missing dust jacket

song of the week: digital - joy division

posted by raspberry beret @ 9:32:00 PM 2 Comments

and now for some psychogeographical drifting

lose yourself

In her essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Virginia Woolf explores the liberating effect of walking without purpose in London, applying the language of rambling to experimentation and rediscovery of the self:

What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

For Woolf, the city walk enables the individual to escape, or ‘deviate’ from themselves, even adopting ‘briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’ as part of a simultaneous escape, and reaffirmation of identity. Unsurprisingly therefore, it plays a significant role in Woolf’s novel on human interconnectedness and isolation, Mrs Dalloway. Concerned with the interior, emotion lives of an apparently disparate, but intimately linked group of people in London, Woolf first acquaints her readers with the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway when she steps out into the streets of Westminster to buy flowers for her party. First sketched, although far less sympathetically in Woolf’s The Voyage Out, Clarissa’s character was developed in the 1923 short story Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. The titles of these two preliminary works immediately intimate the significance of walking in London for Woolf.

As she weaves between the crowds, Clarissa’s thoughts drift between memories of her past at Bourton, observations on London and various impulses and emotions initiated by the walk. For Clarissa, the frantic activity of London’s streets is exhilarating, seeming to possess an invisible electricity or magnetism, in a manner comparable to the experiences of Baudelaire’s painter:

Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.

This ‘divine vitality’ has a liberating and energising effect on both the atmosphere and Clarissa, enabling her to momentarily relinquish the confines of her domestic and familial responsibilities. This shift that occurs when a woman moves from the private interior of home to the impersonal city is wittily (but somehow, bleakly) articulated by Woolf in Street Haunting when she explains that at home:

we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express theoddity of our temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.

Isolated from the milling crowds, Clarissa’s independence results in simultaneously carefree and anxious concentration on the immediacy of the moment and her own mortality:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

The deliberate, strained, repetition of ‘very’ exacerbates the tone of excitement and anxiety that pervades the passage, for despite her freedom, Clarissa remains deeply self-conscious. Joining the streets, she begins to feel anonymous and capable of considering relinquishing her familial responsibilities. Paradoxically, however, the dissolution of self that results in immergence with the crowd exacerbates anxiety about the fact that her public identity remains that of the wife of Richard Dalloway:

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.

In Edmund White’s book on the flâneur, he quotes the following extract from a 1929 essay by Walter Benjamin, describing the splitting of the self that occurs in the city, during which the streets simultaneously dissolve social hierarchies whilst making the walker grasp for the familiarity of their interior lives:

Landscape – this is what the city becomes for the flâneur. Or more precisely, the city splits into its dialectical poles. It becomes a landscape that opens up to him and a parlour that encloses him.

Surely this is similar to the effects the walk has on Clarissa Dalloway in the opening of Woolf’s novel, appropriate when one remembers that the novel concentrates on Clarissa’s simultaneous feelings of isolation from society, frustration at society’s definitions of her, and her desire to reach out beyond her home, achieved through the parallels Woolf draws between Clarissa and the young war veteran, Septimus Smith. The notion of the self fragmenting in the chaotic London Streets, reaching out and forcing sympathetic connections with strangers is explicitly referred to in Street Haunting, when she muses that nature was too distracted when making man, and consequently allowed contradictory impulses and desires to influence each person:

we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here not there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?

By leaving the home and the ‘old prejudices that fold us round’, the individual liberates themselves in wandering the streets, enables the ‘varied and wandering’ self to freely explore and adopt diverse identities, resulting in an affirmation of the self; ‘we are indeed ourselves’.

Frustratingly, as Woolf also acknowledges, this can only be an occasional luxury, for people must allow the world to reduce them to their social status and responsibilities, later rationalising; ‘for convenience sake a man must be whole’. This is a sad fact of all society, but nevertheless, the city provides the walker with the opportunity to ‘shed the self our friends know us by and become[s] part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers'.

posted by raspberry beret @ 7:51:00 PM 0 Comments

song of the week: caring is creepy - the shins

sunday afternoon with minifig, darling vicarage and our friend simon -
brixton's answer to the IT crowd

Absolute weirdness. This Sunday matinee's film was Zach Braff’s Garden State, as recommended by minifig who bears a scary spiritual resemblance to the film’s protagonist, Andrew. “Just watch it,” he implored, “you’ll see why, I promise.” So there I was finding Sam, Natalie Portman’s character, increasingly irritating and desperately trying to work out whom she reminded me of. And then I realised. Me. Aargh. Minifig found it hilarious. Ha. Ha.

Garden State’s not a terrible film – very slow-moving and treading a fine line between kooky/witty and kooky/annoying - but as a film shot through the lens of a depressive, it ain’t half bad. Anyone who’s seen it will know The Shins get a rather significant mention in it and so this week’s song of the week is Caring is Creepy, a dreamily downbeat number on depression.

Don’t be fooled by the chirpy whistling intro and punchy chord-laden intro, which in any other emo single would lead into something a little more upbeat. This is the liveliest it gets. James Russell Mercer’s plaintive warble is mixed into a trembling yowl merging with hushed guitars, sulky bass and moaning organ. The drums don’t so much as roll as plod in, cymbals whispering under a guitar yawning through various swirling effects pedals as if on the brink of waking. Mercer’s murky vocals curl up for a nap as the song folds in on itself.

Something approaching a chorus comes in the dour switchblade triumph of the lyrics ‘Hold your glass up, hold it in’, followed by the sing-song sigh of ‘never betray the way you've always known it is’. This sort-of chorus finally ends with the languid, lethargic syllables of All/ these/ squawk/ ing/ birds/ won't/ quit/ build/ ing/ noth /ing /lay / ing / bricks’ a creepy, meaningless chant that not only echoes the song's opening melody, but oddly, I’ve just realised, Sufjan Steven’s Chicago (last week’s SOTW). The murmuring organ and blurry guitars lazily work up something approaching a musical interlude before returning to that shrugging, tired mantra ‘Hold your glass up, hold it in...’

And yet, in its hushed drumming, distorted guitars and melting vocals there is something cosy about this song. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that depression is a similar game; live with it for long enough and it becomes your friend and bedfellow, something to cuddle up with when the crowds have gone. A warm, fuzzy, big, fat nothing.

At no point in the song is the title referred to. The voice of the song is beyond caring, ‘never got cold wearing nothing in the snow’, and so articulating anything beyond the numb blankness of a bad case of the blues and a Lithium prescription seems facile. There’s none of the militant screams of the early Manics here or the ferocious drone and crash of Nirvana, or the self-loathing thrum of Nine Inch Nails. The Shins are way past that. Caring is Creepy isn’t a nervous breakdown, but the slow, sleep-deprived sigh of resignation. And, in that lazy Pavement, autumnal Elliott Smith kinda way, that actually makes it a rather pretty song. Oh! to be a fake-tortured teenager again. Only I'd probably have to like Panic! at the Disco and *shudder* Fall Out Boy if that was the case, so perhaps not...

Right, enough of this maudlin stuff, who's on for a bit of Push the Button?

posted by raspberry beret @ 7:48:00 PM 2 Comments

song of the week: chicago - sufjan stevens

My sister pointed out how lazy I’ve been with the blog recently. Truth is, I’ve been sort of busy. Still, that’s never a good enough excuse for not writing, so in an attempt to ensure I don’t forget how, song of the week is back.

Opening with a series of gently climbing chimes played on a glockenspiel/xylophone/
marimba/whatever in a series of ascending and then descending notes, Sufjan Stevens’ Chicago is a song that I always take to be about change, despite the fact it's doesn't go anywhere. That simple, see-saw beginning that promises new dawns and bright days - sounding like eyes opening, kettles whistling and toast popping - glides effortlessly into a soaring, pounding journey that gives the impression of continually moving, whilst never diverting from its opening structure, dropping you back six minutes later almost exactly where you began.

Sufjan Stevens’ layered multi-tracked sound (one-man-masquerading-as-entire-orchestra) works to gild the opening progressions, through lush looped strings, uptight, pulsing keyboards, rumbling bass and even-tempered drumming, pulling back to that same soothing opening, before it’s time for the brass, the crashing symbols, the choir. This series of ceaselessly changing, but returning riffs, gives Chicago its tireless, sweeping momentum, pushing you through the song at subtle speed whilst delicately tearing you to pieces.

Because despite, but also maybe because, of its mounting, rapturous repetitions, Chicago is one of those beautifully depressing songs. Whether it’s the soft, inevitable repetition of Sufjan’s simple refrains, shifting from ‘all things go’, to the barely believable ‘all things grow’, or the final, resigned ‘I made a lot of mistakes’, the song’s illusion of progress leaves me feeling both uplifted and empty.

From the first chorus, the innocent, untrained choir flips the previously vague, willowy lyrics into worshipful hymn (you came to take us, all things go, all things go / to recreate us, all things grow, all things grow) opening the song up to characteristic Sufjan Christian spirituality - which he very sensibly leaves up to you whether to take or leave. I don’t have it in me to sing along like I truly mean it, and perhaps it's that unwillingness to take that leap of faith that means I always leave the song too soon. I never quite make it onto the choir’s final chorus with it's clean, bell-like trumpet. Instead, I’m left with the taut restraint of Sufjan’s last solo, coming not towards the end of the song (as you may think) but almost directly in the middle;

The closing choral repetition glances off me with little impact as the song reaches its peaceful conclusion. When Chicago ends with the same opening chimes, overlaid with swooning choral voices, flattening into a trembling violin, I feel little more than a calm emptiness. Perhaps sometimes it takes an elegant, complex epic to make you feel virtually nothing at all, except the skin you’re wearing.

posted by raspberry beret @ 7:32:00 PM 2 Comments