hours - slow, trance-like, drifting: no sleeper could protest. One morning, as the CD was playing, I turned on my mobile phone. I'm no great lover of these generally pernicious devices and had mine turned resolutely off for most of our time in Europe. I was simply checking for anyone who might have tried to make contact in the last day or so.

The most extraordinary thing happened. As you no doubt know, most of these phones seem to come with a little bit of start-up music. Mine being manufactured by Nokia plays that nah-nah-naah-nah-naah phrase, a sound that gets increasingly irritating the more I hear it. But not this morning. The phone certainly played its ditty, but this time in the most magical synchronisation, rhythmically and harmonically with the cunning musical stylings of our ambient heroes. It seemed like business as usual on the Equatorial Stars front - I didn't know the music well enough to be aware that Eno had not deliberately incorporated the Nokia tune in its textures as a kind of joke. But the irritating ditty was now revealed, in its utterly-transformed-yet-the-same form, as one of the great motifs of our time.

And instantly it was gone, never to be recaptured. Spooky.