Jazz Babies

THE VOICE: ...You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY (in a whisper) : Will I be paid?
THE VOICE: Yes, as usual - in love.
BEAUTY (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips): And will I like being called a jazz-baby?
THE VOICE (soberly) : You will love it .

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; sheet music above from 1920, below from 1919).

Marx Cartoons

Yesterday's Telegraph reports that a Manga introduction to Marx's Capital has recently been published in Japan - cover below (for more about this publication see this).Something that has been around for while is Jesse Drew's Manifestoon, an animation of the Communist Manifesto, a subversive detournement of Disney and other cartoons. According to Drew: 'Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though American cartoons are usually thought of as conveying consumerist and individualistic ideologies, as an avid fan of cartoons as a child, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson--that of the "trickster" nature of many cartoon characters as they mocked, outwitted, and ultimately defeated their stronger, more powerful adversaries. In the classic cartoon, brute strength and heavy artillery are no match for wit and humor, and justice always prevails. For me, it was a natural process to link my own childhood concept of subversion with an established, more articulate version of subversiveness'.

Jesse Drew has also been involved in Free Radio and lots of other interesting stuff.

We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams

I first became aware of the line 'We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams' when it was quoted on the cover of Sasha and John Digweed's Renaissance mix in 1994; it seemed to chime with the epic grandiosity of the album, embodied in its cover design and 3 CDs worth of finely mixed Italian and UK progressive house.

The words are also uttered by Gene Wilder in the film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (not sure if they are in Roald Dahl's original novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). This line has been sampled by Aphex Twin and 808 State among others.


The source of the line though is a poem by a short lived Victorian London-Irish poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844 – 1881). I didn't get round to reading it in full until this week when I picked up an anthology including it on Deptford market (Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in English Language, 1928 editon).

The Ode, from O'Shaughnessy's collection Music and Moonlight, is remarkable in a number of ways. As well as the music makers quote, the first stanza also bequeathed the phrase 'movers and shakers' to the English language:

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems

The poem presents a romantic image of music makers and poets as marginal figures ('world-losers'), but whose visionary creations prefigure and maybe even cause great social change. 'We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying, To the old of the new world's worth'. In this sense, music is powerful: 'One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure, Can trample a kingdom down'.

The final stanza suggests the possibility of renewal through contact with the dreams and music of other cultures:

Great hail! we cry to the comers

From the dazzling unknown shore;

Bring us hither your sun and your summers;

And renew our world as of yore;

You shall teach us your song's new numbers,

And things that we dreamed not before:

Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,

And a singer who sings no more

I know it's fanciful, but this can almost be read as a prophecy of what has actually come to pass with the impact of music made by people of African descent in the US, Caribbean, UK and elsewhere.

Klezmer

Klezmer, Book One: Tales of the Wild East (First Second, 2006) is a graphic novel by Joann Sear following a group of musicians in their wanderings through pre-World War II Eastern Europe. Among other things it made me want to read more about the history of Odessa, another of those early multicultural port cities like London and Marseille.

It includes an appendix with the author's reflections on klezmer:

' True to the idea that you're better off practicing useless activities than doing harm, I put my memories into klezmer songs. They're better off there than elsewhere. Those are Jewish voices, but they don't speak only to Jews. I think back about Shostakoviich, who for years carried around in his suitcase his Opus 79, 'On Jewish folk poetry'. And each time Stalin or the others would forbid him to present it. I think about Isaac Babel, whose short stories on Odessa were scattered, banned, lost. I love that mad project they had, of getting people to like the Jews.

I think human populations need friendship. When men sense that they are not liked, they invent the blues or Gypsy music or klezmer. That's how they make their condition understandable to others. Their language then reaches out to everyone and from within the most self-constrained communities rises a universal song. Extending a hand to a neighbour is a momentous thing in fact. The fact that klezmer is still played today, and with such gusto, and with so many non-Jews on stage and in the audience - which is great - says that plenty of people are willing to carry a bit of Jewish memory on behalf of the Jews. And as a result, klezmer is no longer music that is played by Jews for Jews. That gets us out of the realm of folklore; we all dance together while drinking up a storm, we have fun. From a personal standpoint I ask for nothing more'.

Not totally convinced about the blues or klezmer coming about to communicate outside of communities, I think that's probably a secondary function, but I like the idea of the notion of 'universal song' being able to extend across boundaries.

Fahrenheit 451

Contemporary debates about the social impact of personal music devices were anticipated in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953. Many years before the Sony Walkman, let alone ipods and music playing mobile phones, Bradbury imagined a world in which most people permanently wear 'Audio-Seashells'.

Montag, the novel's main character rejects them, but his wife is plugged in day and night: 'In her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk coming in'.

It is a world in which books are banned and Firemen have been redeployed to track them down and burn them (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature book paper catches alight). In this context, Bradbury presents the Seashells as part of an apparatus of mind numbing distraction along with the 'Four-wall televisor' (a living room with a screen on all walls) and an endless diet of sports and light entertainment. This apparatus prevents critical thinking, communication and anything but the most superficial relationships between human beings: 'the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed entirely of trap drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it'.

Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in Francois Truffaut's 1966 film version

Montag's fireman boss justifies the system to him as one that has smoothed out all social contradictions: 'If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides of a question to worry about; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy'. Against this, 'A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it."

Ultimately the distraction proves fatal, the city's inhabitants engrossed in soap opera and music as the bombs down on them.

For me the critique of information vs. thought certainly has some validity, but I've always been uncomfortable with the familiar complaint that people are spending too much time enjoying themselves with 'trivial' pleasures (often made by men against women as is largely the case in F451). Yes, there's something disturbing about people turning a blind eye to the horrors and atrocities around them, though equally it is true that many of these horrors have been perpetrated precisely by men who have rejected the domestic and the intimate in pursuit of higher 'ideals', heroism and power. Maybe the world would be a better place if Hitlers, Stalins and their ilk were content to spend more time dancing to the radio.

The elitism that such a stance implies is apparent in Bradbury; at one point he refers to 'The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority'. I would have thought the dictatorship of a minority is at least as big a problem.

There's also a fear of music at work here, a fear of being engulfed, invaded, penetrated by sound: 'A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness'. Sounds like my idea of a good night out!

Less than Zero

Less than Zero (1985) by Brett Easton Ellis is, as everybody knows, a study in nihilism set among the young, bored and wealthy in 1980s Los Angeles. A lot of time is spent hanging out in clubs and bars. I'm not sure if any of the places Ellis mentions were real clubs, or based on real places (anyone know?), but there are some good descriptions of feeling pretty vacant in nightclubs.

Clay (narrator/main character) visits The Land’s End on Hollywood Boulevard:

'From the back door you walk into the club like you're walking into a cellar and it's dark and like a cave with all these partitions separating the club into small areas where groups huddle in the darkness... Before I can make out any faces, my eyes have to wait a minute to get used to the darkness. The club's crowded tonight and some of the kids waiting out in back won't be able to get in. 'Tainted Love' is playing, loudly, over the stereo system and the dance floor is packed with people, most of them young, most of them bored, trying to look turned on. There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy's car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond­haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on... We pass through the crowd and walk into the back, leaving the thumping music and the smoke-filled room behind us.'

He also goes to the New Garage 'downtown between 6th and 7th or 7th and 8th':

'The New Garage is actually a club that's in a four-story parking lot; the first and second and third floors are deserted and there are still a couple of cars parked there from the day before. The fourth story is where the club is. The music's loud and there are a lot of people dancing and the entire floor smells like beer and sweat and gasoline. The new Icicle Works single comes on and a couple of The Go-Go's are there and so is one of The Blasters...'

There are also a couple of scenes set in 'The Edge':

'The DJ at the Edge tonight isn't wearing a shirt and his nipples are pierced and he wears a leather cowboy hat and between songs he keeps mumbling 'Hip-Hip-Hooray.' Kim tells me that the DJ obviously cannot decide whether he's butch or New Wave... Lindsay and I walk upstairs to the restroom and do some coke in one of the stalls. Above the sink, on the mirror, someone's written in big black letters 'Gloom Rules.' After we leave the restroom, Lindsay and I sit at the bar upstairs and he tells me that there's not too much going on anywhere in the city. I nod, watch the large strobe light blink off and on, flashing across the big dance floor'....

'It's two in the morning and hot and we're at the Edge in the back room and Trent is trying on my sunglasses and I tell him that I want to leave. Trent tells me that we'll leave soon, a couple of minutes maybe. The music from the dance floor seems too loud and I tense up every time the music stops and another song comes on. I lean back against the brick wall and notice that there are two boys embracing in a darkened corner.... We walk out into the hot night and Blair asks, 'Well, did we have a good time?' and nobody answers and she looks down'.

F.Scott Fitzgerald - May Day

F. Scott Fitzgerald's story May Day, first published in 1920, is an account of a drunken night in New York in May 1919. Drunk socialites dance and argue before hitting an all night cafe, drunk soldiers attack socialists in the streets. He describes the different stages of alcohol intoxication, from feeling good to fighting: 'At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague back­ground before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves... as he sipped his third highball his imagination yielded to the wann glow and he lapsed into a state similar to floating on his back in pleasant water'. Before the end of the story, the same character has been in a brawl with bouncers.

A key setting is a dance to a jazz band at Delmonico's, with the author conjuring up its smell: 'From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties - rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odour drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odour she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet - the odour of a fashionable dance'.

Fitzgerald also notes the trance-like sensation of dancing and its stimulation of memory : 'this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else - of another dance and another man... another roving beam... threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic colours over the massed dancers. Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colourful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times... her mind was passive now, her senses were lulled to trance-like sleep; only her feet danced and her voice talked on in hazy sentimental banter'.

Slim Gaillard, Jack Kerouac and Me

In Hanif Kureishi's latest novel, Something to Tell You, the narrator mentions being in a club in London in the late 1970s and meeting Slim Gaillard (1911-1991), prompting him to remark 'There can't have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road... this was a man who'd known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth'. It reminded me that I too once saw Slim Gaillard (1916-1991), in the late 1980s (1987?) playing in a room above the Alexandra pub opposite Clapham Common in South London, I believe at a Hi Note jazz club night. By this time he was an old man, singing songs and still doing his trademark stream of consciousness private 'o-reenee' dialect (apparently he was accompanied by Jason Rebello on piano).

Other than his age it wasn't vastly different from the scene described by Jack Kerouac in "On The Road" (written in 1951): '... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C's, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages'.

Well in Clapham I don't recall bongos or people sitting on the floor, but I guess I was a 'young semi intellectual'! That was my only direct encounter with someone from the beat generation, other than once hearing Brion Gysin give a talk in Bedford library of all places (standing in for William Burroughs who didn't show- this was mid-80s).

More on the Alexandra and dancing in Brixton and beyond in late 1980s here

Benjamin Péret: songs of the eternal rebels

Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) was active in the Surrealist movement from its formation until his death. Among other things he edited at one stage the journal 'La Révolution surréaliste'.

His most substantial prose work is the surrealist novel 'Mort aux Vaches et au champ d'honneur' - literally 'Death to the Cows and to the Field of Honour' but sometimes translated as Death to the Pigs (since Vaches was used as slang for cops).

To give one example of its striking imagery, it features a section where the sobs of cinema goers form a sea of tears that floods the world:

'Suddenly the sun yawned like a dog waking up, and breath reeking of garlic polluted the atmosphere. A kazoo came and fell in to the heap of barbed wire the broom-seller was tangled in. He grabbed it and blew into it. A long whine and several tears emerged, which burst and expelled lumps of foam all around, which floated on the sea of tears. Delighted, the broom­seller continued to blow into the kazoo, continuing to to produce teary fireworks which burst into foam and settled all about him... When the sea of tears was covered over with a thick rug of foam, circumstances changed rapidly for the broom-seller, who had the unfortunate notion of lying down on it. Barely had he stretched out when the kazoo's whimpering became extraordinarily loud. They were no longer whimpers but veritable roars which destroyed his eardrums and slowly dug a tunnel through his head'

Like other Surrealists, Péret used automatic writing as a technique to discover the marvelous in everyday life: 'The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars, occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty'.

His experiences in the French army in the First World War made him a pronounced anti-militarist, as well as being vehemently anti-clerical - Mortes Aux Vaches includes images of 'A general trampled by reindeer' and dogs sniffing dead priests. The photograph here was originally published in La Révolution surréaliste (1926) with the caption 'Our colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest'.

Péret was one of the first of the Surrealists to break with Stalinism. In the early 1930s, living in Brazil (with his wife, the singer Elsie Houston) he joined the trotskyist Communist League. In the Spanish Civil War, he worked first with the independent socialist POUM and then an anarchist militia fighting on the Aragon front. Later he was part of a group called the Union Ouvriere Internationale which broke with the trotskyist movement over the latter's defence of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers state (see this biography of Ngo Van Xuhat for more about this)

In a 1949 poem, A Lifetime, Péret looked back on his long association with Andre Breton and wrote of:

'the songs in raised fists of the eternal rebels thirsting for ever new wind
for whom freedom lives as an avalanche ravaging the vipers' nests of heaven and earth
the ones who shout their lungs out as they bury Pompeiis
Drop everything'.

Main source: Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs and Other Writings, translated by Rachel Stella and others (London: Atlas Press, 1988). The best source online is L'Association des amis de Benjamin Péret (in French)

The Light Behind the Curtains

The break of dawn is not always the end of the party, but it is usually the beginning of the end. If nothing else, the first rays of daylight are a warning that the spell is breaking and that the special quality of night as a period outside of the normal rules of daytime (work, school etc.) is fleeting. In the 1920s, Herman Hesse described a moment at a party when 'a feeling that it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us symptoms of the weariness to come'. For him this was a signal for a last joyful burst of energy 'we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more'.

A more doleful image of a party's end occurs in great Sicilian novel The Leapoard by Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958):

'The ball went on for a long time still, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears. The ladies' faces were livid, their dresses crushed, their breaths heavy. "Maria! How tired I am! Maria! How sleepy!" Above their disordered cravats the faces of the men were yellow and lined, their mouths stained with bitter saliva. Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it were disposed a row of twenty vast vats; by that time nearly all were brimful, some spilling over. Sensing that the dance was nearing its end, the sleepy servants were no longer changing the candles in chandeliers, and the short stubs diffused a different, smoky, ill-omened light. In the empty supper room were only dirty plates, glasses with dregs of wine which the servants, glancing around, would hurriedly drain; through the cracks in the shutters filtered a plebeian light of dawn. The party was crumbling away…'

This pessimistic perspective is in keeping with the theme of the novel. Its main character, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is dying and reflecting melancholically on the fading away not only of his own life but of a way of life as the Sicilian aristocracy decays in the face of Italian unification - the party is over in every respect. For him 'The crowd of dancers... seem unreal, made of the raw material of lapsed memories, more labile even than that of disturbing dreams'. A young couple dancing may be 'sweet and touching' but they too are mortal and doomed: 'his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail-coat, the pink of her interweaving dress, looked like some unusual jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script'.

Still the end of the night doesn't have to signal despair. In Camera Obscura's great party song Let Me Go Home (a favourite floorfiller at How Does it Feel?), 'Daylight appears through the curtains and nobody cares, Supremes in our dreams, Do we quit bein' obscene on the stairs?'. Anyway, sometimes the end of the party holds out the promise of something more: 'Well the room goes boom to the sound of temptations and more, Twisting and turning that girl's looking good on the floor, Well the four walls they collide, Until the blue-eyed girl decides to let me go home'.

Image: from Visconti's 1963 film of The Leopard

Somewhere over the Rainbow

Over the Rainbow must be one of the world's most recorded songs, its popularity partly due to the utopian wish that is at its heart, a wish planted by the creator of The Wizard of Oz, creator L. Frank Baum (1856-1919):

'His [Baum's] purpose is to bring loners and outcasts together to depict just how capable they are. Implicit is the notion that common people do not need managers or middlemen to run their affairs, that the latent creative potential in each simple person need only be awakened and encouraged to develop. Baum's major characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are non-competitive and non-exploita­tive. They desire neither money nor success. They have little regard for formal schooling or silly social conventions. They respect differences among all creatures and seek the opportunity to fill a gap in their lives... he wanted to educate readers to the fact that individ­ualism could be achieved in other ways - through tenderness, good will, and cooperation. To be smart, compassionate, and courageous are qualities which could be put to use to overcome alienation, The colors and ambience of Oz are part of an atmosphere which allows for creativity and harmony along with a sense of social responsibility. Dorothy sees and feels this. She is 'wizened' by her trip through Oz, and Baum knows that she is stronger and can face the drabness of Kansas. This is why he closes the book in America: Dorothy has a utopian spark in her which should keep her alive in gray surroundings...

By the time Baum came to write The Emerald City of Oz in 1910, he had developed precise principles for his utopia, and he formulated them at the beginning of this book:

'Each man/woman, no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community, was supplied by the neighbors with goods and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games. If by chance the supply ever ran short, more was taken from the great storehouses of the Ruler, which were afterward filled up again when there was more of any article than the people needed.

Everyone worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and have something to do.

There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.

Oz being a fairy country, the people were, of course, fairy people; but that does not mean that all of them were very unlike the people of our own world. There were all sorts of queer characters among them, but not a single one who was evil, or who possessed a selfish or violent nature.

They were peaceful, kind-hearted, loving and merry, and every inhabitant adored the beautiful girl who ruled them, and delighted to obey her every command'.
Baum's 'socialist' utopia is a strange one since it is governed by a princess named Ozma, but there is no real hierarchy or ruling class in Oz. Ozma the hermaphrodite is a symbol of matriarchy and guarantees the development of socialist humanism in Oz by regulating magic, especially by banning black magic'.

Source: Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (Routledge: London

Judy Garland's original version of the song from 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz:



'it is significant that Maud Gage, whom Baum married in 1882, was the daughter of an active and well-known feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a colleague of the leading US suffragists in drawing up the Woman's Bill of Rights, as well as a feminist historian... Dorothy in the book is definitely a modern heroine, if not a New Woman; she is the predecessor of many a plucky, stoic, staunch girl lead - neither a milksop nor a tomboy, but a little girl who embarks on her adventures in a spirit of curiosity, wonder and self-reliance...But Dorothy makes allies, and she is convincingly loyal and brave, loving and good. With her clear, straightforward help, the Wizard will be deposed and the ideal Land will be restored to its rightful female ruler; in Oz, women won't reign through lies and illusions, but with sincere kindness. Ozites do not wage war: the enemies who tunnel through to the Emerald City in later stories in order to sack it and kill everyone are tricked by Ozma to arrive very thirsty and drink from a fountain of forgetfulness. They then can't remember why they have bothered to make the journey.

Like many progressives in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, both in Europe and the US, Maud Gage Baum rejected organised religion and was attracted instead by new thinking about the supernatural - spiritualism, psychic research and theosophy. The Baums became theosophists in the 1890s, and their four boys, at their grandmother's insistence, were not baptised. They were sent to Chicago's ethical school instead, where religion was not taught. Traces of the movement's beliefs show in Oz's structure - its matriarchal tendencies, and its freedom from established churches of all kinds'.

Source: Marina Warner, Over the Rainbow, Guardian, 19 July 2008

Here's a version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow sung by the late Hawaiian singer and ukulele player Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (1959-1997 - the bit at the end of the video is of his ashes being scattered in the sea):

Ken Campbell: 'I'm not mad I've just read different books'

Ken Campbell (1941-2008) died on Sunday, not only an actor and comedian but an incomparable counter-cultural transmitter. With the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool he famously staged an eight-hour theatrical version of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy, having picked up a copy of the book in the late lamented Compendium Bookshop in Camden. Wilson himself took great pleasure in 'having this totally subversive ritual staged under the patronage of H.M. The Queen' (since it was at the National Theatre) - at one point Wilson came on as a naked extra chanting 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' (source: Wilson's 'Cosmic Trigger').

In 1979 Campbell and Neil Oram co-wrote The Warp, a 22 hour epic that starts off with a 15th century Bavarian war resister and ends up in the 1970s with UFO conferences and New Age Travellers. It was revived in a production directed by his daughter Daisy Campbell in 1999, performed continuously in the 'Millennium Drome' beneath the arches of London Bridge station alongside a Megatripolis rave.

I saw Campbell at Battersea Arts Centre a few years ago doing one of his legendary monologues History of Comedy: Part One - Ventriloquism, a performance of rambling genius. As he once said, 'I'm not mad I've just read different books'.

I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers

Native moments - when you come upon me - ah you are here now,

Give me now libidinous joys only,

Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank,

To-day I go consort with Nature's darlings, to-night too,

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men,

I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers,

The echoes ring with our indecent calls, I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,

He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be one condemn'd by others for deeds done,

I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?

O you shunn'd persons, I at least do not shun you,

I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet,

I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

Walt Whitman, Native Moments from Leaves of Grass, 1855. Photo from The Paradise Garage (legendary 1980s New York gay club) sourced from The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Voilà notre nuit!

Au Petit Rocher (also known as Chez Dinocheau after its owner) was a popular tavern/restaurant frequented by Parisian 'bohemians' such as Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and 1860s. It was situated in a cellar at the corner of rues de Navarin and de Breda.

Among the drinkers was the writer Fernand Desnoyers who would regularly sing there, his songs being published in his 1865 collection Chansons parisiennes('Parisian Songs'). One of his songs, 'Les rôdeurs de nuit' ('The prowlers of the night') is a celebration of staying up all night:

Quand le bourgeois dort,
Il fait soif encore,
Passon la nuit a boire!
La rue est toute noire;
Mais les vitraux des boulevards
Sont en feu, comme des regards.
Atmosphere enflammée,
Filles dans la fumée,
Eau-de-vie et bruit,
Voilà notre nuit!

(When the bourgeois sleeps,
We are thirsty, still;
Let's drink the night through!
It's quite dark outside;
But the windows on the streets are
Ablaze like people's glances.
Burning atmosphere,
Girls in the smoke,
Brandy and noise,
This is our night!)

Source: Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey (London: Viking, 2006)

Clothes that wear us

"there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking" (Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Chapter Four, 1928)

Image: Charlotte Valandrey and Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter's 1992 film version of Orlando.

The Mosh Pit - Simon Armitage

I enjoyed reading Gig - the Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist by the poet Simon Armitage. A man whose 'definition of a good gig' is 'more legs in the air than arms', his experience at a gig by The Wedding Present at Holmfirth Picturedrome in Yorkshire causes him to reflect on the mosh pit:

'the mosh pit is a community within a community and has a structure of its own, with a hard core of participants forming the main nucleus and lighter or less stable elements towards its outer edge. I've sometimes imagined that at the very centre there's a kind of sweet spot, like the eye of the storm, around which everything else revolves, a position of almost Buddhist­like tranquillity. But if it exists I've never found it. The mosh pit is an energized entity fuelled by excitement and adrenalin, and not always a pleasant place to be, though most moshers appear to abide by an unwritten code of practice that might be described as a kind of gentlemen's anarchy. Stage-divers will always be caught, crowd-surfers will always be rolled, and anyone who slips or stumbles will always be hoisted back to their feet. I've also noticed a discreet form of gallantry in the mosh pit, whereby female moshers are allowed a few more centimetres of personal space to perform their gyrations and are man­handled with greater sensitivity.

A gap tends to open up around the mosh pit - a sort of dry moat or buffer zone - and in my experience, this arc of no-man's-land is the most dangerous area of any gig. A combination of both the ripple effect and chaos theory are at work here: as it radiates outwards, the knock-on effect of any disturbance becomes magnified and exagger­ated as it travels, so that a relatively innocuous push or shove within the tightly packed core can result in the slewing and spilling of several bodies at the circumference. It's also a zone inhabited by the unconfident or inexperi­enced mosher, who are a danger to both themselves and others. But the main peril comes from the people on the other side of the moat, those who henceforth shall be referred to as the firemen. The firemen like Proper Music, not this kind of stuff, but have come to the gig because the venue has a late licence and anyway they're on the day shifr so have been asleep all day and now want Something To Do. They've gravitated towards the front of the venue because they're Not Scared, and as well as being tough they're also big, because they Work Out, and they don't like people coming too close, let alone pushing past. So with their pints clasped against their chests and their girlfriends manfully protected beneath their sizable shoulders, they form a semicircular wall of muscular flesh, through which very few enter and very few leave. Moshers who are thrown across the moat in their direction can expect to be propelled back at twice the speed, because even though moshing looks violent it is not Proper Fighting'.

Colette: The Vagabond

I have posted here before on the French writer Colette (1873-1954). Her novel The Vagabond, first published in 1911, is a fictionalised account of her experiences as a dancer in the cafés chantant and music halls, and of the tension, for a woman in this period, between the demands of a respectable marriage and freedom - even if the price of the latter was solitude.

I was struck by this description of her dancing in front of the kind of bourgeois onlookers from whose domain she was in flight, with its sense of the dance itself a rejection of the constraints on the female body:

"I dance and dance. A beautiful serpent coils itself along the Persian carpet, an Egyptian amphora tilts forward, pouring forth a cascade of perfumed hair, a blue and stormy cloud rises and floats away, a feline beast springs forwards, then recoils, a sphinx, the colour of pale sand, reclines at full length, propped on its elbows with hollowed back and straining breasts. I have recovered myself and forget nothing.

Do these people really exist, I ask myself? No, they don't. The only real things are dancing, light, freedom, and music. Nothing is real except making rhythm of one's thought and translating it into beautiful gestures. Is not the mere swaying of my back, free from any constraint, an insult to those bodies cramped by their long corsets, and enfeebled by a fashion which insists that they should be thin?"

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?



Words: from W.B. Yeats, To a Child dancing in the Wind , 1916; image by Mitch J Johnson via Flickr.

O Ecstasies, O world, O music!

'O Douceurs, ô monde, ô musique ! Et là, les formes, les sueurs, les chevelures et les yeux, flottant. Et les larmes blanches, bouillantes, - ô douceurs ! - et la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques'.

‘O Ecstasies, O world, O music! And here, shapes, sweats, heads of hair and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling – O ecstasies! – and the female voice reaching to the bottom of the volcanoes and the arctic caverns’

from Arthur Rimbaud, Barbare, published in Illuminations (1874).

Photo taken in Space, Ibiza, 1995 - a year I was there too. I found the photo at Faithfanzine.com but couldn't find photocredit -

if you took this and would like to be credited let me know.

All you judges beware

I wasn't sure about going to see Grant Gee and Jon Savage's new Joy Division documentary so soon after weeping my way through Control. Joy Division had a massive impact on me as a teenager and I worry about the mystery being obscured in over-documentation of what was a very short episode. But since my partner won two tickets for the screening at the Brixton Ritzy I could hardly refuse to go, and I am glad I did.

I thought it nicely complemented Anton Corbijn's fictional treatment. The latter evoked the period very well, but as a movie inevitably it raised the story to the dimension of the mythic and universal. The documentary on the other hand is very much rooted in the specifics of time and place, with lots of grainy footage of Manchester and Joy Division gigs and a tour of the sites of lost landmarks in their story - the Electric Palace, Rafters, Pips and other nightclubs. There is mention of Manchester's notoriously right-wing police chief, James Anderton, and super 8 footage of the racks in a left-wing bookshop stocked with magazines like Peace News and World Revolution.

Nice to see the late Anthony Wilson in what must have been one of his last interviews, although part of me thinks that there is danger - typified by his comments - of inscribing Joy Division too tightly within a narrative about the transformation of Manchester. Joy Division's beauty was their defiance of the mundane. As was mentioned in the film their songs opened up windows into other worlds for those looking for them - whether it was referencing J.G. Ballard (Atrocity Exhibition), Kafka (Colony), or Williams Burroughs (Interzone). There's a funny story in the film about Ian Curtis's encounter with Burroughs at a gig in Belgium. Others who wrote about Joy Division, like Paul Morely and Jon Savage, were also inspired and inspiring - even if the latter's quote from Raoul Vaneigem in his 1979 Melody Maker review was later to take on a macabre resonance: 'To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man'.

Several people in the film talk of Ian Curtis in terms of possession, as if he was channelling some kind of energy. Most memorably, Genesis P. Orridge, talks of him switched on by electricity like some 'tranced out symbol for a human being'. Curtis himself seems to have been interested in such notions, and the film features a recording of him undergoing some amateur 'past life regression' hypnotherapy with Bernard Sumner.

All this and an opening quote from Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts into Air: "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are" .