Like Something That Looks Very Like Something Else.

It actually happened.

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A city melting into air

Spy tower, Teufelsburg

I was recently in Berlin, staying near Alexanderplatz in the old East, and was struck by the still-unfinished look of the city, even 65 years since the war and 20 since reunification. The picture-perfect reconstructions of 19th-century streets in Oranienburgerstrasse and Auguststrasse contrast strongly with random patches of debris-strewn grass and fenced, abandoned building sites. The city’s long history of artistic occupation of abandoned buidings is still visible in the admittedly touristified Tacheles complex, but other buildings further from the centre, especially abandoned GDR edifices, are keeping the ad-hoc nature of Berlin’s urban settlements alive. This super slideshow presents some highlights, including an abandoned GDR amusement park, a spy tower built by the West in the wonderfully named Teufelsburg and the remains of the hastily exited Iraqi embassy. These images reveal Berlin to be a fine example of how Marshall Berman famously described modernity:  ‘this maelstrom…..in a state of perpetual becoming.’

A couple of fics I wrote

I got an ao3 account this year and have 2 fics in the Beatles fandom that I'm a little proud of. Both character studies focused on late 1970s John in NYC. Have a read if you're so inclined. Username bodhbdearg.

Where I would be: Househusband era John is very depressed and disengaged from music, but is nudged out of it by folksinging lesbians & NYC queer culture.

Singing a song of ruin: Writing DF-era John is no longer depressed, and spends a night trying to talk someone out of jumping off a bridge.

#notavessel

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'Wherever you go, there you are'

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Swinging through the ivories

Last Saturday saw the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mary Lou Williams, jazz pianist, composer, arranger and, in later life, founder of an organisation devoted to help jazz musicians suffering from drug addiction. Williams, like the blues singer Memphis Minnie, was a person whose personality and talent helped her rise above the strictures imposed by gender and race at the time.

She cut her teeth in the 30s writing and arranging for Benny Goodman’s and Duke Ellington’s bands, and in the 40s she mentored Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, among others. She wasn’t restricted to playing in bands either – her large-scale compositions include the Zodiac Suite, a series of musical sketches, the long hymn called Black Christ of the Andes and several masses (following her conversion to Catholicism in the 50s).

As pianist Billy Taylor remembers, when Williams was mentoring Thelonius Monk she helped him refine his playing style – basically, she stopped him battering the holy shit out of the keyboard! Monk’s style needed to be toned down a bit, and the end result was still characteristically muscular but infused with greater feeling. No doubt Monk had many different mentors. but Taylor’s story shows that Williams was not an insignificant one.

Dark times in the city

Below is a review of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, showing in the IFI in Dublin till Thursday. This review has also been published in Politico magazine.

For decades the only version available of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece ‘Metropolis’ was a cadavre exquis made up of what footage survived after American distributors cut nearly an hour from the original edit and the lost scenes were left to rot in various warehouses. Bits of film have been rediscovered over the years, leading to various ‘definitive’ versions, including the 1986 cut accompanied by Giorgio Moroder’s infamous synth-heavy soundtrack, but it’s only this year that the fullest, most logical version of the film can be seen. This was faciliated by the discovery in 2008 of over 30 minutes of original footage in an archive in Buenos Aires, and it is the existing footage plus these additions that is on view in the IFI until Thursday 23 September.

‘Metropolis’, set in a dystopian future where countless workers toil underground to facilitate the luxurious lifestyles of the inhabitants of the eponymous city, is a truly unique film, combining high art with blockbuster melodrama with complete unselfconsciousness. Its technical and imaginative achievements remain unparalleled – the prototype for all TV robots, the ‘mad scientist’ and his lab and the dystopian city of the future are found in this extraordinary feat of technical and creative imagination. The plot apparently makes far more sense in this complete version than in previous edits, and centres around the discovery of the subterranean hell of the workers by Freder, the somewhat hysterical son of Metropolis’ founder, Joh Frederson, and his attempts with the saintly Maria to help the workers using non-violent means. Rotwang, the mad scientist employed by Joh Frederson, creates a robot version of Maria to incite the workers to open rebellion and thus justify Joh Frederson’s intentions to crack down violently on them. Modern-day parallels are hard to ignore, when the third world labours on subsistence pay to accommodate the lifestyle of the West, but the film had more immediate, and questionable, appeal at its time – its message of a ‘Mediator’ being needed to reach concord between the workers and the bureaucrats struck a chord with Goebbels and Hitler. This appeal can perhaps be attributed to the movie’s scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife at the time and later an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party (she and Lang had divorced by that time). The ‘good’ Maria’s peasant-girl costume and rather wimpy appeals to the workers to wait for the mythical ‘Mediator’ are easily identified with the contemporary growth in nationalistic sentimentality that the Nazis piggybacked so effectively on, while the ‘evil’ Maria’s exhortations to violently rebel are clearly meant to echo (and criticise) Bolshevism (her gestures while speech-making are even reminiscent of Lenin).

But ‘Metropolis’ is by no means a ‘Nazi’ movie, and should not be judged by its political sympathies of its writer and fans. Frankly, the script comes a poor second to the magnificent cinematography and montages that Lang showcases, from the iconic opening sequence of the cogs and pistons of the ‘Heart-Machine’ to the jaw-dropping sequence where the ‘evil’ Maria performs an atavistic erotic dance, spinning off into wild apocalyptic fantasy with the Grim Reaper and the personified Seven Deadly Sins turning up for good measure. Sequences such as these will more than make up for the tediously melodramatic acting beloved of silent cinema at the time. The addition of the original score by Gottfried von Huppertz also carries things along at a fine pace. Not to be missed.

I was looking through editions of my local newspaper for mentions of The Beatles and I thought this piece in the Bristol Evening Post was so interesting that I typed the whole thing out. I'm such a sucker for these early-ish interviews when they're all still so chatty and relatively excited by the fame and money.

Source: The Bristol Evening Post, 10 November 1964 (they played a concert in the city that day).

Transcript below the cut...

A distant volley of screams penetrated the quiet upstairs foyer of the theatre.  

“Oops, here we go,” said a middle-aged reporter.  “They’re here.  Can somebody tell me which one is which?”

The television men switched on their lights, the photographers squinted through their viewfinders and the journalists juggled with notebooks and pencils.

“I know one of them’s called Ringo,” said the middle aged reporter.  “Could somebody point him out?”

There was a clatter of feet on the stairs, and the Beatles appeared in single file through a doorway, grinning all over their faces, and made straight for the bar.

Everybody instantly forgot all their pungent, searching questions they had been thinking up for weeks, and started firing away with fairly idiotic queries like: “How do you feel?” and “What are you doing these days?”

The television people grabbed John and Paul, who happened to be in the front, and I grabbed George, who started telling me about his new airgun.

“I spend my spare time shooting potatoes off trees in the garden,” said George. “I started with bits of cardboard on the clothesline, but cardboard doesn’t do anything very spectacular when you hit it.  So now I balance spuds on the trees and blast them to bits.”

A television man sneaked up behind me and shoved a microphone in between me and George. George clinked his glass on it and shouted “Cheers” down the mike.

“What are you going to do when the Beatles finish?” asked the television man.

“I’m going to be an engine driver,” said George.  “If they won’t let me have a train, I’ll drive a fire engine.”

Ringo, meanwhile, had retired to a corner for a quiet smoke.

The middle-aged journalist was busy interviewing Paul, whom he thought was Ringo. 

 “Press conferences can be quite a laugh,” said Ringo.  “Have a ciggie.”

We lit our ciggies and talked about Ringo’s New Image.

“Since the film, people seem to notice me a bit more,” said Ringo.  “They used to talk to the others and leave me out because I was supposed to be the quiet one.  Actually I can be quite noisy.  I used to feel rather out of it, but I feel like a proper Beatle now.  It’s amazing though how many people still can’t tell us apart.  Reporters still ask me, “How are you, John?”

The Beatles’ road manager, Neil Aspinall, came over and led Ringo off to have his picture taken.  The Aspinall rescued Paul from a bunch of reporters and the Beatles wandered off to inspect the stage in the A.B.C. theatre.

On stage, Paul was doodling on an electronic organ, and Ringo was doing a violent drum duet with the drummer of one of their supporting groups.

Neil Aspinall had promised me half an hour in the Beatles’ dressing room - the pop equivalent of a pass to the Kremlin.

“I can’t disturb the others for a minute,” he said, “but John’s upstairs.  You can start with him.”

John was chatting with two old school friends from Liverpool.  In the corner of the dressing room a TV set was showing a children’s programme with the sound turned off.

John jumped up, shook hands, and insisted on me taking his armchair. “You look as if you need it, Rog,” he said.

We talked about the allegations that the Beatles are slipping.

“Last year,” said John. “Beatlemania was news. Now No Beatlemania is news. The press have gone to town on the places where there have only been a couple of hundred kids outside of theatres instead of a couple of thousand.  They haven’t bothered to report things like Leeds, where there were 15 of the kids on the stage at one point.”

“Last year that would have been news.  It doesn’t bother us.  We’re sold out pretty well everywhere.  Can you think of another group that is filling halls at the moment? The Stones aren’t.  Maybe we should have done this tour earlier.  We all wanted to do England again before America this year. But Brian said no. And what Eppy says goes. He literally plans our careers.”

“I think we’re better organised now, anyway.  The police are marvellous.  They get us stowed away in the theatres before the kids come out of school, so obviously there aren’t so many riotous scenes.”

The idea of the Beatles breaking up still seems unthinkable. But I asked John if they ever considered adding any extra musicians.

“We’ve thought about it — yes,” said John. “We were once a five-strong group, before Stuart Sutcliffe died.  We’ve toyed with the idea of adding a piano or organ in the past. And for our last disc, we did think of bringing in an orchestra.  But we always rejected the idea in the end.  You see, for the kind of music we play, any more musicians would be superfluous.  I suppose we might have a couple of guest people on the odd occasion, but they wouldn’t be real Beatles.  I’d turn round at the end and say: “Ta very much to Arthur on the organ and Harry on the flute” and that would be that.  I just don’t think anyone else could fit in with us now. We’re a sort of closed shop, the four of us.  An outsider just wouldn’t be accepted, if you see what I mean.”

Before the Beatles’ Christmas show in London and the shooting of their next film — “which is going to be a bit madder than the last one” said John — they are taking a fortnight’s break.

“I’ll just stay home with the wife, Cynthia, and play records,” said John.

Home is his £20,000 Surrey country house, purchased in July as a retreat from the fans.

“Cyn and I are living on the second floor with the cooks and people,” said John. “The rest of the place is like a battlefield.  It’s swarming with electricians and plumbers and odd job men, all trying to get it straight for us before Christmas. I keep on bumping into these strange blokes on the stairs.  I haven’t a clue who they are, but Cyn seems to have them organised.  I’m not sticking my nose into that side of things, except to say vaguely how I want the house to look. Can’t even put a plug on myself.”

“The gardens? Well, there are an awful lot of them, I’ve seen a bloke sort of digging around the place. He smiles and waves, and I smile and wave back. I suppose he must be the gardener. His name is probably Fred.”

John said occasionally Beatle fans manage to find the house.

“They’re usually so exhausted by that time that they haven’t got the strength to actually battle their way in and pull my hair.  Though, the other morning when I was asleep, Cyn found some of them crawling up the stairs.”

Paul and George came in.  Paul sat on the windowsill and George read out an interview with P.J. Proby in a pop paper, in which Proby claimed to have been the first to introduce a certain sound to pop.

“He’s fantastic, isn’t he?” said Paul. “He really believes he’s the greatest. We must tell him some time.”

I asked Paul if he could think of anything which the Beatles hadn’t already been asked.

“There isn’t anything,” said Paul. “But we don’t mind answering the same questions all over again. We like talking to people.”

He enthused about his new Aston Martin. “I did 120 up the M1 and died of fright.”

And he talked about the Beatles futures.

“Whatever happens, I think John and I will carry on writing songs. And I think George, Ringo and I will all get married eventually. But not yet. We haven’t got time.”

Ringo came in with a musical paper carrying a feature article about Paul.

“Don’t like the picture,” said Paul. “They had a much better one of John last week.”

“It made me look like a fat idiot,” said John.

“Exactly,” said George.

A picture of the Beatles suddenly flashed on to the television screen.  

“Quick, turn up the sound, Rog,” said John.

“Don’t bother,” said George. “It’s only that ugly old Beatle lot. I thought they were all dead.”

251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, England | 21 April 1964

[➕] Mimi's framed photo of John:

eight word horror story