Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown

By David Yaffe

Yale University Press, June 2011

ISBN: 9780300124576

In this concise, concentrated and erudite book David Yaffe focuses on four key facets of the great singer-songwriter.

He devotes a chapter to Dylan’s voice, an incredible instrument, the thing that primarily differentiates him from a poet of the page.  Another chapter, the second, looks at Dylan and cinema: films he has made (e.g. Renaldo and Clara), films that have been made about him (e.g. Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There).  The third chapter touches on Dylan’s knotty relationship with ‘blackness’ or the African-American experience: his deep immersion in the blues, his involvement in the civil rights struggle and his support, much later, for Barack Obama.  Remember that ‘Blowing in the Wind’ was the one song Sam Cooke wished he’d written.  Finally, chapter four is all about Dylan as plagiarist, as joker and thief.  It is clear, of course, that between these four aspects there is some overlap.  For example, Dylan as bluesman: that could just as easily be described as cultural appropriation = theft (in a sense).  And he wasn’t above taking credit as the author of a traditional blues song.  Come to think of it, there was also that commotion over Dylan’s use of Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, which for some reason Yaffe omits to mention.

It’s a solitary oversight, however, and Yaffe undoubtedly knows his onions as far as Dylan is concerned; and he generously shares his knowledge and insights.  His prose fairly flows too; he writes very well indeed.

Just when it seemed I would not be warranted in making even a slightly negative comment about the book, I came across the description of ‘High Water’ as a ‘standout track’ on Love and Theft.  Now why the word ‘standout’ and not the perfectly normal and well-established English word ‘outstanding’?  What virtues and fine qualities does this new-fangled, now alas all-too-common coinage possess?  Please explain someone.

Place this lapse aside, however, and you have a well-nigh perfect study of Dylan and his art.  At the end of the book you’ll be in no doubt as to why Dylan matters.

The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In

La piel que habito

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Spain, 2011

Cornerhouse, 28 August 2011

What Almodovar does, to answer the question posed at the end of my review of Jonquet’s novel, is to make the character of Vincente/Vera (Eve in the novel) central to his film.

Vincente has also become a more sympathetic character; he doesn’t rape Richard’s daughter, though Richard believes otherwise.  His daughter’s distress arises because she witnesses her mother’s suicide.  In short, Almodovar has made the novel’s material his own, circumvented it towards his own concerns.

However, it would be too simple to say that Vera, as a gender queer personage, discovers her own nature.  Or has it forcibly thrust upon her.  The final few scenes introduce a distinct note of ambivalence.  Not to choose or edit out, to be both Vincente/Vera, seems to be where he/she is at.

This is a stylish thriller, visually striking as is only to be expected from Almodovar, and it holds one’s attention throughout.  Sometimes his signature is a little too obvious (e.g. high heels as a marker of power: Norma’s shedding of them, Vera’s trying them on), but on the whole it’s wonderful to look at.  There are many more colours and flavours than noir, but maybe para-noir might make for an apt formulation of the effect that he achieves.  Anyway, Vera is a rare bloom and not at all your garden-variety femme fatale.

In a Better World

In a Better World

Hævnen

Directed by Susanne Bier

Denmark, 2010

Cornerhouse, 28 August 2011

Yes, Bier’s film is certainly worthy of its Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; and it is a very worthy effort overall.

The question raised is how you should respond to violence, whether in the form of a bully or a gangster.  It is a theme that many films have tackled in the past, notably Shane.  Do you turn the other cheek ?  What about responding in kind, even though it risks an escalating exchange of blows?  Then there is the firm and measured approach.   That the film offers no easy answers almost makes it an intelligent film by definition; there aren’t any.

Even among the many fine performances, Mikael Persbrandt as Anton, a doctor steadfastly committed to the Hippocratic oath, and William Johnk Nielsen as Christian, an adolescent disturbed by the recent death of his mother, stood out.  And there was an excellent performance also by Wil Johnson, the guy who plays the especially pernickety police officer in Waking the Dead.

A solid and satisfying film.

Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet

Tarantula

By Thierry Jonquet

Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith  

Serpent’s Tail, July 2011

ISBN 9781846687945

This is the novel that lies at the root of Pedro Almodovar’s new film.

It is a well-constructed work, warped and weird in nature, often hilarious (if you have a dark sense of humour) and ultimately quite moving (if you have a wounded, battered heart).

When Richard Lafargue’s daughter is raped, he hatches an elaborate plan of revenge.  He hunts down her attacker (believing there to be but one) and - by using his skills as a cosmetic surgeon adept in gender reassignment - changes him into a woman.  She (once he) is then pimped out to all and sundry, including an apple-cheeked sadist, as and when the need for revenge takes hold, which is usually after Lafargue has visited his daughter in a sanctuary and come home distraught.

All very fine and dandy, and a perfect outcome in a perverse kind of a way.  For the raper has become the one who is raped.  But what complicates matters is that Lafargue begins to develop feelings for this woman he has created….  And there’s a further complication: a bank robber on the run seeks out Lafargue, believing that as a cosmetic surgeon he can give him a new face and a ticket to freedom.

Thierry Jonquet’s novel owes a little something to David Goodis’ Dark Passage, but it is probably best seen as a neo-noir reworking of a Symbolist tradition best exemplified by Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus or even Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve.  (Lafargue calls his new creation Eve, incidentally.)  As a yarn, it is both crazy and yet somehow psychologically plausible; it has a kind of warped logic.  What starts out as a tale of rape and revenge segues into pity, forgiveness and love.  The secrets that bind lovers together: both have been abusers, both have suffered from abuse.

An extraordinary novel by Jonquet, now what kind of film will Almodovar make of it?

Sourdough and Other Stories

Sourdough and Other Stories
By Angela Slatter
Tartarus Press, August 2010
ISBN: 9781905784257

They have elements of fairy tale and fantasy, myth and horror, do the 16 interrelated stories in this stupendous collection.

All the stories are set in an imagined world that has the city of Lodellan at its centre, with woods, forests and mountains all around.  It is a compelling and convincing world, and one that Brueghel or even Bosch would have been familiar with, being both grim and Grimm.

Several characters recur throughout, so that altogether the stories make up a mosaic or a tapestry.  In the first, a dark enchanting concoction called ‘The Shadow Tree’, we meet Ella, a nanny who abducts children to pay her return fare to a netherworld from whence she was exiled, and we learn from one of her happier charges in ‘The Bones Remember Everything’.  Perhaps also the king here is the twice-born son to be seen in ‘Little Radish’, a radical retelling of the Rapunzel story.  The unfortunate suitor in the second story, ‘Gallowberries’ (fruits that ‘grow lush and glossy, uniformly round and enticing’ yet taste ‘of rotting flesh and spent seed’), turns up as a half-wolf familiar in ‘Sister, Sister’.  And you can trace the fate of Jessamyn, and of her mother and son, through quite a number of stories.  As well, a certain Murcianus, the author of various esoteric tomes – and the sound of whose name may give a clue as to his nature – is often alluded to.

Just why these stories work quite so well is difficult to fully discern, but I’d say it is because amid the witches, the corrupt clergy, the trolls, the robber bridegrooms, the werewolves and other shape-shifters – in other words, the characters and personages that make this world so exciting and intriguing to live in, at least in the imagination and for an hour or two at a shot – they are about things that really matter.  One case in point is ‘Under the Mountain’, the story of Magdalene, a young woman who risks her life to rescue her mother Theodora from the kingdom of trolls.  Once among the trolls, though, they recognise her as one of their own and she realises that she was a cuckoo child; they, the trolls, are her own people.  And she must look on as the woman who, all her life, she had believed to be her mother rejects her utterly:

I look at Theodora, drink in her pain, her distaste and her hatred.  See how my transformation has washed away every trace of affection.  All the love she poured into me, all the care she took, the protection she gave, all were for nought.  The knowledge that she was too late to save her own child so long ago, that she already sheltered a thing, will weigh on her forever, I think.  She will not return for me this time.  I am no longer hers.  I never was.  (231)

Clearly, a story that is in part about becoming yourself, though that be different or even alien to your parents; the meanings don’t need labouring.  Except to say that you can also read this story – and another one, by name of ‘Lost Things’ – as a skit on Orpheus and Eurydice.

Betrayal is a theme that surfaces often, showing its various facets.  In ‘Dibblespin’, a troll tests her half-sister’s love and finds it wanting; in ‘The Navigator’ a young woman (the niece of the aforementioned suitor in ‘Gallowberries’, though you have to work it out) has committed an unforgivable act of betrayal and, as a kind of redemption, she colludes in her own sacrifice.  So too the aged witch in ‘Ash’, who’d used a child as a bartering chip.  Sure the twist at the end of this story shows you one of the laws of this world, the way it works.  And the killer detail in ‘The Shadow Tree’ – the queen’s complicityin her child’s fate – is maybe the most treacherous act of all.

Another story I liked very much was ‘Angel Wood’, though perhaps that’s because I recognized the revamped borrowings from The Golden Bough.

These stories are stupendously good and offer many distinct pleasures: a strange yet superbly realised world, compelling characters and, above all, beautiful prose that has the power to move.  One of those characters mentions of her lover’s failings that ‘he could not realize how all women are, in one way or another, “her kind” [i.e. a witch], even his dear departed mother.’  And that could be a coda for the book.  Sympathy for the witch, indeed.

Further details of the book can be devoured here.

Angela Slatter’s website is here.

And Stephen J. Clark’s book covers are well worth a considered look.

Rose, c’est Paris

Rose, c’est Paris (with DVD)
By Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly
Taschen, February 2011
ISBN: 9783836527859

The title alludes to Duchamp’s alter-ego, Rrose Selavy, and there are echoes of the artist and his work to be found within these pages as well.

You can perhaps best describe the book as a photographic novel composed along the lines of Max Ernst’s novel in collage Une semaine de bonte, though Helmut Newton and Cornell Woolrich are also likely influences.  It begins with a missing girl and then moves on to what seems like a séance, before switching to a near-naked girl on a train, fur coat draped around her shoulders, reading a well-thumbed copy of Fantomas.  Just following this there is a mermaid in a tiara dispensing gifts; and there are diverse shenanigans to follow.  In character, the photographs could be called surrealistic, fetishistic and ludic.  They are intriguing and dreamlike rather than disturbing and dark. 

Paris is the main character in the novel, cliché though this may sound, but it is Paris as primarily the city of artists and of the imagination.  Though having said this, actual locales – the Boulevard du Palais, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower (of course), the Seine, various gardens and cemeteries – are in fact used rather well.  Among the interiors are two photographs of Boris Vian’s home; and it’s a great pity that Andre Breton’s study was not likewise preserved when it was put up for auction a fair few years back.

Every photo is listed at the end of the book and several are annotated, revealing a recondite knowledge of the ancient City of Lights.  Reading the notes to ‘Mona Lisa of the Metro’ (each photograph is titled), I learn that Rembrandt’s great painting was stolen from the Louvre on 22 August 1911, exactly a century ago today.  Quite a period of time passed – over two years – before it was returned.

This is an enchanting volume and, while many models are present, Inge van Bruystegem is the principal one.  She is very easy on the eye.

The Guard

The Guard
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Ireland, 2011
Cornerhouse, 21 August 2011

Do not be put out by the lamentable under-appreciation of Russian literature evidenced by Brendan Gleeson’s police officer.

He proves himself a good copper, capable and perceptive.

The film is a rather fine comedy drama centreing around a spot of smuggling in the West of Ireland.  Wendell Everett, an FBI officer played by Don Cheadle, comes over to lend a hand to the locals; and he and Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) strike up an unlikely alliance.  It is full of smart dialogue and efficient, fast-moving action and, while not terribly original, it is immensely entertaining.  There’s a witty commentary on genre conventions but no radical departure from them.

And as for the likes of Chekhov, Bunin, Isaac Babel and Daniil Kharms…  Well, sure they made their point fairly pronto.

Elastic Bridge

Elastic Bridge
Written and Performed by Eddie Fortune, Rosie MacPherson and John James Tomlinson
The Lowry, 19 August 2011

The saving grace of this play is its humour.

Sylvia (Rosie MacPherson) comes to a bridge where Alexander (Eddie Fortune), a distraught gay librarian and a would-be suicide like her – though without her unique star-quality – contemplates his fate; and both are soon followed by Kurt (John James Tomlinson), an accountant seeking a different kind of oblivion.  The chosen career no longer does it for him.  Intimacy, or at any rate talkativeness, seizes them.  No hidden motives are left undivulged.

It meanders a little bit, to be frank, and the second part of the play is rather cursory, but the welcome sprinkling of humour allays these faults somewhat.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber
Opera House, 16 August 2011

What to add to my previous review of this vibrant production?

Tim Rice’s flippant lyrics and blatant anachronisms make the musical work wonderfully well.  That’s its secret.  Indeed, a carefully researched and elegantly structured show wouldn’t be half as much fun.  If you want an intelligent and insightful retelling of the bible story, read the Thomas Mann novel.  He wrote a good one about Joseph and his brothers, though the one about the magic mountain was most likely his best.

Let us have Elvis as the pharaoh, down-home cowboy and calypso songs, a melancholy French ditty about Canaan days gone by and never to return.  They’re all here and there’re fellows in Judge Dread visors an’ all.

This is the musical that has got ‘cheesy and cheerful’ down to a fine art form.

Project Nim

Project Nim
Directed by James Marsh
UK, 2011
Cornerhouse, 14 August 2011

Our relationship with our fellow creatures and in particular with chimpanzees, our near-neighbours on the phylogenetic tree, comes under the microscope in this moving documentary.

The chimp named Nim (after Noam Chomsky) was taken from his mother shortly after birth and raised as a human child.  He was used to test a scientific hypothesis: can chimps learn language, and in particular grammar?  Can they generate unique sentences as people do?  It was soon considered that they cannot; and that is still the scientific consensus.

When the project was abandoned, and after years spent among human beings, Nim was cast aside and placed in a cage.  His human contact was severely limited.  And later he was put in a lab that tested vaccines to be used against HIV.  As an act of betrayal it was pretty despicable.

You come away after watching this documentary with an heightened awareness of how we use other species for our own ends, no matter how noble or admirable those ends may claim to be.  We assume ownership over their lives, believing this to be a God-given right.  Surely there should be a way whereby we can avoid this unwarranted and unseemly arrogance, as well as any anthropomorphic sentimentality (also on show here), and be simply responsible custodians of the earth and its creatures?  Then again, maybe that’s just my inner hippy talking.