John Martyn - Small Hours (1978)

genius

John Martyn - I'd Rather be the Devil

Evil.

John Martyn - I'd Rather be the Devil

Evil.

Ah hang on...we're hosting the Olympics in 2012, aren't we? I just remembered. Perfect timing.

Well done everyone!

Errr. Though on the evil/greatness thing maybe this song wins. Sorry about the video, nowt to do with me.

Yep, that's right. I'm listening to a lot of rockabilly today.

Nice one Bonsai.

Cheer up, Ping!

Richard Thompson - Cold Kisses - California 2005

If there is a correlation between acknowledgement of evil and artistic greatness, unsurprisingly, the winner is Richard Thompson.


Here I am in your room going through your stuff
Said you'd be gone five minutes, that's time enough
Here in your drawer there's lacy things
Old credit cards and beads and bangles and rings
Well I think I've found what I'm looking for
Hidden away at the back of the drawer
Here's the life that you led before

Old photographs of the life you led
Arm in arm with Mr X Y and Z
Old boyfriends big and small
Got to see how I measure up to them all
There is a place we all must start, love
Who were you holding in that fond embrace
I've found a door into your heart, love
And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

Here I am behind enemy lines
Looking for secrets, looking for signs
Old boyfriends big and small
Got to see how I measure up to them all
This one's handsome, not too bright
This one's clever with his hands alright
Tougher than me if it came to a fight
And this one's a poet, a bit of a wet
Bit of a gypsy, a bit of a threat
I wonder if she's got over him yet

Old passions frozen in the second
Who were you holding in that fond embrace
Hearts have a past that must be reckoned
And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

Time to put the past away
That's your footstep in the street I'd say
Tie the ribbon back around it
Everything just the way I found it
And I can hear you turn the key
And my head's buried when you see me
In a Margaret Miller mystery
And do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses
Do you still feel the warmth of cold kisses

You know I take Abba EXTREMELY seriously and all that….

Abba’s The Day Before You Came, the penultimate song they released and upon the success of which the prolongation of their existence as a group depended, manages, without any hysteria or grandiosity, to be a fundamentally messianic work.

Lyrically, and it’s primarily lyrically that I’m going to deal with it, the song maintains a brilliant and mysterious tension between the mundanity of a daily life at best now only half remembered, and the visitation of some kind that has subverted and overturned it utterly .


The assumption holds, given that the details of the day are partly conjectural (I must have ... I suppose….) that the life lived after that day carries none of the hallmarks of the life as now lived. Certainly the life sketched out in The day before you came is one of which the bearer has grown weary. What is also implied of course is that the violence of the intercession into the normal way of things was so dazzling and traumatic as to partially eclipse that which immediately preceded it.

The song is a message from the other side of a divide, to a YOU who must be unaware of the details of the life that has been interrupted. This is partly what prevents the song from being just another song about a new relationship, that along with the title (the day before we met would imply something other than the day before you came, in which there is no reciprocity) suggestive of something in the nature of a visitation.

It may of course be simply that death has taken her, but the song’s failure to hint at any such tragic dimension undercuts that, as does the muted rapture in, the clipped serenity of the voice. Rather the song leaves open a space that can not be adequately talked about (or imagined by the listener) language still being tied to the day before you came, to the objects, rituals and routines that have melted into air. The day before can be talked about, but not the day after. There isn’t a void at the centre of the song, but rather in front of it and the void is to be welcomed. It’s a song which sets a threshold and speaks in a now redundant language of that threshold.

The singer exists in the songs future, temporally beyond ( it always feels to me, at some great distance beyond) the features of the day she enumerates. That future has a dual character in the song, as anticipated by the central character as she goes about her life it will be composed of days identical to today, the singer, now on the other side of the threshold knows that the future is radically unlike the anticipated future. The arrival is impossibly sudden, could never have been anticipated.

If it is love that YOU brings it is love in a form that is also beyond representation by any standard trope. By this point ABBA had all been through long marriages and divorces had risen to the height of their fame and seen it begin to fall away, they weren't young. Having already been wrung through all the illusions still they have not arrived at despair, the bare, undelineated possibility of change exists, only a “ You”, an addressee without any formal content exists, the you of a pure future rinsed clean of any projection or expectation, an unknowable certainty. This is the messianic apprehension in the song, and an undoubted source of its appropriately quiet yet tremendous power, the unthinkable, unnameable, unbidden and irrevocable sundering of one world and the introduction of another.

“Oh yes I’m sure my life was quite well within its usual frame/ the day before you came.”

ABBA - The Day Before You Came

I was born in '63
Got a little job in the factory
I don't know much about Kennedy
I was too busy working in the factory

We got a kid that's two, we got another one due
We get by the best we can do
The factory's got a good medical plan
And, cousin, I'm a union man

Saying, Yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir - Work !

I was born in Mechanicsburg
My daddy worked for Pontiac 'til he got hurt
Now he's on disability
And I got his old job in the factory

Saying, Yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir - Work !

Early in the morning I feel a chill
The factory whistle blows loud and shrill
I'd kill my wife or she'd kill me
But we gotta go to work in the factory

Six days a week at the factory
Up early in the morning at the factory
I've been working in the factory Johnny,
I've been working in the factory
Kickin' asbestos in the factory
Punchin' out Chryslers in the factory
Breathin' that plastic in the factory
Makin' polyvinyl chloride in the factory

I also really like this ( it's like Ipecac is my label of the year or summat, shudder) largely because I like Dalek not because it does anything especially new. Yes I know it's all a bit Wordsound circa 1988, but then agan I've also been listening to this with a fair degree of pleasure. Yeah, I also know that Bully records is sooooooo five years ago too, but there's just something to that white-B-boys-try-Krautrock (see:Sixtoo) that I find kind of deeply appealing.

On a somewhat less edifying note, surprise, surprise the Spleen has googled up *this while hunting for porn. So what was the search term that got you to this then, Bonsai?









*I've manfully resisted two puns here, the first the obvious "came across", the second that "Pipi's spunk will be all over the internet in a matter of days." It's all about restraint, innit

I like this post on celebrity over at the Pinocchio theory, using one of Graham Harman’s concepts, that of allure, to tease out something of the nature of modern celebrity.

One of the reasons I like it is that it helps me to understand Harman a bit more. My lack of understanding has nothing to do with Harman’s prose or presentation which is basically as straightforward and lucid as you could hope for. One of the tedious things about having no philosophical training/background is just how long it takes you to understand exactly what other people are going on about via a process of incrementally less baffling encounters with their work/thought, so it’s often when their ideas are applied to pop-cultural phenomenon that you can get a grasp on at least some aspect of them. This was one of the great beauties of the Music press circa the mid to late eighties, as we all know, something that has now largely shifted to the blogosphere.

It’s true that I feel a kind of responsibility to know in the degree of depth that I can, the Significant Thought Of The Day. I assume that it’s kind of incumbent on everyone to be as aware of philosophical trends and significant thinkers as possible. That it’s a kind of a human obligation, some form of basic indebtedness for having existed at all. The fact remains that understanding just what the fuck anyone’s going on about can be tricky. I well remember accidentally seeing Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual at the ICA a few years ago having arrived too late for the screening of Beckett’s Play. I’ll give it a go I thought, having already eyeballed a number of his books in the bookshop. I followed the argument for about the first ten minutes, and then my head imploded, trapping me in a dark, confined space with a huge madman ranting incomprehensible and harshly inflected gibberish at me for another two hours. What the fuck was that all about?

At those what the fuck was that all about moments you can go two ways. Decide that it’s either bullshit/not worth your time and effort to find out about or make some effort to get to grips with it. I’ll do the latter. This won’t immediately, necessarily make me any happier; in fact it will just present me with a disheartening seemingly impossible uphill slog. Lacan? Christ, I understand the rudiments and this is after a couple of years of exposure to his thought, and only ever reading secondary texts of course. I have read Zizek’s “How to read Lacan” several times and each time grasped a concept that was initially elusive a little better, and hey, this is the idiot’s guide. Darian Leader’s “Why do women write more letters than they post?” another, widely praised introduction to Lacan’s thought struck me as being pretty difficult to understand and there were long passages where I was completely lost. Never mind. I’ll return to it. Again.

I also work on another assumption, that it’s much better to repeatedly fail to understand something than just to decide it’s incomprehensible and stop trying, I also work on the assumption that basically I can and will understand something if I continue, it may simply be that what prevents me from understanding it is the time I have to devote to it. Some people will get it in ten minutes, it might take me a lifetime, or more, but what am I supposed to be doing that's so much more gratifying/rewarding anyway? I also assume that bluffing is a) immediately detectable even to other bluffers and b) antithetical to what brought you there in the first place.

What I am broadly encouraged by is the fact that if you do return to it, if you do think about it, probe at it, reflect on it, it will yield up its meaning, or at least a meaning. It will sound perverse but one of the best experience s of my life was being stuck in Ramsgate as a twenty six year old with the collected works of Wallace Stevens and little else to distract me, no You Tube in those days. I read poem after poem in total incomprehension until I got to “On the road home” one of the simpler expositions of Steven’s thought, a toehold of sorts. Then other pieces began to take on a sort of sense until I felt confident that I could reasonably offer an idea as to what Stevens was about. It required months of engagement (but hey, y'know it was a deeply committed and complex poet's lifework I mean, excuse me for not immediatley having a handle on him) to come up with nothing very sophisticated, a basic idea, and there is still much of his work that remains thoroughly obscure to this day.

The point is it was an adventure, a form of exploration, discovery and limited conquest that all took place in a dingy basement flat with a book from the local library. I take it that the goal of life in some ways is to make its primary elements thought, language, the body and the thoughts, bodies and language(s) of others the primary source of pleasure. this is one of the ways we escape from the poverty of over-reliance on "things". Perhaps I’m idealising it, but after a certain stage I imagine that the mind needs less and less material in order to occupy itself, that a single object/concept can be viewed from and wrung through so many perspectives and processes that it yields up a multiform richness . This is the alchemy of thought and its addictive quality, also its liberating aspect.

So despite Professor Power's* heroic attempts to explain phenomenology to me on a bus ride to Stratford one rainy afternoon, I’ll probably have to keep banging my head against that particular edifice for a good long while. Don’t worry though; eventually I’ll shake something loose.


*And actually I should point out here that the people I know who genuinely know stuff are always much more intellectually generous than those who know relatively little. This is testified to by the fact that they would be immediately uncomfortable at the idea that “they really know stuff.”

There’s an interesting overlap between the question of how much pop shapes our erotic imagination, and Reynolds’s recent diagnosis of Havershamitis. It’s easy enough to change the way you look, for instance, to start going a bit more mainstream Gap-dad as you get older in funkily age-appropriate ways but is this necessarily calibrated to any internal shifting and reshaping in your object of desire?

It’s always a bit cowardly not personalizing things like this, isn’t it? So the crux of this question would be, do I as a balding, badly dressed thirty eight year old and pillar of my local community still fancy teenage Goths or has the passage of twenty years worth of rich and varied life experience served to gently affix my libido elsewhere.

The answer at least in my case is no. This puts me in the miserable/threatening realm of the leering and creepy, of course ( lock up your self-harming daughters!) But hey, I’m just trying to be honest with you. Certain other types of maturity and self-surpassing may well occur but these will often be related to what seem to me more malleable and fungible aspects of the psyche, discursive matters, the kind of hardcore chemical cathecting we’re talking about, no matter how finally obscure the object of desire might actually be etc is probably ineradicable. You might gloss it, but it’ll hang around needling you.

There’s another problem here, a Catch-22 of a kind, which is that as you get older and your clothing represents your inner set of convictions/subcultural cleavings less and less, how do you spot someone whose inner world roughly correlates with your own ( ie miserable, book obsessed, alienated types, y’know, the exciting ones!) if they are doing the same thing? Clothing is after all a convenient form of shorthand, marking out a broadish set of tastes/orientations and hence promises of varying degrees of connection. However, precisely the set of compulsions that have lead up to you divesting yourself of your costume will make you wary of a women/man of the same age still wearing them ( Havershamed-up, is, I believe, the term) whereas if they’re young you can offer yourself the consolation that at least they’ll grow out of it in the way you yourself haven’t quite managed yet. Or ever will.

So this post is really just an apologia for still fancying girls who look like they’d be going down the Phono in Leeds if it was 1989, innit?

Except I’m not apologizing.

yeah..Iv'e been trying hard not to like this...Patton's involved...but it IS a bit of a monster.

Excellent stuff. Valter on Caina. I still haven't got round to responding to his earlier post on music-as-gift. I wonder what Poetix made of this release.

I recently submitted a bit on Caina to a well-known music publication, but unfortunately it wasn't used, leaving me free to put it up here, I guess. I was asked to edit it down quite substantially, which was an interesting enough process in itself (well it was a first for me) so I'll stick both versions up.

Caina is apparently “Doom” and certainly on the discerning metalheadz label-of-choice Profound Lore but this shouldn’t be allowed to affect our judgement of just who and what he is. Doom? No. Metalgaze? Drone? Black Metal? Nope.

Caina is in fact vastly more interesting and important than any generic pigeonholing would suggest. His first album, the wistful, plangent, brutalised “Mourner” with it’s desperate yearning for belief, (“break yourself on rocks”) was a testimonial to the submerged, disavowed history of Britain over the past twenty five years, the grim, strangulated state of the nation behind the bright façade, a missive from those left to drift and dream through late Capitalist stagnation. It was an album steeped in a sense of both history and history’s end, “Wormwood over Albion.” A bedsit eschatology cobbled together from second hand paperbacks on Crowley and Swedonborg, from death metal and millennial folk.

With “Temporary Antennae” it’s clear from the first track “Manuscript found in an unmarked grave 1919”, as its blustery silver-grey drones and pinwheeling wind chimes give way to a quote from William Hope Hodgeson, (author of “The House on the Borderland” the novel that obsesses the central character of Ian Sinclair’s “ Radon Daughters”) that we are within a particular continuum of Englishness. Caina, self-styled “ cartographer of misery,” is part of a long tradition of English hermetic discontent and his work owes much more to John Martyn, Nick Drake, the Smiths, Durruti Column, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine and their unfairly usurped heirs both sonically and in terms of sensibility than it does to presumed influences like Sabbath or Burzum.

The Brit Pop/Cool Britannia counter-revolution lumped us with a culture of permanent recycling. Caina’s work is both a continuation of the modernist impulses of post-rock bands like Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis and a result of their having been banished to the margins by the arrival of Suede et al and the inauguration of Pop as heritage industry. Increasingly metal has served as the arena in which those fabled smart, disaffected, trapped kids go for kicks and it’s precisely that toxic, invigorating injection of metal that has allowed Caina to expand on this lineage. Metal certainly has its dreary Hipster contingent, but one among many of Cainas’v irtues is his deep, almost subterranean unfashionability. In a world of compulsive irony Caina is bracingly earnest and unashamedly pretentious. If the Urban is the locus of all innovation an excitement, Caina is determinedly provincial and rural. Gadfly networking and collaborative eclecticism is the default artistic mode? Caina is singularly insular and withdrawn. “Temporary Antenae” is much closer to the frail, serotonin-depeleted pastoralism of Crescent or the chiming, autumnal ruinology of July Skies than it is to any of his label mates.


This doesn’t mean of course that he doesn’t also know how to rock out when required. “Ten men went up river” a kind of sonic analogue to James Dickey’s “Deliverance” kicks of with a staccato riff, all dully serrated ferrous sheen and pointed determination that’s slowly overwhelmed by long idling waterways and ends up mired in a humid, flybown backwater. “Tobacco Beetle” rapidly acquires monolithic critical mass then slowly unravels before surging skyward again on massive tarnished wings. Elsewhere the mood is more bucolic. “Willows and Whipporwills’” luminous guitar line is slowly eaten away by a noxious fug of grey noise and Caina’s slough-of-despond growling. The title track goes through several movements, from almost Gregorian vocal interplay into heavy-weather shoegaze drone, culminating in a surging, Motorik drum-machine driven finale, while “ Larval Door” with it’s drum pattern stolen from the Cure’s “In between days” and lyrical guitar is positively jaunty. Throughout a wracked English pantheism prevails, a pervasive sense of fragile and hard won beauty being overwhelmed, of moments of violent struggle against an all embracing and seductive torpor.


In short, a superb and heartening record, a record that reminds you that all is not yet lost. The quintessential Romantic figure, the pale, eternally questing, brilliant malcontent, sick with dreams and raging at reality has found another expression here, skulking through the ruined industry, the half-dead towns and the overgrown graveyards. It makes little difference whether the book stuffed in his back pocket is Ballard or Blake, whether the music in his head phones is Bowie or Bathory: he is a true son of England.

and the edit.

It’s clear from “Temporary Antennae’s” first track “Manuscript found in an unmarked grave 1919”, its blustery silver-grey drones and pinwheeling wind chimes give way to a quote from William Hope Hodgeson, that we are within a particular continuum of Englishness. Caina, self-styled “cartographer of misery,” is part of a long tradition of English hermetic discontent and his work owes much more to John Martyn, Nick Drake, the Smiths, Durruti Column, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine and their unfairly usurped heirs both sonically and in terms of sensibility than it does to presumed influences like Sabbath or Burzum.

The Brit Pop/Cool Britannia counter-revolution lumped us with a culture of permanent recycling. Caina’s work is both a continuation of the modernist impulses of post-rock bands like Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis and a result of their having been banished to the margins by the arrival of Suede et al and the inauguration of Pop as heritage industry. Increasingly metal has served as the arena in which those fabled smart, disaffected, trapped kids go for kicks and it’s precisely that toxic, invigorating injection of metal that has allowed Caina to expand on this lineage. Metal certainly has its dreary Hipster contingent, but one among many of Cainas’ virtues is his deep, almost subterranean unfashionability. In a world of compulsive irony Caina is bracingly earnest and unashamedly pretentious. If the Urban is the locus of all innovation an excitement, Caina is determinedly provincial and rural. Gadfly networking and collaborative eclecticism is the default artistic mode? Caina is singularly insular and withdrawn. “Temporary Antenae” is much closer to the frail, serotonin-depeleted pastoralism of Crescent or the chiming, autumnal ruinology of July Skies than it is to any of his label mates.


This doesn’t mean of course that he doesn’t also know how to rock out when required. “Ten men went up river” a kind of sonic analogue to James Dickey’s “Deliverance” kicks of with a staccato riff, all dully serrated ferrous sheen and pointed determination that’s slowly overwhelmed by long idling waterways and ends up mired in a humid, flybown backwater. “Tobacco Beetle” rapidly acquires monolithic critical mass then slowly unravels before surging skyward again on massive tarnished wings. Elsewhere the mood is more bucolic. “Willows and Whipporwills’” luminous guitar line is slowly eaten away by a noxious fug of grey noise and Caina’s slough-of-despond growling. The title track goes through several movements, from almost Gregorian vocal interplay into heavy-weather shoegaze drone, culminating in a surging, Motorik drum-machine driven finale, while “ Larval Door” with it’s drum pattern stolen from the Cure’s “In between days” and lyrical guitar is positively jaunty. Throughout a wracked English pantheism prevails, a pervasive sense of fragile and hard won beauty being overwhelmed, of moments of violent struggle against an all embracing and seductive torpor.

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

-- Theodore Roethke

Mama Mia’s particular hotchpotch of themes and genres and its rapturous reception (fastest selling DVD evahhh!!!) tells us something about the dismal state of culture circa 2008. Swedish pop meets Bollywood in Greece, with an Anglo American cast. It’s supposed to be a highly-coloured, undeniable confection, but is in reality an unappetising dog’s dinner composed of baklava, kulfi, salted herring and candyfloss. With extra side orders of corn and cheese.

What’s awful about much of it has been anatomised elsewhere; the greatest of its sins is not just its fundamental misuse/misunderstanding of Abba’s body of work, but the terrible clumsiness with which certain songs are shoehorned into the narrative conceits. Here, for example, When all is said and done accompanies the marriage scene (but not, gasp! the one you expected!). Slipping through my fingers makes no sense, in context, from its opening line “Schoolbag in hand she leaves home in the early morning”. It is kind of a song about loss and daughters, but is rather more a meditation, as much of Abba is, on the collision of fantasy and reality, on the ungraspability of experience, the half awful/half joyful evanescence of it all. Mama Mia forgets the half-awful part. It would take only the most cursory of sing-a-longs to Waterloo, a song that characterizes love as a catastrophic defeat to realise that there is a deeply perverse core to Abba. Mama Mia just turns a blind eye to the songs themselves. They’re there in the broadest possible terms, (a song about wanting a man/a song about falling in love etc) to the extent that the whole project, transplanting watchful Scandinavian pessimism into a Place In the Sun aspirational Greece does no justice whatsoever to the music it purports to celebrate

But hey, none of that matters because the point remains that if Meryl Streep, (I mean she’s got Oscars and stuff) is prepared to make an utter twat of herself skipping along a mountainside in dungarees, and Pierce Brosnan will gamely have-a-go, bellowing his way like a gut shot water buffalo with sinusitis through the aforementioned When all is said, then who are we, the mere spectator, to churlishly refuse to surrender to it all. Nothing perhaps is viewed with more suspicion than your inability to just have a good time. Especially when everyone else is. But then there’s an especially brittle phoniness to the British attempt to be unselfconscious. Mama Mia’s determination to be a bit of harmless fun, its determination to overwhelm your critical faculties with its ceaseless outpouring of emotion and excitement gives it a certain aggravating passive-aggressive quality. A part of its strategy is just to embarrass you so much that after an hour or so you’ll have been so thoroughly bludgeoned that you kind of give up hope and just wearily assent. One of those people who insist on dragging you up out of your chair to dance despite the vehemence of your protest and manifest discomfort, because they think that finally they're actually doing you a favour. While it’s not quite as desperate to distract you from its own ramshackle mediocrity as Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive farrago Moulin Rouge (I’d rather have Brosnan try Song To the Siren than I would hear Ewan McGregor flex his tonsils again) it falls desperately short of the kind of swimmingly exuberant overflow of colour and sentiment that Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding attained, despite ripping off its rain soaked finale.

In X-Factor Britain, we’re all just a step away from celebrity and there is no higher accomplishment than being able to y’know, sing and dance. These capacities, along with that elusive X-factor, detectable only by those of truly heightened sensibilities such as Simon Cowell and Sheryl Cole are your tickets out of the most degrading of all personal situations, anonymity. Mama Mia with its I-can-do-better-than-that pseudo-democratization of enticing blandness plugs right into the notion that the distance between you, in your bedsit and the supremely nondescript young couple in the movie is wafer thin. So close I’m practically already there. And mum and dad, you can be funky and passionate too. Your children will not view you with contempt and scorn, we can all live together in the great intergenerational Karaoke booth that is (or at least was) Britain Inc circa 2008. And what’s wrong with a bit of harmless escapism? After all it’s not like anyone has the capacity to change anything! It’s weirdly fitting that as the disparity between rich and poor increases to unprecedented levels and class mobility disappears Bollywood becomes the model for Brit Feelgood. I’ve yet to see Slumdog Millionaire but given it’s by Danny Boyle, my least favourite British filmmaker of all time, and knowing the concept I don’t hold out much hope. (It has of course been sold out all over town).

But then again I take things too seriously, don’t I?

Right, I'm about to watch Mamma Mia......

more on that later.

This isn’t the post on Abba that I intend to write but may at least be a preamble to it. I should point out now that I take Abba EXTREMELY seriously.

Basically I’ve been listening to the Visitors a lot, having picked it up just before Christmas, with a few bonus tracks, on a cd re-issue. Obviously it’s a great record, but not really substantially better or different in tone to anything else they ever did. As it’s a wee bit more Nordic, darker and colder and a tad more keyboard-y ( and it has a sinister title) it has the reputation of being the Abba album it’s ok to like, something partly based on the fact that the single finest piece of writing on Abba, or possibly on anything, Taylor Parkes' essay on the Visitors in the sadly-in need -of-a-re-issue Unknown Pleasures book given away with Melody Maker donkey’s years ago, has taken on a kind of holy status. Well, it has for me and the Baron at least.

One of the singles from The Visitors was When all is said and done, the other of Abba’s two great divorce songs, along with The Winner takes it all. The Winner is touched by a certain tragic existential grandeur, a brilliant combination of the cosmic and the quotidian. “I don’t want to talk if it makes you feel bad” / “the gods may roll a dice. Their minds as cold as ice” capture something of the agonizing enormity of emotional pain, the whole world is subsumed by it, from the tiniest domestic detail up to the nightmarishly impersonal nature of the universe. It’s a magnificent example of the way in which an entire cosmology can cluster and set its co-ordinates around a relationship, the degree to which separation can be an apocalyptic experience, the sundering away of the world whose underlying principles you understood and it’s replacement with a raw, unmediated reality too vertiginously vast for you to do anything but shrink from for a while. The world doesn’t make sense without you.

But When all is said and done has a grandeur all its own. I’ll expand on this when I write more on Abba and their perfect distillation of what for Humanist critics is largely considered to be the fundamental purpose of art, that it offers us the possibility of reconciliation to the flawed and compromised nature of our efforts at happiness, the Chekhovian “laughter that smiles through tears”, or more prosaically, the bittersweet. The simultaneous recognition/acceptance of the impossibility of fulfilment brings the joy of escape from the unattainable ideal at the same time as the disappointment of unfilled hopes compresses some other part of you.

Clearly there are FAR too many bands aiming at this, well, let’s call it, Humanist Affect (fugging Coldplay, and all them cunts) but no one has ever attained it so well as ABBA, and any idea that it will be possible to surpass them seem to me to be wrong. They represent a certain type of horizon. I will elaborate on why at some future point. Suffice to say that the affect aimed at, which requires a certain kind of internal tension between form and content can only be fully realised in Pop. Rock has a hard time getting at it and indeed it’s when it moves closest to pop, say John Cougar Melloncamp’s Jack and Diane ( whose rousing, sing-along chorus is “ oh yeah, life goes in/long after the thrill of living is gone” ) that it’s most effective.

But for the moment I’m focussing on When all is said and done. There is an element to the song, a part of what makes it so joyful, that carries in fact a certain kind of ironic, counter-intuitive comic charge, suggestive of the idea that finally the best role some people can play in your life is that of an ex-partner. Indeed it may even be the case that the qualities you recognize in someone, that leads you onto want to be with them, is that they have all the qualities of a great ex. The relationship you can have once you’ve got through the tedious preparatory rigmarole of having the actual “relationship” and break-up itself may have been what you were aiming at all along. You're looking for someone who will finally forgive you as you will forgive them.

There can be an insufferable side to this, a certain Liberal-humanist grandstanding (“look how superhumanly mature and non-judgemental I am") and equally it may be that in later life, going round the block for the Nth time it’s the only possible entry into the narcissistic mirroring that gets you so hard the very first time round, rather than celebrating each other’s implicit amazingness (you’re amazing and you think I’m amazing so I must be as amazing as you are too, and you are really amazing, so…) you have access to a more muted but still joyful bit of mutual gratification. But on another level, and at it’s best, it’s a liberating acknowledgement of both another persons limitations and their depths, a desire to engage with the person in full, fantasy traversed, the relationship itself just the arduous shedding of illusion, the preparation for the really gratifying thing, being the ex.

There’s certainly a wonderfully celebratory, deeply moving form of engagement in When all is said and done which isn’t in Winner takes it all. First off, Winner, like so many ABBA songs is fundamentally addressed to another, to “YOU” a device much more common in ABBA than any other band and surely vital to their impact, (along with the skill with which their videos, surely the most singularly brilliant ever made, exploited the tensions of their inter-relationship, but again, more on this later) When all is said, is all about “we”. It’s not just that it’s still “we”; perhaps it’s only now that it finally can be.

"Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run

There's no hurry any more when all is said and done"

ABBA - WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE

Here's to us one more toast and then we'll pay the bill
Deep inside both of us can feel the autumn chill
Birds of passage, you and me
We fly instinctively
When the summer's over and the dark clouds hide the sun
Neither you nor I'm to blame when all is said and done

In our lives we have walked some strange and lonely treks
Slightly worn but dignified and not too old for sex
We're still striving for the sky
No taste for humble pie
Thanks for all your generous love and thanks for all the fun
Neither you nor I'm to blame when all is said and done

It's so strange when you're down and lying on the floor
How you rise, shake your head, get up and ask for more
Clear-headed and open-eyed
With nothing left untried
Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run
There's no hurry any more when all is said and done

Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run
There's no hurry any more when all is said and done

The Specials - Ghost Town

i'd like to dedicate this tune to.... 2009!

Interestingly, the expression “there is a policeman in all our heads” (and he must be destroyed, or some such) was the old hippy argument against the repressive rules and feelings of guilt and responsibility that kept you tied to the work ethic and being a good citizen. He must be vanquished, he restricts access to pleasure, or at least he condemns us to pleasure and holds us away from jouissance, but in terms of the postmodern superego, whose injunction is (at least according to Zizek) “Enjoy!” then the policeman starts to look more like a friend, actually, more like a subversive.

Equally interestingly if you thought about who, critically, had done the best job of promoting music as a form of ecstatic transport and access to jouissance it would be Simon. There is a distinction, I admit, between being overwhelmed/swept up in a particular musical event/song/moment etc and a culture in which we are all overwhelmed at every moment (and it must be even more draining if you’re a critic and actually have to do it for a living rather than a blogging civilian) but the question kind of remains whether our current imperative to enjoy and the sheer mind-numbing/evacuating superfluity of material, isn’t in some ways a social analogue of the kinds of pleasures that Simon was initially seeking out. An inundation too vast for the mind to hold onto.

Morely’s positive, poptomist vision of it is of the individual sensuously adrift in an endless warm flow of sound and vision. But for the rest of us , who may at some point have entertained other hopes, the problem is, I suppose, that this questing after jouissance was always supposed to have broader social consequences, a little bit like the old “if everyone got on one their would be no war, man” argument. Surely a society in which everyone listens to MBV (or whatever) must be a better place. Surely exposure to these kinds of coruscating left-field art forms must transform the subjectivities of those exposed to them. The hippy ethos that social transformation starts with individual transformation, first free yourself!

If destroying the policeman once looked like the political gesture, then perhaps reconstructing him is the current task.

Or more probably it’s not about the tackling the policeman in your head at all, but the policeman outside your door.

Several things have set me off thinking over the past couple of days, so there'll be several overlapping and contradictory posts coming up.

First of all, Seb’s throwaway comment below that if you’re not “set up that way” you won’t get MBV opens up an interesting argument on the way music is received/appreciated/apprehended. The materialist argument ( I’d tend to think of it more as a dismissal) as far as I understand it, suggests that we’re each of us set up along certain neural pathways in the brain to appreciate certain sounds, it’s kind of hardwired into us. I will like Oasis because of the way my brain is, you’ll like Terry Riley because of your circuitry, only a fool argues in matters of hardware etc. Brute fact! Forget your pussy/redundant cultural/psychological readings and accept your machinanimality, whimpering Humanist!

But my experience of listening to MBV isn’t consistent, it’s had a different character at different times, the music has done different things, been different at different stages, neither it nor I have had a definite fixed form* or inter-relationship. If you’re like me and often listen to a particular record super-obsessively ( a habit picked up back in the bad old/good old days when you listened to the few records you had repeatedly, when you’re imaginative investment in the records was so deep that to some degree it almost didn’t matter what the record itself was. Christ, I remember being so strapped for music as a teenager that if I bought a record I HAD to like it, just too much time and effort ( trips to Eastern Bloc in Manchester etc) had gone into acquiring it) then forget about them completely for anything up to twenty years at a time, encountering them again can be thoroughly disconcerting. I can’t really imagine myself enjoying Wiseblood’s “ Dirtdish” that much anymore, though when I was sixteen it was simply the greatest thing imaginable, the pinnacle of human expression (still entirely possible I might be given mediating leeway through the enjoyment of another, I guess).

On the other hand, I still love the Young Gods first album, but would have been literally unable to sit through anything by Orange Juice, let alone Miles Davies or King Tubby at the same time I was getting into it. That kind of stuff didn’t compute, but not really in any kind of neurological/ sonic dataflow way, it simply wasn’t the music that someone who wanted to be what I wanted to be listened to. At that point my relationship to music was almost entirely scopophilic, I identified with the attitude/persona of the singers, invariably some variety of macho-yet-tortured, irresistibly fucked-up nihilist, precisely the opposite of my reality as gangly, effeminate, prematurely-ejaculatory teen.

Music’s crucial role in self-definition for some just excises huge chunks of arguably great potential sonic experience out of the air (though without the appropriate receptors/filters you don’t miss out on what you just can’t hear). Certain stuff is just not you; it doesn’t provide the dreamspace, the theatre in which you can act out your ideal-ego. Music is deeply related to self esteem in lots of ways that are both boring and mystifying for anyone who is constituted otherwise. The broadening out of your tastes as you get older is probably related to the fact that self definition is constituted through a wider variety of means/ roles than music, to the point where it may wither away as a concern all together. I’m a tad atavistic in this respect, I confess, despite some ( here come the scare quotes) “improvements” over the years. Hence all the ferocious arguing over the merits of certain bands I may still at times engage in. You diss The Nectarine No 9, dude, in some ways you’re dissing me, and quite deeply. I’ll become hostile. I’ll take it personally.

There is that always entertaining moment when you play someone a song they don’t know, but which is roughly in the arena of their professed tastes and ask them if they like it. Lots of people will want to know who it’s by before committing. I am one of these people and probably, dear blogreader, you are too.

Irritating sadist: What do you think of this?

Impostume: (jejunely) Oh, errmmm, ahh... who is it by?

Irritating sadist: Just yes or no.

Impostume (desperately trying to guess whether he’s recently been railing against this very artist/ genre) Hmm , yeah it’s .. kind of... I dunno.. .who was it again…?

Irritating sadist: I didn’t say. So do you think this is good? Is this “good” music as far as you're concerned? Would you say that you “liked” this? Hmmm?

Impostume: Well…hmm..it’s (cocks head, tries for non-committal expression, lips pursued, deep in contemplation, hoping sadist will drop a hint)

Irritating, persistent sadist: So… si or no?

Impostume ( certain that if he says yes it’s Colour Me Bad, no and it’s The Mike Osborne Trio) Honestly, you’re ridiculous, as if it matters, get a life! (exeunt)

Thirty minutes later Impostume returns in a poorly concealed lather of impatience and self-doubt, brandishing kitchen knife.” Who was that fucking track by!!!!!!!!!!!”

*and given that Ping tells me Loveless is "beautiful" it may be about to shift around again.

Actually, the moderate kerfuffle in the comments box re my dissing of MBV as pissweak forces me to qualify and also extend things a bit.

So, let’s imagine that you spend a certain amount of time enjoying other people’s enjoyment of something that you enjoy. For example, that someone, for argument’s sake let’s call them Ping, discovers the joys of all the American guitar stuff you grew up with, most significantly The Meat Puppets circa “Up on the sun” Big Black circa “Songs about…”, The Buttholes’ “Locust” and “Hairway” and most enthusingly of all Dinosaur’s “ You’re living all over me.” You haven’t listened to any of them in a long, long time but suddenly they mean so much to someone else, they’re so revelatory and they get off so much on listening to them, that it’s almost impossible for you not to share in the delight, you like these records anyway but suddenly now they’re making someone whose happiness you care about happy. This re-intensifies the pleasure. You express enthusiasm for the record; you both pay close attention to it. You say things like, “this bit's fucking great” or simply laugh out loud at a particularly spectacular “moment”. It takes on a kind of hyper-vivid quality, becoming suffused with al other kinds of emotional colourations, becomes something that in a small way you intensify and mould together. In the same way that forced laughter can become real and convulsive, so shared enthusiasms can start from the smallest nudge and then snowball.

So you get it into your head that this person, Ping, should hear Loveless and Isn’t Anything because as far as you remember they’re the daddies, the absolute guitar-reinvention zeniths of the period, peerless, everybody says so. You buy them as a gift to send to said Ping. You listen to them on your own. Your immediate feeling is, Ping’s not going to like this much. It’s not rocky enough. The record sounds lacklustre. You wonder what all the fuss was about. Whether Ping likes it or not I’ve yet to discover, but very possibly, on the basis that Ping does, my own appreciation of it may well be amplified.

Now that may make me, in fact, piss weak in some ways. Don’t you know what you think about anything/like, man? But it kind of raises the question of the degree to which enjoyment is ever not enjoyment of/through the other. The people I have had the most consistent musical dialogue with, my brother in law and sister, are a huge factor in my listening experience. The minute I hear something and think that either Jackie and/or Niall are going to like this, my pleasure in it is boosted. An excellent recent example would be the Shockheaded Peter’s “Are you happy or are you real” the moment I heard it I imagined my sister dancing about the living room to it. Instantly I liked it. There is a deep and gratifying reciprocal element to music appreciation of course, swapping tapes, breathlessly naming tracks and artists in reverence sessions down the pub etc, but I think it goes deeper than that. Even if the people for whom/on whose behalf you’re always listening aren’t concrete others, family members, friends, lovers etc, it's non-contentious enough surely to suggest that you are always listening for someone, in terms of critical voices, political ideas and ideals, a sense of the tradition etc, so a reasonable question might not be, what do you think of that, but, do you have anybody to listen to that for? And with Loveless, I didn't.

Best of all, of course, is when the ones you’re listening to it all for are also the ones you’re listening to it with.

Actually,Throughsilver has just solicited a slightly belated top whatever from me at approximately the same time as Reynolds is ruminating on all things listly on Blissblog, so there’ll be a weird bit of conceptual overlap here. Actually, a couple of us had to stick together a top ten for the year just before Christmas and we had a problem A) immediately coming up with ten albums released in 2008 that we’d devoted any particular time to* and B) immediately coming up with an album of the year, something which in previous years we would have no problem identifying.

Part of it is the sheer amorphousness of the modern listening experience. You’re exposed to so much, both old and new that it’s difficult to give anything more than one listen. If it doesn’t hook you in immediately, why would you return to it when there’s so much other stuff to contend with? It’s the auditory equivalent of channel surfing. What you finally settle on might be defined as much by fatigue as anything. Christ, I’ll commit to this I can’t be bothered keeping on searching, or, I’ll just commit to this straight off, that way I won’t have to bother searching. It’s hard to know whether the lad-ish, questing aspects of music buying/listening aren’t taking over from it’s pleasures (or becoming it’s main pleasure). Less a sense of discovery than kind of nerdish machismo where you prove yourself equal to the sheer wearying excess of it all, something nicely spiked by the eternal muso-boy’s Stockhausen Syndrome, the desire to always be listening to something more obscure/difficult and in increasingly obscure combinations than your peers are, as a desperate attention/kudos grabbing gambit.

Maybe that’s why, echoing Reynolds to a degree, I was pretty middlebrow in my tastes. It’s going like this for me at the moment, I need some broad operative criteria in order to be able to navigate the vast reaches of modern music consumption/production, the chorus of competing critical voices. Last year it was Counterfactual Mainstream. I spent the year filtering everything I heard through the question, is this number one in a world where Britpop never existed?

This sort of lead me on to listening to what is I guess the slightly more Avant end of Indy. Mostly 31 Knots, Of Montreal, Crystal Castles, Tobacco, Gang Gang Dance and yep, Tricky, all of whom seemed to be largely what you would want a mainstream to consist of. I have no idea what Pitchfork’s top ten looks like but there’s probably a big overlap with mine.

I probably picked up on this due to certain weariness with the, ahem, avant garde proper and having overindulged on metal (though Genghis Tron’s “ Board up the House” was a monster, as were the cool and surprising (Tobacco again!) slew of remixes). Every now and then you need to go elsewhere for a while to feel excited by home again. Admittedly you can just pick and mix, listening to the best of everything, all the time, but my brain doesn’t work that way, the pleasure I take in something has to be imaginatively enjoined to some overarching concept, some set of grounding ideas. In other words music is a part of the way I conceptualize things, it’s part of the architecture of my understanding of the world. This means it has a rather different status for me than it does for others, perhaps (I feel it’s a big “perhaps”). I suspect that there’s even a certain moralistic aspect thrown in. I tend to approve of records I enjoy. In other words there’s a whole, admittedly shifting, personal/political/cultural edifice that records slot into.

To give you an example, I was recently having a kind of ad hoc Invisible Jukebox with a couple of well-known local Characters (The Baron/The Monster). Apart from The Baron's astounding ability to name any Krautrock related tune/artist within three seconds of a track starting (“Asmus Teitchens’ took about ten seconds and one ultra-minimal clue fer Christ’s sake!) The Monster, initially rather sniffy about a tune, suddenly rather liked it when he found it was by David Lynch. This makes perfect sense to me. Sound isn’t just sound, it’s the angles we’re viewing it from. It may sound like something off a Wax Trax compilation but if it’s David Lynch sounding like something off a Wax Trax compilation, suddenly it’s far superior in every way to Mussolini Headkick. What you like is largely an argument about who you are and what the world is or ought to be.

So this is who I was and what I thought the world ought to be in 2008. Here’s a top Five!

31 Knots Worried well
Tetine Let your X's
Tricky Knowle West Boy
Dusk and Blackdown Margin’s Music
Caina Temporary Antenna





*I spent a lot of time listening to music from 86-89 this year, for complicated interpersonal reasons, i.e. the music of my youth. Know what? “Loveless” and “ Isn’t anything” sounded piss-weak “You’re living all over me” and “ Hairway to Steven” absolutely staggering. MBV? To quote Brent on Betjeman, “Overrated!”

Update!

I'm sorry but a list of the 150 best albums of 2008 is just nonsense....how do you decide, in the depths, between these micro-fractions of "liking" and tabulate everything coherently.. X is number 135 while Y is definitely number 134. Surely these are demarcations beyond any reasonable/realistic possibility of assessment, plus...who would actually want a) to have heard the 150th best album of the year, the 122nd or whatever and B) not just have immediately dismissed it as " not for me" rather than going...ahh, yes, I enjoy this fractionally more than the last thing which left me totally unmoved...number 117, then....

Pathological!

Hate to open that can of worms again, but....hey, ENJOY!

thanks to Bat!

I’ve just had a retail experience.

As anyone who knows me will readily attest, I’m not much of a one for clothes. Of course I wear them, but, problematically, I always wear exactly the same ones. I often dissemble, pretending that like Einstein I have a wardrobe filled with identical grey suits, my equivalent being a pair of three quid blue jogging pants and a green hooded top.

Fashion is something I don’t get. No not even fashion as such, but wanting to look nice. Who gives a shit? Partially this is just arrogance of course; clearly I’m so intellectually dazzling in person that even a patchy beard and reeking trainers couldn’t put the ladies off. Partly it’s often the sheer shitness of the way people w ho have clearly gone to a huge effort to look good actually look. Christ, they must have a chronic case of turd polisher’s elbow you think to yourself as they lumber in seven hours late still looking like a sack of dung and dogsick with a knot tied in the middle. Plus it takes thought and effort, two of the exigencies of the human condition I normally do my best to avoid.

Sometimes though I have no choice but to think about it. I’m no longer allowed to wear my one pair of jeans to work, you see. This wasn’t a problem for a while as I simply wore my one pair of army trousers. You think I exaggerate but to give you an example, I recently went to Japan for a week with one piece of hand luggage. It weighed three kilos. Two of them were books. What’s the problem with taking off your clothes, or in my case maybe I should use the singular, clothe, taking of your clothe, washing your clothe, sticking your clothe on the radiator overnight then putting your clothe back on again the next day? Still I digress. My army pants are now in such a state of disrepair that I can’t with a clear conscience wear them to work again. You can see my underpants (or perhaps I should say underpant) through the holes both front and back.

I attempted to buy some trousers on Oxford Street just before Christmas. After dragging myself round the major chains for what felt like an eternity in pursuit of a pair of black cords you’ll be pleased to hear that I did finally manage to come back with six cds and the Preston Sturges DVD box set. Then I couldn’t face the prospect of trying again until it was absolutely necessary, hence today’s trip to my local retail park.

The first and most pressing problem I face clotheswise, and this may be a big factor in why I’m so disinterested in them, is that it’s virtually impossible to find anything in my size. Waspish of waist and sinuous of shank as I am I need a thirty four, thirty six. Does that exist anywhere in the UK? Pretty much not, unless you want to pay a hundred quid for a pair of dun Farah slacks from Fatty and Lanky,” weirdly sized clothes for freakishly proportioned social pariahs”. Hey, where’s MY consumer choice Mr Kapitalismos. Oh I see, I don’t “fit” into your convenient retail pigeonholes, huh? Kollectivize Matalan!!!!!!!

The best part of it all is shopping for shoes.

Impostume (entering store: of beleaguered mien) Hello.

Shop assistant (chirpily) Is there anything that myself can be doing for yourself vis a vis the helping of you, izzit?

Impostume (momentarily non-plussed) errr…what’s the largest size you do in a man’s shoe?

Shop assistant (glances down at Impostume’s feet, then recoils in shock and horror, arms flailing up over her face) Fuck me comatose! You could feed half the dossers in London with plates of meat that size!

Actually they’re not THAT big but they are a rather inconvenient size twelve and a half. Meaning you either Rudolf Nureyev around the shop wincing as they tell you they’ll stretch, or flap about like Charlie Caroli as they try and flog you some insoles.

So effectively, for a man of my proportions the British Retail Sector (RIP) gives neither good trouser nor shoe. The trouser it does give suggests that we’re a country populated largely by the pygmy hippo. Fifty two inch waist/twenty six leg? No problem. Can we really fundamentally be a nation of morbidly obese dwarfs? And I’m not even just talking about the Chavscum’s emporiums of choice, where you might think decades of going to work (as if!!!!) on two handfuls of Haribo Star Mix and litre of Red Bull Sugar Blast (“Insulin spike! Yussssssss!!!!”) would have kept them tubby ‘n’ teeny. I’m talking about quality prêt- a-porter clothiers like, err…. Burton and Peacocks.

So anyway the point is I found some. They’re too big round the waist and just about long enough in the leg. Another pair of black Army pants. Expect to both see and probably smell quite a lot of them in the near future.

Still. That’s that for another three years. See you down there in 2012. If anywhere is still open.

Excellent, so that’s only taken just over a year then…

As the regular and devoted Impostume readers (of whom, due to the somewhat extended hiatus in which I was supposed to be finishing that novel ( haven’t yet!!!), there’s now basically none) will already have noted from the comments box below, Charlie has finally got in touch via the magic of the world wide interweb. This is more a tribute to Charlie’s persistence than anything (or, I like to think, the sheer addictive elan of my Pere Ubu related longeurs. Though that comment does worryingly imply that I may have but one topic of conversation.) I’ve just sent him an e-mail, so I’ll keep you updated.

In the pantheon of British grimness they don’t get much grimmer than Fleisher’s “Ten Rillington Place”. It’s hard to imagine that Fleisher spent a huge amount of time in the UK prior to making it (or that Lumet did prior to “The Offence”, or Friedkin prior to “The Birthday Party” ) or that he can have had much first-hand experience of the era of post war austerity it documents. Part of its success is down to the cast and crew of course, the set design, the costumes, the location, the lighting and so on, and much of it to Fleisher’s claustrophobic camerawork, a kind of penny-pinching, drab expressionism.

But there is also a large extent to which “Ten Rillington Place” could have been concocted purely cinematically, out of old Ealing comedies, with their post-War devastation as a backdrop and Sixtie’s kitchen sink dramas. The film is in fact something of a hybrid of the two with a newly permissible level of Seventies sexual realism thrown in. It’s perfectly possible to imagine that Fleisher, working entirely outside England, with an entirely non-British crew could still have concocted something that rang true purely on the basis of having been steeped in the cinema of the decades that preceded it, rather as John Hawkes did with the novella “Whistlejacket”, summoning up a Britain he’d never visited through the stories he was told by British serviceman during the war.

Which leads on to a rough consideration of how best a non-native director might get a grip on England these days (we’ll leave aside the dystopian visions of “Children of men” and “Twenty Eight Weeks Later”, for the moment, though I concede that in some ways it’s only in the dystopian “imagining” of Britain that anything like a realistic representation of the place can come about). The two that most readily spring to mind are Cronenberg and Woody Allen, with two recent Brit-set movies a piece, “Spider” and “Eastern Promise”, “Match Point” and “Cassandra’s Dream.” The most successful of these is “Spider”, arguably because it is largely a period piece and Cronenburg does have the same source material to draw on (it owes quite a lot to "Ten Rillington Place" I'd argue). Where it goes most weirdly and intriguingly wrong is in Allen’s “Cassandra’s dream”, a film which, even more so than “Match Point”, represents contemporary England, or at least London, almost exclusively through reference to previous representations. The London of “Match Point” is a Swinging London, the London of “Blow Up” crossed with the milieu of Losey’s “The Accident”. “Cassandra’s dream” keeps roughly the same vision of Britain but attempts to look at the lives and aspirations of ordinary folk. In his senescense Allen seems to have his had his fantasies that he’s Ingmar Bergman overtaken by the fantasy that he’s Dostoyevsky. With “Cassandra’s dream” all these shortcoming reach such a pitch of hyper-reality that you could actually be watching something like a Mockney version of Fellini’s “Toby Dammit”. Both appaling and fascinating.

The question must be, why are almost all contemporary cinematic visions of England so unsatisfying, why do they feel so wrong, when thirty years ago even the foreigners (and the guy who made “Fantastic Voyage”, at that) could get it right?

“Thirty days of night," is a serviceable take on the vampire genre, a hybrid of Katherine Bigelow’s “ Near Dark,” John Carpenter's “Ghost of Mars” and “Tremors”, in which a gang of existential Vampires besiege a remote Alaskan town.

What’s really significant about it however, is that the leader of the vampire gang is played by Danny Huston. He’s not on screen for any huge amount of time, nor does he really have to do anything other than provide a nemesis to hero Josh Hartnett’s self sacrificing cop, nonetheless he once again steals the show. This is as much a testimony to Huston's greatness as anything. It would be wrong to dismiss Hartnett as a generic himbo, for all his square-jawed matinee idol prettiness he has managed to bring depths of conflict and yearning to most of his recent roles in a series of largely mediocre films, most obviously in De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia”, but also in the so-so remake of “L’appartement" “Wicker Park" (in which he was unfortunate enough to have to compete with memories of Vincent Cassel) and the grindingly po-mo-by-numbers "Lucky Number Slevin.” Clearly though, he’s no match for Huston. Then again, who is?

Few people do voluble, highborn raffishness as well as Huston, witness his towering performances in "IVANSXTC" or "Birth," but in “30 days” he has no intelligible dialogue whatsoever, speaking a subtitled Vampire language augmented by a range of growls, barks and hisses. The gang-leader is a typically, self-consciously modern Vampire, a Romantic nihilist driven by hunger and pain who spouts the usual cod-Nietszchean aphorisms on the godlessness of the universe and the lemming-like stupidity of the mass. It’s a deeply unpromising B-movie bit-part, an unlikey choice for Huston, especially after the overweeningly "literary", Nick Cave scripted "The Proposition", yet he somehow manages to transform into another great performance.

It’s precisely the kind of role that a lesser actor would have camped up and exaggerated, Huston’s tactic seems to be to play it as a kind of saturnine Eastern European thuglord, there’s no cartoon villainy in it all, in fact its marked by a certain slack jawed, heavy browed weariness. What’s additionally interesting about both the role and the performance is that Huston has to speak a non-existent language and communicate in guttural yelps. Again he performs semi-miracles with this unappetizing task, managing not just to bring meaning but even nuance to shrieks, wails and potentially absurd clusters of spooky alien sibilance.

I’m not really suggesting you go out of your way to watch it, but if you do, watch it for him.