MOG - Mark Mordue's Posts

Steve Earle's Doghouse Roses

Mark Mordue — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:39:14 GMT

Anyone witness to a recent [2002] solo live tour by the rock musician Steve Earle would have no qualms telling you about the greatness this aching bear of a man exuded on stage. Drawing on elements of folk, country and blues, this 'roots' performer summoned up a peculiarly troubled form of American heroism and its troubadour, protest spirit, echoing a lineage from Lightning Hopkins to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

A lot of fans were prone to read between the lines of his maverick tales for the personal shadows that motivated them: the wandering teenage years; the drug problems and time spent in jail that all but destroyed his significant early promise; the six ruined marriages; and the way the 45 year old had gone straight in the last seven years to produce what Nick Hornby in the New Yorker called "the relaunch of... one of the most creatively successful careers in contemporary American music," noting this "renewed version of Earle gives every impression of wanting to claw back the years he wasted."

Aside from his dedication to the cause of ending capital punishment in the USA, Earle also teaches songwriting, runs an independent record label, writes for theatre, and here has produced his first collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses. With a dash of black humour perhaps these tales are offered much like the antagonist's gifts of flowers in the title story - as compensation for bad behaviour and emotional damage. As expected certain stories feel like fleshed out and over-extended versions of his songs, but even in the weaknesses one still senses the same lyrical drive that Michael Ondaatje described, in almost awestruck terms, as "his songs of furious loss".

Doghouse Roses begins powerfully enough with a clearly semi-autobiographical tale about a country musician addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, being ferried out of L.A. by his emotionally exhausted record company girlfriend. There's a striking sense of silence and space to this depressed road story, the existential apartness of the self-absorbed junkie who can't rise from his habits, well captured in the metaphor of a desert drive at night and a lingering sadness that can't be resolved. It's a knockout.

Elsewhere though Earle telegraphs his conclusions, their obviousness and forced neatness, way too easily. This spoils 'Wheeler County', the tale of a drifter who sets down roots, with an unnecessarily clichéd last ride and mars the post-Vietnam War encounter story, 'The Reunion', with some tidy coincidences that do nothing for what otherwise might have been a fine two-hander about veterans from opposite sides of the fence coping with the culture of death, duty and damage from which they spring.

There's also a sizeable ego at work in Earle's stories, a self-romanticizing that can get laborious and surprisingly self-oblivious - especially from an otherwise acute observer of human nature. There's a less surprising anger underlining that ego as well, but it doesn't finally carry what I'd call the repulsive puritanism in 'Billy the Kid', the story of a Nashville Jeff Buckley meets Gram Parsons who is never discovered because of a tragically premature death and the friends who elect to destroy his recording tapes to protect him from industry corruption. It reads as an Earle revenge fantasy, an aesthetic suicide wish, and the beatific tone doesn't wash it clean.

Earle is also prone to undramatic expositions of fact - sometimes in the guise of rather stiff conversations - that lay undigested within certain stories and break the mood completely. But I feel like I'm being terribly harsh when this book also offers so much.

It ends with a devastating story about the husband of a murder-victim witnessing an execution, Earle moving through the details of character, crime and punishment like a smooth-idling long black limousine. As in 'Doghouse Roses', 'The Witness' rings with semi-autobiographical intensity (Earle witnessed the execution of a friend on death row) as well his tough poetic eye:

"The last six miles of the drive from the city out to the state penitentiary was a dark, lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop winding through a no-man's land of second-growth timber and fallow farmland - a kind of airlock between the prison and the free world."

If this was the first book of an unknown writer, you'd be watching to see how he developed and mark him into a territory still in the shade of Hemingway, Carver, Ford and Banks. It'll certainly be interesting to see if Earle can both elaborate on and resist the sketch-point power of his songwriting in his story telling on the page and take it up another notch. The signs are he can.

For the moment we have a very flawed, at times annoying collection with a few killer punches and the need for a much tougher editor (arguing with Mr Earle would be no easy task to be sure). Beyond that we might contemplate the way Earle's stories still have an emotional impact even when they show so many flaws. The reason, simply enough, is a highly committed voice, surprisingly political, behind the tales - a sense of belief that more refined writers could do well to consider when the smoothness of their words overruns the heart they've left behind. Fortunately for us, Steve Earle still wears his on his sleeve.

- Mark Mordue

First published in Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books section on May 25th, 2002 and then 12Gauge.com (USA) also in 2002.

Don't Look Back?

Mark Mordue — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:10:44 GMT

DIED PRETTY ED KUEPPER Enmore Theatre, Sydney, Australia 08.02.08

Have you ever experienced that moment in a performance when it feels like the band in front of you has peeled away its own skin to reveal an entirely more intense and grander being? Great musicians strive to get to such places. And during their encore rendition of ‘Winterland’ Died Pretty did just that.

Proving – if there were any doubt left – their ecstatic and lyrically romantic take on what is loosely called ‘garage rock’ was always of the highest ambition.

For the Pretty it’s a sound that embraces the Velvet Underground, Television, The Stooges, The Doors (that trademark organ swirl) and early Echo and The Bunnymen (that rolling thunder sound) as well as a dark and streaming intuition of the psychedelic that drives deep into what ultimately feels like singer Ron Peno’s inner space.

Without guitarist Brett Myers pushing the melodic direction of the band ever forwards – if not quite ever upwards – Peno’s lyrics could turn too interior, too fucked up and beaten. Instead one of the beautiful ironies of their songwriting partnership is the strange joy that emerges in even the saddest songs.

It’s a quality that was always one of Died Pretty’s most distinct songwriting moods: a feeling you were embarking on a mysterious journey; a sense of momentum and some kind of grace being granted.

As the launching act for the Don’t Look Back series where local Australian and overseas groups return to a classic album and play it from start to finish, Died Pretty’s visitation of their 1991 album Doughboy Hollow was a stunner. It was well matched by Ed Kuepper’s supporting adventure into his 1992 recording, Honey Steel’s Gold.

Honey Steel’s Gold is one of Kuepper’s re-invention albums, the kind he seems to make every five years or so. Live this seam-shattering confidence was present in a sound that could have emerged yesterday: the behemoth swing and laconic tension in Jeffrey Wegener’s drumming and Kuepper’s splintering guitar work; the cascades and chimes and sour melodies; and that almost sarcastically mournful voice of Kuepper’s that seems to drag behind the music, then sling a lyric at your feet like a corpse.

Following an act as certain of itself as Kuepper and his band is no easy task. There’s no room to be weak. Indeed, when Died Pretty hit the stage and strode into the Doughboy Hollow opener ‘Doused’, an epic piece of sorrow about a gambler down on his luck (‘his Midas touch has all dried up, his hair has all turned grey’), the song felt bigger than them. There was a feeling Died Pretty did not quite believe they were here, that this music belonged to them anymore.

Thirty seconds of doubt later the band was suddenly possessed and inside their moment. It never stopped from then on till the finish. In a full house that would give them three standing ovations for the three encores that would follow Doughboy Hollow – encores that eventually constitute an entire other set of songs like ‘Everybody Moves’, ‘Stoneage Cinderella’ and ‘Turn Your Head’ – Died Pretty weren’t just in command, they were unleashed.

There’s a lot of talk these days that the album is dead, speculation that i-Tunes and the i-Pod have killed everything – including bloated CDs that go on interminably – but the power of a single song. Something about the Don’t Look Back series and these two acts tonight is a reminder of how powerful the LP (long-playing) experience can still be.

Watching Died Pretty and Ed Kuepper I nonetheless began to wonder if live performances of this magnitude might fade like the LP itself and the notion of an inter-related and sustained set of songs?

If a decade on from now great live bands will be thinner on the ground? If a great live experience might become as rare as the ability to write or read a good novel? Will the speed of our pleasure sap our attention, our scope? I have to honest – if Died Pretty and Ed Kuepper strode the stage tonight like colossi, I also felt a glimmer of them as saurian creatures we might well regret the passing of.

Whatever those thoughts, an encore song like ‘Winterland’ (which comes off their album Lost) didn’t sound like a spent force reliving old dreams. It came on like a band still expanding and exploring, still taking their music further out than ever. A part of this was a textured electronic outburst in the middle of the song that intimated at the band’s new horizons when they finally broke up in 2002.

Even without that ‘touch’ some things become timeless precisely because their roots are so clear, at least to a hometown audience like this. Many of whom would have felt part of a magical time when Doughboy Hollow seemed to resound out of every stereo in the Sydney inner city suburbs of Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Chippendale and Newtown in the summer Saturday afternoons of 1992, when the album resounded like an anthem for peoples’ lives and what might burst open that very night: a kiss, a breakup, a party, a death.

Out front of it all then and now was the diminutive Ron Peno. His antecedents were obvious: Iggy Pop and Stevie Wright and Bon Scott. Peno is their equal, a poet of the body as much as lyric and voice. Shy and shadowy, an almost Gothic figure as he slid and shuffled and bent and twisted and pranced, he finished with a nervous little wave as if it was all hard to believe. Then, as he sang it in ‘Turn Your Head’, it was time to “turn and walk away”.

- Mark Mordue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysu9DGMiOxI

An abridged version of this review was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald 11.02.08.

Nick Cave Let's Love In (1994)

Mark Mordue — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:16:03 GMT

I did the following interview with Nick Cave over the phone in 1994 for the now defunct Juice Magazine in Australia. He was just about to release Let Love In, still one of my favourite records by him. It's full of vitality, even joy or at least humour, in a typically skewed and erotically dark Nick Cave way. Our conversation was free and easy, almost careless at times. I'd been up all night before we spoke and was basically in a don't-give-a-fuck-who-I-am-talking-to-or what-I-say mood, without wanting that to seem like I was being unfriendly or that I was unprepared. I've seen this interview get posted around the net a bit and my interviewing 'style' get criticized. But I know Cave and I had fun talking. Sometimes it just rolls off the tongue...

Mordue: Could you describe for us a favourite walk you take in Sao Paolo, Brazil?

Cave: Well, I make my favourite walk daily. Which is up to my local bar. Out the door, up the street, past the junkyard where the chickens and the old junkyard dog sits. And up a steep hill to my favourite bar, SanPedro's. There's this giant barman there who is the fattest guy I've ever seen. He is constantly described by locals as a huge woman, but he's a man with a moustache. He looks more like a giant baby to me. I sit there and read, drink, and contemplate the meaning of life. Then I walk back down.

M: So what were you reading at the time of Let Love In? I was wondering about literary influences on the lyrics.

C: I draw influences from everywhere, in terms of a line that will excite me - and maybe a song will develop out of it. It can often come from the worst airport novel you could ever find. It doesn't necessarily have tobe good literature to be inspiring. I couldn't tell you what I was reading at the time. I read three, four books a week.

M: 'Let Love In' is a very positive and celebratory statement.

C: It's supposed to be. There isn't much irony in it, although people have expressed that interpretation of the title. It's the idea of letting love in and experiencing what love has to give. It's not necessarily allgood - but it's all worthwhile.

M: What about the lines in the first single, Do you Love Me? "I stacked all accomplishments beside her/Yet they seemed so obsolete and small."

C: Yet I seemed so obsolete and small... Well, I feel that way. That's a very personal song, actually. It's a nice line, I think.

M: Later you say, "Do you love me?/Like I love you?" I think when two people are trying to get along, in a way they are trying to make love be the same. But that is the big miscommunication.

C: Yeah, yeah, that sounds okay. (Laughs) I was really going to try not to go into what the songs are about. I did that with Henry's Dream and I always regretted it.

M: How come?

C: I think it demystifies everything. It's like an actor talking about his role in a film. If he does a good job of acting it, you don't need him sitting there on some entertainment program talking about what his character is supposed to be. I always find that immensely irritating. I just didn't want to have to spell out the songs, that's all I'm trying to say.

M: I'm not necessarily asking that of you. I'm just interested in using them as points to leap off into discussion. Jangling Jack really jumped out at me as the album's sing-a-long track.

C: That was written very quickly. And I hope it sounds like it. It's about an Englishman going to America and getting shot. It's my little ode to America. I deliberately wanted it to be as throwaway and as short as possible. So the only way I could record the song was if I could make it in under three minutes. We had to pare it down and down and down. It's about two minutes, fifty. It's just a hateful little track about a certain aspect of America which disgusts me.

M: In Jangling Jack I also got an impression of you hating a man being cool and excessively confident.

C: Well Jangling Jack isn't the object of hatred in it. It's the guy who kills him actually... It's just a quick, throwaway song.

M: Loverman was the other song that I got into. When my friend and I were listening to it, he described it as 'a real togs-off rock & roll song'.

C: (Laughs) I don't know about a 'togs-off rock & roll song'. Very briefly, it's about a guy or person destroyed by his life, feeling that he can become something if he is rejuvenated by the object of his desire. It'sa flailing mess of a song. And of course he can't be.

M: So you don't think a woman can redeem a lost man?

C: (Laughs) I think it's a myth, but who knows?

M: I like the incantation at the end: "I am what I am what I am..." It reminded me of some cartoon character.

C: I think it's Popeye: "I am what I am what I am".

M: I love the simplicity of the opening to She's Nobody's Baby Now, where you talk about trying to "unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Saviour". It made me wonder about the first time you had a notion of what Jesus was in your life? And then maybe you rejected that in your upbringing?

C: You want me to talk about that?

M: Yeah, if you could.

C: Well, the line is in a verse in which someone is trying to work outwhy he isn't with a woman anymore. But at some point along the way I had some vague religious notions about things. I still read the Bible a lot.And I still think that Jesus Christ is an extremely enigmatic and exciting figure. But I can't really get my teeth around the resurrection and thevirgin birth. I mean, I just can't believe that. I look at him objectively these days.

M: So you don't find yourself becoming more religious?

C: I don't find myself becoming religious at all.

M: A song that made me laugh was Lay Me Low, about when you die. And the cavalcade of cars and the six page feature articles that will be written. It made me wonder if you ever fantasised about having one of your songs played at your own funeral?

C: No, I don't. I've never thought about it.

M: Never thought about a song in particular? Or never thought about dying?

C: I've thought about dying. Everyone has thought about dying! But no, I haven't made a list of songs I want played at my funeral. I haven't written all my good songs yet, so that would be a bit premature. I'm not planning on dying in the near future.

M: Is Let Love In a breakthrough for you?

C: Every record has its difficulties. Mostly for me it's in the actual writing of the songs, and this was equally difficult. There was as much panic and fear that I wouldn't have it done as there was with any other record. But once the songs were recorded it fell together so easily. And I believe that is because we worked with people we knew, and who understood our work. Especially Tony Cohen, the guy who produced it with me. We knew that we were doing something that was going to be good. Right from the early stages, the foundations of the record were really strong. We didn't relax at any point, but we could play around with stuff a lot more. And it was a lot more of a creative experience than the last one (Henry's Dream).

M: Tony Cohen must be amazingly talented - producing the Cruel Sea's The Honeymoon is Over, Dave Graney's Night of the Wolverine, and now this. He apparently brings out the best in people.

C: He has an understanding. He knows what to do, and gets on with it. And he's great with sounds. He enjoys making offensive records, I think. He just enjoys it. It's not a job to him.

M: There's a real energy to this record, more so than for a long time. I wonder if you wanted to come out towards your audience more, and seduce them, invite them in at the same time? Some of your records aren't easy to approach, but there's something inviting and playable about Let Love In.

C: With Henry's Dream I wanted to make an incredibly aggressive record with acoustic instruments - a raw, nasty record. And it isn't that. It's basically a rock record - and not much more - and that's not what I wanted to make at all. Let Love In has a wide range of song styles, there isn't such a concrete idea about it. The songs are joined very close together lyrically. But musically it's quite diverse.

M: Have you gone through times when you've thought, "Is my talent slipping? Are things falling apart? Do I have the strength to be the kindof performer that I used to be?" And with these questions, were you looking to refocus your power with Let Love In?

C: I've always gone through that feeling. I've always been in a panic about these issues. Right from The Birthday Party. I used to approach each record with a great fear - that it wouldn't be accomplished enough or whatever. And it continues. It's always very difficult for me to write songs, and I don't expect that will ever change.

M: Why is it so difficult? The image, in spite of the songs having their work, is that they do pour out.

C: Or fall out of the sky? Well, they don't. It takes me ages, months, to write a song. Occasionally I get what I describe as 'given' a song, where you just suddenly find you've written a song and you don't knowhow or where it comes from, but it sounds okay. Normally, songs take a very long time to write, and a lot of consideration. With the artwork for this record, behind the actual lyrics I've tried to put various pages from the working process of the songs. They're like a backdrop to each lyric, showing how much writing goes on. Some of them have ten, twenty verses, to end up being a three verse song. I'm always very finicky about that side of things. Probably too finicky. I guess that's a strength and a weakness at the same time.

M: There is such a thing as letting your conversational expression tell the story that needs to be told, and forgetting about the style or technique.

C: Yeah. I Let Love In is like that. And Red Right Hand was almost completely improvised at the moment of actually singing it. But the other ones, like the two Do You Love Me’s took ages to write. I don't think any one song is better than the other. I just think you have to get to a point, one way or another.

M: Currently I'm perfecting hunching over at the right moment on Loverman and singing along to it, or doing "Do-da-de-doo" down the street to Jangling Jack. I really do love this record, I think it's a beauty.

C: I love it too. I'm really very happy with it. I've survived in Sao Paolo for two months now. Usually by the end of the first month, because I just sit here and do nothing really, I'm champing at the bit to get out and start working again. Which is a basic panic thing that I get into. But here I am, sitting back with this, because I feel like I've really done something worthwhile with this record.

Dead Men Walking - the return of the cowboy

Mark Mordue — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:30:15 GMT

I was made aware that the Western was dead when I visited a junk shop recently. Looking down at a collection of cowboys and Indians just like the ones I had played with as a boy, I began talking to the shop owner about the fort they came with. She smiled at me and said, “Not many kids these days have an interest in a set like that. They hardly even know what cowboys and Indians are. It’s just not part of their world.”

Standing there in my Levi jeans and blue flannelette shirt, I too had to wonder if I would soon be headed for the ‘antiques’ store? A little more seriously I began to consider the saturating cultural force of the Western in everything from film, radio and literature to art, music and fashion throughout most of the 20th Century.

Though its residual influence remains today in everything from a pair of boots to a Ryan Adams song – not to mention the cowboy poses middle-aged Neil Young fans attempt to strike - the truth was obvious: the Western had all but faded from our cinema and television screens, and now seemed as archaic as the history it once so vitally envisioned.

And yet riding in over the horizon have come three major films which fall under a ‘New Western’ star. First there was the Australian director Andrew Dominik’s haunting epic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a contemplation of notoriety and mortality in which Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck featured as the mutually hypnotized outlaw and his Judas. Right beside it was James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma, a clockwork tight, violent entertainment with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, respectively, as a good man trying to get a very bad one on the train to jail.

Then the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men came shooting its way into town, a ‘contemporary Western’ with Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin dogging each others’ tracks across the Texas-Mexico borderlands as a drug deal goes wrong and the body count rises.

Two of them are presences at this year’s Academy Awards. All three are affected by classic Western tropes: the use of mirror opposites to personify good and evil in conflict as well as affinity; a journeying atmosphere of drifting and propulsion; the solemn moral philosophy and feelings of loss that underline most Westerns, as if something (the past, the frontier, the loner) is being overtaken (the future, civilization, the community); and the significance of an all-embracing landscape, within which lies the absolutes of sacrifice and death, and the almost mystical power of the horse and the gun.

The American ‘West’ has always been a violent place - in myth as much as fact. It remains the necessary imaginative territory America turns to whenever it needs to puzzle out its own identity as a nation, most particularly in the ways that force can lead to honorable ends (if not always honorable means).

Everybody is always trying to kill a cowboy, of course. The same thing might be said of the Western and its cinematic reputation.

As a genre it suffers more than most for being judged on its’ worst, and most wooden qualities. As a result the Western has seen a few spells in the graveyard on Hollywood’s Boot Hill before reviving itself and walking back into the commercial maelstrom of Dodge City again.

Three films now do not constitute a movement. Reviving a seemingly dead genre takes a lot more heat than that.

But it’s possible to see renewed vigor behind the Western when you also take into account the critically lauded HBO television series, Deadwood (2004-06) - a prosaically brutal take on how the chaos of a gold mining town is civilized – and Brokeback Mountain (2005), author E. Annie Proulx and director Ang Lee’s gay re-visioning of a cowboy romance up in them ‘thar’ hills.

In A Personal Journey with Martin Scorcese through American Movies (1997), Scorcese said that “the most interesting of the classic movie genres for me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.”

His point about the indigenous nature of these genres is a powerful one. To understand America, one must understand its Western Dreaming. And ask why, now, of all times, the genre has staged a return? Recognizing the way that the Western frontier moved on into Vietnam and the shock of defeat - and how that same sense of the frontier and some final moment of historical trauma continues to this day in Afghanistan and Iraq - might well be a reason.

What is strange about the Western as a genre is that it was dreaming itself into life right from when the American frontier was first opening up, until the West was more or less ‘won’ with the final massacre of Lakota Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The dime novels of the nineteenth century and sensational news reports had already made the likes of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson legends in their own lifetimes. Kit Carson’s observation on what the dime novels said about him pretty much summed the whole thing up – “It may be true, but I ain’t got no recollection of it.”

By the 1890’s ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ was touring internationally, a vaudeville circus show that featured the man himself alongside Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull re-enacting moments in the history of the West.

As ‘the reality’ of the 19th century receded the Western would go on to reflect the age in which it found itself: almost purely entertaining in the ‘30s and ‘40s when ‘singing cowboys’ like Gene Autry and later Roy Rogers rode the range; even more heroic and ennobling in World War Two when the Western began to take epic shape in the hands of such fine directors as John Ford and Howard Hawks; then shadowy and edgier in the 50s during the Cold War as Ford’s own palate darkened in films like The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne played a vengeful and psychologically damaged Civil War veteran twisted up with hatred for Comanche Indians.

Perhaps most remarkable of all in the 1950s were a series of noir Westerns by director Anthony Mann, featuring Jimmy Stuart across eight films as a murderous and damaged figure trying to regain his moral composure and peace of mind. Stuart had once been the Tom Hanks of his age thanks to directors like Frank Capra, and the twisting of his image was almost unbearably bold.

In a renowned essay from 1954 entitled ‘The Westerner’, the film critic Robert Warshow argued that the cowboy “at his best exhibits a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity; this ambiguity arises from the fact that, whatever his justification, he is a killer of men.”

Warshow emphasized how the moral centre of the Western universe was defined by the gun. The significance of this cannot be underestimated in a country where democracy and the “right to bear arms” are somehow conflated, an equation born out of the historical violence - that is ‘Western’ violence, ‘frontier’ violence - that first made America a nation in the nineteenth century and later confirmed its place globally as a superpower.

According to Warshow, the Western “offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be found nowhere else in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence… These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence in our culture but, if anything, have helped free it from moral control…”

Violence as an aesthetic, as a moral form, becomes an entirely necessary cultural act in Warshow’s eyes, something the civilized world needs to process. “Watch a child with his toy guns,” he writes, “and you will see: what interests him most is not (as we much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man looks when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.”

George Stevens, the director of Shane (1953), arguably the greatest Western ever made, was considerably sanguine about this mythology. And yet his film Shane is perhaps the most pure ideal of the Western hero in existence, a fable that connects the gun slinger at his best with the knights of old. The director was nonetheless distressed to return from service in World War Two and see just how popular (and poorly made) Westerns had become: “People were using six guns like guitars.”

On the DVD to Shane the director’s son, George Stevens Jnr consults his father’s note books and interviews to reveal how “the film was really about deglamorizing the six-shooter that was becoming a graceful object in the fictional hands of illustrators [comics and advertising], and in particular film people. And it was a time when kids had gone very Western. There were Western chaps and hats and cap-guns everywhere. We wanted to put the six-gun in its place visually in a period as a dangerous weapon.”

You can roll out the statistics like tumbleweeds, but perhaps it’s enough to recall that up until the late 1950s a quarter of the films Hollywood had ever produced were Westerns. They would keep on rolling into day-time and late night television well into the next two decades, with the likes of John Wayne, Jimmy Stuart, Henry Fonda and Alan Ladd (Shane) sent to wander in some immortal loop in every boy’s mind.

It’s in the nature of television to blur historical epochs, repeating and recycling successful formulas till they drop. A list of television Westerns from the late ‘50s well into the ‘70s feels like an iconography of growing up through one unbroken era: among them The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Rawhide (which established Clint Eastwood as a star), Bonanza, High Chaparral, The Rifleman, The Texas Rangers, Shenandoah, Rin Tin Tin, Zorro, Casey Jones and Little House on the Prairie, as well as a comedy called F Troop and a martial arts Western known as Kung Fu. Even Star Trek fell under this dominating ethos, with creator Gene Rodenberry pitching it to the networks as “Wagon Train to the stars”.

1959 remains the high water mark for Westerns with twenty-six of them running in peak time on TV, eight of them ranking in the top ten most watched programs in America. Initially driven by the Cold War and an American need for moral comfort and heroic certainties, the cap gun age inculcated most of the young teenagers who would go on to fight in Vietnam into the values of sacrifice and bravery on the frontier, and what can be described as an archetypal style of violence.

To some extent television also tried to turn back the clock and deny the darkness of the cinema Western as the genre entered the 1960s. The ‘spaghetti Westerns’ of Sergio Leone, and a little later Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), exploded with violence and sardonically annihilated the lines between bad and good. Things on television were inevitably more defined and restrained, a kind of soporific propaganda. By the time news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam was being put before the public in 1969, it was nonetheless difficult to view the mass slaughter of Indians as homogenous heroic entertainment anymore - or to accept a white hats and black hats view of the world.

Artists are not mere vehicles of sociology, however, and it’s easy to cite numerous films that contradict such neat historical positions. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, for example, has been variously cited as a fable on the madness and horror of Vietnam War and a slow-motion celebration of bloody gun fighting that turned the ‘60s generation on to the thrills of violence. Like much great art it resists being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within the moral terms we might prefer to frame it.

It’s nonetheless possible to argue that the ‘60s counter-culture killed the Western along with sheer over-exposure on television. As people were watching Slim Pickens slowly bleeding to death to the tune if Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ - under what looked like an equally bleeding twilight sky in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) - it felt like a generation was witnessing the end of an era: “Mama take this badge off me, I can’t use it anymore. It’s getting dark, too dark to see.”

The failure of Michael Cimino’s epic Heaven’s Gate (1980), to even make it through to wide release seemed to confirm that the Western was not only aesthetically exhausted – in Hollywood’s darkest terms it was bad for business, almost bringing down an entire studio in the process. Despite something of a renaissance at the turn of the ‘90s with the mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989) on television and both Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) netting Oscars for best films, all these works were eulogies to the genre in one way or another.

There’s something inherently regretful about most Westerns, which leads to the genre articulating its own demise through an ongoing obsession with mortality and time’s inevitable passing. The cowboy’s way of life is lonely and however noble or needed, it has to die. In fact the eulogy is almost the single common note struck by Westerns since the 1950s. As if at the very high point of American power there was something deeply embedded in the culture which sensed how things would ebb away.

This thread of regret often pivoted around a growing awareness that the ‘red skin’ was not simply a ‘savage’ but an abused and brutally displaced human being. It ran through films as varied as Anthony Mann’s Broken Arrow (1956) and John Ford’s last work, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), before reaching melting point in 1970 with the release of A Man Called Horse, Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, the same year Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an elegiac history of ‘the Indian wars’ from a Native American perspective, became a publishing phenomenon.

A sense of indigenous wounds and lost causes was also filtering across into more contemporary American genres like the road movie. What, after all, is Easy Rider (1969) but a cowboy movie where the ‘horses’ are motorbikes. Dennis Hopper knew what he was doing wearing a fringed buckskin coat. The red-neck joke of the era was “Hippies are God’s proof that cowboys still fuck the buffalo”. This new generation was plugging into the spiritual ecology of the American landscape, and the result was they felt like Native Americans themselves.

Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1996) brilliantly twines American illusions about the frontier with these prescient Native American themes. As Johnny Depp heads further and further West by train, he is the very personification of Horace Greeley’s call to “Go West young man and grow up with the country”. This 1860s catch cry was caught up in notions of Manifest Destiny, a hodge podge of philosophies about racial superiority and religious duties to embrace “God’s providence” as set before settlers entering the landscape. That the flow Westward would also be the journey of America’s becoming as a nation, is oddly echoed in Native American ideas of the “vision quest”, where young man would go out into the landscape and receive visions (often drug induced) to confirm their manhood.

In many ways ‘Western’ cinema has been a continuation of this tension between a vision quest and American ideals of manifest destiny. It’s a dream that is played out in the crucial literary references that are made in both 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Principle characters in both films are seduced or fascinated the dime novels of the era as if they were true reports. In Jesse James this leads to obsession and disillusionment as the young Robert Ford sees that the real Jesse James is not the romantic hero he thought he was (and wanted to imitate). In 3:10 Yuma it’s actually the source of renewed idealization as a boy looks at a pencil sketch and realizes that it depicts his father just like the heroes on the covers of all the books he has been reading.

The echoes between the seductions of the dime novels and the seductions of these films today are not hard to miss. As visions of a renewed Western Dreaming they speak to rather conflicting enchantments: sometimes you get to play a hero; sometimes you land the villain’s role. By the end of 3:10 to Yuma, the boy’s father has nobly entered the mythology of the Old West before his son’s eyes. By the end of Jesse James, Robert Ford has killed his ‘hero’ and seen the charismatic world of violence for all its futility, only to be murdered himself: “The light going out of his eyes before he could find the right words.”

- Mark Mordue

Loved at Home: Heath Ledger 1979-2008

Mark Mordue — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:26:31 GMT

You know the old Oscar Wilde saying, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’? The meaning behind it seems to get grimmer and more perverse as we continue to watch train wrecks like Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears careen along in their lives – and into ours. The more voyeuristic our culture gets the less compassionate we become as a society. It takes a death to soften us again, to wake us back up. It takes a death to remind us of the human stuff buried at the core of our entertainment machine.

And yet as soon as I read of Heath Ledger’s death my feelings for his loss went far deeper than usual. The morning here in Sydney was a little overcast when I took in the news, before the clouds broke with sun, covered over again, then broke with light at last in the afternoon. The day seemed to taking on his spirit, as it were, all the while the information kept filtering through online.

Inevitably I started thinking about the deaths of other people ‘just like him’ and how they marked significant days in my life. Moments when a distant event on the cultural map and how you simply feel about someone famous becomes personal and connected: Kurt Cobain and his suicide; Jeff Buckley and his drowning; River Phoenix’s drug overdose; Michael Hutchence’s lonesome, ambiguous farewell in a Double Bay hotel room; the similarly shadowy end of David McComb of The Triffids, whose greatly under-estimated music was recently revived and celebrated in ‘A Secret in the Shape of a Song’ at the Festival of Sydney.

Isn’t that a fine title, ‘A Secret in the Shape of a Song’? Isn’t that what all these people were to us, even if they weren’t musicians – living songs, human poems?

“I have a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said. “And of my secret life I have not revealed a word.” I’ve always taken that to mean there is a mysterious and unknowable core in people that cannot be easily known or given away or summed up. Maybe our families or closest friends or lovers glimpse it. Artists more than most suffer nonetheless from an illusion of familiarity, a fake intimacy, particularly in these highly mediated times. The kind of tick-a-box pop psychology that people swallow whole from self affirmation books these days makes this phenomenon even worse – glib summaries accepted as insights on someone’s soul. It’s the bedrock of the modern celebrity interview and I’m sad to say I’ve been sucked into its maw like many other jobbing journalists.

Ledger was known to hate this stuff. I actually interviewed him once on the phone. It was well over a decade ago, when he was making the move from Perth to Sydney, a hot young talent on the go – or so I was so told back then. I didn’t really give a damn. I resented being forced to talk to some guy who was barely more than a teenager, a kid who had done nothing to warrant a conversation for a magazine story other than be good looking and have some hype behind him. As it turned out he was equally embarrassed about doing the interview so prematurely, even apologetic. Sorry you got pressured into this. Let’s have a drink some time. Yeah sure, sure...

He seemed like a nice guy, like someone straining to be real. That’s what I remember anyway.

You look back over someone’s career at times like these, rake over the coals. It’s hard to miss certain qualities: Ledger’s pained smile and interior gaze, as if you can sense him watching the world and turning it over hesitantly in his mind (a quality the camera loved); his ability to suggest an ironic view of his own good looks (the Errol Flynn raised eyebrow and lithe skip he used in more fun or light weight leading roles for A Knight’s Tale and 10 Things I Hate About You), the shadows of hurt and confusion and repression he summoned up in his greatest films: the gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain and the junkie in Candy.

There was the off-screen stuff too of course. Notably the reticent and sometimes weird or rude behaviour he exhibited with journalists and at public events – peeling an orange obsessively throughout an interview, giggling non-stop while presenting an award – along with a larger feeling that all the attention was like a rock he’d like to crawl out from under. That hunched slouch of his whenever he hit the red carpet. The hurt and anger he felt at not being able to drift around unbothered by paparazzi on the streets of Sydney any more. I’m going back to New York, man, where people will leave me alone. I feel driven out of Sydney…

It’s not clear yet whether Ledger killed himself - or if the more likely conclusion will be ‘death by misadventure’. All that’s known so far is that his relationship with his fiancee Michelle Williams ended last year, that he’d been suffering from pneumonia, taking pills for anxiety, using Ambien tablets to help fall asleep, and talking about his relationship to death and his two year old daughter Matilda in a recent interview: “I feel good about dying now because I feel I’m alive in her. But at the same hand, you don’t want to die because you want to be around for the rest of her life.”

Who really knows what that all adds up to? That he was struggling to keep his head afloat, well yeah, clearly that’s there to be interpreted. That his relationship had ended and it hurt, that he loved his daughter madly, that he worked way too hard on his last roles as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There and The Joker in the new Batman film Dark Knight, that he was sleeping badly… It’s all there I guess, somewhere between the lines.

Skimming through news on the internet there are photos of him everywhere. It seems to increase the loneliness surrounding his departure, the sense of waste amid the prevalence of his curiously tired smile. No one should die when they’re 28, it’s too young. No father should leave a young daughter behind to wonder what he was like. But I don’t have any grand theories to paste over his death. Any instant insight or false intimacies to assume. Like I say, the guy brushed past me once in a nice phone conversation a long time ago. I loved his acting in a few fine films. I found his uneasiness with fame interesting, and, I guess, unnecessarily tormented when I saw him being interviewed on TV. Now I’m just sad he has left this world too soon; that his family and friends are in so much pain. That there was so much good work still left to do. Like Michael Hutchence, who Australians have a particularly sad affection for, Heath Ledger might be surprised to wake from his sleep and discover just how well loved he was at home today – and as he sleeps how we have been awoken to that love.

- Mark Mordue

We Ride Like Birds

Mark Mordue — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:07:56 GMT

We ride like birds our heads are feathers our face is blood our thoughts are weather

we lay in sky we talk like songs our plans in darkness can float like swans

our friends are branches our loves are leaves we pray for moonlight the wind it breathes

we’re black in snowfall we’re death and laughter we scavenge silver have seen here after

our dreams are mothers our tracks are smoke we whisper children we smell their hope

the love of fathers the hunting crows the silent heavens the rain that blows

we know this somewhere we know this flight we sleep in maps and eat the night

we ride like birds we’re death and laughter our heads are feathers our tracks are smoke

- Mark Mordue

Above image 'Crow on a branch' by Maruyama Kyo (1733-1795)

Operator Please ping towards greatness

Mark Mordue — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:27:31 GMT

With 'Just A Song About Ping Pong' the Brisbane, Australia teen band Operator Please might have seemed like a joke band. One song with a catchy title, gimmick done, MySpace career over and out before they even got an adult kiss. I sure made that lazy assumption. Big mistake. Because their latest single 'Get What You Want' confirms they're the real thing - a great young band with a sound reminiscent of The B52's meets Sonic Youth, with more than a splash of Le Tigre jumping away in tigerish guitars, drums and female vocals. Highly recommended for those of you who have been missing their voltage of punk pop pleasure. O to be young again and storm the world without a care or a goddamn. Their long player Yes Yes Vindictive is due out any day. Jump!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmHqsSblXg0

Alive and Ticking

Mark Mordue — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:11:18 GMT

Yeah, I'm alive and ticking. Hope to drop a few more lines here again from time to time. Also have a new blog that may interest some of you.

http://markmordue.blogspot.com/

Walking through ash...

Mark Mordue — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:04:19 GMT

THE ROAD Cormac McCarthy

Sons and fathers are central to Cormac McCarthy’s novels. So much so you could say most of his books are about what means to be a man - and if in becoming a man tenderness can survive? That theme and the power of death loom through his work, great, churning, masculine universes overflowing with Old Testament savagery and a primal mysticism indebted to the blood-drenched history of the American West.

To live in Cormac McCarthy’s world is to certainly know death in all its manifestations: from nature and wolves to man-made acts of evil or necessity, when good men do bad things to survive. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) was high noon for this. A psychotic dream across the page, Sam Peckinpah meets William Faulkner, its writing felt more like lava than language.

The literary critic Harold Bloom acclaimed McCarthy on its release as one of America’s four most important living writers alongside Don DeLillo, Phillip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. But it wasn’t till All the Pretty Horses (1992) he reached the best-seller lists. Devotees turned away, calling it too sentimental. Last year’s No Country For Old Men (2005), a genre thriller set, unusually for him, in the present, was similarly canned as McCarthy-Lite. It too became a best seller and was optioned for film rights by the Coen Brothers.

Given how foreboding McCarthy is, even his supposedly lightweight stuff is tough enough to wind most readers badly. No Country for Old Men, the tale of a drug deal gone wrong, just moved at a faster, leaner clip than his older books, turning McCarthy’s war horse into a hot rod. It nonetheless added to malcontent amongst hard core fans who felt the old man was going soft, crowd pleasing, cleaning up his grim act for the popcorn theatres.

McCarthy’s delivery of The Road barely one year later puts paid to that idea in spades as he unloads the tale of a man and his son stumbling through a post-apocalyptic landscape that might once have been America: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”

Soon after a woman gives birth to a son before she goes blind from radioactive poisoning and walks off to commit suicide. These events and others are glimpsed in truncated flashbacks, startling images that play on the mind. The father, later unable to sleep, lies “awake in the dark with the uncanny taste of peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mind.” Most of The Road is his story. An end-of-the-world misery causes him to reflect “each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.”

We follow father and son as they travel toward the coast, fleeing the onset of winter. They move by foot, pushing a cart, scavenging through empty houses and destroyed cities, eluding gangs reduced to cannibalism and sub-human madness. Everywhere is burnt and grey, marked with ash. “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.”

Neither the man nor the boy is given a name. But the fretful tenderness and constant fear gives animal urgency to their long march. It is soon established what the father must do if they are in danger of being captured. “He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?”

McCarthy cultivates a chill in you with those words, and with it an echo of Abraham’s plight in the Bible when God demanded his son as a sacrifice. In this world, of course, there is no God, but for McCarthy, and his authorial eye holds little joy for where we are headed as a species. Ten pages into this book I was depressed, even troubled by its tone. But there’s a momentum that pulls you on nonetheless, a momentum that might partly be identified as hope.

Structurally McCarthy also maintains the pace by keeping each scene barely more than a paragraph long. This accentuates The Road’s impressionistic power, adding to its rhythm, as if the book were not composed of sections but stanzas in a poem, the metaphysical footsteps of his characters, beat by beat in a terrible dream.

Every time father or son moves more than a few feet away from each other, a panic intrudes as you read. It is the tense chord of the lost child suspended in your heart, the worst thing about to happen, and McCarthy strums it again and again. Few will read The Road without running to their own children and holding them close. Few will read it without a worry for the world they inherit. In this book it’s a fate worse than death. “Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being in you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him towards you. Kiss him. Quickly.”

Amid all this the boy and his father attempt to survive, and more than that hang on to their humanity. Lost and starving, the father promises they will never revert to cannibalism, to what the others are like. “We’re the good guys,” he says repeatedly. Though we’ve already seen the father’s protective ruthlessness in action all the while the boy serves as his conscience, a feeble shaft of light in all the ash and blackness. The father likewise preserves something in the boy and that emerges to be nothing less than love. If you can hold back the tears when that revelation comes you will be made of stern stuff indeed.

Touted as something of a post-September 11 novel by the publisher, The Road actually harks as much to the disturbing imagery of the 1991 Basra road massacre in the First Gulf War and more recent Iraqi traumas. In The Road the father and son pass by refugees slaughtered by some form of explosion, “Figures half mired in the black top, clutching themselves, mouths howling.” Another scene echoes the Buddhist monks who set fire to themselves in protest at the Vietnam War. Another, when McCarthy teeters on the edge of self-parody, seems part Mad Max meets the Civil War. The point is McCarthy has studied the imagery of American violence and put his best efforts to evoking its horrors at home in his spare and disturbing prose.

Looking back to No Country For Old Man you can see how McCarthy’s experiment with a stripped down, script-like approach has taken him on into this prayerful minimalism now, paring his language down and scene construction down to essences in The Road. Something of Samuel Beckett emerges in this. Beneath that are all the old archetypal figures that work on McCarthy’s fiction, the ever-present shadow of Faulkner, the remnant American machismo and alcoholic scents of rage that have marked his novels as kin to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and, a little more laterally if you appreciate the poetry and surreal energy in his language, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson respectively.

McCarthy, now 73, has a seven year old son of his own. It’s possible to read The Road as a love letter to his child, a dark adieu. I’m not sure of the conclusion, its sudden irradiating burst into faith and colour, which comes too quickly and briefly to satisfy. But perhaps that is a truth of its own. “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

Caught in the tide....

Mark Mordue — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:59:11 GMT

On Chesil Beach By Ian McEwan

“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.”

So Ian McEwan begins his latest novel, a short but highly charged work of barely 170 pages. The year is 1962 and the newlyweds are Edward and Florence, names that reek of an old world the ‘60s will soon transform.

When the book opens they are being served dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast of England by two trussed-up local lads who seem as awkward with the occasion as they are. In the distance the waves of Chesil Beach can be heard breaking, a sound of “gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles”.

Initially McEwan’s writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays, and ‘hears’ the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed, but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan’s voice:

“This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”

McEwan’s intent, however, is not drawing room comedy. Ominous descriptive traces like the “hissing against the pebbles” and far rawer feelings are pulsing within a few pages. The internal mechanics of the book quickly reveal themselves as we discover who Edward and Florence are (he an aspiring historian, she a young violinist), diving into their thought patterns and family memories, reliving the romance between them, and returning to the events of the wedding night as seen through each of their eyes.

Virtually everything that happens in On Chesil Beach occurs during this one evening, and the tidal intensity, the back and forth between Edward and Florence, is palpable as it leads us down, finally, to the beach itself and the book’s climactic scene.

McEwan exposes the rationalizations and self deceptions we all succumb too, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another, in situations of great emotional uncertainty. In doing so the book takes us deeper and deeper into two people’s lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see.

As the extent of Florence’s fear of sex becomes clear – “her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh… Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but the price she must pay for it” – we are clued into Edward’s long-standing awareness of her repressive personality. Florence’s genuinely loving affection, along with her passion for playing the violin, has allowed him, however, to deceive himself of what must be “her richly sexual nature” and what he mistakes for simple shyness. Florence, of course, is at pains to make it seem this way. Edward, not entirely insensitive to these tensions and resistances, tries to be understanding, to take their wedding night slowly. By the time she is moaning in disgust at his touch he is interpreting it as the sound of ecstasy.

It’s hard to tell you more than this without giving away the plot to this slender book. Suffice to say the emotions and ideas are profound in what might seem like the narrowest of circumstances. And though the focus remains overwhelmingly intimate – newlyweds in a hotel bedroom, mutual concerns about when will they fuck and how it will it go - McEwan summons up the Cold War atmosphere with textures like the wireless playing downstairs, from where Edward hears the word “Berlin” and to where Florence wishes she could flee, “to pass the time in quiet conversation with the matrons on their floral-patterned sofas while their men leaned seriously into the news, into the gale of history.”

McEwan, of course, has always been a political writer, as demonstrated in works as varied as his film script for The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985), a critique of life in Thatcher’s Britain, or his last brilliant novel, Saturday (2005), an attempt to grapple with the nature of violence and human connectedness in a post September 11 world. His reflections in The Guardian on the events of September 11 still stand out among the best things written at the time. Whether penning an elegy for a deceased author like Saul Bellow or speaking with deep ambivalence about the Iraq War, he remains committed to the engaged notion of a public intellectual rather than ivory tower accomplishments alone.

And yet there’s a provocative, almost mathematical coolness to his writing that undercuts the comforting status of a literary good guy. His debut collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), opened with the tale of a boy telling you, in a bemused tone, how he raped his sister. McEwan’s ability to evoke the psychotic pull of a murderer in The Comfort of Strangers (1981) or a stalker’s obsession in Enduring Love (1997) similarly displayed his taste for evil and violence in ways that appeared irresistible, almost mystical.

This interest in the sexually aberrant, the bizarre and the psychologically unsettling led to McEwan being nicknamed ‘Ian Macabre’ early on in his career. Over time McEwan’s books have become less overtly strange (one of his most acclaimed short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ deals with a man who discovers how to fold his wife up like a piece of paper and make her disappear) and more everyday or common in their intensities. And yet the same neo-Gothic traits of lives lived in secret and looming darkness infects all his works with elements of threat and fear.

When Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam it was criticized as a lightweight work in a darker and more confronting career, little more than a tightly plotted entertainment satirizing the self-interest of the times. Though done with the intention to amuse, the schematic tightness that can sometimes undermine a McEwan novel – the feeling of being introduced to a character via a resume of attributes and background information, the sleek convenience of circumstance and chance in his narrative engines – was so on display it left many readers empty by the time of Amsterdam’s somewhat vaudeville conclusion.

The general feeling was that McEwan had won the Booker for Amsterdam as compensation for missing out the previous year with what is still widely regarded as his masterpiece, Enduring Love (1997). Amsterdam remains a slight, if witheringly humorous work when compared to the larger novels he has written since then like Saturday, where the same schematic attributes are used and then usurped to create momentum and suspense.

This particular attribute of tension and surprise in McEwan’s work should be noted, as anyone who has read the home invasion scene in Saturday, or his justly celebrated portrayal of a ballooning accident in Enduring Love will attest. On Chesil Beach similarly depends upon this to sustain your agonised involvement to the end, to keep you taking part in what might be described as a terrible closeness.

Like Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach has arrived as an extremely short work in the wake of a set of major novels, in this case Saturday and Atonement (2001). In its depth and resonance, however, On Chesil Beach is far more serious than its thinness might suggest, harking back to the compressed nature of his early and most haunting short stories, as well as McEwan’s long running interest in the random and banal ways ordinary lives can be shattered by so-called ordinary troubles. Proof that no life is completely private or shut off from the world: that we can be victims of ourselves and if we’re unlucky, our historical moment too.

Thrown to the floor

Mark Mordue — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:38:25 GMT

Staggering. That’s how it feels when ‘On Your Living Room Floor’ bursts open like some Jurassically slow, proto-punk revenge anthem against the lies of capitalism and rock ‘n’ roll.

When I first heard Melbourne's Ground Components on An Eye For A Brow, A Tooth For A Pick, fellow Australian bands like the legendary Radio Birdman and the strangely under-rated Rocket Science popped into my head as comparisons. Though vocalist Joe McGuigan’s adenoidal yell most closely approximates a more searing and beastial Ween, if that's imaginable.

McGuigan would probably hate that last comparison, and part of it all may just be the Aussie sarcasm that sometimes drips from his phrasing.

It’s been ages since I’ve heard this kind of rage, though what happens across the record is far more sprawling: from the nervy pop edges of female rapper Macromantics in ‘Coming In From All Angles’ to a ten-minute, organ-driven version of Dylan’s ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ that comes on like a defiantly abstract suburban boy's dummy spit at everything that has ever confined him, including so-called reality.

You can imagine Ground Components building one towering moment on top of another then letting the whole thing topple, but something about this live energy limits them in the recording studio too. They’re yet to bust the urgent and visceral textures of their approach truly wide open and go where the likes of Sun Burned Hand of The Man and Akron/Family have taken their urban hillbilly visions. These guys will get wilder. When they do you will know.

The Boys Are Back In Town

Mark Mordue — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:07:29 GMT

We used to play in the park by the highway panic and laugh about the cars, carry our bikes across the railroad tracks, throw rocks half-heartedly to try and break a signal-box window, then run and run and run hands sticky with blackberries.

You smoked cigarettes, I didn’t. You knew more about motorbikes. We both talked about girls. Talked porno at what we didn’t know were pre-recorded messages in the public telephone booth, laughing to ourselves so sensationally.

Yeah we were champions of the secret life, could sit in trees and squirt passing cars with water pistols so nobody knew what the fuck was going on, promised to return to our secret carvings among the branches in ten years of endless time.

Our playground around Broadmeadow was the storm-water drains we loved when they flooded, sluicing our ‘pushys’ down through the fake rush of a tide. ‘Don’t go near them now’ instructions were never listened to man! ‘Styx Creek’: I couldn’t make a name like that up and be serious. Yeah that was where we hung out, grey and furious and free like the sky.

So Tony where did the boy go? How did you bend down into madness like a peaceful sleep that wrapped you better than a blanket from the southerly’s cold?

Man, I sit with you at the club over a beer and we laugh about your passing fits and playing smoke on the water. You say, ‘I tried to baptize myself in those drains when I thought I was Jesus!’ Then you smile, one tooth missing, drastically fat: ‘Been getting myself off the medication - I don’t want to have to live with it.’

Some living man.

Where did the pretty boy that you were go? The one that blonde girls chased through their blue, cool polaroids, listening to ‘Young American’ while we dreamed of being you?

The whole thing snapped. You gave away your watch to her. There was no replacement. Your exercise books were filled with tiny words that you told me you were ‘learning’.

The one that kicks in television sets, runs naked down his street, says his prayers at traffic lights: who is he in the stop-go scratchy dawn?

Hey Tony, there’s still another way… on our bikes, out in the rain, you riding with a broken leg in plaster, Thin Lizzy on the record player way up loud, the shimmer of ‘Still In Love With You’ on your bright red buzzing guitar.… God it seemed to burn from your fingertips when you let it run.

Tony, where did the boy in you go?

Now these crackups of yours that come about once a year to rest your weary soul, it’s like some escape clause, I just know it but it gets harder for you to come back from the white and wordy shuffle of your mind.

Some living…

It has to end.

And sure enough I make a Christmas call to your mum, Raving at me in her Italian rosary of unreason, she tells me: ‘Tony, he is gone to hospital. He is finished now. He won’t be no good no more.”

Click. The dial tone death. The nostalgia for a life I can’t properly remember without you talking too. Here, it’s all through me, what I have of it.

Oh man, where did the boy go? Do you even know it’s summer now again, that twenty years have passed and our branches are bones, that our names are still there like wounds healing? That a dry sheer curtain pale as a ghost just blew over me as I sat slumped beneath the window, its blurring frost burying my face like a bride.

Where the streets have no name...

Mark Mordue — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 01:24:55 GMT

Sometimes it’s right in front of your face. As if out of nowhere, which is probably how it should be. Great rock ‘n’ roll, after all, should seize us head on, claim the center stage and say yes, now, this moment is ours. Because of the Times by Kings of Leon does that in spades.

It opens with the depressingly thrilling ‘Knocked Up’, a seven minute epic that soars on what seems like desert night air and a Springsteen dream of escape that sounds doomed from the start: “I don’t care what nobody says we’re gonna have a baby / Taking off in a Coupe de Ville she’s buckled up on navy / She don’t care what her momma says no she’s gonna have my baby / I’m taking all I have to take because taken gonna shape me.”

Guitarist and vocalist Caleb Followill is one of the best lyricists operating in rock ‘n’ roll, though nobody seems to say so, bringing a touch of Picasso (and Dylan) to his cubist takes on sex and sin and sorrow and sex again. Take another look at the above passage and his slightly dislocated spin on a stock-standard tale of fleeing town with a pregnant girl. Then catch a hold of its killer reprise, “I’m a ghost and I don’t think I quite know where we’re gonna go.”

Together with brothers’ Nathan Followill’s tersely propelled drums and Jared Followill’s heart-beat bass line, his cousin Matthew Followill caps off ‘Knocked Up’ with a spacey lead guitar that would do U2’s The Edge proud. Not forgetting Caleb’s own voice, a whisky sweet, slurring thing that oozes wounded Southern machismo and what comes off like futility here and joyous yearning elsewhere.

The impact is a cinematic blow to the mind. You’re in that car, you’re with that girl, you’re talking like a big man but you’re a kid who is scared as hell.

Kings of Leon have plenty more up their sleeve. Once touted as “a Southern Strokes”, the band has taken their spindly garage rock and bluesy Rolling Stones romanticism into major widescreen. U2 and Bruce Springsteen are the obvious ‘new’ references along with a huge production sheen, but instead of getting lost in bombast everything about Kings of Leon just sounds deeper and better, more ambitious and immediate, even urgent.

Their first single ‘On Call’ signals that with an icy studio air. It’s good, but probably the most over refined track on the record, somehow distant. ‘Charmer’ sounds like The Pixies doing primal scream therapy for sex addiction. ‘McFearless’ balances Sex Pistols and U2 guitar sounds with Kings of Leon’s inherent American energies, an ode to the purity of performing amid very carnal pleasures. ‘Fans’ runs to a similar theme with an acoustic strum that Oasis might gladly take advantage of for another ‘Wonderwall’, with Matthew Followill again plying that Edgey sky-scraping sound above and beneath.

Past comparisons between Kings of Leon and Lynrd Skynrd must be some source of pride in terms of the music and the hard living ways of both bands. What’s not much mentioned is the way Lynrd Skynrd similarly merged their country and blues rock roots with that of British translators and inspirations like Free and The Yardbirds. It’s a subtly trans-Atlantic flavour that Kings of Leon have updated, making them major rock stars in Britain all the while they’ve bubbled under at home in the USA. Or as Caleb Followill puts it in ‘Fans’: “England swings and they sure love the tales I bring.”

You could reduce this down to American guts and British style if you wanted. The fact Kings of Leon are a rock ‘n’ roll band based around Nashville also gives them a lot of comfort when it comes to accepting the artifice of the studio and the necessities of songwriting craft, with just the right amount of abandon. You certainly can’t question their authenticity, from their childhood days on the road helping out at revival meetings with their Pentecostal preacher father, to singing country ‘n’ western to crowds at rodeos as teenagers.

Many will find Caleb Followill’s lyrics the hardest thing to accept, and misogyny charges are already being thrown around. How to put it? He’s a handsome 24 year old rock star with the world at his feet, and the devil of an upbringing behind him (the Followill’s father was eventually defrocked for his carousing). So yeah, all Caleb Followill mostly writes about is sex with groupies and whores, and a damned notion, at best, of a love never grasped. Can honesty and poetry be a defence for who you are? Does it have to be? Those comparisons with Picasso and Dylan earlier were not made lightly. His work justifies itself, and if cars and bad girls is all it takes, then so be it.

Greatness in music is rarely a solo affair. It’s a collaborative effort. And in this regard the Followill family has excelled as Kings of Leon. The way this band of brothers and their guitar-slinging cousin play together is breath-taking, freely borrowing from their influences and stretching out with what they want to do in ways that are utterly convincing. It’s a sound so obvious in its influences and classic rock dynamics that what’s truly amazing is how many others have tried to do the same thing and failed - and how naturally right and commanding Kings of Leon make it feel.

Fan, however, will know that something special from Kings of Leon has been brewing for a long time. If Youth and Young Manhood, their 2004 debut, was four cracking songs that made everything else on that record seem so-so, Aha Shake Heartbreak in 2005 threw down arrangements and textures that showed just how rich and strong this band could be. It also emanated something you rarely see, something Because the Times only confirms: that this band is growing all the time.

‘Arizona’ closes Because of the Times with an epic sound that is similarly spacious to ‘Knocked Up’, only this time everything seems prettier and more relinquished. It appears Caleb has seen a girl who notices him too and that somehow he has gotten into a fight he has lost. The music rises beneath his voice as he croons in that slurry lamenting particularly joyful way of his how “I kind of think I like her”, his face in his own blood on the pavement. Yeah, sure, Kings of Leon sound bigger than ever before and bound for mainstream success. But they can still take you to where the streets have no name. They're still looking for an answer to their song.

Comforting Ghosts

Mark Mordue — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:33:15 GMT

I guess I hear the girl inside the woman on this record. The way Sally Seltmann, alias New Buffalo, is in a state of sweet mourning for who she was and who she loves. Which makes Somewhere, anywhere. a song cycle of sorts about growing up.

Parallels with Beth Orton are obvious (Orton actually sang backing vocals for New Buffalo on her first CD The Last Beautiful Day), as is the jazzy bounce of Feist on ‘It’s Got to Be Jean’ - but there’s more to the Australian performer New Buffalo than that.

Songs like ‘Stay With Us’, about how “you wish you were a man, but you’re walking, softly slowly, with a bun in the oven” seem self-addressed. Someone’s pregnant, someone’s sad. Will they keep the child? It’s the kind of question (implied not stated) that gives the youthfulness in Seltmann’s voice an inevitable ring of hope and loss.

The aforementioned ‘It’s Got to Be Jean’ adds to the child-at-play side of the record, a water-colour of a song enhanced by clarinet and flute. ‘I’m the Drunk and You’re the Star’ is the shadow side, but it avoids bitterness because of Seltmann’s raindrop piano, which puts all the focus on longing rather than hard core truth telling. Cat Power should try this song on for size.

Across the record there are other mentions of what seems like the same boy, far away at the end of a phone line, hurt and depressed, unable to help. Overall this night of the soul should therefore be a downer, but Seltmann makes it feel joyfully resigned, like a late night walk home alone, a may-as-well-skip-as-cry feeling.

Somewhere, anywhere. (the full stop in the title seems to be important) was recorded in her home studio, a shed somewhere off the Great Ocean Road outside Melbourne in Victoria. The dominant instrument apart from Seltmann’s voice is an old piano that has been in her family for over a hundred years. At her touch it gives off a tidal, starry sound across these songs that finally suggests you can be haunted and comforted at once.

Another Brick in the Wall

Mark Mordue — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:19:34 GMT

A 'CONVERSATION' WITH LOU REED ABOUT BERLIN

Some details you should know:

When Berlin first appeared in 1973 it was criticised for its nihilistic subject matter and frequently described as “the most depressing record ever made”.

After the glam rock success of 1972’s Transformer and its hit song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, Reed had hoped to make Berlin his masterpiece.

Critical antagonism along with a mediocre commercial response all but buried the record and derailed his mainstream career.

No wonder. Berlin told the love story of two drug addicts in Berlin, using the theme of a city then divided by the Wall to explore themes of addiction, domestic violence, suicide and the destruction of family (‘They’re taking her children away”).

Reed played the dark chanteuse - almost talking us through his vignettes at times – in a recording that seemed as close to Cabaret as rock ‘n’ roll. Berlin has since grown in stature to the point where it is now regarded as one of his finest recordings.

It was originally produced by Bob Ezrin, then the whiz kid behind Alice Cooper’s School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies and much later Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Reed’s new stage production of Berlin (at St Anne's Warehouse in New York last December and the State Theatre for the Sydney Festival in January) brought Ezrin back to the fold as a music director, along with Hal Willner, best known for the Leonard Cohen tribute Came So Far For Beauty. It also utilised the talents of Julian Schnabel, the film director behind Basquiat and a famous painter in his own right, who worked on stage design and overall direction; and Jennifer Tipton, renowned for her lighting work with the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group.

The results were triumphant, emotional, and even uplifting.

Talking to Lou Reed before the event, however, was like trying to communicate with a doorstop. The kind of thing you inevitably stub your toe on.

Reed is, of course, notoriously difficult: testy, abrupt, contemptuous of journalists and prone, at best, to dead weight answers that refuse anything akin to conversation.

Management demand to see all likely questions before the interview, ‘control’ is the dominant theme once we are actually talking.

It was all the more pleasurable to be warned by Reed’s personal assistant just prior to our phone chat that it would be wise to avoid questions about the past. A little difficult, I tried to explain, when we’re supposed to discussing a show based on a 33-year-old recording.

The PA sighed as if to tell me ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you’. As for Reed, he would convey a lot by his tone of voice too. Just before we began there was some noise in the background, then the PA announced in a rising cry usually reserved for freak waves about to hit a boat, “Here heeeee comes!”

I wanted to ask the obvious question - why return to Berlin now?

'You know, it’s the one question I get asked. Susan Feldman, who runs St Ann’s Warehouse [an arts space in New York] - John Cale and I did Songs for Drella there - always wanted me to do this. I just said, “Yes. Why not? It might be fun.”'

When Berlin came out it in 1973 it got a lot of antagonism for being ‘the saddest record ever made’, for being an ugly record, so I wondered if you if you wanted-

'You mean from critics? Why would I pay attention to that?'

Returning to Berlin now, I thought there may have been a desire, somehow, to be more emphatic about the beautiful side of it in terms of the music and-

'Well it’s [the beauty] always been there. I can’t control what critics say. And I have no interest in it either.'

What about the team around Berlin this time? The influence of people like Julian Schnabel (direction and stage design) and Jennifer Tipton (lighting)? Is there anything-

'Bob Ezrin, the original producer [of the record Berlin], is arranging, and Steve Hunter, the original guitar player is playing. Steve Bernstein has put together the band. I just worked with Steve on a tour where we all did Leonard Cohen songs in Dublin – that was interesting, by the way. And Hal Willner, who I’ve worked with forever - he did The Raven and Ecstasy with me - he’s involved as a music director, him and Ezrin and Steve [Bernstein]. Julian [Schnabel] is doing the sets and directing, and his daughter is doing visuals…'

I’m just interested if you can see any shift in the flavour of what you’re doing because of that team now compared to the original team on the record?

'It’s a similar team. Bob produced and arranged it, Steve [Hunter] played on it.'

How about something like the way Andy Warhol suggested you follow Albert Speers way of lighting Hitler-

'What, what, what, what, what?'

I read when you first toured in the wake of Berlin, Warhol advised you to use Albert Speers lighting techniques – the way Speers lit Hitler – extreme black and white contrasts, extreme spotlighting on you, etcetera. I wondered whether that might have affect what Jennifer Tipton might do?

'Err, wow! That’s an amazing statement. Who knows if that’s true? But it’s certainly not being told to Jennifer Tipton. She’s really accomplished person with the Wooster Group.'

Okay, so you never heard that comment before about the Speers lighting?

'Well I may have, but I certainly haven’t remembered it. You don’t find it funny that you’re asking me, thirty years after the fact - just because you read it somewhere - whether I remember if Andy Warhol said that I should use the same lighting as Albert Speers did? You don’t find that strange?'

No. I don’t find it unusual you don’t remember.

'You do. And that’s what you came up with to ask me about. That’s very funny.'

It’s good to keep you amused. But I was more interested in what Jennifer Tipton and Julian Schnabel might be doing now, beyond the fact they’re simply doing it.

'Well, you’d have to ask them.'

So you’re basically not taking an interest in the staging and lighting?

(Pause) 'I pick people that I really love. Like on the records I make, I pick musicians that I like, and I don’t try to change them. I don’t get someone to do something they can’t do - it’s that I like what they do in the first place. I went over a bunch of the sets with Julian, and they’re pretty amazing – actually, it’s staggering.'

Are you able to describe it at all or-

'No. But we’re going to film it.'

What about your musical team? I know you said it was pretty much the same-

'We’re following the original arrangements. I loved them then, and I love them now. I thought Bob [Ezrin] did an amazing job.'

Why does thematic story-telling interest you so much? Obviously you’ve had Songs for Drella and more recently The Raven and-

'I’m interested in writing. Writing married to rock. I’m pretty simple. No big mystery in me. Truly.'

I ask because-

'I mean it’s like saying “Gee, A Streetcar Named Desire is a very depressing play” or “Wow! Hamlet is a depressing play.” Yeah?... You know, [rock ‘n’ roll] recordings are thought of at such a low level. Like “Wow! What’s that doing on a record?” It’s really odd.'

You referred to Hamlet in relation to Berlin when it first came out, and you just mentioned it again then. Why does that link attract you so much? You also used the phrase ‘Hamlet of electricity’ back in 1973 as something you wanted to aspire to.

'I just mentioned it because people think Berlin is depressing just as Hamlet is depressing. I’ll ask you, is Hamlet depressing?'

No, Hamlet is probably my favourite Shakespeare play.

'But everybody dies at the end. What do you think?'

Well one of the things that always interested me about Hamlet was the question of whether he’s neutered and procrastinating, or if he’s driving everything [towards tragedy]. I tend to think he’s driving everything.

'My teacher [the famed American poet and short story writer] Delmore Schwartz said, “One way to think about Hamlet is that he’s drunk.”'

That’s interesting-

'He was joking.'

Well I make a bridge back to Berlin because of the self-destructive themes that have characterised your music. Why that interests you so much, and what you were trying to explore in Berlin - then and now?

'First of all, I don’t think what you said is true. You’re just picking isolated things, for whatever reason. It’s a real potpourri that I do. Song for song, note for note, idea for idea, attitude for attitude, I like to think I have a broader palette than what you said.'

I don’t think I was saying it was the only thing you do, but it’s definitely a theme – sadism, annihilation, loss. Archetypal stuff really – but, focusing on Berlin-

'What about love?'

Love too, yeah. Love is very strong in your work.

'Love, friendship, survival, transcendence, spirituality – what about all of that?'

Yeah true. But what about in terms of the things you were trying to develop with Berlin in particular? Like this talk of wanting to bring Hamlet to music-

'It’s called ‘writing’. And the object is to make a reality with lyrics and music that someone can respond to and relate to. I wanted to tell a story. And I put it in Berlin because it was a divided city and I thought it was a great metaphor.'

That’s interesting because obviously you’ve been associated with New-

'I hadn’t been to Berlin [back then], you know.'

It definitely seems like a state of mind on the record.

'Yeah, well, ‘the Wall’. Of course the Wall is not there now.'

I thought the whole divided city theme wasn’t just a way of looking at a relationship - but clearly, because you’re the writer, it was also a matter of looking at yourself.

'I don’t know. Writing is writing. I never understood it, so if you do, you’re ahead of me.'

Listening to Berlin, I felt you were exploring issues to do-

'With everybody.'

With everybody, yes, and you can’t avoid yourself in these things, I mean-

'Everybody and everything is writing.'

Okay Mr Reed, thank you.

'You’re welcome.'

Born For Porn : The Anna Nicole Smith Story

Mark Mordue — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:22:45 GMT

BORN FOR PORN

The tawdry death of Anna Nicole Smith at age 39, from a reputed drug overdose in a South Florida hotel room right above a casino, is perhaps the last word in modern celebrity. To be honest Smith seemed older to me than that, a mutton-dressed-as-lamb, plastic surgery nightmare blaring back at any sign of graceful aging, let alone graceful living.

I wish I could fully explain why her death makes me feel so horribly sad now. I never cared about her before - and it is unlikely I will care much about her tomorrow. And yet of course the sadness is there and surprisingly universal.

It’s hard to pin point where a train wreck like hers even begins. The suspicious death of Smith’s 20-year-old son Daniel from a drug overdose in his mother’s hospital room in the Bahamas, a few days after she gave birth to Dannielynn Hope (her now five month old baby daughter whose paternity is being contested by no less than three different men), is perhaps a good enough place to serve some public notice here.

And yes, it did put Smith back in the headlines where she had spent so much of her time already - and has now completely expired.

The history of a topless dancer, Playboy playmate, reality TV star and renowned gold digger – you’ll recall she married an aging oil tycoon who died soon after, and that Smith was still contesting her rights to his fortune at the time her own death (rights that could make Dannielynn and whoever her father is multimillionaires many times over) – is a case study in how to grab attention on any terms.

That Smith also catered to our insatiable need for fat people who lose extreme amounts of weight, then stack it back on again, just made her the ultimate trash celebrity of our time. She really had it all, including large breasts. As she put it at the 2004 American Music Awards “Like my body?” Most of the time truth is she probably didn’t and we enjoyed that too. She was, like her heroine Marilyn Monroe, a tortured American blonde.

Her Pamela Anderson meets Courtney Love appeals have therefore sustained the greasy pages of magazine racks at endless supermarket checkout lines for years. We all know her. We all laughed at her. She’s one of the many Celebrity Grotesques that now enrapture the public imagination, from Paris Hilton and her porn video and herpes prescriptions to Britney Spears’ threesomes and drinking problems and how it affects her ability to put on underwear as well be a mother and make hit records.

Love herself is meanwhile on the come-back trail with a second solo album due out soon called How Dirty Girls Get Clean. Paving the rehab regenerated way is a book, Dirty Blonde, a diary of course. It features email exchanges with Lindsay Lohan on how to handle negative publicity. Love refers to the Vanity Fair article that caused her and partner Kurt Cobain to have their daughter Frances Bean briefly taken from them after their drug habits became a little too clear. “I realise now,” Love tells Lohan, “that as hardcore as it was, it made me a lot more interesting and somehow employable.”

In a similar vein to Cobain and Love, there is Britain’s Pete Doherty and Kate Moss - the UK thinking person’s version of ‘Becks and Posh’, or Peter Andre and Jordan (a couple who actually seem rather happy) - for those who like their gossip with a bit of ‘street cred’ and rock ‘n’ roll and some remote inkling of intelligence.

Thus far supermodel Kate Moss has been lucky with her own drug story. She was barely out of police clutches and away from tabloid snaps of her cocaine binging before I could see her in skin-tight black leathers, riding a motorbike into advertising spreads in every glossy magazine I picked up, as well as pole dancing in a video for the White Stripes’ ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’.

Yes, ‘Cocaine Kate’, as the UK Daily Mirror dubbed her, was back - bigger and badder than ever – and all I wanted to do was snort up every detail.

Seeing the latest images of Moss’ on-again off-again lover, musician Pete Doherty, shooting up in a backpacker’s hotel room in Thailand was less appealing. I felt the inexpressibly heavy availability of pornography in everything about the scene he was in: from Doherty’s strangely twisted posture, his head kinked into a pale shoulder as he talks to Moss on a borrowed cell phone, hands and eyes totally focused on the needle he is using; to the grainy texture of the cell phone video; to the act of me looking at it and its wide spread visibility across the media and internet.

It made me think there is no privacy in failing anymore - if such a thing might exist. Certainly not for celebrities - if ever there was. The opportunities for surveillance are just too rich these days, too varied, as everyone from Australian cricketer Shane Warne to more refined presences like Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman will tell you.

And so it’s another hotel room, another good time for a ‘star’ on the slide with temporary friends, made available for a price to us all. At least Doherty had the wit – I hope - to tell The Sun a while back that the real reason for one of his breakups with Moss was “I can’t buy her diamonds and my dick is too small.”

Amid this welter of too-much-information it is hard to remember a concept of fame that once involved discretion, restraint, aloofness. These days we want it all and get it all, from camera angles up starlet’s skirts seeking out their cellulite, to an endless array of third class ‘celebrities’ in reality TV shows who have parlayed their way into seasonal fame only to slide out the back door a few years later – to take the recent UK Big Brother example - mouthing racist slurs and then dribbling to be forgiven, to let them back in that door, oh please, please, please.

Achievements of a substantial kind are generally not needed or even desirable in this world. Wear a scandalous dress, bend over for the camera, sleep with someone, behave like a yob, get on TV, blow whatever talent you may have on drink and drugs and weight reducing pills, wait for the paparazzi to hound you into your grave. Hey presto, you’ve made it in the mainstream.

It’s becoming increasingly hard to understand the appeals of such low grade celebrity, beyond a ghoulish interest in human misery and idiocy - and increasingly hard to accept it. If I don’t want to jack off, vomit or laugh in the ugliest fashion at them, it’s quite reasonable to say these people are of no use to me and most of ‘their fans’ at all.

Of course there are plenty of people who love these soap-by-numbers, real-life horror stories for more overtly caring reasons than I can discern. Who seem to feel some obscure connection to their celebrities’ moneyed and deluded troubles. Perhaps it’s just the reassuring blast of mutual loneliness and inability to cope that makes the common man or woman feel they are not so alone and miserable themselves. This kind of mutual victim sympathy nonetheless strikes me as similarly self interested and self pleasing and, I suspect, creepily isolating for everyone involved.

As I’ve hinted at already, I would argue the appeal of modern celebrity is almost entirely pornographic these days - in the true sense of that term, which is derived from Greek word pornographos: a construct that basically equals ‘prostitute’ + ‘write’. So if these fucked-up stars are whores for our attention and pleasure (whether they care to admit it or not) then lets be completely honest and admit our position as ‘johns’ or clients in the bargain. And let the media, most particularly the ‘celeb watchers’ and definitely the paparazzi, admit they’re pimping and running the brothel.

So yeah, I take a look at what appears to be the red velvet cast over Anna Nicole Smith’s body as she is being carried on a stretcher from her Florida motel. Then I read a quote from her former publicist David Granoff, on MSNBC. How he was “shocked but not surprised” by her death. But it’s his next quote that is devastating to me. He says there was “just no spark in her anymore”.

It’s then I picture the horrible vacancy of her smile as I read those words. It’s then I think suddenly of Pete Doherty and how he was depicted shooting up in that backpacker’s hotel room. That I recall an image of Posh Spice looking torturously groomed and tight faced like a gasping fish on the cover of a magazine. Remember shots of Britney Spears, all overweight and cheap and trashed, spilling out of a nightclub like there’s no tomorrow. That I have a vision of Paris Hilton with her sunglasses on, pouting like she is ready for an act of fellatio…Of course, when this is all over, I feel very depressed afterwards.

Then I read yet more breaking news, how efforts to revive Anna Nicole Smith were filmed and sold by a paparazzi agency to a media outlet for US$500,000. She died as she lived, and that’s the tragedy. Or as Chris Spinder, a producer for the Fox News Channel who viewed the final footage said, “You cannot see her face, you cannot see hair flowing out from underneath the [oxygen] mask... if someone didn’t tell me this was Anna Nicole Smith, I totally would not have known it. You can’t even tell it’s a woman.”

Mark Mordue

Transistor

Mark Mordue — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:52:04 GMT

I think I am about 14, but maybe I’m 15, and it’s after midnight so I know the local ABC radio station has switched to transmitting the then very alternative Double Jay from Sydney. The transistor I have is small and bound in a stiff brown leather case. It used to belong to my grandfather, who died of cancer when I was 9, and sometimes when I hold it and put my ear to it I sense very vaguely that I am holding a part of him to me and that this makes me feel less lonely though I’m too young or unsophisticated to know I am lonely or just so used to a certain kind of aloneness the idea of an absence in my life isn’t outlined yet.

So I lie there in my bed listening to the radio covertly, pressed between my ear and the pillow. I don’t want my grandmother to know I am awake; I don’t want my grandmother to know I am listening to music.

I track all kinds of things at these late hours and have ever since my grandfather’s death and the gift of his radio. At first it would be the cricket, test matches in England with names like Snow and Lever, Cowdery and Walters, Marsh and Mallett and Lillee. Then I found a broken hearts and lost spirits channel where a hip priest dispensed advice and listened to stories and arguments and regrets about God and violent husbands and grog and getting pregnant young and all manner of death and weakness and unfairness and the odd happy story too, of course, the child who got better, the man who sobered up.

So there I was, a boy in his bed in Newcastle, astral travelling via radio waves. Leaning into the world as surely as you would place your ear to a shell and hear the sea.

One night I actually managed to use the S-W channel to drop in on a couple calling friends from their yacht. I felt like a spy, like they might catch me if they heard me breath. I could make out the beating rhythm of water against the hull, the sound of their voices inside a cabin, the echoing space of the boat, its pings and sighs, and what sounded to me like the night itself, black and wet, while these people laughed and talked about stupid things that finally bored me.

It made me think about this idea I had that no voice is ever lost or gone. That they all just gather up into the wind and keep on blowing forever. So maybe one day there will be a device that can unthread the voices from the wind and then we can hear Napoleon and Captain Cook and whoever else we might like, clear as a bell.

My parents have left me here in Newcastle to think and listen like this. Because I was doing well at school and it was better for me to stay behind. Where they went, the school was no great shakes. Kids dropped out in their third year or even sooner, got like ‘Z’ grades, and teachers came and went in a matter of months. They took my sisters with them, though - not because my father didn’t think they deserved an education like me, but mostly because he didn’t think their education mattered quite so much and anyway they didn’t have the interest like I did.

Where they went – where they went - was a mining town in the Northern Territory, bauxite, red as rust on the ground. I always knew it as ‘up there’. The plan was for them to make some money and return a year or two later. I’d visit them for Christmas holidays. Keep doing well at school; maybe become the first in my extended family to get to university. The time would pass quickly.

But one or two years turned to three, then four and this feeling of being adrift from my family became a way of life.

I was living in my grandmother’s house, keeping her company after the death of my grandfather. Watching Bill Collins’ At the Movies, then Creature Feature when she went to bed, living on Coco Pops for breakfast and devon and tomato sauce sandwiches for dinner and the world’s most horridly boiled vegetables for tea. I used to throw the vegetables over the fence into various neighbours’ yards. They’d report strange findings: carrots, potatoes, brussel sprouts, pumpkin pieces, like meteorite particles mysteriously crashed to earth. The clouds had vomited again.

My grandmother liked me better as a boy than a young man and as I started to get interested in music it signalled a change in me she could not control. The cup of tea I still made for her, the apple I peeled, it wasn’t the same, and I was resentful, distant, a surly servant. More interested in my world and the way it had to be protected - as if there was something in me, a thing that could be hurt or put out by her.

So I think I’m 14, but maybe I’m 15 and I’ve found this radio station called ‘Double Jay’ that comes onto the ABC bandwidth after midnight and it plays all kinds of music I haven’t heard before and sometimes the DJs swear or make jokes about drugs and I have friends who begin to listen to it as well and so we interpret this world and the bubbling moments when it sounds like the DJ is having a bong and the stories we’ve heard that the female DJ does her show naked.

And this night is the night I hear Patti Smith singing ‘Piss Factory’, snarling poetry about how she’s sixteen and it’s “time to pay off”, how she’s gotta get out of this place, this factory, how she’s “got something to hide here called desire”, and it seems like the whole song is an urgent spiral with the piano galloping along beneath her and the words get more intense and everything about it is like some beautiful emergency, some perfectly melodious siren going off inside of me.

I don’t know this is about Smith’s first time reading Rimbaud and how he inspired her to leave a factory job and go to New York. But her song affects me the same way as Rimbaud must have hit into her - and I start to realize there are other places and that I can go to them as well. But I’m just too young and even though I know these places are physical they still feel like a dream to me. I don’t know what the city is, not really. I’m just a kid. But it’s a voice and a seed and a light all at once and it is calling me.

Maybe this is what the capital does to the provincial; what Sydney, in this case, does to me in Newcastle. Call us and corrupt us by letting us know another world exists, even if what we receive of that world is skewed and re-imagined through who we already are. So when I think about being a boy from Newcastle I see deep down that I made Sydney up, that I invented it through songs I was receiving on the radio – songs like Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ and The Jam’s ‘That’s Entertainment’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ - and not that much later a more specific underground Sydney music scene that featured the thunder and moan of the Laughing Clowns rock ‘n’ roll jazz, the jagged ecstatic lyrical panic and pin-splatter of Tactics, the amniotic and cluttered soundtrack strangeness of The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast, and the simple bursting desire to fuck and to love and still feel alone and strong that possessed The Sunnyboys and of course me along with them.

In Newcastle, I invented Sydney.

And to me it was a city of enlarged identity, artistic, experimental, dangerous with poetry and drugs and different clothes, like some wild masked ball where people started to act out the way they were and become all the freer for it.

I remember finishing uni and overloading a van with every piece of junk I owned and setting out for Sydney. Crossing the Harbour Bridge on a perfect sunny day, the water below blue as sky, the Opera House shell white. Light ribboning between the pylons and cables as I rode high in the driver’s seat of the hired van, promising myself that I would be someone and make a mark on the city. That it would know me. I was 21 year’s old.

Of course that’s very Saturday Night Fever meets Holden Caulfield, with a slightly power-mad dash of Alexander the Great thrown in for good measure. But it doesn’t embarrass me to admit such feelings. Because I can still feel the sincere hope, the becoming force, the way the Cahill Expressway gulped me down into one last arresting moment as I let its momentum take me into the city. Zoom.

Now I’m trying to go back home. And only songs can help me truly get there.

My family still lives in Newcastle, which means it’s the place I don’t go return to as much as I really should. When I do it’s usually by train, against the inevitable resisting tides of track work, along the silvery solitariness of the Hawkesbury and its oyster beds, then through the scrubby outer suburbs till my stop at Broadmeadow – now the Newcastle Knights’ official home station, I’m honestly proud to say.

It makes me think of how Newcastle can get at me now physically. Like the year, 1997, when the Newcastle Knights won their first Rugby League grand final, the underdogs triumphing over the silvertails, Manly. I read the Daily Tele’ before the match, how everyone lined the road for 30 kms all the way out to Swansea as the Knights’ team drove their bus south to do battle in the big smoke. They’d asked the team captain, Paul Harragon, if he felt pressured by that and he seemed stunned. “Oh no, it’s like they’re carrying us on their shoulders.” I almost cried when I read the words and in a flick it was this deep down stuff that reminded me of who I was, who I belonged to.

A different but similar belonging hit me in New York one year later when I saw Silverchair playing at the Bowery Ballroom to a full house. They weren’t just Australian like me, they were from my hometown and what was strange and true was that I could hear all this steel and surf in their sound, a kind of ‘bigness’ that made me think of looking across the Hunter River at dusk to see the BHP factory works all flamey and orange lit and heavy with distant industrial thunder, me like some grungy Jay Gatsby looking for my own version of ‘the green light’; or the way the ships waited in heavy, faraway lines while bad weather sent violent waves cresting over the breakwater at Nobby’s, blocking their entry to the harbour.

I was in New York, I was listening to a rock ‘n’ roll band from my hometown, and that’s what I was hearing in my heart.

It’s funny to think I so often felt strangled and stymied by Newcastle because now much of what I remember and recall has to do with space, light – often bereft – but free in its own peculiar way.

Music digs this space out of me.

Hearing Van Morrison’s ‘Got To Go Back’ and remembering the gravely lanes of New Lambton where I sat with my childhood gang, our backs against the paling fences, our talk loaded, always, with secrets. Listening to Thin Lizzy’s ‘Still In Love With You’ and remembering how beautifully one of my best friends, a young Italian guy, Tony Vallon, could play along to it in his parents’ shed, his practice amp buzzing like sweet blotting paper – how fluid and magical he was in every way till he started to fall to pieces and was diagnosed a schizophrenic by the time the rest of us were finishing uni and leaving town. I remember going with him to see Thin Lizzy at the newly opened International Sports Centre, thousands of rock ‘n’ roll youth from all over the Valley gathered, a gang of fortunately happy bikies right behind us skulling goons, the way Thin Lizzy came on and all of Newcastle took its thongs off its feet and hurled them in the air till it was raining thongs and the band realized we weren’t assaulting them, we were just letting them know their rock ‘n’ roll had us by the feet and we loved them so very much.

I remember the Star Hotel riot and deciding not to go that night because I thought it would be too crowded, the way the girls danced on the bar there and how good a version of ‘New York Shuffle’ a local band called Meccalisa did before they went punk and changed their name to DV8. I remember going punk too and wearing a suit jacket that I bought from the Salvation Army and how this was proof I was PUNK even though I had a beard that was half Beatnik, half mistake. Living in a share-house with an aspiring actor and a poet and two dogs and a lounge-room we’d decorated surreally, or so we thought, with hundreds of matchboxes blu-tacked all over the walls and ceilings to freak anyone out who had bongs with us while we nodded our heads to Public Image Limited’s ‘Poptones’.

Some days in Sydney I will see old faces. John, the feted one, dark and long haired and bare foot, the genius of the university, coming out the other side of his failures to be a success all over again; Jenny, now softer than I recall and yet still storming away, the pin-up radical girl of the era back then, an ardent Communist who I argued with once, very stupidly, about Catholicism and politics (the latter of which I knew next to nothing, the former of which I knew too well); Steve, the smoke-eyed clown, a star of absurdity, with his own ironic surf music band and a great, crazy terrace in Bull Street, Cooks Hill and a way with the women that always astounded those around him. I saw Steve yesterday morning on a film-clip for this punky-pop version of ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ and the really funny thing about it, I thought, was yes, she usually was. You really gotta watch those funny guys.

Anyway, just thinking about them all I know I’m struggling to make the connections meet. But I’m proud to know these people and I think it’s striking we all do know each other in some way, however remote or coincidental the encounters – because Newcastle is/was a small-enough big-enough place to make us close and yet let us imagine other selves that have since gone out from the province into the lifeblood of the capital. For all the changes I never feel Newcastle people are strangers, more that they are allies - and even those that are really strangers are somehow familiars deep inside.

I think this goes down into something about Newcastle as a working town, and with that working town mentality a sense that you should never get too big for your boots. The flipside of that are the close-minded, small-minded inhibitions that step on anyone who is odd or artistic – one reason why we all had to escape. Though I also fancy the big spaces of Newcastle drove us to fill out something in ourselves we could never have done in Sydney. We really are a part of some secret society – ‘Novocastrians’ – and I get a kick out of that and even feel sorry for people born in Sydney, as if they were somehow born without dreams and songs to take them somewhere else and then to send them back home.

Story first published in the Australian literary magazine, HEAT. http://www.giramondopublishing.com/heat/index.html