Culture - May

Books read:

Oscar Wilde - 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (play)
Will Self - 'Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys' (short stories)
Charles Mackay - 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' (non-fiction)
Charles Dickens - 'Night Walks' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Day of Creation'
Gustave Flaubert - 'Madame Bovary'

Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions’ was a weighty, sometimes long-winded, oftentimes fascinating examination of the many follies and delusions that have gripped humankind with such a stranglehold throughout civilisation. It explored such issues as the South-Sea Oil Bubble, witchhunting, the Christian crusades, alchemy, and haunted houses; clinically exposing the rank ignorance, gullibility and fervid imaginations that combined to propagate and maintain such collective insanities.

Throughout my reading, I couldn’t help but notice the striking parallels and depressing recurrences between these and popular delusions that still cling fast to contemporary societies (celebrity obsessions, social media, late capitalism, perhaps?)

I also strongly enjoyed Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’, it being far more than the dry romanticism I had been expecting. The characters were painted with such an alacrity – their effeteness, deviance and connivance coming across in such vivid tones – and the eponymous heroine with her air of desperate desire that would inevitably run her to ruin, that propelled me swiftly through the book.

Films Watched:

'Eyes Wide Shut' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Chernobyl Diaries' (Bradley Parker)
'The Stone Roses: Made of Stone' (Shane Meadows) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)

May was a slow month for new films. I found ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ to be rather more gripping and intriguing than I had been lead to believe by Kubrick purists, although far from being a satisfactory final act in the director’s unrivalled cinematic career.

Shane Meadows’ unabashed ‘love letter’ to the Stone Roses was as fine a tribute as could have been expected, and whilst it occasionally fell short of being the comprehensive documentary of the band’s career that I hoped for in favour of shameless misty-eyed nostalgia, it instead beautifully portrayed the kind of mad adoration instilled in hardcore music fans. Surely, a modern-day delusion worthy of Mackay?!

Albums Played:

Primal Scream - 'More Light'
The Fall - 'Cerebral Caustic'
The Fall - 'The Marshall Suite'
The Fall - 'Country on the Click (The Real New Fall LP)'
The Fall - 'Reformation Post-T.L.C.'
The Fall - 'Imperial Wax Solvent'
The Fall - 'Re-Mit'
The Rolling Stones - 'Undercover'
The Rolling Stones - 'Dirty Work'
The Rolling Stones - 'Steel Wheels'
The Rolling Stones - 'Flashpoint' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'Voodoo Lounge'
Can - 'Soundtracks'
Savages - 'Silence Yourself'
The National - 'Trouble Will Find Me'

I enjoyed the new Primal Scream album an awful lot; a defiant step in the right direction for them after more recent albums of dreary second-rate Stones emulation. By contrast, The Fall’s 30th album ‘Re-Mit’ was decidedly mediocre to my ears, bereft of any real diversity or creative zeal. Being The Fall though, the album was still a compelling, if ultimately disappointing, listen.

The hotly-tipped female post-punk band Savages released their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. Although their influences seep from every aural pore, this is a band with an adrenalized grit and raw power that is seldom heard in today’s bands. A very welcome burst of aggression.

Perhaps the musical epigone of Savages, The National’s new album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ had me continuing to scratch my head at the abiding popularity of this band. After several attempts to engage with their music I find them to be tediously maudlin, tepid and uninspired; I’m continuously left baffled at the precise basis of their appeal.

Gigs Attended:

Damo Suzuki & The Dream Machine Allstars, + Eat Lights Become Lights (at Windmill Brixton)
The Fall (at Clapham Grand, London)

This month I was lucky enough to see Damo Suzuki just round the corner at the wonderfully dingy Windmill Brixton. The frontman of legendary German band Can during their ‘golden era’ of 1970 - 1974, Suzuki now tours through a means of connecting with a network of ‘sound carriers’ – local musicians he enlists for a largely improvised live band. Damo and his band (including members of the also excellent Eat Lights Become Lights), eschewed any breaks, playing almost 90 minutes of scorching hypnotic trance-rock that had myself and the crowd of around 100 captivated throughout.

Can were, of course, majorly influential for The Fall, who I saw for the third time this month. Despite not being as revelatory an experience as my first time at a tiny club in Manchester, the band were tight as they ripped through predominantly new material (which naturally improved in a live setting), with Mark E Smith appearing to be in a mischievously positive mood, despite now being forced to disappear at regular intervals for a sit-down behind the amp stacks. The down-side was the venue’s strict curfew which compelled them offstage at 11pm sharp, meaning we were unlucky in missing out on a customary encore.


Exhibitions:

Andre Kertesz - 'Truth and Distortion' (at the Atlas Gallery) (photography)
'Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective' (at the Tate Modern)
'A Walk Through British Art' (at the Tate Britain)

This month I went to the Tate Modern to see their blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective. It’s hard to appreciate the true scale of Pop Art’s radicalism and innovation viewing them in 2013. Indeed, I tried my hardest to approach the pieces as though the last 50 years of modern art hadn’t yet happened. The problem is, I found, that Lichtenstein’s deadpan renditions of advertisements and household objects in dot stencil form have become so ubiquitous and universal, long since adopted by the very industry they were designed to ironize, that they fail to strike as anything other than passé. His most famous works from the 1960s on war and romance do still, like the best cartoon art, have a genuine resonance (on a side note, I think that some of Herge’s Tintin cartoons should likewise be exhibited in art galleries, but that’s beside the point).

I was intrigued to see Lichtenstein’s lesser-known works on sunsets and seascapes, mirror surfaces and parodies of other artists’ work like Picasso and Monet (of these I was actually disappointed he didn’t go further in pastiching more well-known artworks – a Benday dot Mona Lisa perhaps?!) In his later career though, it’s clear that he was an artist wrestling with the style and technique that had made his name, akin to listening to the Rolling Stones trying to shape-shift into disco beats and New Wave in the 1980s, desperately clinging to a fading relevance. By stretching his trademark form to attempt nude renderings, abstract expressionism and Chinese landscapes, you get the feeling that he was frustrated by the confines he had set by his own early innovation.