Me and my friends, we're all misunderstood

There are some people who will tell you that youth in mass is an inherently animalistic, base and destructive thing; that, given a chance, young people will make life worse for people because that's what their idea of a good time is. There is a subliminal cultural mentality, I think, that has always been around, that decency has to be forced on the incoming generation.

At Andrew's 21st last week, I witnessed one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. Given the very chance I have already mentioned, allowed any and all sorts of shenanigans (as is the custom of the twenty first birthday celebration), the not-inconsiderable mass of youth that I was in the company of could think of nothing more enjoyable or worthy of their time than to gather on the dancing floor and sing along with drunken and endlessly good natured luster to Go West's The King of Wishful Thinking.

I was genuinely, absolutely awed, and monumentally proud to be young.

That Measured Melbournian Poetry of Jordie Lane

I knew Jordie Lane tangentially in high school as the senior king of guitar, and indeed he was in those days something of a technical and musical wizard. What the young performer has grown into, however, is an artist of astounding tastefulness, one whose poetry is fused into treasure somewhere between the beauty of music and the bare honesty of lyric. The more that I listen to his reflective ballad I Could Die Looking At You, the more I become disturbed by the certainty that it is, however obscure, one of the great Australian songs of our time.

Have a listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bMBquVKnYo

Robin Wood on "Taxi Driver"

While rushing to finish a belated essay on famed film critic Robin Wood, I came across what I considered to be a rather interesting factoid. Wood contends that Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976) is an exemplary work of what he calls 'The Incoherent Text' of the seventies. Basically he argues that the movie avoids success and never finds equilibrium on its own terms because it is fundamentally 'incoherent'. I don't want to go on qualifying the words of someone else, but I have to: he doesn't mean that the film doesn't makes sense, merely that "it doesn't know what it's trying to say."

Now, I must thank Mr. Wood for discovering and illustrating for me probably the main reason I think Taxi Driver is such a great film. He didn't mean to, I don't think. He doesn't think it's great, only interesting, and he chalks up its ultimate incoherence to the auteurial collision of Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader. But in doing so I think he's hit the nail on the head for us yea-sayers.

Taxi Driuer is absolutely an incoherent film; such an amazing, stylish and masterfully created incoherent film that it couldn't help but tap into the innate incoherence of the human condition and become the artistic champion for our disillusionment, open-nerve-anger and fucked-upness. In fact, I would probably describe the film as schizophrenic; it's a Hellish, urban confusion in which every scene has nearly opposite but equal motives running through it; a dash of light shed on the inner most turmoil of every young man's soul; film noir on acid. It's not just Travis (Robert DeNiro) that lends the film these psychotic qualities: they are tied to and revolve around him but sink deep into every facet of the film, from direction to music to editing to the reactionary performances of Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel. I'm sure the film struck a chord with a certain nation still shaking from the rude awakening that was the Vietnam war, but I think its significance does deeper and further than that. I think this is a film whose incoherence only sweetens it, whose confusion over "what it wants to say" results in a overarching message that can only be felt and that only confusion can bring: I hurt and I want it to end.

To hell with what Wood thought Taxi Driver's incoherence meant: I say it was fucking integral to what makes the film an immaculate cinematic prayer and goodnight to everyone who ever felt like "God's lonely man."

And the movies, like the world, turned black...

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes even more to explain exactly what the beast that is film noir... is. The historical story, as I see it: film noir, as it would later be named by the French when a big glut of American films hit them after the war, was cinema's adolescence. It was the period when the injustice and agony of the world came tumbling down on Hollywood's head and it no longer had the guilelessness of newborn innocence to protect it. And like do us all at that troubled time in our lives, it lost its mind a little.

Because they were the most convenient and appropriate examples of the "social fantastic" (Tom Conley), the things you have to look out for are:

• A Hard-Boiled Detective Who Has Either Never Loved Or Loved So Strongly It Broke Him And Now There's No One Home
• A Rainy City
• A Dame With Big Eyes Who's Not What She Seems
• One Or More Guns
• Hats And Coats
• Complication After Mind Bending Complication To The Central Case That The Detective Is Working On
• Edward G. Robinson
  
• An Unhappy Ending

Aside from that, the spirit of noir lives on, no matter the vibrancy of color. We're not talking about pictures on a screen here, but a way of life, perhaps the oldest and most seductive of all. The term may technically translate as "black movie", but film noir means Shit Is Fucked Up. It looks like its going to take a whole semester of explaining all the intricacies of the matter, the societal disillusionment that washed America white after the Second World War, the pop culture of the nation consistently blaring the worst nightmares of its nuclear-family, bomb-shelter-conscious, gosh-darn-steak-and-brussel-sprouts audience right in their face. But I think James Naremore summed it all up nicely when he spoke simply of the faded night-club star, as she "imagines again the dazzle of her debut through the bottom of her bourbon".

The Thing About BATMAN

What for me vampires are to the world of ghouls, Batman is to the world of comics. They are both the key to unlocking the value of their respective mythological forms, because they exist so distinctly on a foundation of human struggles. They are, in their most fundamental form, elaborate symbolic stage plays for the innately pompous but nonetheless fascinating concepts of good, evil, belief and redemption.

Chris Nolan's recent rehauling of the Batman franchise is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to comic book cinema. Reimagining the filmic introductions and conflicts of Bob Kane's magnificent creations that were first attempted by Tim Burton in the eighties, Nolan gives us, at long last, the Batman of noir, quasi-morality and metropolistic tragedy that we all need. The issues of societal and sociological complexity that are broached are, admittedly, handled with groaning heaviness, but at least they're fucking there. And there's plenty more that the latest film, The Dark Knight, does perfectly.

The foremost is, of course and no prizes for guessing, Heath Ledger. It's at once a shame that the young actor, who had only just begun to show that he had potential to be an icon of DeNiro caliber, must leave behind a comic book villain as his legacy. But, in his defense, I believe that Ledger has pretty well changed the world of film villainy forever and ever amen. His haunting and extraordinary performance as The Joker, Batman's ultimate comment on the dark side of human nature, hooks in with frightening and tragic power to the instability of The Abused Child, The Feared Leper, The Angry Anarchist, and most importantly, The Lonely Man.

Although Aaron Eckhart turns in a very nicely arced performance as Harvey Dent, who is manipulated into a horrific fall from grace (from Gotham's D.A. Angel to "Two-Face"), it is Ledger's Joker that steals the show at every turn, because he is such an intriguing dark symbol. We do not and shall never know who he really was, before his disfigurement and ensuing insanity, but that's the way it should be, because his purpose is not to show the dialectics of the human soul, as "Two Face"'s is. The Joker's only signs of humanity are the bad ones - resentment, cruelty, loneliness. He is a live wire of negative response to a cruel world, an exposed nerve of conditioned disdain and anger. He exists to show us all the kind of monster us mortals can create from one another, much the way Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter did, in his first (and only his first) film appearance.

Not only all this, but he's there to show that Batman is only a hero through the murky morals of Gotham city. They aren't so different, these two immortal characters. They walked the same miserable paths all their lives and then, as if by the flip of Two Face' mythic coin, came to different conclusions. Their "battle for the soul of Gotham", as The Joker very rightly puts it, is founded on nothing more than a conflict of beliefs... and an emblematic town that will do what its ruling giant tells them.

The thing about BATMAN is quite a simple one. Kane's vision and Nolan's synchronize with beauty in this latest feature, for they both take a distinctly gothic, tragic and metaphysical view of their seemingly pointless craft: The Dark Knight tells the tale of a lively philosophical debate, taking place far too late. The delicious ambiguity of the Batman universe created Gotham City, and it's because nobody spoke up one way or the other that it did. Batman and The Joker are taking their stands - they ask that each of their citizens do so as well. Suddenly I can't seem to stop thinking about that damn coin of Harvey's; spinning, spinning, spinning into the dark night.

*Thanks to Martin Kingsley for an editorial note on the finer points of Thom Harris.

And Song the Fourth

A working model for poetic meditation on the intense pathos of insanity and the insanity in pathos.


Tuesday Pills

I heard a voice on the wind

She said, ‘The danger’s over.’

But there was no one, so then

I’m hearing voices again.

I saw a man on the road in town,

saying, ‘If you need a cry, then here’s a shoulder.’

But when he spoke, there was no sound

So I’m seeing things now.

The newspaper is full of messages, and

It's all tantamount to me being missed

And wanted home. “You’re not alone”.

The secret people, they’ve heard my tapes

And they love what I do and the way that I play,

They tell me so on my phone,

Their code is in the dial tone.

Oh, and I’m not so bad

What did you expect to have

Happen?

Oh, and i’m not that scared

I know I’m almost there

So it might not happen this afternoon, but

The whole world is going to love me

The whole world is going to love me soon.

Northern Wisdom

The greatest thing about Northern Exposure was that it was a series that simply should not have worked. The fish-out-of-water premise is solid enough, but the Kaufmanesque, profoundly bizarre and ahead-of-its-time eccentricities in every other specific should have left it dead in the water, an unpleasant blotch of debris that never had any cohesion to rely on. And yet, as if by magic, the ship floats, the show engages and a miracle takes place: we learn to love it. Northern Exposure is a clanking, Wells era contraption that somehow still manages to fly, and on the strength of this simple boost of faith proceed to tear up the sky.

Few would argue with the series' own analyst and philosopher, worldly ex-con and radio personality Chris Stevens, when he inadvertently summarizes the series motto: "It's not the thing you fling, but the fling itself." This is the most beautiful way of contextualizing and and rationalizing Northern Exposure's dizzying depth of insanity, expressed in a quintessentially Northern Exposure decorum. But tonight my gratitude to the show's writers is caused simply by this gorgeous and poetic paraphrasing of the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, articulated by Chris toward the end of a dream-episode whereby Rob Morrow imagines he has a sleazy Jewish twin (played by Rob Morrow). The quote is as follows, and could stand in its beautiful blending of modernity and classic romantic philosophy to be one of my favourite quotes ever:

"It's like brother Nietzsche says: being human is a complicated gig. So give that old dark night of the soul a hug... and howl the eternal yes."

Something

First blog since the sadness.
I don't think I want to talk about it in my usual stupid way.

But here's something: I'm going to start playing solo gigs next month. It's a pretty big deal for me, a terrifying one, but I'm at a time where I really feel it would be destructive not to do it, for a number of reasons, and every person I've told about it has thought it is a good idea.

I was kind of running on apprehension last night about the whole concept of playing by myself in front of other people, and I ended up writing this song about what I realized is the state of my life. Strangely enough, it's pretty much the first time i've ever done that. I usually end up writing songs in really abstract ways, but this one was pretty direct and personal and just fell out. Anyway, I'm really happy with it. I think I'll open with it at my first solo gig (:S).

Song the third

Those Weird Kids (In Primary School Who Cared About Things)

I believe in kids
who never called in sick,
making plans to fix the world.
Cuz I don't know 'bout you,
but I could go a few, so honey
tonight let's let the kids do the work.

Dancing on the table is not a wrong thing to do
near as I can tell from the queue;
lining up to take
the Normal Person claim,
putting down on paper why it should be you


I believe in luck
fucking people up
and the worst cases aren't here to get drunk.
So see these times as ships.
parting ocean lips.
Baby, we're among the rips

But swimming in the water is not a wrong thing to do
near as I can tell from the view;
standing on the shore
of how things were before,
rubbing myself raw and through


I believe in sweets
being good to eat.
There's this place down the street: it's cold.
Oh, please don't give me that "no" smile,
you can stay a while,
The kids have everything under control
The kids have everything under control.

"Baby, you are gonna miss that plane"

There's something interminably magical about Richard Linklater's Before Sun- films. I've seen both of them several times before, but only yesterday did I have the pleasure of seeing them both back to back for the first time, courtesy of some academic something-or-other.

I think there's a certain type of person who can be wholly entertained by two people talking for almost three hours all up, and that I am this type of person. What you need to do to make it work is really pay attention. Pay attention to what Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke say, the way the say it. The way they look at each other when the other is talking, or act when the other isn't looking. It's an accumulative effect of a thousand words and mannerisms to build to nothing more than two extraordinarily real people experiencing a profound connection. Most films fail in plot, development and meaning because they never properly established that real connection, and those real characters. Linklater fucks all those narrative trinkets off and strips everything right back, just to get these basics right.

In the end, though, I think its the reflection of self and society that appeals to me through these two very quiet, slow and uneventful films. It's a diluted mix of that same feeling I get from Eternal Sunshine. Although a lot of the dialogue is philosophically derivative and vapid (and although we forgive this because it sounds genuine and builds the characters well), there are occasional nuggets of gold that hit home. For me, it was Ethan Hawke professing that he always felt like a thirteen year old boy, pretending to be an adult, taking notes for when he'd have to actually do it.

And in the grand scheme of things, this couplet of movies really says a lot about the notions of romance, idealism, lost time and broken hearts. The two young lovers never met up again in Veinna, as they arranged to do at the end of the first film. We discover this at the beginning of the last. So that romantic plan went bust. Then we hear all about the subtle but drastic impact their encounter had on the rest of their lives. They seem shocked to discover that their connection really was as profound as they thought it was. Something always seemed "off" to them. Something should have happened, and it didn't. In a way, this gives the series an odd kind of romantic cynicism: yes, there is such thing as true love, but you'll probably fuck it up.

What I love most about the franchise, and the second film, is that it resolves the open ending of the first one, and then leaves us hanging yet again. Their second chance encounter ends with Ethan Hawke having a tea with Julie Delpy in her Parisian apartment. He is married with a kid, she is in a serious relationship with a war photographer. Life went on and saddled them with second best, then hooked them up again to talk about it. Yet the look on Hawke's face, the last shot of the movie and series, is one of almost unbelieving contentment. She seems happy enough too. I think getting to see each other again is close enough a happy ending for both of them.

Whether its close enough for us is our choice, I guess.

Speaking of Fucking Up

A close friend of mine who is traveling and being brave made a short stop in London very recently before she continues on Contiki tour to Ireland. I managed to catch her on remote online messenger and chat and such like, wherein she told me that she attempted to call the previous night, but no one answered. I felt bad about this, a) because she tried to call and was let down and b) because I really really would have loved to hear from her and hence I now feel let down. This was 11 pm Melbourne time, 2 30ish pm London time when we got to chat msn style and I heard about this.

I told her, hey you should call again when you've gotten back from your internet cafe to the motel you're at, seeing as you are leaving for Ireland in about 20 hours. She promised she would. I went to bed at this point, but I should point out that this was only to thoroughly establish the setting of being snug in my bed in the dark while it rained when I got to talk voice-to-voice with my friend on the other side of the world. I had no intention of falling the fuck asleep. I thought, even if I do fall asleep, the handset is right next to me, it's ring will wake me up.

The next thing I knew it was five thirty in the morning, which would have been about 8 in the evening in London. I can only assume she rang... and no one answered. My excuse, which is that I fell asleep, is really quite poor. I did, after all, implore some one to ring me and then not answer the phone, even if it was due to unconsciousness. But I had no way of telling her that. I left a bunch of messages for her at various internet locations explaining and apologizing. As of now I don't believe she had the time to go on the internet to read any of them.

After three hours of sleeplessness, at about 8 30, I got showered and dressed and wandered up to the tram stop to go to uni, which begins at 10. I was there til two. There were delays with trams and buses which meant I didn't get home til three. I was there for maybe an hour, checking internet and phone. Nothing. Then I was whisked away to various band related functions that kept me out until fifteen minutes ago (20 past 10 at night, for those keeping track). At one of these band functions, I will mention I ran into a mutual friend of this mysterious traveling girl who told me she was rung up on the telephone by her earlier in the day (while i was out doing fucking band shit), and that at the time of the call she was at the airport, going to Ireland.

When I got home, I found a message on the machine that was about 4 seconds of silence and then a hang up. It was left at quarter to six (while I was out doing fucking band shit) and its almost impossible that it wasn't my friend in London. So now, not only have fate and I cheated myself out of something which I really wanted - talking with close friend, finding out how she is, how Europe was, how she's feeling - but have no choice but to consider it from her point of view - She rang three times and got no answer on any of them, including a call that I solicited quite strongly. What must she think?

So now I'm thinking thoughts a little along the lines of

fuckfucketyfuckingfuckedfucktardfuckingfuckFUCKFUCK!

and hoping that she's feeling better than me, cuz I feel positively awful.

I really did want to talk to her.

"It's Never Over": More on the magic of Jeff Buckley

About three hours ago I finished reading David Browne's dual biography of Tim and Jeff Buckley, a compelling read for any Buckley fan as avid as I which tells two equally interesting and tragic tales, spun thirty years apart. Though the book has, to an extent, inspired me to look further into the music of Buckley Sr., I don't plan on giving cash prizes to anyone who can guess which of the two I was more smitten with. The experience has lead me to reiterate in text my love for Buckley's masterpiece:

Having unspecified relationship troubles with Rebecca Moore, an un-discovered Jeff Buckley began fiddling with a song idea in 1992, detailing his pretty standard feelings of inadequacy, regret and all round heart-ache. The song was called "Lover, You Should've Come Over". And, from the corner of Sin-e amongst the clatter of forks and the bustle of the street outside, the greatest Love-Lost song of all time was born. From the mere title, in itself a lingual treat that feels good in your mouth, to the melodic moaning, crooning and howling which end the song, communicating what words couldn't quite reach, it remains to me one of the most perfect musical pieces ever written... and I get such a strange rush out of realizing I was alive and well when this happened. It reminds me that music, I mean really great, life-changing music, is not dead.

But the untouchable, untouched musical passion that resided in Jeff Buckley isn't the driver in this case: it only necessitates what makes "Lover" great; it gives the song its force and sharpness with which to penetrate us, all the way to that deep part of the human experience where Jeff lived, all the time. Once he's there, we hear what he's saying, and if the moment has caught us just right, we'll damn near weep.

Because it bends a lot of people out of shape to know it, I think, but every hurt and every happiness you ever suffer never leaves. They make you who you are, and you carry them around with you, in varying forms, til you die. That's why there shouldn't ever be a person who hears the sadly uplifting gospel bridge of "It's never over; my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder" and doesn't immediately think of one specific person. There shouldn't ever be someone who hears those words sung with that voice without remembering with a frightening freshness that feeling, that feeling that there was nothing in all your life you wouldn't have given for one more second of being a whole with that person, that feeling that nothing would ever be alright without them. It was everything, that feeling. It was the whole fucking world for however long you felt it. And Jeff Buckley felt it too.

It takes a special kind of person, I think, to write a song of such paradox with such confidence, but I say what is emotional pain but confident paradox? "Lover, You Should've Come Over" is the truest of all songs in that sense: it is every sad story. We all hear it as we are, sitting at home and feeling normal and good enough, watching the funeral of the outside world parade before our door, and its no coincidence at all that amidst these verses of calmness and acceptance and the signs of a life moving on, every chorus comes back a little stronger than the last, a little more insistent. It's the hardest, and most universal kind of sadness, this: we are happy enough most of the time and as many problems as we may throw up to the sky in the process, the only answer that feels right, and that keeps returning with more and more force: "oh, but I wish you'd come over." It is the tear that hangs inside our soul forever.

And yet Buckley holds out hope: "It's not too late" are his parting words, before the song calms down to its initial lull and fades away, as Jeff himself did not three years later. Because of his untimely departure, we will never know if he was right. Was this optimism his greatest strength or greatest tragedy? Would someone, some day have walked through his door and make it feel, to his hurt and yearning, that his lover had returned? Was the surety that it's never over virtue or vice? The pain is undeniable and universal, but the conclusion is entirely ours to draw, through ourselves and everything we know. That's the magic that Buckley had.

Explosions in the Sky

At least I assume there were - I was pretty well passed out by the time out-dated, unhip, good-for-nothing last year passed the baton to this brand spanking new shiny one full of promise. In a related note, I don't recommend centurions. They are good experience but not the kind worth revisiting. So for the first time in my life, I missed NYE; the classic romantic celebration of The Beginning, but also, of The End. You might say we are marrying 2008 - New Years Eve is our wedding, and as much celebrates the death of our vapid bachelorhood (2007) as it does the birth of our future. Anyway, I've never much cared for the said explosions in the sky, and so am happy to simply listen to the Texan guitarchitect quartet of the same name instead.

I don't care for sentimentality either, so I'll make this quick and painless: last year was the best of my life. People, places, experiences, all new and amazing. I finally feel like I am in motion, and am closer to happiness than I feel is really appropriate or comfortable.

There. Glad to be rid of that. Also, I am plagued with doubt and indecision and fear and rage and self-loathing and all such things, but they've had more than their fare share of screen time since 1989, so I'll be damned if I'm going to, at least for the time being, give them a minute more.

I hope that others I know and enjoy feel similarly about affairs at this, the turn of the New Year. If not, well we'd all better get crackin', because according to the Mayans, it's all over in four years. Big existential piss up in the park!

Hope to see you all there.