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1 June
This story had to be told - one way or another, although it was written for New Empress Magazine's issue (number 10), with the theme of Time in cinema, it resisted inclusion.
Finished, it would have looked at Eraserhead (1977) and seen whether Brazil and After Hours (1985) were both indebted to Lynch, but had gone in different directions with it (a bit like particles flying out from a sub-atomic collision)...
In late 1983, there proved not to be the sustainable will – or, with it, the money – for Martin Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he had also insisted had to be shot in Israel (adding to the cost). As he says in Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber & Faber, London, 1996 (updated version)), he sublimated his rage at the studio for thinking Christ ‘not worth the trouble’ (as Barry Diller at Paramount told him, apologizing for not saying before that they were pulling the plug) : he looked around for another film to make.
Not being able to see himself make either, Scorsese turned down Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Witness (1985), and so ended up, again, in the world of independent film with After Hours and, ultimately, with Fassbinder’s cameraman, Michael Ballhaus. Before then, a few things happened on the way…
In New York, Scorsese got to see a script that he liked. It was owned (i.e. they had the film option) by Griffin Dunne (Dunne played Paul Hackett, the male lead) and Amy Robinson (who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), and was, with Dunne, a co-producer of After Hours). In his own words, Scorsese started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue […].
This is where things got interesting, because Scorsese had apparently been told that it had been written by Joseph Minion in a class at Columbia University (and been given an A in the Graduate Film Program), whereas that seems not to have been the whole story.
Even I, as a fourteen-year-old, learnt the basic rules of plagiarism : even if others had not also decided to lift material for their essay from the introduction to our edition of Julius Caesar, which made ‘the borrowing’ obvious, one could not simply pass off something as one’s own, and had to cover one’s tracks. (Either that, or acknowledge one’s sources, of course*.)
In this case, as blogger Andrew Hearst reveals (linked from the film’s Wikipedia page), there was a radio monologue called Lies, written, performed and broadcast by one Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse in 1982. On Hearst’s blog, it can be heard in full, and runs to around 11 minutes, providing the broad synopsis for around the first one-third of After Hours.
One might just about be able to listen to it and not be spot the relation to After Hours if one had not seen it recently: were it not, that is, that bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights made of plaster of Paris are a bit of a give-away (even if a five-dollar bill flying out of the cash-cradle, and through the window, of a taxi and leaving Hackett without cash is not already). Where I cannot agree with Hearst, because what he writes does not take account of how screenplays get written and end up in production, is what he makes of the evidence.
Hearst writes ‘Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise’. It is, of course, an easy assumption to make, but do we know that Minion was credited with the screenplay as the (willing ?) fall guy for someone else’s theft of the plot, because there appears to be nothing against which to check the story about the screenplay and the Columbia course ?
The real mystery is that anyone would attempt to pass off Lies in the guise of After Hours without changing some very significant details, some of the more obvious of which have been mentioned. Is it, so we are being encouraged to understand Minion, that we have to imagine him inexperienced and greedy, and so getting himself a bad name by miring the picture in the litigation that Hearst talks about ?
I have not looked for evidence of the court case, not just because it is so long ago (and I would not know where to look), but also since, if there had been an out-of-court settlement, only the fact of the case’s existence, which we probably suppose, would have been apparent. Scorsese, of course, makes no mention of the issue in interview, and even the injured Frank, according to Hearst, was being reticent to name the film that paid him off.
All that we have to hope is that he got a good settlement, because, comparing his performance and the film, it is all there, right down to the characterization of Rosanna Arquette (as Marcy), whom Hearst described as ‘interested and indifferent at the same time’. As for what happened to Minion, there seems to be a bigger elephant in the room than that :
Dunne makes a perfectly good, nervy Hackett, and the film gets good ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, but, looking at Dunne’s career and judging it from IMDb’s page for him, he seems to have achieved more as director and producer than the rather bitty parts and t.v. work on the other side of the camera.
Yes, things happen - or do not happen - in a career quite unfairly, and maybe After Hours, as the Rotten Tomatoes figures show, had the critical appraisal, but insufficient popular appeal, to allow Dunne to move on from there.
Or maybe there was no moving on from a persecution-complex character such as Hackett, hounded by highly organized vigilantes within hours of visiting the area, giving off signals of being attractive to women, but dangerous, and ending the film dusty and dazed back at the office where he began it.
The all-too-often quoted opening words of ‘Burnt Norton’ from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – which lose significance out of context – have a place here, in looking at what, if I am not mistaken, is a film directed by Scorsese that made too little impact on its release :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
I have not seen Dunne in anything else, but I am grateful to him for wanting to get this film made and being Paul Hackett, and I am sure that others will be for what he has produced or directed since.
End-notes
* Which I do not think that the film credits do with an even bigger theft, that of a story by Franz Kafka that he incorporated into the scene in the Cathedral in his unfinished novel The Trial (Der Prozess), where Josef K. is told a parable about the law, Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). The story is lifted straight into the film in the context of the bouncers to the club that Hackett needs to enter, and it feeds into the film's uneasy quality of persecution, witch-hunt and - although Dunne is not Jewish - maybe anti-Semitism.
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Monday 17 June 2013
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Lad goes out / Lad gets laid
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2 June (updated 4 June)
My e-mail accounts will not talk to Varsity.
At any rate, the following comment, which I sought to add to what Hannah Wilkinson has written, has to reside here because of such lack of dialogue :
This piece is almost entirely predicated on the idea that there is, specifically in Britain (at whose universities students come from all over the world) and as if no men of other nationalities might do what is contended for as usual, 'a lad culture' that somehow dictates conformity. This is said numerous times, in different ways, but it is hard to see how this Alfie-like notch-on-the-bedpost 'culture' of conquest is universally true or, even if it were, what the mechanism is for having reached that point.
The supposition, because the article goes on to make a link with rape, is that women do not also go out 'in packs' and do not seek or engage in one-off sexual acts with men who were strangers before the night in question. If women, coupled with drinking large quantities of alcohol, are doing this - as they give every impression of doing - then what makes the 'culture' actually 'a lad culture', when women are looking for and doing the same thing as a way of 'having a good time' ?
The writer thinks that something is being unpicked and described. In fact, the lazy assumptions of the terminology and of how things are however they are means that the piece needs unpicking as to what is mere conformity itself to a way of picturing the world that bears no better relation to reality than 'a one-night stand' to a loving and understanding sexual and emotional relationship.
Post-script
I now see that Nick Badman Brittlebank, who is ranked (somewhere) as a Top Commenter (and appears to be Dogs body at Rohilla B&B), has added the following :
"Not only in the sense that obviously normalising sexually violent language and being slaves to a pack mentality can lead to potentially dangerous situations"
There were some legitimate points made in this article but this wasn't one of them. It's wildly implausible to suggest there's some causal relationship between 'sexually violent language', which could include describing an innocuous sexual act with violent language for effect, and rape.
I find 'lad' culture annoying because it's obnoxious, and I reject it because I think I can express my masculinity without being obnoxious. But I don't think 'lad' culture is dangerous. Writing a moralising article about the dangers of banter paints it as something other than an irritation and is just going to further alienate people who think that feminism is, itself, an irritation. If you don't like 'lads' then don't associate yourself with them, and certainly don't have sex with them. They're not 'imposing a conformity' on anyone- you don't have to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to or conform to any standard you don't like. It honestly is that simple.
I cannot do more than quote Nick here, as Varsity requires me to have the Arsebook account that I vow never to open, and I cannot much diasgree with how he has framed his riposte.
Thoughts, anyone... ?
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2 June (updated 4 June)
My e-mail accounts will not talk to Varsity.
At any rate, the following comment, which I sought to add to what Hannah Wilkinson has written, has to reside here because of such lack of dialogue :
This piece is almost entirely predicated on the idea that there is, specifically in Britain (at whose universities students come from all over the world) and as if no men of other nationalities might do what is contended for as usual, 'a lad culture' that somehow dictates conformity. This is said numerous times, in different ways, but it is hard to see how this Alfie-like notch-on-the-bedpost 'culture' of conquest is universally true or, even if it were, what the mechanism is for having reached that point.
The supposition, because the article goes on to make a link with rape, is that women do not also go out 'in packs' and do not seek or engage in one-off sexual acts with men who were strangers before the night in question. If women, coupled with drinking large quantities of alcohol, are doing this - as they give every impression of doing - then what makes the 'culture' actually 'a lad culture', when women are looking for and doing the same thing as a way of 'having a good time' ?
The writer thinks that something is being unpicked and described. In fact, the lazy assumptions of the terminology and of how things are however they are means that the piece needs unpicking as to what is mere conformity itself to a way of picturing the world that bears no better relation to reality than 'a one-night stand' to a loving and understanding sexual and emotional relationship.
Post-script
I now see that Nick Badman Brittlebank, who is ranked (somewhere) as a Top Commenter (and appears to be Dogs body at Rohilla B&B), has added the following :
"Not only in the sense that obviously normalising sexually violent language and being slaves to a pack mentality can lead to potentially dangerous situations"
There were some legitimate points made in this article but this wasn't one of them. It's wildly implausible to suggest there's some causal relationship between 'sexually violent language', which could include describing an innocuous sexual act with violent language for effect, and rape.
I find 'lad' culture annoying because it's obnoxious, and I reject it because I think I can express my masculinity without being obnoxious. But I don't think 'lad' culture is dangerous. Writing a moralising article about the dangers of banter paints it as something other than an irritation and is just going to further alienate people who think that feminism is, itself, an irritation. If you don't like 'lads' then don't associate yourself with them, and certainly don't have sex with them. They're not 'imposing a conformity' on anyone- you don't have to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to or conform to any standard you don't like. It honestly is that simple.
I cannot do more than quote Nick here, as Varsity requires me to have the Arsebook account that I vow never to open, and I cannot much diasgree with how he has framed his riposte.
Thoughts, anyone... ?
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The girl on the train
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2 June
England & Wales is a separate legal jurisdiction from Scotland, with its own laws, courts, Acts of Parliament.
It used to be said, in the early 1990s, that it was a principle of the law of England & Wales that, if one saw a child drowning in a puddle of water (i.e. one could intervene and save him or her without hurting oneself), one was under no obligation to prevent it happening.
I have no idea whether that is still so, and, of course, the law assumed the legal fiction of a stranger, whereas a parent would owe different duties. Curious that Lord Denning was at pains to point out the Biblical origins of the law, but this inhumane example showed otherwise, a callous version of the travellers who went by on the other side of the road in the parable of the so-called good Samaritan (the whole point of the parable was to answer the question Who is my neighbour ?, duties to whom some were seeking to avoid).
At any rate, a child standing and playing on the lap of a woman (who turned out to be her grandmother) was taking too much interest in the nearby open window, one of those narrow ones that flaps down at the top of a larger pane. I kept conceiving of her fingers being in the way if the violent wake of an intercity train passing caused the window to snap shut, or, as she seemed to be doing at one point, of pushing it shut it on her own hand with the help of turbulence.
After we stopped at one station and some hesitation, I felt that I couldn't stand back in the face of what might happen, and, if it did happen, would be deeply damaging to a young child and her fingers, so I approached the woman and, prefacing my remark with the wish that I hoped I wasn't interfering, shared my fears. She then shared them with the girl, and urged the reluctant girl to wave to the man (she never did, but she smiled).
If I'd been asked why, or thanked too much, I'd have said that I would hope that anyone would do the same, even in the keep-myself-to-myself days of train travel when we look at each other and pretend that we haven't, etc.
But I do hope that, that anyone else, seeing the risk, might have dared say something, and have thought nothing special of wanting to avoid a harm to the livelihood of a young life.
Later, after a tiring walk in which I was pulling a case on its wheels, I was kindly offered a lift to the village where the driver also lived. I do not see that, as some would, as karma, but the two were clearly related as acts of care for another.
If such kindnesses happened all the time, would we need to think of talking of karma ?
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2 June
England & Wales is a separate legal jurisdiction from Scotland, with its own laws, courts, Acts of Parliament.
It used to be said, in the early 1990s, that it was a principle of the law of England & Wales that, if one saw a child drowning in a puddle of water (i.e. one could intervene and save him or her without hurting oneself), one was under no obligation to prevent it happening.
I have no idea whether that is still so, and, of course, the law assumed the legal fiction of a stranger, whereas a parent would owe different duties. Curious that Lord Denning was at pains to point out the Biblical origins of the law, but this inhumane example showed otherwise, a callous version of the travellers who went by on the other side of the road in the parable of the so-called good Samaritan (the whole point of the parable was to answer the question Who is my neighbour ?, duties to whom some were seeking to avoid).
At any rate, a child standing and playing on the lap of a woman (who turned out to be her grandmother) was taking too much interest in the nearby open window, one of those narrow ones that flaps down at the top of a larger pane. I kept conceiving of her fingers being in the way if the violent wake of an intercity train passing caused the window to snap shut, or, as she seemed to be doing at one point, of pushing it shut it on her own hand with the help of turbulence.
After we stopped at one station and some hesitation, I felt that I couldn't stand back in the face of what might happen, and, if it did happen, would be deeply damaging to a young child and her fingers, so I approached the woman and, prefacing my remark with the wish that I hoped I wasn't interfering, shared my fears. She then shared them with the girl, and urged the reluctant girl to wave to the man (she never did, but she smiled).
If I'd been asked why, or thanked too much, I'd have said that I would hope that anyone would do the same, even in the keep-myself-to-myself days of train travel when we look at each other and pretend that we haven't, etc.
But I do hope that, that anyone else, seeing the risk, might have dared say something, and have thought nothing special of wanting to avoid a harm to the livelihood of a young life.
Later, after a tiring walk in which I was pulling a case on its wheels, I was kindly offered a lift to the village where the driver also lived. I do not see that, as some would, as karma, but the two were clearly related as acts of care for another.
If such kindnesses happened all the time, would we need to think of talking of karma ?
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Sunday 2 June 2013
Censored by The Indy ?
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31 May
I think that it was to The Great Gatsby review: Long, gaudy and flawed, but there is much to admire in Baz Luhrmann’s stonking lack of subtlety that I tried to add a comment.
I added it once or twice more, still 'awaiting moderation', and have now recalled that I still have it, so here it is :
This review is not alone in finding what I interpret as 'a mess' in this film, yet a seemingly 'compelling one' :
It sounds as if the film's 'all-over-the-placeness' should just be an absolute irritation, yet it isn't. (However, are critics indulging in this release a quality in the shower-singer story-line in To Rome with Love (2012) that they too easily dismissed, whereas, for me, Allen gave a potent parody of the type of excesses to which operatic direction and staging - let alone Hollywood films - are prone ?)
I'm going to err on the side that what I have been dubbing 'The Great Fatsby' is irritating, and not bother, because, with any number of reviewers having pointed out different out-of-whack features, not one of those is going to fail to jar - all at once and cumulatively.
I don't recall anyone drawing attention to what length this feature runs to (so probably it in no way drags), but I was even unimpressed the other day by hearing an allegedly 1920s-style number with Bryan Ferry, whose Roxy Music always sounded lively and jazzy anyway - I don't choose to spend time or the premium on a 3D film that possibly might as well be Marvel or Manga as F. Scott, because, although it may be classier than many of its 'blockbuster' peers, what worth does it have in (hypothetical) absolute terms ?
I know how I felt with On the Road (2012), which may have been doing its best to render Kerouac on screen, but left me wondering Why have bothered ?
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31 May
I think that it was to The Great Gatsby review: Long, gaudy and flawed, but there is much to admire in Baz Luhrmann’s stonking lack of subtlety that I tried to add a comment.
I added it once or twice more, still 'awaiting moderation', and have now recalled that I still have it, so here it is :
This review is not alone in finding what I interpret as 'a mess' in this film, yet a seemingly 'compelling one' :
It sounds as if the film's 'all-over-the-placeness' should just be an absolute irritation, yet it isn't. (However, are critics indulging in this release a quality in the shower-singer story-line in To Rome with Love (2012) that they too easily dismissed, whereas, for me, Allen gave a potent parody of the type of excesses to which operatic direction and staging - let alone Hollywood films - are prone ?)
I'm going to err on the side that what I have been dubbing 'The Great Fatsby' is irritating, and not bother, because, with any number of reviewers having pointed out different out-of-whack features, not one of those is going to fail to jar - all at once and cumulatively.
I don't recall anyone drawing attention to what length this feature runs to (so probably it in no way drags), but I was even unimpressed the other day by hearing an allegedly 1920s-style number with Bryan Ferry, whose Roxy Music always sounded lively and jazzy anyway - I don't choose to spend time or the premium on a 3D film that possibly might as well be Marvel or Manga as F. Scott, because, although it may be classier than many of its 'blockbuster' peers, what worth does it have in (hypothetical) absolute terms ?
I know how I felt with On the Road (2012), which may have been doing its best to render Kerouac on screen, but left me wondering Why have bothered ?
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Saturday 1 June 2013
The Mysteries of @hullodave...
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1 June
Of course, @hullodave means it as a joke, for humorous effect, but he is right, of course, that the words folding umbrella and telescopic umbrella are synonymous, thereby concentrating on the incidental fact that one cylinder (or more) slides within another (or others) to allow the focus to be adjusted, rather than on the actual purpose of making distant things more visible for which the device was invented.
A feature of his nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll used the word portmanteau to describe a word with more than one meaning present, for example the opening line of 'Jabberwocky' :
'Twas brilling and the slithy toves
Two words (I won't say which) entered the English language because of this poem alone. Carroll's mind would have seen perfectly, and condemned in his child friends, how viewing telescopically was being confused with the mechanical properties of the telescope itself : he had an odium for muddled thinking of the kind identified by Dave Steele.
However, if I have a rifle with a telescopic sight, it is clear enough and right that the sight has the properties of a telescope, seeing accurately over a greater distance than would be possible without it.
With 'microscopic', the meaning of the word has been blurred in other ways, meaning no longer literally what is rendered visible (or more clearly) by using a microscope - a scornful patron could well nowadays condemn a microscopic salad, so the connection with the viewing instrument has just been lost in the hyperbole of calling something small.
Though Dave's follow-up Tweet is hard to construe, he must have been gazing on some wee coos during his recent Scottish jaunt to come up with this whimsy. One hopes...
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1 June
In the same way as we refer to very small things as microscopic, perhaps we should refer to far away things as telescopic.
— Dave Steele (@hullodave) May 31, 2013
"Dougal, these cows are microscopic. Those cows are telescopic." Actually forget the previous tweet.
— Dave Steele (@hullodave) May 31, 2013
Of course, @hullodave means it as a joke, for humorous effect, but he is right, of course, that the words folding umbrella and telescopic umbrella are synonymous, thereby concentrating on the incidental fact that one cylinder (or more) slides within another (or others) to allow the focus to be adjusted, rather than on the actual purpose of making distant things more visible for which the device was invented.
A feature of his nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll used the word portmanteau to describe a word with more than one meaning present, for example the opening line of 'Jabberwocky' :
'Twas brilling and the slithy toves
Two words (I won't say which) entered the English language because of this poem alone. Carroll's mind would have seen perfectly, and condemned in his child friends, how viewing telescopically was being confused with the mechanical properties of the telescope itself : he had an odium for muddled thinking of the kind identified by Dave Steele.
However, if I have a rifle with a telescopic sight, it is clear enough and right that the sight has the properties of a telescope, seeing accurately over a greater distance than would be possible without it.
With 'microscopic', the meaning of the word has been blurred in other ways, meaning no longer literally what is rendered visible (or more clearly) by using a microscope - a scornful patron could well nowadays condemn a microscopic salad, so the connection with the viewing instrument has just been lost in the hyperbole of calling something small.
Though Dave's follow-up Tweet is hard to construe, he must have been gazing on some wee coos during his recent Scottish jaunt to come up with this whimsy. One hopes...
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Thursday 30 May 2013
Report from Beverley Early Music Festival – Chapel and Tavern with Vivien Ellis and The Carnival Band
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30 May
As a fellow festival-goer agreed, we had not seen the attraction of the option of the venue of ‘the tavern’ (Beverley’s The Angel) first – and also that, if matters had ended with just the Chapel (though it had, again, been open to book just that venue’s part of the evening), it would have been a fairly sombre end to things, despite Charles Wesley’s fervent hopes.
For little that was sung was not setting Wesley’s texts, and he was not born until 1707 (and died when he was 80). So the first promised century or more of music from 1616 onwards – the year of Shakespeare’s death – was left to be represented by Thomas Butts’ reworking of Henry Purcell for ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, and a traditional English tune for Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’, which had apparently been collected by Vaughan Williams. (There was also a text early on of Isaac Watts, ‘Rejoice, ye shining worlds’. Settings of Wesley after his death accounted for extending the scope to the beginning of the Victorian era.)
The thinking may have been that Toll Gavel, as a United Reformed Church, suited this music better than music from the Anglican orthodoxy – and I have no notion whether former Methodist chapels were converted to use by that denomination, although it seems not unlikely.
In any case, though we had been urged to join in, if we knew the words, the hymn-books contained many of these Wesleyan ones, and there might have been greater participation, if this had been pointed out. I suspect that those books would have gone quite outside the chapel tradition, and therefore that the impression of music that we gained was not one that reflected the non-conformist tradition in which we were silently being asked to locate ourselves.
The performers arrived looking a little footweary (they had already done a tavern slot), but donned less brightly coloured garb, including a complete change for Vivien Ellis into a stretchy black number – and, when she re-emerged, the redness of her nose and mouth made me consider the possibility that she had had need to resort to a menthol remedy. (The others all had black jackets, with a stylish double-breasted top-jacket for Jub Davis (on double bass).) However, it may have worked – or I may have been mistaken – for there was no sign that her voice was lacking in power, and, when the men sang as well (in one case, with (I think) ‘Come all ye mourning pilgrims’, on their own), there were some agreeable harmonies.
When those of us watching did sing, as a quiet background to the performance, it added to the experience, but it was rather hard to be sure what that was : we knew that these were not concert-pieces, but also that this was not worship (and, as I have suggested, that this was a deliberate limitation to ‘chapel-type’ music), and, for me, that meant that I did not know where I felt myself to be. That said, there was an enthusiasm, even a fervour, that made this not simply performance.
Interspersed in the proceedings, Vivien Ellis nicely read a Thomas Hardy poem, ‘A Church Romance’, about how his parents allegedly met as the result of a glance exchanged in church, and Steve Banks ‘a sermon’ in the form of admonitions and exhortations of Wesley regarding sacred music, many of which parishioners would well heed : for example, not singingly too slowly, and trying to sing together.
I believe that we showed that his urging had had an effect on us as we joined in Bunyan’s hymn, and so closed ‘the first part’ – since it seemed a good idea, my companion pilgrim and I were out quickly and on foot to the tavern, not so much in the spirit of Till in heaven we take our place, as in the roofed-over beer-garden.
Getting there for a seat under the influence of a patio-heater was a distinct bonus (possible evidence that the troupe had been chilled earlier – along with the fact that, in this half, Vivien Ellis mainly kept a body-warmer on over her dress), as also was being able to join a short queue at the bar.
Here, the sound was amplified, and, in addition to the bag-pipes (played by Andy Watts), we were treated to rounds, some topical, and two from the seventeeth century. Here is my one of them that I liked best :
Beverley ale !
Where, where, where ?
In the blacksmith’s house.
I would I were there.
Also fun was :
A boat, a boat, haste to the ferry !
For we’ll go over to be merry
And laugh and sing and drink old sherry.
We also had a spirited rendition of O that I had but a fine man by Pelham Humfrey, in which Vivien Ellis took delight both in finding in the audience ‘a spicy one’, and showing how If I die, I die, in the true guise of an operatic diva.
Elsewhere, two more sensitive numbers in ‘An thou were my ain thing’ and, in ‘A blacksmith courted me’, one of her oft-performed ones.
We ended with two numbers from the volume Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy, a suitable title for this music, which, concentrating on ‘Old Simon the King’. All in all, a good and lively collection of tunes to round off the evening !
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30 May
As a fellow festival-goer agreed, we had not seen the attraction of the option of the venue of ‘the tavern’ (Beverley’s The Angel) first – and also that, if matters had ended with just the Chapel (though it had, again, been open to book just that venue’s part of the evening), it would have been a fairly sombre end to things, despite Charles Wesley’s fervent hopes.
For little that was sung was not setting Wesley’s texts, and he was not born until 1707 (and died when he was 80). So the first promised century or more of music from 1616 onwards – the year of Shakespeare’s death – was left to be represented by Thomas Butts’ reworking of Henry Purcell for ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, and a traditional English tune for Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’, which had apparently been collected by Vaughan Williams. (There was also a text early on of Isaac Watts, ‘Rejoice, ye shining worlds’. Settings of Wesley after his death accounted for extending the scope to the beginning of the Victorian era.)
The thinking may have been that Toll Gavel, as a United Reformed Church, suited this music better than music from the Anglican orthodoxy – and I have no notion whether former Methodist chapels were converted to use by that denomination, although it seems not unlikely.
In any case, though we had been urged to join in, if we knew the words, the hymn-books contained many of these Wesleyan ones, and there might have been greater participation, if this had been pointed out. I suspect that those books would have gone quite outside the chapel tradition, and therefore that the impression of music that we gained was not one that reflected the non-conformist tradition in which we were silently being asked to locate ourselves.
The performers arrived looking a little footweary (they had already done a tavern slot), but donned less brightly coloured garb, including a complete change for Vivien Ellis into a stretchy black number – and, when she re-emerged, the redness of her nose and mouth made me consider the possibility that she had had need to resort to a menthol remedy. (The others all had black jackets, with a stylish double-breasted top-jacket for Jub Davis (on double bass).) However, it may have worked – or I may have been mistaken – for there was no sign that her voice was lacking in power, and, when the men sang as well (in one case, with (I think) ‘Come all ye mourning pilgrims’, on their own), there were some agreeable harmonies.
When those of us watching did sing, as a quiet background to the performance, it added to the experience, but it was rather hard to be sure what that was : we knew that these were not concert-pieces, but also that this was not worship (and, as I have suggested, that this was a deliberate limitation to ‘chapel-type’ music), and, for me, that meant that I did not know where I felt myself to be. That said, there was an enthusiasm, even a fervour, that made this not simply performance.
Interspersed in the proceedings, Vivien Ellis nicely read a Thomas Hardy poem, ‘A Church Romance’, about how his parents allegedly met as the result of a glance exchanged in church, and Steve Banks ‘a sermon’ in the form of admonitions and exhortations of Wesley regarding sacred music, many of which parishioners would well heed : for example, not singingly too slowly, and trying to sing together.
I believe that we showed that his urging had had an effect on us as we joined in Bunyan’s hymn, and so closed ‘the first part’ – since it seemed a good idea, my companion pilgrim and I were out quickly and on foot to the tavern, not so much in the spirit of Till in heaven we take our place, as in the roofed-over beer-garden.
Getting there for a seat under the influence of a patio-heater was a distinct bonus (possible evidence that the troupe had been chilled earlier – along with the fact that, in this half, Vivien Ellis mainly kept a body-warmer on over her dress), as also was being able to join a short queue at the bar.
Here, the sound was amplified, and, in addition to the bag-pipes (played by Andy Watts), we were treated to rounds, some topical, and two from the seventeeth century. Here is my one of them that I liked best :
Beverley ale !
Where, where, where ?
In the blacksmith’s house.
I would I were there.
Also fun was :
A boat, a boat, haste to the ferry !
For we’ll go over to be merry
And laugh and sing and drink old sherry.
We also had a spirited rendition of O that I had but a fine man by Pelham Humfrey, in which Vivien Ellis took delight both in finding in the audience ‘a spicy one’, and showing how If I die, I die, in the true guise of an operatic diva.
Elsewhere, two more sensitive numbers in ‘An thou were my ain thing’ and, in ‘A blacksmith courted me’, one of her oft-performed ones.
We ended with two numbers from the volume Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy, a suitable title for this music, which, concentrating on ‘Old Simon the King’. All in all, a good and lively collection of tunes to round off the evening !
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Sunday 26 May 2013
Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Double bill with Roller Trio and Polar Bear
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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23 May
I have tried to write this up before my recollections fade further... they have faded far enough...
Roller Trio comprises tenor sax, electric bass and drums, and they play with an assurance that cannot just come from knowing their material, but also from the unshowy musicality that seems to be the group’s ethos. Not that one will not be impressed by James Mainwaring’s riffs or the funky depths that Luke Wynter conjures up, but it is all of a piece from three guys (the third being drummer Luke Reddin-Williams), whose main aim clearly is to make music, rather than deliver solos.
In a way, we were spoilt to have a fifty-minute set from the trio and then one from quintet Polar Bear, but it did mean that certain things had to be left unexplored, and that neither band, knowing that they had to wind down early, could get into a seventy-five-minute groove.
Not that that came over in the trio's playing, but it probably limited their ambitions for what they could share - which is where I come back to saying that one had to regard this as a good chance to hear both bands. And I know that Roller Trio took the opportunity to do just that with Polar Bear, and then, because they were staying in the same hotel, had a chance to talk later.
It was the right way around to have Roller Trio first, as their sassy and less-extended numbers made an interesting contrast with the electro-acoustic sound-world that followed, of drawn-out and flexible sections, and with the thrill of two tenor saxes (Mark Lockheart, Pete Wareham) playing off each other.
Seb Rochford, drummer and the band’s almost self-deletingly frontman, introduced the three pieces that they had time for with a highly tentative wish that the audience ‘might feel something’. In my case, I had the sense of free navigation around structures that allowed saxes, electronics (Leafcutter John), bass (Tom Herbert) and drums to fit into their place and move around in them.
I am left hoping to see the bands again, maybe hear them on the radio before then, and to look into some of their recordings...
Both have web-sites, which are linked to Roller Trio (@RollerTrio) and Polar Bear (@polarbear_uk) for you
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 May
I have tried to write this up before my recollections fade further... they have faded far enough...
Roller Trio comprises tenor sax, electric bass and drums, and they play with an assurance that cannot just come from knowing their material, but also from the unshowy musicality that seems to be the group’s ethos. Not that one will not be impressed by James Mainwaring’s riffs or the funky depths that Luke Wynter conjures up, but it is all of a piece from three guys (the third being drummer Luke Reddin-Williams), whose main aim clearly is to make music, rather than deliver solos.
In a way, we were spoilt to have a fifty-minute set from the trio and then one from quintet Polar Bear, but it did mean that certain things had to be left unexplored, and that neither band, knowing that they had to wind down early, could get into a seventy-five-minute groove.
Not that that came over in the trio's playing, but it probably limited their ambitions for what they could share - which is where I come back to saying that one had to regard this as a good chance to hear both bands. And I know that Roller Trio took the opportunity to do just that with Polar Bear, and then, because they were staying in the same hotel, had a chance to talk later.
It was nice, @rollertrio, to be where the likes of @polarbear_uk and you were spending the night !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013
It was the right way around to have Roller Trio first, as their sassy and less-extended numbers made an interesting contrast with the electro-acoustic sound-world that followed, of drawn-out and flexible sections, and with the thrill of two tenor saxes (Mark Lockheart, Pete Wareham) playing off each other.
Roller Trio seemed @bbcjazzon3, but Polar Bear more like @bbcradio3's Late Junction - perhaps @imaxreinhardt ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013
Seb Rochford, drummer and the band’s almost self-deletingly frontman, introduced the three pieces that they had time for with a highly tentative wish that the audience ‘might feel something’. In my case, I had the sense of free navigation around structures that allowed saxes, electronics (Leafcutter John), bass (Tom Herbert) and drums to fit into their place and move around in them.
I am left hoping to see the bands again, maybe hear them on the radio before then, and to look into some of their recordings...
Favourite five events (unranked) from #cheltjazzfest : @cmartinjazz, Troyk-estra, Barbacana, Roller Trio / Polar Bear, Ravi Coltrane Quintet
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013
Both have web-sites, which are linked to Roller Trio (@RollerTrio) and Polar Bear (@polarbear_uk) for you
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Saturday 25 May 2013
Report from Beverley Early Music Festival - Trevor Pinnock
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25 May
Trevor Pinnock gave a solo harpsichord recital this lunchtime, which he clearly enjoyed immensely, and which led up to Bach's great Partita No. 4 in D Major, BWV 828, and even - unusually for the festival - two encores.
The programme had been constructed around the loose idea of the composers whom Spaniard Antonio de Cabezón would have encountered in his travels with his royal employer, in Britain and on the continent, and his own compositions were represented by the enchanting short variations Differencias sobre el canto del Caballero, with the notes on the pieces speculating that meeting de Cabezón, and learning about his music, may have inspired Tallis and Byrd to use variation form.
Byrd's The Bells, which we know from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, was masterfully delivered by Pinnock, and the very occasional off note could not take away from the expressiveness and energy of his performance. He played it as a group with pieces by Tallis and John Bull (also from the Fitzwilliam collection) : the text which 'O ye tender babes' sets is not known, but it was very tender, and the third piece combined inventiveness with a variety of moods and impulses, which Pinnock brought out beautifully.
Further connections are these : Bull knew Sweelinck, who was the forerunner in the North German school of organ to its great son Bach, and Bach had the score of Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali in his library, whose Balletti I and II (from another collection) Pinnock played his next. He said that, to general amusement, that although no one knows what a balletto, this is definitely one. He also described the movements as sometimes just being seconds of music (which should have put me in mind of Webern), and they combined melodic variation with very different styles of music, which derive from dance-forms.
Playing from scores, Pinnock nevertheless showed in the subtlety of his interpretation that he knew them very, very well. It was clear that he had an intimate sense of how, musically, the movements belonged together and informed each other, particularly in the Partita, whose Ouverture he not only engaged with at the level of its structure and what was to follow, but also in the detail of phrasing, the interplay of the voices, and of sound quality and texture.
The delicacy of the Aria was heartfelt, because Pinnock grounded his playing in it and its tender emotions, and its feeling nourished the unfolding of the remaining movements, especially the towering Gigue with which the Partita concludes. The audience's applause was unceasing, and kept bringing the harpsichordist back onto the stage.
Closing with a piece by Henry Purcell (a keyboard miniature of an aria from King Arthur ?) and Scarlatti's Sonata in E Major, K. 380, we had, in mircrocosm again, the deft command over the rhythmic and emotional detail that had been the essence of Pinnock's playing. A delightful concert that left many a warm smile behind.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 May
Trevor Pinnock gave a solo harpsichord recital this lunchtime, which he clearly enjoyed immensely, and which led up to Bach's great Partita No. 4 in D Major, BWV 828, and even - unusually for the festival - two encores.
The programme had been constructed around the loose idea of the composers whom Spaniard Antonio de Cabezón would have encountered in his travels with his royal employer, in Britain and on the continent, and his own compositions were represented by the enchanting short variations Differencias sobre el canto del Caballero, with the notes on the pieces speculating that meeting de Cabezón, and learning about his music, may have inspired Tallis and Byrd to use variation form.
Byrd's The Bells, which we know from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, was masterfully delivered by Pinnock, and the very occasional off note could not take away from the expressiveness and energy of his performance. He played it as a group with pieces by Tallis and John Bull (also from the Fitzwilliam collection) : the text which 'O ye tender babes' sets is not known, but it was very tender, and the third piece combined inventiveness with a variety of moods and impulses, which Pinnock brought out beautifully.
Further connections are these : Bull knew Sweelinck, who was the forerunner in the North German school of organ to its great son Bach, and Bach had the score of Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali in his library, whose Balletti I and II (from another collection) Pinnock played his next. He said that, to general amusement, that although no one knows what a balletto, this is definitely one. He also described the movements as sometimes just being seconds of music (which should have put me in mind of Webern), and they combined melodic variation with very different styles of music, which derive from dance-forms.
Playing from scores, Pinnock nevertheless showed in the subtlety of his interpretation that he knew them very, very well. It was clear that he had an intimate sense of how, musically, the movements belonged together and informed each other, particularly in the Partita, whose Ouverture he not only engaged with at the level of its structure and what was to follow, but also in the detail of phrasing, the interplay of the voices, and of sound quality and texture.
The delicacy of the Aria was heartfelt, because Pinnock grounded his playing in it and its tender emotions, and its feeling nourished the unfolding of the remaining movements, especially the towering Gigue with which the Partita concludes. The audience's applause was unceasing, and kept bringing the harpsichordist back onto the stage.
Closing with a piece by Henry Purcell (a keyboard miniature of an aria from King Arthur ?) and Scarlatti's Sonata in E Major, K. 380, we had, in mircrocosm again, the deft command over the rhythmic and emotional detail that had been the essence of Pinnock's playing. A delightful concert that left many a warm smile behind.
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Friday 17 May 2013
The mome-rath sings
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 May
It may be evident to outsiders that I follow Lucy Sixsmith's blog, Mome Raths and Mended Rhymes.
Very modestly, in a recent posting and the present one (Not Being A Poet (Again) : Not NaPoWriMo), Lucy has suggested that she was unsuccessful with the suggestion to write a poem in each of April's thirty days for National Poetry Writing Month.
However, I very much like the (sequence of ?) eight resultant poems, and how they evoke what I understand to have been a time in the last year or so in Moscow, and will read them again at a more leisurely pace - but, as I have commented, they do draw one in !
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17 May
It may be evident to outsiders that I follow Lucy Sixsmith's blog, Mome Raths and Mended Rhymes.
Very modestly, in a recent posting and the present one (Not Being A Poet (Again) : Not NaPoWriMo), Lucy has suggested that she was unsuccessful with the suggestion to write a poem in each of April's thirty days for National Poetry Writing Month.
However, I very much like the (sequence of ?) eight resultant poems, and how they evoke what I understand to have been a time in the last year or so in Moscow, and will read them again at a more leisurely pace - but, as I have commented, they do draw one in !
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 16 May 2013
Why we should listen to Cloud Atlas (2012)…
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 May
I begin with some Tweets :
@theagentapsley I'm good, but tired. But I'm now somewhat scared by the meat eating piggies!
Maybe, @barackobama, but Asimov and others wrote about The Greenhouse Effect DECADES ago - was it just OK on other Planets ?! #Ostriches
Thesis : Any good ‘literature’, something that – in the broadest sense – we can just read, or choose to read deeply in, yields understanding.
It could be Measure for Measure, about which Peter Brook spoke last night (in conversation with @DrMatthewSweet on @bbcNightWaves). Brook’s right about its depths, of course : it’s a play that I haven’t thought about in a long time, but, with its shady Duke, shadier Angelo, dubious Friar, and its Isabella, who wrestles with accepting how the world is to save her brother Claudio, it has heaps to tell us about our own time(s) !
Significant interjection Stuff the people who, intellectually*, reject the term ‘emotional intelligence’ – being truly understanding about the emotional life of ourselves and of this world is a form of intelligence, that some scorn to own, lack, or haven’t learnt to use !
They are the ones who fail to employ the patent wisdom of Pascal’s wager, because they wrongly think it only relevant to belief in God through Jesus Christ : such is not just emotional ignorance, but intellectual suicide through philistinism. At school, geography (and my reading in Asimov and the like) told me all about The Population Explosion and The Greenhouse Effect.
Years later, how can politicians** tell us that this has become a problem, when (for example) US Presidents have quite deliberately ignored the truth for years : the truth being, not whether climate change is or is not a reality, but that – in accordance with the wager – one has to act / believe, because, if one doesn’t, it will be too late by the time that one’s scepticism is proved wrong.
Why didn’t those Presidents act ? Sheer political self-interest in the face of the car lobby, i.e. the manufacturers, drivers, gasoline merchants, petrochemical industries, geologists, and all those who propel the resistant forces against change or invest (financially, emotionally or intellectually) in the status quo. With four-year Presidential terms, who was going to screw their hopes or those of their party ?
You’re gonna miss that train, if you don’t leave now. Who speculates on the possibility of supraluminal travel to get him or her to the station as the train is parting ? Who except abusers, crudely put, fuck their children’s and other generations’ future by selfish inaction to retain power ?
The message of Cloud Atlas, of (at the heart of the film) Sonmi-451, played beautifully and with great inner sensitivity by Doona Bae, opposes such greed, such mean-spiritedness, such lack of human-kindness. We need cultural messages such as this one to overcome our base, venial and mean-minded inclinations and to look to the interests of others – whoever they may be, seen or unseen…
End-notes
* And do so on the level of Intellectual Intelligence, i.e. little better than Mental Masturbation, the game that we can all play with reality : good sex is an escape from how terrifying life can be, in my view, and masturbation (when only bad or no sex presents itself) is, as Woody Allen’s script for Annie Hall (1977) has it, ‘sex with the person I love [most / best].
And, people who knocked To Rome with Love (2012), is the failure and condemnation of the Nazi-styled opera vindication of his lovely parody in the guy who can only sing well in the shower ?!
** Arguably, rooted only in getting re-elected, not frightening the frail and frightenable electorate with awkward truths that might have them do things differently, which they don’t want, of course.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 May
I begin with some Tweets :
A change in paradigm in MH is a threat to the purveyors of disease research and pill practitioners, how do the powerful react when anxious?
— Steven Coles (@Steven_Coles_) May 16, 2013
@theagentapsley I'm good, but tired. But I'm now somewhat scared by the meat eating piggies!
— Steven Coles (@Steven_Coles_) May 16, 2013
Maybe, @barackobama, but Asimov and others wrote about The Greenhouse Effect DECADES ago - was it just OK on other Planets ?! #Ostriches
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2013
Next on the blog : Barack Obama, political timorousness, BSE, Animal Farm, and the messages of Cloud Atlas (2013)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2013
Thesis : Any good ‘literature’, something that – in the broadest sense – we can just read, or choose to read deeply in, yields understanding.
It could be Measure for Measure, about which Peter Brook spoke last night (in conversation with @DrMatthewSweet on @bbcNightWaves). Brook’s right about its depths, of course : it’s a play that I haven’t thought about in a long time, but, with its shady Duke, shadier Angelo, dubious Friar, and its Isabella, who wrestles with accepting how the world is to save her brother Claudio, it has heaps to tell us about our own time(s) !
Significant interjection Stuff the people who, intellectually*, reject the term ‘emotional intelligence’ – being truly understanding about the emotional life of ourselves and of this world is a form of intelligence, that some scorn to own, lack, or haven’t learnt to use !
They are the ones who fail to employ the patent wisdom of Pascal’s wager, because they wrongly think it only relevant to belief in God through Jesus Christ : such is not just emotional ignorance, but intellectual suicide through philistinism. At school, geography (and my reading in Asimov and the like) told me all about The Population Explosion and The Greenhouse Effect.
Years later, how can politicians** tell us that this has become a problem, when (for example) US Presidents have quite deliberately ignored the truth for years : the truth being, not whether climate change is or is not a reality, but that – in accordance with the wager – one has to act / believe, because, if one doesn’t, it will be too late by the time that one’s scepticism is proved wrong.
Why didn’t those Presidents act ? Sheer political self-interest in the face of the car lobby, i.e. the manufacturers, drivers, gasoline merchants, petrochemical industries, geologists, and all those who propel the resistant forces against change or invest (financially, emotionally or intellectually) in the status quo. With four-year Presidential terms, who was going to screw their hopes or those of their party ?
You’re gonna miss that train, if you don’t leave now. Who speculates on the possibility of supraluminal travel to get him or her to the station as the train is parting ? Who except abusers, crudely put, fuck their children’s and other generations’ future by selfish inaction to retain power ?
The message of Cloud Atlas, of (at the heart of the film) Sonmi-451, played beautifully and with great inner sensitivity by Doona Bae, opposes such greed, such mean-spiritedness, such lack of human-kindness. We need cultural messages such as this one to overcome our base, venial and mean-minded inclinations and to look to the interests of others – whoever they may be, seen or unseen…
End-notes
* And do so on the level of Intellectual Intelligence, i.e. little better than Mental Masturbation, the game that we can all play with reality : good sex is an escape from how terrifying life can be, in my view, and masturbation (when only bad or no sex presents itself) is, as Woody Allen’s script for Annie Hall (1977) has it, ‘sex with the person I love [most / best].
And, people who knocked To Rome with Love (2012), is the failure and condemnation of the Nazi-styled opera vindication of his lovely parody in the guy who can only sing well in the shower ?!
** Arguably, rooted only in getting re-elected, not frightening the frail and frightenable electorate with awkward truths that might have them do things differently, which they don’t want, of course.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday 15 May 2013
Me and Theresa May
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15 May
Here is a response to part of what Theresa May is reported as having said (in @guardian) :
THEAGENTAPSLEY
15 May 2013 3:51pm
Recommend
0
I believe all these proposals will make a real difference to police officers on the ground. But ultimately police officers need the assurance that vulnerable people with mental health problems will be dealt with by health and social care services, not the police.
Not for the first time, a Secretary of State not knowing what he or she is talking about :
If a person is 'liable to be detained' (i.e. before formally taken to a psychiatric unit, or having 'absconded'), or someone enters premises under s. 135 Mental Health Act 1983, the police have the specific job of, in some cases, of 'conveying' the person liable to be detained to the unit, but anyway of bringing back absconders and breaking into premises.
In fact, the police are all over the 1983 Act - talking about s. 136 is just the usual knee-jerk, ill-thought-out rash promise of change in the hope of not doing anything (much) before the General Election, and just because of having to in the light of the Adebowale report.
An average of 11 deaths per year just for The Met is shocking. However, does anyone care about the routine level of deaths on in-patient units ? :
It would be helpful to have some figures cited for this rate of mortality, if collated figures exist (Care Quality Commission ?), before assuming that (a) this is simply a problem of the police (with s. 136) having to do what they shouldn't do, or (b) is less mismanaged by 'health and social services', or that those services' practices are any better than those of The Met...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 May
Here is a response to part of what Theresa May is reported as having said (in @guardian) :
THEAGENTAPSLEY
15 May 2013 3:51pm
Recommend
0
I believe all these proposals will make a real difference to police officers on the ground. But ultimately police officers need the assurance that vulnerable people with mental health problems will be dealt with by health and social care services, not the police.
Not for the first time, a Secretary of State not knowing what he or she is talking about :
If a person is 'liable to be detained' (i.e. before formally taken to a psychiatric unit, or having 'absconded'), or someone enters premises under s. 135 Mental Health Act 1983, the police have the specific job of, in some cases, of 'conveying' the person liable to be detained to the unit, but anyway of bringing back absconders and breaking into premises.
In fact, the police are all over the 1983 Act - talking about s. 136 is just the usual knee-jerk, ill-thought-out rash promise of change in the hope of not doing anything (much) before the General Election, and just because of having to in the light of the Adebowale report.
An average of 11 deaths per year just for The Met is shocking. However, does anyone care about the routine level of deaths on in-patient units ? :
It would be helpful to have some figures cited for this rate of mortality, if collated figures exist (Care Quality Commission ?), before assuming that (a) this is simply a problem of the police (with s. 136) having to do what they shouldn't do, or (b) is less mismanaged by 'health and social services', or that those services' practices are any better than those of The Met...
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The efficacy of what are called Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) - The Agent comments
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15 May
I added this comment the other day to this, a report on the @Mental_Elf web-site (by Kathryn Walsh) called Community treatment orders fail to reduce psychiatric readmissions for people with psychosis :
One of the criteria for the trial is said to be ‘capacity to give consent’.
I wonder whether this is ‘a red herring’, if the seeming legal niceties of ‘putting someone’ (as it is often put) on a Community Treatment Order (CTO) are not actually observed.
From professional experience*, I believe that the legal opinion has been expressed that it is possible under Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), and without a patient ‘applying for’ it, for him or her to be given section 17 leave to, say, a care home or a non-NHS specialist unit. (I am thinking of someone on s. 3.)
In theory, if hospital authorities needed to, ‘reasonable force’ could be used to oblige him or her to go. Forget how ‘untherapeutic’ that is, because the general regime of psychiatric units (e.g. locked wards, compulsion as to ‘treatment’ under the Act – usually an injection, and the dehumanizing environment and attitudes) can hardly be conceived of as therapeutic – or, when it is not that, it is cajoling, coercing, wheedling and blackmailing to seek (a form of) compliance.
Almost certainly, someone whose consideration for a CTO is ‘triggered’ by the Act (e.g. by application or referral to a First-Tier Tribunal, or at the time of contemplating s. 17 leave) will have been plenty depersonalized and demoralized by all of this already, before one even gets in sniffing distance of a formal meeting ‘to consider’ the Order.
Where the Principle of Least Restraint then (not least if no one cannot work out whether it is the CTO regime or that of s. 17, including the example that I gave above, that amounts to least restraint) ?
Patients who have already been brutalized by a place such as I describe (and will typically lack self-confidence and self-esteem), even if formally given the choice to consent to an Order [I understand that they aren't actually 'Orders', and the question of consent is more honoured 'in the breach', I gather], have no obvious reason to say No, when it means that they can go home.
(I believe that anyone would snatch at going home, whatever they are asked to agree to, because he or she (wrongly, I think, because not informed) assumes that it is that, or staying put.)
No reason obvious to the patients, then. If they were properly and independently advised as to (a) being able to say No, and (b) What, if they did say No, would be the Responsible Clinician’s (RC’s) options then, the position might be different :
If the RC cannot secure agreement from the patient to meet the conditions that are sought and / or the Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) won’t countermand the Order, there is still a position to fall back onto, i.e. s. 17 leave, or even discharge (since there no longer is supervised discharge).
But how many patients oppose a CTO ? How many think – more relevantly, are told – what happens, if they state openly that they will not comply with the conditions, rendering the notion of putting them on an Order ‘dead in the water’ ?
The RC has beds ‘to unblock’, considering a CTO is forced by certain events, but, if the patient is patently saying No, what will the RC do ?
So an Order is effectively dangled, and capacity to consent is really falsified : the patient is not allowed to weigh up whether to agree to the conditions for a CTO in compliance with the test under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (as amended) simply because he or she is almost certainly not given the full information, which, if he or she had, could be understood and applied.
In truth, I think that the real scenario of a CTO coming about is having huge debts, but being marched down to a bank and told that you need a personal loan from that specific bank.
So not told any safeguards, e.g. that :
(a) the bank can advise only on its own products, and there may be other products
(b) even if the borrower won the Lotto that night and could pay back the loan, interest is charged up front;
(c) there are arrangement fees;
(d) the Bank of Mum and Dad is only too willing to help out, etc., etc.
Such a transaction, if challenged, wouldn’t stand up to the Financial Services Authority (FSA). For me, the way that CTOs are ‘secured’ is no better, but there is no adequate FSA, and patients affected are unlikely to have recourse to one, because they just ‘wanted to go home’.
End-notes
* There is a little more about that experience here in relation to mental health advocacy.
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15 May
I added this comment the other day to this, a report on the @Mental_Elf web-site (by Kathryn Walsh) called Community treatment orders fail to reduce psychiatric readmissions for people with psychosis :
One of the criteria for the trial is said to be ‘capacity to give consent’.
I wonder whether this is ‘a red herring’, if the seeming legal niceties of ‘putting someone’ (as it is often put) on a Community Treatment Order (CTO) are not actually observed.
From professional experience*, I believe that the legal opinion has been expressed that it is possible under Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), and without a patient ‘applying for’ it, for him or her to be given section 17 leave to, say, a care home or a non-NHS specialist unit. (I am thinking of someone on s. 3.)
In theory, if hospital authorities needed to, ‘reasonable force’ could be used to oblige him or her to go. Forget how ‘untherapeutic’ that is, because the general regime of psychiatric units (e.g. locked wards, compulsion as to ‘treatment’ under the Act – usually an injection, and the dehumanizing environment and attitudes) can hardly be conceived of as therapeutic – or, when it is not that, it is cajoling, coercing, wheedling and blackmailing to seek (a form of) compliance.
Almost certainly, someone whose consideration for a CTO is ‘triggered’ by the Act (e.g. by application or referral to a First-Tier Tribunal, or at the time of contemplating s. 17 leave) will have been plenty depersonalized and demoralized by all of this already, before one even gets in sniffing distance of a formal meeting ‘to consider’ the Order.
Where the Principle of Least Restraint then (not least if no one cannot work out whether it is the CTO regime or that of s. 17, including the example that I gave above, that amounts to least restraint) ?
Patients who have already been brutalized by a place such as I describe (and will typically lack self-confidence and self-esteem), even if formally given the choice to consent to an Order [I understand that they aren't actually 'Orders', and the question of consent is more honoured 'in the breach', I gather], have no obvious reason to say No, when it means that they can go home.
(I believe that anyone would snatch at going home, whatever they are asked to agree to, because he or she (wrongly, I think, because not informed) assumes that it is that, or staying put.)
No reason obvious to the patients, then. If they were properly and independently advised as to (a) being able to say No, and (b) What, if they did say No, would be the Responsible Clinician’s (RC’s) options then, the position might be different :
If the RC cannot secure agreement from the patient to meet the conditions that are sought and / or the Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) won’t countermand the Order, there is still a position to fall back onto, i.e. s. 17 leave, or even discharge (since there no longer is supervised discharge).
But how many patients oppose a CTO ? How many think – more relevantly, are told – what happens, if they state openly that they will not comply with the conditions, rendering the notion of putting them on an Order ‘dead in the water’ ?
The RC has beds ‘to unblock’, considering a CTO is forced by certain events, but, if the patient is patently saying No, what will the RC do ?
So an Order is effectively dangled, and capacity to consent is really falsified : the patient is not allowed to weigh up whether to agree to the conditions for a CTO in compliance with the test under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (as amended) simply because he or she is almost certainly not given the full information, which, if he or she had, could be understood and applied.
In truth, I think that the real scenario of a CTO coming about is having huge debts, but being marched down to a bank and told that you need a personal loan from that specific bank.
So not told any safeguards, e.g. that :
(a) the bank can advise only on its own products, and there may be other products
(b) even if the borrower won the Lotto that night and could pay back the loan, interest is charged up front;
(c) there are arrangement fees;
(d) the Bank of Mum and Dad is only too willing to help out, etc., etc.
Such a transaction, if challenged, wouldn’t stand up to the Financial Services Authority (FSA). For me, the way that CTOs are ‘secured’ is no better, but there is no adequate FSA, and patients affected are unlikely to have recourse to one, because they just ‘wanted to go home’.
End-notes
* There is a little more about that experience here in relation to mental health advocacy.
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Experience, though noon auctoritee
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 May (Posted at Paddington Station) [re-edited 31 October 2021]
So Geoffrey Chaucer had the Wife of Bath say. Chaucer was a poet, but also a civil servant, diplomat, ambassador (Ambassador, you’re spoiling us !), and knew a bit about life, and Boccaccio, French dream-poetry, Latinate Christian (?) philosophy…
His Boke of the Duchess, so magical, mysterious, moving – this persona he developed of a slow-witted dreamer, a little resembling Dante’s of himself in the Commedia, but less knowing, more innocent, and so stumbling across the man whom we suppose to be the inconsolable John of Gaunt (a nearby golf-club is named after John), weeping over the death of Blaunche.
Does Chaucer tells us, in the guise of the Wife of Bath, that we keep making the same ‘mistakes’, falling in love with the same woman, with a dream of a woman, the scent (or ghost) of a woman¹ ? Probably, as he has so much to say that I don’t know why people don’t seem to read him more – how about Brush up your Chaucer – start quoting him now !, and, if I weren’t drawn to that story about the man in black, I’d go to his House of Fame :
We think, in this emotionally, mentally and financially impoverished world, that we know it all, with our smartphones, Internet², and high-frequency trading. I suspect that Chaucer knew more in the fourteenth century, if we just hear what the poet has to say about spin, smear, slander – forget The Prince, for this man really knew what power and repute / reputation are, and how they are won, lost, granted and revoked.
So, in what remains of May, I’m going back to these works, to witness Chaucer - as wordsmith - wrestle with sleep, meet a goddess all in white, overhear the birds pairing up, and, if I’m finally up to it, let him tell me how to use an astrolabe³…
End-notes
¹ Only a surprisingly dirty-minded person (such as one woman with whom I once worked…) would think, nay openly insist, that to be an obscene and crude film-title.
² I knew someone else who aspirated it – is it really, though, the Hindernet (the technological equivalent of Hindemith), full of Blind Alleys, Red Herrings, Love-on-a-Stick ?
³ The former colleague in the first end-note should heed : if you don’t know what an astrolabe is (or aspirating²), don’t make up some coarse idea !
Post-script :
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15 May (Posted at Paddington Station) [re-edited 31 October 2021]
So Geoffrey Chaucer had the Wife of Bath say. Chaucer was a poet, but also a civil servant, diplomat, ambassador (Ambassador, you’re spoiling us !), and knew a bit about life, and Boccaccio, French dream-poetry, Latinate Christian (?) philosophy…
His Boke of the Duchess, so magical, mysterious, moving – this persona he developed of a slow-witted dreamer, a little resembling Dante’s of himself in the Commedia, but less knowing, more innocent, and so stumbling across the man whom we suppose to be the inconsolable John of Gaunt (a nearby golf-club is named after John), weeping over the death of Blaunche.
Does Chaucer tells us, in the guise of the Wife of Bath, that we keep making the same ‘mistakes’, falling in love with the same woman, with a dream of a woman, the scent (or ghost) of a woman¹ ? Probably, as he has so much to say that I don’t know why people don’t seem to read him more – how about Brush up your Chaucer – start quoting him now !, and, if I weren’t drawn to that story about the man in black, I’d go to his House of Fame :
We think, in this emotionally, mentally and financially impoverished world, that we know it all, with our smartphones, Internet², and high-frequency trading. I suspect that Chaucer knew more in the fourteenth century, if we just hear what the poet has to say about spin, smear, slander – forget The Prince, for this man really knew what power and repute / reputation are, and how they are won, lost, granted and revoked.
So, in what remains of May, I’m going back to these works, to witness Chaucer - as wordsmith - wrestle with sleep, meet a goddess all in white, overhear the birds pairing up, and, if I’m finally up to it, let him tell me how to use an astrolabe³…
End-notes
¹ Only a surprisingly dirty-minded person (such as one woman with whom I once worked…) would think, nay openly insist, that to be an obscene and crude film-title.
² I knew someone else who aspirated it – is it really, though, the Hindernet (the technological equivalent of Hindemith), full of Blind Alleys, Red Herrings, Love-on-a-Stick ?
³ The former colleague in the first end-note should heed : if you don’t know what an astrolabe is (or aspirating²), don’t make up some coarse idea !
Post-script :
Chaucer's telling of the story of Chaunticleer ('The Nun's Priest's Tale') has more potential ? !
— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021
Or, if one has not deliberately misunderstood one about Constance ('The Man of Law's Tale'), there's that concerning Griselde ('The Clerk's Tale')...https://t.co/QyX72QYkS1
2 / 2 https://t.co/SpmzljCnQq
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Sunday 12 May 2013
Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Was that really two duos ?
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12 May
Don't get me wrong...
If the set had been broadcast, and so you couldn't see Neil Yates on stage and unable to make / find an opening in what Marius Neset was doing, maybe you'd not have noticed his absence from the texture - or assumed that he smoked and had wandered off for a roll-up, etc., etc.
Don't get me wrong also...
What Neset (with or without Dave Stapleton) and fellow Norwegian Daniel Herskedal were doing / playing was just fine, but, for stretches that felt awkward for me, it did make Yates' being there redundant.
(Herskedal's solo number on tuba with pedal-invoked multi-tracking was great, but, as I suggest, all too symptomatic of the Brito-Norwegian divide between audience left and right.)
Don't get me wrong finally...
Of course, a quartet doesn't have to be playing on all four cylinders at once, but if a member (or two) of the personnel might as well be down the pub... Maybe Neset thought that the photo from the Cheltenham Jazz Festival web-site gave him licence 'to take charge', as if it were a replication of his own quartet :
Overall, whatever the curatorship of @fionatalkington hoped for and strong sax apart, more like the Cheltenham Double than the Edition Quartet ?
Post-script
On her blog, @maryleamington had this reaction to Neset and the quartet :
But on Saturday night we saw another Marius (last glimpsed in Flight by Dave Stapleton at St George’s Brandon Hill last year), unexpectedly fragile, human, reflective. Just as a Michelangelo sculpture moves us as its strength appears out of simple form (I am thinking of his unfinished Slaves here), so Marius has the same effect on me. The Edition Quartet is a perfect ensemble – Dave Stapleton on piano, Neil Yates on trumpet, Daniel Herskedal on tuba and Marius on saxophones.
Leamington, rightly impressed by Neset in himself, calls the Edition Quartet perfect - however, I thought of the track Secret World from Peter Gabriel's album US (which is where I started) :
Divided in two
Like Adam and Eve
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12 May
All team-players or divided in two ? Edition Quartet #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 4, 2013
Don't get me wrong...
If the set had been broadcast, and so you couldn't see Neil Yates on stage and unable to make / find an opening in what Marius Neset was doing, maybe you'd not have noticed his absence from the texture - or assumed that he smoked and had wandered off for a roll-up, etc., etc.
Enjoyed hearing him in Troyk-estra, and, when he had the chance, Edition Quartet, @dave_stapleton #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013
Don't get me wrong also...
What Neset (with or without Dave Stapleton) and fellow Norwegian Daniel Herskedal were doing / playing was just fine, but, for stretches that felt awkward for me, it did make Yates' being there redundant.
(Herskedal's solo number on tuba with pedal-invoked multi-tracking was great, but, as I suggest, all too symptomatic of the Brito-Norwegian divide between audience left and right.)
Playing detective at Edition Quartet : a missing chart, glances exchanged, wandering off stage, playing volumes, postures, #cheltjazzfest
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 4, 2013
Don't get me wrong finally...
Of course, a quartet doesn't have to be playing on all four cylinders at once, but if a member (or two) of the personnel might as well be down the pub... Maybe Neset thought that the photo from the Cheltenham Jazz Festival web-site gave him licence 'to take charge', as if it were a replication of his own quartet :
Overall, whatever the curatorship of @fionatalkington hoped for and strong sax apart, more like the Cheltenham Double than the Edition Quartet ?
Post-script
On her blog, @maryleamington had this reaction to Neset and the quartet :
But on Saturday night we saw another Marius (last glimpsed in Flight by Dave Stapleton at St George’s Brandon Hill last year), unexpectedly fragile, human, reflective. Just as a Michelangelo sculpture moves us as its strength appears out of simple form (I am thinking of his unfinished Slaves here), so Marius has the same effect on me. The Edition Quartet is a perfect ensemble – Dave Stapleton on piano, Neil Yates on trumpet, Daniel Herskedal on tuba and Marius on saxophones.
Leamington, rightly impressed by Neset in himself, calls the Edition Quartet perfect - however, I thought of the track Secret World from Peter Gabriel's album US (which is where I started) :
Divided in two
Like Adam and Eve
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The Agent Apsley on depression
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12 May
To open* :
Since I Tweeted this, I shall say more (to @stephenfry, or - as he may not - anyone who cares to listen) :
What did this refer to ? :
Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather.
Where I saw it, it wasn't properly punctuated (unlike here), and no source was given (true elsewhere) :
Excuse the poor quality of another's reproduction of his letter, but it seems that he wrote something similar, just at more length, to someone called Crystal seven years ago (10 April 2006**), shown at http://missbeautifullydepressed.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/depression-is-like-the-weather/
But is Fry right, or do such analogies hamper us 'getting to grips with' the negative thinking, patterns of self-depreciation, and modes of cataclysmic reaction, which might make life better, in time ?
If I'm wrong - and Fry's right - then people like Wilhelm Reich with his cloud-busting*** just has no place in a world where a crap day is a crap day, but it will pass... Forget Reich, but, as some will also know, clouds can be seeded - and so, in this respect, we can manipulate when (and so where) rain will fall.
That doesn't destroy Fry's analogy : it's the message, though, of sheer helplessness that he seems to convey in :
In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes.
You'd think that no one (who can afford to) spends the winter in (what they hope will be) warmer climes - or even just (with a car) drives out of the rain (or into it, for that matter).
Staying with this powerlessness of just waiting for things to get better, or just feeling myself going low and allowing it to happen, is not what I spent a dozen or so sessions with a psychologist for, or why I read parts of Paul Gilbert's book Overcoming Depression, about compassion, self-hatred, and the like.
No, I believe that @stephenfry's message is a negative and unhelpful one for anyone and everyone to hear - I have experienced being able to seed (or bust) those clouds, and I want to escape from this meteorological notion of the inevitably of depressions and cold fronts, which is, as far as I am concerned, not 'reality', as Fry claims, but barometric.
End-notes
* Quoting the spirit of Words and Music, one of Beckettt's plays for radio.
** He seems to favour the ever-encroaching US format for dates... He also writes (about the weather) It isn't under one's control as to when the some [sic] comes out, but come out it will. One day.
*** An experience that Kate Bush alludes to in 'Running up that hill' (from the album Hounds of Love), probably drawing on Peter Reich's (Reich's son') book.
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12 May
To open* :
British psychiatric practice is a bit like this : It's as if someone were talking Scots, but saying Gae hame were perceived as psychosis.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 11, 2013
Since I Tweeted this, I shall say more (to @stephenfry, or - as he may not - anyone who cares to listen) :
Sorry, @stephenfry, but this notion that depression is as the weather and - one supposes - we just live with it 'till it changeth' is tosh !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 11, 2013
What did this refer to ? :
Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather.
Where I saw it, it wasn't properly punctuated (unlike here), and no source was given (true elsewhere) :
Beautifully put by @stephenfry about #depression - please RT if you agree that this is amazing: twitter.com/otrbristol/sta… #mentalhealth
— Off The Record (@otrbristol) May 8, 2013
Excuse the poor quality of another's reproduction of his letter, but it seems that he wrote something similar, just at more length, to someone called Crystal seven years ago (10 April 2006**), shown at http://missbeautifullydepressed.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/depression-is-like-the-weather/
But is Fry right, or do such analogies hamper us 'getting to grips with' the negative thinking, patterns of self-depreciation, and modes of cataclysmic reaction, which might make life better, in time ?
If I'm wrong - and Fry's right - then people like Wilhelm Reich with his cloud-busting*** just has no place in a world where a crap day is a crap day, but it will pass... Forget Reich, but, as some will also know, clouds can be seeded - and so, in this respect, we can manipulate when (and so where) rain will fall.
That doesn't destroy Fry's analogy : it's the message, though, of sheer helplessness that he seems to convey in :
In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes.
You'd think that no one (who can afford to) spends the winter in (what they hope will be) warmer climes - or even just (with a car) drives out of the rain (or into it, for that matter).
Staying with this powerlessness of just waiting for things to get better, or just feeling myself going low and allowing it to happen, is not what I spent a dozen or so sessions with a psychologist for, or why I read parts of Paul Gilbert's book Overcoming Depression, about compassion, self-hatred, and the like.
No, I believe that @stephenfry's message is a negative and unhelpful one for anyone and everyone to hear - I have experienced being able to seed (or bust) those clouds, and I want to escape from this meteorological notion of the inevitably of depressions and cold fronts, which is, as far as I am concerned, not 'reality', as Fry claims, but barometric.
End-notes
* Quoting the spirit of Words and Music, one of Beckettt's plays for radio.
** He seems to favour the ever-encroaching US format for dates... He also writes (about the weather) It isn't under one's control as to when the some [sic] comes out, but come out it will. One day.
*** An experience that Kate Bush alludes to in 'Running up that hill' (from the album Hounds of Love), probably drawing on Peter Reich's (Reich's son') book.
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Saturday 11 May 2013
Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival – Troyk-estra and Talk II
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 May
That review (on 29 June 2009) (of the opening Troyka album by Martin Longley, which I talked about before) goes like this (with my added numbering in parenthesis - so that I can add facetious comments...) :
A transgressive sound, full of bent notes and shiny contortions
Troyka are yet another young London combo who are inhabiting (1) the increas-ingly (2) vibrant scene that's devoted to the uninhibited collision between jazz, rock, free improvisation and funky jamming. They're beaming off into a completely different direc-tion when compared to the work of keyboardist Kit Downes' previous band, Empirical. Downes has so far (3) been heard as an acoustic pianist, but in this setting (4) he concentrates on the organ, cranked up to its grittiest settings (5).
Troyka's other two members are not so familiar (6) on the jazz scene, but they're certainly empowered to excite (7). Guitarist Chris Montague and drummer Joshua Blackmore add to the forceful jazz-rock judder, with spiny constructions and shifty beats, as Downes jams (8)out on his electro-warbled keys. It's a transgressive sound, full of bent notes and shiny contortions (9), erupting with powerchords (10) and prog rock organ bursts, and even featuring the odd dose of bluesy bottleneck slide guitar.
The opening pair of tracks are so profoundly excessive in their pursuit of leaden riffage (11) that, for a while, subsequent (12) pieces can't help but feel restfully in-active by comparison. Tax Return contorts around an organ susurrus, with guitar that's by turns prickly and overloaded. It's not surprising that New Yorker Wayne Krantz is cited by the band as a heavy influence. The Frenchman Marc Ducret could be another contender as a guitaring forefather. Blackmore's drum patterns are highly detailed, the Troyka combination ending up as being at once avant (13) and visceral. The chunky organ flamboyance can't help but remind the listener of Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge. Even mightier, Clint must surely be dedicated to Mister Eastwood in Dirty Harry guise, with its extremely weighty powerchords (14) and bassy overhang (15).
The itchy time signatures continue (16), but most of the heavy artillery is reserved now until the album's closing tracks. A sinister bass padding dominates Bear, then Cajoch gets into some fidgety clenching (17). Twelve rains organ droplets, with a guitar that arcs up from vibrato-ed pings to the return of that earlier scalding sensation (18). The granite riffing (19) is sustained during Born In The 80s (20), but it's now alternating with a glowing sensitivity (21). With Noonian Song, Montague is getting into Krantz via the arcane tunings of composer Harry Partch, or maybe even the bendy tonalities of Fred Frith's table-top guitars.
The Agent's facetious comments
(1) Can one 'inhabit [... a] scene' ?
(2) Is the word 'increasingly' increasingly used when someone wants to claim some-thing is happening more - without telling you how much ?
(3) Is it obvious that this phrase is meant to mean when Downes was playing with Empirical ?
(4) Isn't 'setting' a word more used to describe a venue (or a venue's features) than a 'combo' ?
(5) Clumsy repetition of 'setting' ?
(6) Does this mean (a) 'less familiar', or (b) 'less familiar than Downes' ?
(7) Authorized to titillate ? Licensed to kill ?
(8) Overused (also in the first paragraph) ?
(9) We may know what a duck-billed platypus is, but what are 'shiny contortions' ?
(10) Whatever they may be - heavy note-clusters ?
(11) Is Leaden Riffage a village in Kent (a twin to Granite Riffing - please see (21), below) ?
(12) Posh way of saying 'later pieces' ?
(13) Posh way of saying 'before' ?
(14) Does repeating the 'word' (please see (10), above) help ?
(15) Huh ? A medical condition ?
(16) Whatever their itchiness may comprise, did I know that they'd started ?
(17) Couldn't they get some ointment for it ?!
(18) Which 'earlier scalding sensation' was that ?
(19) Eh ?!
(20) It may be intentional to confuse verbiage with the names of tracks (e.g. 'A sinis-ter bass padding dominates Bear, then Cajoch gets into some fidgety clenching'), but why does the track listing render this one as 'Born in the 80's' (apostrophe and fewer capitals) ?
(21) Is (a) the way in which the 'granite riffing' alternates glowingly sensitive, or (b) are some sections 'granite riffing' and alternating ones 'a glowing sensitivity'... ?
All in all, that panel in the talk on Music journalism in the 21st century might lead one to believe that a piece published by the BBC wouldn't be open to any such criticism - as I say, are they just protecting their backs, but not seeing the onslaught of those who write appreciations of live or recorded music in a different way from a traditional review ?
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11 May
That review (on 29 June 2009) (of the opening Troyka album by Martin Longley, which I talked about before) goes like this (with my added numbering in parenthesis - so that I can add facetious comments...) :
A transgressive sound, full of bent notes and shiny contortions
Troyka are yet another young London combo who are inhabiting (1) the increas-ingly (2) vibrant scene that's devoted to the uninhibited collision between jazz, rock, free improvisation and funky jamming. They're beaming off into a completely different direc-tion when compared to the work of keyboardist Kit Downes' previous band, Empirical. Downes has so far (3) been heard as an acoustic pianist, but in this setting (4) he concentrates on the organ, cranked up to its grittiest settings (5).
Troyka's other two members are not so familiar (6) on the jazz scene, but they're certainly empowered to excite (7). Guitarist Chris Montague and drummer Joshua Blackmore add to the forceful jazz-rock judder, with spiny constructions and shifty beats, as Downes jams (8)out on his electro-warbled keys. It's a transgressive sound, full of bent notes and shiny contortions (9), erupting with powerchords (10) and prog rock organ bursts, and even featuring the odd dose of bluesy bottleneck slide guitar.
The opening pair of tracks are so profoundly excessive in their pursuit of leaden riffage (11) that, for a while, subsequent (12) pieces can't help but feel restfully in-active by comparison. Tax Return contorts around an organ susurrus, with guitar that's by turns prickly and overloaded. It's not surprising that New Yorker Wayne Krantz is cited by the band as a heavy influence. The Frenchman Marc Ducret could be another contender as a guitaring forefather. Blackmore's drum patterns are highly detailed, the Troyka combination ending up as being at once avant (13) and visceral. The chunky organ flamboyance can't help but remind the listener of Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge. Even mightier, Clint must surely be dedicated to Mister Eastwood in Dirty Harry guise, with its extremely weighty powerchords (14) and bassy overhang (15).
The itchy time signatures continue (16), but most of the heavy artillery is reserved now until the album's closing tracks. A sinister bass padding dominates Bear, then Cajoch gets into some fidgety clenching (17). Twelve rains organ droplets, with a guitar that arcs up from vibrato-ed pings to the return of that earlier scalding sensation (18). The granite riffing (19) is sustained during Born In The 80s (20), but it's now alternating with a glowing sensitivity (21). With Noonian Song, Montague is getting into Krantz via the arcane tunings of composer Harry Partch, or maybe even the bendy tonalities of Fred Frith's table-top guitars.
The Agent's facetious comments
(1) Can one 'inhabit [... a] scene' ?
(2) Is the word 'increasingly' increasingly used when someone wants to claim some-thing is happening more - without telling you how much ?
(3) Is it obvious that this phrase is meant to mean when Downes was playing with Empirical ?
(4) Isn't 'setting' a word more used to describe a venue (or a venue's features) than a 'combo' ?
(5) Clumsy repetition of 'setting' ?
(6) Does this mean (a) 'less familiar', or (b) 'less familiar than Downes' ?
(7) Authorized to titillate ? Licensed to kill ?
(8) Overused (also in the first paragraph) ?
(9) We may know what a duck-billed platypus is, but what are 'shiny contortions' ?
(10) Whatever they may be - heavy note-clusters ?
(11) Is Leaden Riffage a village in Kent (a twin to Granite Riffing - please see (21), below) ?
(12) Posh way of saying 'later pieces' ?
(13) Posh way of saying 'before' ?
(14) Does repeating the 'word' (please see (10), above) help ?
(15) Huh ? A medical condition ?
(16) Whatever their itchiness may comprise, did I know that they'd started ?
(17) Couldn't they get some ointment for it ?!
(18) Which 'earlier scalding sensation' was that ?
(19) Eh ?!
(20) It may be intentional to confuse verbiage with the names of tracks (e.g. 'A sinis-ter bass padding dominates Bear, then Cajoch gets into some fidgety clenching'), but why does the track listing render this one as 'Born in the 80's' (apostrophe and fewer capitals) ?
(21) Is (a) the way in which the 'granite riffing' alternates glowingly sensitive, or (b) are some sections 'granite riffing' and alternating ones 'a glowing sensitivity'... ?
All in all, that panel in the talk on Music journalism in the 21st century might lead one to believe that a piece published by the BBC wouldn't be open to any such criticism - as I say, are they just protecting their backs, but not seeing the onslaught of those who write appreciations of live or recorded music in a different way from a traditional review ?
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