Boring Like A Drill.

Like Parson Yorick, I spent several days wandering around Paris in a state of blithe obliviousness, with the consequences just as negligible. Every service I needed just happened to be one not affected by the general strike; and whichever part of the city I visited, the protesters had either moved on or not yet arrived.

I did see some very cheerful students with banners and facepaint walk into a bar in Montmartre for a well-earned drink after a busy day rioting, and was almost approached by a heavily armoured policeman when I was photographing the nice big wall they’d put up around the Sorbonne. That’s pretty much it. If you spend all your time in the centre of the city you’ll mostly meet Americans and other tourists like you, anyway.

By a fluke, I managed to get into the Chatelet to see the Bang On A Can All-Stars, who restored my faith in a couple of things. Firstly, they played Philip Glass’ Music in Fifths, one of his most relentlessly single-minded scores. After suffering Icebreaker’s travesty of Music With Changing Parts I began to wonder if Glass’ earlier music, which rarely specified instruments, could ever be as effective in arrangements other than the composer’s own ensemble of amplified winds and electric keyboards. The All-Stars’ performance was on non-traditional grand piano, clarinet, cello, marimba and electric guitar. It was fast, it was tight, it’s meagre musical material needed no further embellishment to make it compelling listening from start to finish.

(It was only during a talk by one of the musicians to the audience between pieces that I learned there was a strike on. Either my French had really sharpened up after a couple of days in town or he was speaking in English, I forget. If it was the latter then Parisians certainly understand English very well when the speaker is saying nice things about their city. Either that or the audience was full of Americans.)

After the interval, they made me take back a lot of what I’ve said about crossover*. The second half of the gig featured the Czech singer and violinist Iva Bittová, who at first came on stage alone, playing with apparent urgency, impatiently slipping and sliding from Slavic folk music to louche cabaret to cod avant-garde histrionics, violin melody turning to noise, turning to ecstatic vocal gibberish. She’s an exhilarating musician, but the cynical part of my brain kept worrying at what would happen when she was joined by the All-Stars, for a suite of peices she had written for them and herself.

Great, I thought sarcastically, the soloist is either going to have to tone down her natural exuberance, or else look out of place amongst the other musicians. Her music will become stuffy and mannered as she tries to write something with gravitas appropriate to the occasion. The musos will miss the shifts in musical styles and not understand their playing attitude needs to change with them. Stand by for 45 minutes or so of dreary cabaret defanged by the concert-hall atmosphere.

Amazingly, none of this happened. The set of songs and instrumental passages held together: they were fun, and they were moving. Bittová’s performance, part chameleon-like chanteuse, part concertmaster and part ringleader, had the whole audience entranced (although you could tell by their reaction there were a number of converts and diva-worshippers in the hall); her adopted band could both follow and lead her abrupt changes in mood. The sense of the music kept taking unexpected turns, whipping up tumultuous noise before just as suddenly burning out into sullen melancholy; the performers knowing how to shade the slow, unravelling melody to make it bite and not meander in muzak.

It was one of the best gigs I’ve been to for a long time, something I haven’t experienced for a long time, partly because I’ve been jaded and reluctant to expose myself to it: a happy and completely unexpected surprise.

* Not on this blog, just incoherent ranting after one vodka too many after disappointing genre-crossover gigs.

If you’re anything like me, then you know the biggest music event of the year is drawing near: The Eurovision Song Contest!

The official site has full previews of the competing songs, the singers, and the multitalented hosts, but I prefer to take my Eurovision as a surprise. Even so, over the next week or so in the lead-up to the final, there’ll be a small preview of some of the least-promising entrants, a review of last year’s big night in the Ukraine, and most importantly, a revised version of the Eurovision Drinking Game. This last is essential to enduring an entire evening of the finest entertainment Europe has to offer.

Speaking of Ukraine: why didn’t anyone tell me that 2004 winner and upskirt champion (link not safe for work) Ruslana is now a member of parliament? It doesn’t seem that sparkling Ukrainian co-hosts the Klitschko brothers, or best-ever Eurovision loser Alf Poier have run for public office. Yet.

When I first wrote about Philip Guston, I mentioned being first impressed by “one of his big, abstract expressionist canvases from the 1950s, back when I was an impressionable nipper.” It was when a bunch of paintings from the Phillips Collection from Washington D.C. were shown in Adelaide. It was one my primary formative experiences of modern art, and wouldn’t you know it? The Phillips Collection has put its collection of American artists online.

So, for the record, here’s that painting: Native’s Return (1957). The pic below doesn’t do it justice: in real life it’s 65 by 76 inches.

I mentioned the Rothko room at Tate Modern last week, saying it had been left as before. It turns out this is not exactly true: the entire thing has been reinstalled (I thought they’d just closed off a door), as explained here:

In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors. Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space’s greyish lighting – itself a kind of masterwork – the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried.

I had wondered about the title card at the Tate explaining that these paintings were originally commissioned to decorate(!) The Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko couldn’t be serious, could he? The restaurant couldn’t be, could they?

“I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment.”

I’m still working through a backlog of stuff, but after the longish writeups of Samuel Beckett and Tate Modern (and too much time spent dicking around with pictures of John Hurt) it’s time for a few, short, stupid posts to break up the routine. See them below: one, two, three.

I woke in a cold sweat last night and had to get online to check my blog again, convinced that somewhere in my discussion of Monet and Rothko I had used the word ‘diaphanous’. False alarm, thank god.

Someone visited this site searching for “Denise Drysdale tits“. I’m speechless.

Urgent Ditsy Casual Pack

Speaking of the influence of Samuel Beckett’s antiphonal dialogues on Kenneth Gaburo’s music, UbuWeb has a complete recording, with sleeve notes, of Gaburo’s Maledetto, a 40-minute disquisition on the word screw “for seven virtuoso speakers”. If you’re unsure about downloading the whole thing, here’s a 2-minute excerpt (MP3, 3.5 MB). Hosted through the Boring Like A Drill Hit Parade.

Bonus Beckett links: Filming Play. Dunno if this could be any good (screenshots, Anthony Minghella, etc.)

Video clips of John Hurt doing a Krapp.

There were plenty of happy punters in the Tate Modern on Sunday: they had found the Dalìs. Four of them, by my count, and good ones too, made before the kitsch element of his work became overwhelming. (I’m not a Dalì fan, but if I was forced to have one on my wall I’d probably pick Mountain Lake, on display here – or else a really small one.) While in the new surrealism room I heard three people call their mates over to where the Dalìs were hanging.

How does the new surrealism room at the Tate compare to the old one? Tate Modern never had a surrealism room before! Its first and, until now, only hanging of its permanent collection was one of those dreaded “themed” arrangements whose main objective is the career advancement of museum curators. So if you liked surrealism, and a lot of people do, you wandered through room after room – all with titles like “The Body and Society”, or “Nature and Growth”, or anything else that sounds like a high school curriculum’s euphemism for sex ed – hoping you stumbled across the one with the Magritte in it.

(Did anyone pay attention to the putative themes of those galleries? Or did everyone just scuttle from room to room in a game of hunt-the-Dalì? Can anyone, even the curators, remember what the rooms were called?)

Sometimes, that Magritte wasn’t there at all. The arranging of work by ideological themes put the curators in something of a bind. The average art-loving punter stubbornly clings to the old-fashioned expectation that museums are places where you go to look at lots of great art. Put up too much good art, and your precious theme will be diluted to the point of giving the lie to your curatorial pretensions. On the other hand, put up third rate art that supports your thesis and your aesthetic judgement will become suspect. Now that the themes have been abandoned, the first thing everyone’s noticed is that there’s a lot more art up on the walls.

Sorry I don’t have 100% accurate information on what was hanging where, or how much of it is on loan to the Tate to supplement their own collection. I was there on a bank holiday Sunday and the place was packed, so I didn’t always get the chance to scrutinise the title cards. Besides, the main reason I was there was to accompany the girlfriend’s belated viewing of Embankment. Her verdict: it’s OK.

The most immediately obvious room is the one that squares off their big Monet Water-Lilies opposite a big (well, long) Pollock. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of Pollock. Blue Poles would look amazing in this company, but Summertime: Number 9A is a bare canvas soaked with an elegant scrawl of dripped black paint, highlighted with brushed on patches of primary colours. It isn’t a surface or a palette that matches Monet’s at all. Fortunately, a bench runs lengthwise down the room so you can face one painting or the other, with audio guides on hand for punters wanting to know more about either work.

The really clever juxtaposition is a pretty Rothko on the wall adjacent to the Monet, at the head of the long room. Its greeny-golds and pinks, the translucence of its surface, play off against Monet’s water-lilies until the Monet looks like a Rothko and the Rothko a Monet. An ingenious pairing.

The room full of Rothkos has been kept intact, as you would expect. Plenty of bench space so you can spend an entire, melancholy afternoon in there if you like.

Unless my memory is played tricks on me, they left that Joseph Beuys thing where it was. Can’t blame them not wanting to lug that big pile o’crap around any more than absolutely necessary.

The recent British art on display is way lame. Dear Tate: don’t trust Charles Saatchi’s acquisitions advice!

I know the lefty press loves a good conspiracy theory but this is a bit of a stretch, even for them:

Who knows what the avant garde would have created if there had been no assassination in Sarajevo and no first world war? Or did the very extremism of cubist art somehow bring about the ensuing chaos?

That’s right Jonathan, World War I was fought over cubism. Actually, judging from his recent articles, it’s surprising he didn’t blame the Americans, for once.

Apart from weird digressions like this, I agree with most of what Jones says about the Tate Modern rehanging of its collection. It’s halfway done now, and I was going to wait until it was all open to the public before writing about it, but given that The Guardian is blabbing about what’s on the fifth floor I may as well say how it looks… soon. I’m too busy right now.

Funnily enough, Picasso was questioned in Paris in relation to the Archduke’s assassination. He told them Braque did it.

The best-known line in Samuel Beckett’s Play is one that is never heard spoken on stage, but its consequences are heard throughout the second half of the play, and define the drama. Out of all the plays being put on at the Barbican for the Beckett centenary, this is the one I was most eager to see: reading it, even with the most conscientious imagination, can in no way substitute for experiencing it in live performance.

Luckily, I managed to get to see it. (In an indication of my artistic seriousness of late, I missed most of the Beckett centenary events because I was in Italy doing pretty close to sweet bugger all. I had planned on going to see Krapp’s Last Tape when I got back but some fool cast John Hurt in it so it’s been booked out for months.)

In terms of drama, Play gives you everything and nothing. The plot is a received idea: a love triangle, the most hackneyed of cliches but an inexhaustible source of dramatic machinations. If in Waiting for Godot nothing happens twice, then in Play something happened, once. The three protagonists – man, wife, mistress, all long dead – pick over the details of the affair, interrogated in turn by an inquisitory light. What remains of the story when there is nothing more to it than memory?

The three, being dead – cremated, in fact – are ash confined to urns: the “action”, such as it is, consists of their voices and the light. Performing the play hinges on questions of timing and execution – musical questions – as much as of dramaturgy.

The connections between Beckett and music have always been obvious. Music appears as a character in its own right in several of his radio plays, and his stage scripts took on musical directions to varying degrees; from the mysterious Quad, a wordless choreography apparently more suited to dancers than actors, to Krapp’s Last Tape, a monologue with deft use of tape recording and playback that has been, or should be, the envy of composers who have attempted combining live performers with tape. (Morton Feldman, a composer who collaborated with Beckett on several occasions, was astonished to learn that Beckett didn’t own a tape recorder.)

Play is the text that most entices musicians: it’s closing direction “repeat play” caps off a text that resembles a musical score as much as a drama, with its dependence on vocal dexterity and precise timing between the three actors. Kenneth Gaburo conducted a performance of Play by his Mew Music Choral Ensemble (NMCE), interpreting the script as they would a piece of music.

Back when he was interesting, Philip Glass was hired to write music for a number of Beckett stage productions, including Play. What impressed him was that at every performance the emotional climax came at a different point in the play, proving that the substance of the play was not in its text, but in the relationship of the text between the actors and the audience. Play makes clear the audience’s complicty in theatre.

In this performance, the great emotive moment came early in the second half, as we realised we were hearing the same story all over again. The lighting, already wan, dimmed to near total darkness; the voices, already soft, retreated to a murmur that would have been unintelligible to anyone entering the theatre. This knowing use of sound, of how little of the voice was needed to carry through the small theatre, was the most successful part of the production. The audience silent, craned forward slightly to hear a tale they had heard before.

At first we laughed (the new received opinion: Beckett is funny) at the seemingly irrelevant details of their story, which seemed then to define the triviality of their minds. The second time around these little digressions became uncannily poignant, the enduring memories of a life irretrievably lost, clung to as dearly as their self-inflicted hurts and humiliations.

If you really want to see John Hurt perform Krapp’s Last Tape, he made a film of it in 2000, the same year he narrated The Tigger Movie.

While I was offline I got bored hanging out at the laundrette and so went to Italy instead. Here’s a few highlights apart from the bits everybody knows about the great food/climate/art/pickpockets etc.

My girlfriend can arrive in any country and in less than 12 hours get involved in a loud conversation on the pavement with a local who’s spent enough time in Australia to discuss, in exhaustive detail, the acceptable usage of the word “cunt“.

If you’re too tight or broke to stay in Venice, you can stay over in Padua, which is a 30 minute train ride away. It’s much cheaper, unless you go on Easter Sunday and no-one tells you that’s the night they cancel the last train out of Venice and you have to catch a taxi back to Padua.

If you like Italy but aren’t so keen on Italians then go visit some ruins, which are all full of French; or else visit Florence, which is full of Americans who are unnervingly familiar with the place. The Germans will be waiting for you at the bar afterwards.

The only truly archetypal dopey American tourists I’ve seen were all in Rome: if you overhear some of them wondering aloud if there are any good restaurants around the Trevi Fountain, recommend to them a little place nearby called I Cazzi Gabinetti – they can ask a local for directions. Hilarity guaranteed.

You can also amuse yourself at dinner by watching your waiter attempt to translate “osso bucco” into English, before telling her the correct term is “osso bucco.”

Over dinner in Rome we sat next to two Italians chatting away about places they’d travelled to, from Vegas to Nepal. They were very enthusiastic about Melbourne’s Federation Square.

Having foiled a pickpocket in Riga, my girlfriend also managed to thwart another kid in Rome, just as he was about to make off with someone else’s bag. Later that night she celebrated by shortchanging a bartender over the price of a cognac. Note to self: never, ever attempt to double-cross the girlfriend.

We went to the Vatican to look at the pope, but when we visited he was curled up asleep at the back of his enclosure. The Holy See was disappointingly light on duty-free shopping, and although they do a nice line in stamps their range of postcards only extends back to the last pope, so you can’t send your Star Wars nerd friends back home a card of Pope Lando.

Also disappointing was the Vatican bookshop’s lack of publications in Latin; however, they do stock an Italian translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Unlike at Montserrat, there were no crazy menopausal women at St Peter’s who wanted to punch on with us.

Italian TV is less batshit insane then I remember it, but they still hire just that one shouty baritone guy to overdub everybody from Mr T to Woody Allen. Woody pops up in phone ads with someone else speaking his lines so I must conclude that Italians consider him eye candy, a thought which is alternately distressing and inspiring.

From the way you’ve heard everyone talk about it, you’d think that Naples was a filthy shitheap of a city swarming with petty crooks.

I might put some photos up on Flickr, but I didn’t take that many while I was there. It seemed kind of pointless. Everyone knows what the Colloseum looks like, but on the other hand you feel like a total wanker if you stand outside it facing the other way, trying to photograph a packet of Fonzies in the snack stall parked out front.

Besides, if you really want to experience what a visit to the Colloseum is like, just watch Double Team.

Thanks to travel, and to my internet provider screwing up my service without explanation for the better part of a fortnight, I have a large number* of half-finished posts lying around. Because all the news is stale, stale, stale, I’m going to put them up in reverse order so the latest stuff isn’t too old and the oldest stuff looks like a series of appropriately nostalgic flashbacks.

Right now, the new! improved! name and subject indices have been updated to the end of March.

A special thankyou to the extra person who subscribed to this site through Bloglines during my forced absence from updating the site regularly, only to unsubscribe again once I added a fresh post last night. I hope you enjoyed my blog while it was stagnant, and I’m sorry I spoiled everything for you by adding fresh content.

* Four.

Today is an auspicious day. My long Babylonian captivity in the laundrette down the road has come to an end and I have resumed occupation of my bunker. The internet connection is once again fully functional.

Moreover, today marks a year since I left Australia and relocated to London. This anniversary has given me cause to reflect on the many changes in my life over the past twelve months away from my native country, but one happy thought in particular stands out: I have now gone an entire year without hearing The Cat Empire. Life is good.