Reload! Blogging Again....

Good analysis of LJ. I don't remember overt Paul disike but I do remember a lot of Linda dislike. Tho that seems to have been part of a sort of reflexive lack of solidarity between women in the rock scene at the time, encouraged to see each other as threats or something. There's even a weirdly bitchy aside about Joni Mitchell of all people.

The Lost Weekend doco is prob more mature in that way & more positive to Paul+Linda, tho it seems revisionist in that John's violence & periodic dumping of May is played down, & the "paul bringing a message from yoko" forms part of her story by then even tho it's clear from the book that she knew nothing about this at the time. Not dunking on May or saying she's lying - it's just another example of how memories get softened with time, and augmented by stories from others.

Anyway my favourite part of Loving John is John and David Bowie queening out over Elizabeth Taylor, please someone put that in a fic

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.

Naming the city

Towards the end of Claire Kilroy’s 2009 novel All Names Have Been Changed, set in the mid 1980s, the narrator prepares for emigration with the damning speech: ‘There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better.’ As Kilroy has said herself: ‘When I wrote that, we were still in the full throttle of the boom…There was no sense we were going back there.’

In a way it’s good that the novel’s prescience is accidental, since self-conscious ‘boom-to-bust’ novels are painful to read. I was drawn to the novel not so much for its subject matter (a group of mature students and their incestuous relationship with the famous novelist who teaches them creative writing in Trinity) but for its historical and geographical setting – Dublin in the 80s. By all accounts it was a pretty depressing place, though Kilroy’s narrator Declan lays on the misery a bit thick in places. Still, overall the city is beautifully, even lovingly evoked, with burnt-out corporation flats described as keenly as the rarified campus of Trinity.

Wisely, Kilroy avoids a too-broad geographical sweep, instead focusing in on a few key areas – Trinity and its surrounding nexus of College Green, Dame Street and Westmoreland Street,  Mountjoy Square and its decayinge environs, and a brief excursion to the southside suburbs. The Trinity campus is a haven for characters seeking to escape the sudden violence and unpredictability of the city, particularly the alcoholic novelist Glynn, but no-one can escape reality for too long, no matter how much they may try to through writing.

A wonderful set-piece follows Glynn, storming out of a pub on Westmoreland Street in a rage and heading back to Trinity. This is a walk of no more than five minutes, but it becomes an Odyssean journey of danger and wonder, as Glynn boosts his spirits by taking in the city he thinks he knows, before being attacked by a gang of youths and fleeing for safety into the protective arms of Trinity campus, where he still rebels against the college’s incongruous ownership of acres of valuable city land by kicking up the grass of its rugby pitch. Much is said about Ireland’s contradictions in that chapter, and said more effectively than in a later chapter in which Declan rages against the excesses of St Patrick’s Day.

Drink is a curse in the novel, as it is in so many Irish novels, but the other curse of working-class Dublin is brought to life by Declan’s accidental friendship with stoner-turned-junkie Giz who occupies the bottom floor of his building. It would be easy for this character to feel tacked-on, but Giz comes to life and in some ways seems more real than the main characters. It would also be easy to make him more sympathetic by adding a tragic backstory or imbuing him with a fake ‘salt-of-the-earth’ dependability, but Kilroy avoids the clichés.  Giz is violent, aggressive and untrustworthy; a real friendship between him and Declan is impossible due to their insurmountable differences in background, yet somehow he elicits sympathy. His decline mirrors that of the city, but he is not just a symbol. It can be very difficult for a writer who has not grown up poor to successfully evoke inner-city characters – descriptions tend to fall prey to dehumanising hatred or pity – but Kilroy’s observant eye sees the realness of the ‘scumbag’ without glossing over his unpleasantness.

It is these, almost peripheral aspects of the novel that interested me most. The main plot offers much of interest, but the opaqueness of the characters as seen through Declan’s eyes meant they took a while to come alive.  Glynn himself is despicable, yet like Giz, is oddly engaging and realised, but the four women who make up the rest of the class are hard to fathom. Kilroy has said:  ’At all times I know what the women are thinking in the novel and from there I had to guess at what he [Declan] was thinking.’  As the novel progresses it’s clear that there is a whole, untold aspect of the story that’s hidden from the male characters. Declan for the most part is well-drawn, except for a few brief instances where he thinks or behaves in a self-consciously ‘male’ way – the trap that female authors writing in a male voice must constantly try and avoid falling into, and vice versa. He’s not particularly sympathetic, yet he’s worth following nonetheless. Of the female characters, only Aisling the mentally unstable goth and Antonia the brittle, sharp-tongued divorcee convince. The pliant Guinevere appears to have no other function in the plot other than to be beautiful, which is perhaps the point, and the mumsy Faye barely registers. As seen from the point of view of Declan (and, vicariously, Glynn) this is perhaps an entirely accurate depiction of the group.

Unfortunately the group’s worship of Glynn in the first half of the novel is hard to fathom – his legacy is well-described, but they all seem so helpless and cringing before him as to be unbelievable. I read a comment somewhere that the friendship between the group seemed unconvincing because none of the epic conversations engaged in during their marathon drinking sessions with Glynn are described in any detail. Also, for a crowd who spend so much time drinking, they rarely seem to laugh or have any fun. Maybe that’s literary types for you! Or maybe Kilroy is making another point here – that a lot of the conversations we have while drunk are so much pointless nonsense. She’s an intelligent writer; I’d be inclined to think that the seeming flaws in the novel are intentional.

All Names Have Been Changed is worth reading once you get past the first few, somewhat turgid, chapters; though its occasional self-consciousness and elaborate language will not appeal to some. It certainly deserves a place among works of art that bring to life the psychogeography of Dublin, a city that continues to inspire, even at its bleakest.

Obviously the second part of this quote gets the most attention but I really love the first part because it's so true! Read a page of Finnegans Wake aloud and tell me you don't hear John.

“John spoke the way James Joyce wrote. To me, he was the Beatles. He was always the spark. In a late wee-hour-of-the-morning talk, he once told me, ‘I’m just like everybody else Harry, I fell for Paul’s looks.”

— Harry Nilsson speaking about John Lennon.

I was wrong, it was harry benson that took the hazy paul photos. multiple photographers horny for beatles

John Lennon backstage at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, England | 4 April 1963 © Dezo Hoffmann

"At first neither John nor I liked this picture because it was contradictory to his tidy image. But his expression and the lighting were so good that we ended up liking it. It seems to sum up John at that time." ~ Dezo Hoffmann

melody maker letters as the burn book from mean girls

So you think 'Imagine' ain't political? It's 'Working Class Hero' with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn't dig the words. Imagine! You took 'How Do You Sleep' so literally (read my own review of the album in Crawdaddy.) Your politics are very similar to Mary Whitehouse's -- 'Saying nothing is as loud as saying something.' Listen, my obsessive old pal, it was George's press conference -- not 'dat ole debbil Klein' -- He said what you said: 'I'd love to come but...' Anyway, we basically did it for the same reasons -- the Beatle bit -- they still called it a Beatle show, with just two of them! Join the Rock Liberation Front before it gets you. Wanna put your photo on the label like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Aint ya got no shame!) If we're not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU? No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same, and as I said on the phone and in this letter, whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.

John Lennon's letter responding to Paul, published in its entirety in Melody Maker

literally the ramblings of an insane person I am GAGGED

Songs from the room of life

Back cover of the sleeve of ‘Songs From A Room’.

Leonard Cohen’s career has been incredibly long and varied, covering everything from whispered 60s folk to extravagant 80s hyper-production, but his songwriting themes have remained quite consistent over the decades. Sex, God and the weight of history come up again and again, expressed in ways that are in turn beautiful, shocking, funny and tragic.

His later career has been pretty illustrious and judging by the reception to his recent tours, he is more loved than ever, but in many ways he reached the apogee of his favourite themes early on, in his second album, 1969′s Songs From A Room. This has always been my favourite Cohen album – I never get tired of the way he delicately juxtaposes the longing of love with the search for transcendence and the heavy meaning of history, both personal and universal.

Despite being a Buddhist for some decades now, Cohen’s chief spiritual inspiration has always been his Jewish heritage, and this is revealed time and again in Songs From A Room. In ‘Story of Isaac’, Cohen not only represents the turn of humanity from primitivism to monotheism and text-based religion, as the angel sings to Abraham: ‘”You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it any more”….my father’s hands were trembling, with the beauty of the Word’, he also succintly analyses the mythological schism between the sons of Abraham that led to the separation of Judaism and Islam: ‘And if you call me brother now, forgive me if I enquire, just according to whose plan? When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can’ (followed by the qualifier ‘when it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can’).

In ‘You Know Who I Am’, the jealous God of the Old Testament addresses his people as a lover: ‘I cannot follow you my love, you cannot follow me, and the distance you put between all the moments we will be. You know who I am, you’ve stared at the sun, I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one’ and carries the story forth into the New Testament and Christ: ‘I will give you one broken man, who I will teach you to repair’. God is a darker figure in ‘The Butcher’, ‘slaughtering a lamb’ while the narrator, possibly again the collective voice of humanity, feels he is experiencing the same fate. He cynically reflects on the feebleness of faith in the face of disaster ‘I saw some flowers grow up, where that land fell down, was I supposed to praise my lord, make some kind of joyful sound?’ but concedes that he cannot do without the butcher-father-god: ‘do not leave me now, do not leave me now’, while the butcher repeats ‘listen to me child, I am what I am, and you are my only son.’

History and politics are universalised in ‘The Old Revolution’, when the narrator, perhaps a supporter of the monarchy adjusting to life post-early 20th century-socialist-revolution, thinks about past glories and current disasters: ‘I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing, as they carry the bodies away….To all of my architects, let me be traitor…Now let me say I myself gave the order to sleep and to search and to destroy’, carried through by the extraordinarily moving refrain: ‘Into this furnace, I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray’. ‘The Partisan’ is a reworked version of the WWII French Resistance anthem ‘La complainte du partisan’ by Anna Marly, but stripped of time-specific references (the French line ‘les Allemands l’ont pris’ is sung by Cohen as ‘then the soldiers came’), placing the protagonist as a universal, nameless, hidden figure, found in every war in history.

That same sense of timelessness is found in one of the album’s sadder songs, the exquisite ‘Seems So Long Ago, Nancy’. Written in homage to a good-time girl from Cohen’s youth, who killed herself after her illegitimate child was taken away from her, the story of her fate unfolds sparingly: ‘Nancy wore green stockings, and she slept with everyone. She never said she’d wait for us, although she was alone. I think she fell in love for us, in 1961′. Nancy comes from ‘the house of honesty’, but as Cohen devastatingly puts it ‘none of us would need her in the house of mystery.’ The way he sings ’1961′ makes it sound like some impossibly ancient time, before the founding of Jericho. Haunted by visions of the dead Nancy, the narrator ‘sees her everywhere. many use her body, many comb her hair’. She reappears at the end, a ghostly figure ‘in the hollow of the night’ who comes to you ‘when you are cold and numb’, both a comforting mother and a frightening spectre: ‘you’ll hear her talking freely there, she’s happy that you’ve come’. In death Nancy still seeks love, and the living people still run in fear.

Another ghostly woman appears in ‘Lady Midnight’ but this time she is a representation of despair, perhaps of the will to suicide that Cohen openly says stalked his younger years. After ‘argu[ing] all night, like so many have before’ the lady tersely tells the singer ‘Don’t try to use me, or slyly refuse me, just win me or lose me, it is this that the darkness is for.’ Perhaps she frees him from egotism when she tells him ‘if we cry now…it will just be ignored’, at any rate he awakens to new hope: ‘I walked through the morning, sweet early morning, I could hear my lady calling “you’ve won me, you’ve won me, my lord”.’

It’s a Leonard Cohen album, so there are no overt love songs – Cohen, for all his reputation as a chronicler of the heart, only really writes ‘love’ songs about sex – his real, all-consuming love is for the terrible father-God figure who stalks his entire oeuvre. After all the tenderness and wisdom that comes before, the album ends on a depressing note dressed up in a jaunty tune – ‘Tonight Will Be Fine’ cynically dissects the mutual dishonesty and cowardice that keeps a failing relationship limping unhappily along. Perhaps the album’s ‘message’ if it has one, is that dependence on romantic relationships is just a cover for the real lacunae in our lives – the search for something beyond reality, the struggle to find meaning in the past, the huge questions we must all ask but repeatedly hide from. It’s one of the most human pieces of art ever created, and that’s why it’s so timeless.

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Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.

The Beatles rehearse for the BBC radio show Teenager's Turn (Here We Go) in Manchester, England | 11 June 1962 © Mike McCartney