Bob Mould: Addendum

Still haven't picked up Bob's record. And he's playing in my manor next week too - sold out, happily, though I rather wish I could be there - but then that in itself isn't 'true fan' talk anyway, is it?
Scouting around today I read this Spin magazine interview snippet from last year:
SPIN: Both you and Grant Hart were gay, but no one ever spoke about that while Hüsker Dü were active. Looking back, do you wish you had been more open? Would that have even been possible?
MOULD: We never talked about it that much. As an artist, writing at the time gender-neutral songs, I wanted everyone to be included, and had the band been labeled as 'gay music', no one would have listened. Fast-forward a few years to 1994: Spin sends Dennis Cooper to spend two days with me in Austin, saying that if I didn't come out, they were going to out me. So I capitulated, and now everything's good, but I came from a very small town and they had to deal with that. One of my friends from high school who was also gay went away and then got killed when he came back. At this point in my life, I feel assured and centered and whole, but to get here? Jesus.
It was only a few years after Husker Du split that I figured out Bob was homosexual, and this in the pre-internet days (c. 1989-90?) when news travelled a little slower, after someone or other in the music press remarked (perhaps indiscreetly) that 'they'd never heard a gay man make music like that.' (Hardcore rock 'n' roll music, to be precise.) But Mould's comments are illuminating, and prove how much dogged thought has to go into all of this when an artist wants a real career - 'gender neutral' songs, indeed. Listening to Warehouse: Songs and Stories back in 1987 I absolutely felt like he was writing and singing about me and how I felt about the Girl down the street, or up on Heaven Hill or wherever. But then that's artistry for you.

Angela Carter, the Wicked Queen, Sadean Women etc

The latest 'classic' from the Disney canon that my daughter has discovered and seized upon is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, so I’ve watched it about a zillion times over the last seven days. Still, unlike Cinderella, this one is more or less a pleasure: clearly, all things considered, a great movie, hugely innovative for its time, with intricately shaded passages that still startle – all of these the ‘scary ones’ concerning the Wicked Queen, of course, rather than the eponymous heroine and the titular 'little men'.

The boldness of the picture is all there in how it opens, with the black castle, the Queen and the superbly animated Magic Mirror. The Queen’s later transformation into the Old Hag is still a tour de force in a subsequently crowded field. The picture takes obvious and age-old mythopoeic elements and makes them newly beautiful and forceful, just as did Cocteau (albeit more archly and richly) in his rightly adored Belle et la Bete and Orphee.
The Queen was but the first of Disney’s appalling stepmothers, and the first villain to suffer the standard Disney villain fate of death by a nasty fall. Watching her haughty/gleeful malovelence this time I was reminded of Anne Sexton’s description in her Snow White poem: ‘Pride pumped in her like poison.’
The other eminent female writer summoned to mind when one thinks about the rich reworking of fairytale is of course Angela Carter, whom I began to read with huge enthusiasm back in the mid-1980s after the release of Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves and the near-simultaneous publication of what seemed to be her most successful novel, Nights at the Circus. Helen Simpson writes interestingly here about The Bloody Chamber, the story collection that inspired the Jordan film and which also includes Carter's warped mirror-image of Snow White, The Snow Child.
I was flicking through some of Carter’s books only a few weeks ago, for the first time in twenty years. She was brilliant, and her best sentences are stinging, sensual images that lodge in the memory, though she could also inflict page after page of overdressed fancy on the reader. Simpson quotes Carter to the effect that she insisted she was only using the ‘latent content’ of ‘traditional stories’, content she believed to be ‘violently sexual.’She was right, though there’s part of me that feels that fairytale or myth played straight is more stark and suggestive and involving than any sophisticated post-Freud/Jung re-imagining. One doesn’t want to spend too much time in the dream world, behind the mirror... But then, it might be different for girls.
A novelist who was taught by Carter at one of her many Creative Writing perches once told me a funny story about how he went on a fell-walking/pot-holing excursion in the company of her and some other students, only to take a bad fall and injure his ankle. He remembers Carter being a useful part of the rescue/relief effort, but also that she spent a certain amount of time gazing thoughtfully at him during his plight. He later understood that she had been recording the details of the accident mentally, in case she needed to draw upon it later for fictional purposes. Ah, the writer, and the chip of ice in his or her heart…

Bob Mould: Life and Times now in stores

As every couple of years in this particular passage of life, the question comes round: should I buy Bob's new one? My story on this score is only much the same as that of a million other hardcore rock adherents. For the adolescent me, Husker Du were unquestionably the most vital contemporary band in Christendom c. 1985-87 (when they threw out about 3 albums a year, some of them doubles, unlike Bob's more stately output these days, at the age of 47...) The Fraught First Solo Period (Workbook, Black Sheets of Rain) was in time for my late-teenage 'transition' moment; then The Sugar Years were more or less contemporary with my College Years; and I was around for the start of the Second Solo Stint, but this was also the point where I stopped going into shops and buying music...
Bob's previous, District Line, I was given as a gift, and I've been playing it today while writing. And looking round the web (as above) there are some stirring glimpses of the new material. So, yeah... I think I'll get myself to a record shop next week and buy me Life and Times. Not Woolworths anymore, sad to say etc, as I did for my last purchase, the mighty Chinese Democracy (see passim). But then Woolies never stocked Bob's stuff anyhow, I'm fairly sure.
I hear Bob is even writing his autobiography now, for the editor Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, NY, a guy I met once in very fraught circumstances and liked a great deal. Maybe I can persuade him to send me a free copy down the line. Le Crunch, bien sur...

Alistair Darling: Do You Really Want To Hurt Him?

I looked at all the headlines today for the first time in about a fortnight, and everybody's pretty well sick of the government. Those who aren't, seem to be grasping for something else to talk about, to waste the jury's time. PoliticsHome offers the 'first poll since the Budget' and it suggests that most people found most of the measures reasonable, but they don't believe anything the Government predicts, and the biggest issue on their minds is the stupefying scale of our debt. Hence, the return of a 20-point Tory poll lead is cantering up to the horizon.
The public don't seem to bear too much of a personal grudge against Darling, though. Perhaps they find him largely pitiable, soon to be out of a job like so many of us. Perhaps they're just relieved it's not Fred Goodwin who's keeper of our nation's purse-strings.
Anatole Kaletsky in the Times has defended Brown once or twice in the last 12 months, a form of seppuku in certain social circles, so I read a piece of his deriding the Budget from top to bottom with great interest. Somewhere near the top, he tossed away the merest notion that Cameron didn't have any better ideas, and one was slightly interested to see that all the comments his piece had attracted were from a gaggle of little Tory-Boy online invigilators crying 'How dare you? Prove it!' etc etc.

Africa Alive nr. Southwold...

... is a pretty good spot for a family day-out. Rhino, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, monkeys. Lemurs. And, of course, the kings of the jungle, less disgruntled than most lions I've seen in safari parks, even on a day when the breeze was a tad brisk. My Darling Wife and I even had a nice cup of tea. The intrepid little girl in the purple coat is of course our Dear Daughter.

Esquire (May 2009) now on stands: includes vampires

I haven't yet been able to prise my copy of this month's Esquire away from my wife, but I'm very much looking forward to it, because I know it contains an essay by my friend Dan Davies about the Hillsborough disaster, at which he was present; and on the basis of previous discussions with him on this very subject I strongly suspect that what he has written, 20 years on from the tragedy, will be extremely powerful and enlightening.

My own contribution to this ish is a review of the newly released Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In, which I thought was generally terrific. But the money sentence in the write-up runs like so:

"At heart we know that the best fairytales are not about under-age wish-fulfilment but, rather, the getting of wisdom: the sorcerer’s apprentice makes a devil’s pact, and there’s a price to pay for a wish to come true."

This sentiment is certainly hinted at in the movie, but finally it comes down on the side of under-age wish fulfilment, and who wouldn't, these days?

Run DMC, right and exact

In the early spring of 1985 I bought RUN DMC's long-playing record King of Rock at my local record emporium, brought it home and listened to it in a state of uncontainable excitement. So much so that I called up a schoolfriend, someone with whom I'd talked casually about 'maybe forming a band', and played the title-cut of the album down the phone to him. He didn't seem to like it too much. Hard to fully appreciate rap music down the phone, to be fair, but then I don't think the chap in question would have come round to that sound if he'd spend ten years poring over the master-tapes in Abbey Road.
That said, it was only 18 months later that their cover of 'Walk This Way' made RUN DMC a household name, but in a way it was a shame that the heavy metal aspect of their particular fusion had to be made so explicit and radio-friendly. And nothing they did thereafter was embraced by the mainstream, which possibly hurt them, though they were hurt by other things too.
Anyhow, I say all of this in contented reminiscence because RUN DMC are now formally installed in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and their eulogist, eloquent as only he can be, was Marshall Mathers.

James Lasdun reviewed in FT by RTK

I am, in footballing parlance, a massive, massive fan of James Lasdun, so it was a deeply satisfying assignment for me to be asked to review his latest collection of short stories, It's Beginning To Hurt, for the Financial Times, who have now run the write-up in today's 'Weekend' edition, online here. On a personal note, this is the first time I've written about Lasdun since I reviewed his previous collection Three Evenings for my college paper back in 1992... He gave a reading in the college bookstore not long thereafter, at which I was really pleased to chat with him, and yet more pleased that he had read and appreciated my 'notice'. He was already a highly-rated writer then, and has become only more so in the intervening years: unquestionably one of the finest in contemporary English fiction.

PMQs by RTK

A friend kindly invited me up to the Gods of the press gallery for yesterday afternoon's Prime Minister's Questions, and so I took the rarefied air of the Mother of Parliaments for the first time in 6 or 7 years. Not much changes, of course. This is England. The halls of the palace still have the feel of those uppercrust-if-slightly-faded European hotels. And the chamber remains an august bear-pit created for boorish 'adversarial' behaviour.

I should stress that I am no Hercules, and no Adonis, no Einstein neither, nor am I anyone's spring chicken; yet it does still seem to me that Commons debates and exchanges are a setting that permits a staggering number of paunchy, purple-faced, intellectually vapid specimens of manhood to hoot and bray scornfully from their seats as if they were ready for a principled punch-up in the street that very moment. When, in fact, it seems obvious that most of them could neither argue or fight their way out of the proverbial soggy paper bag.

It's still a bit surprising to my fragile ears how much noise gets made when people, such as the Prime Minister, are speaking. But this is what MPs have to get hardened to, and you see why women and other people with manners usually need a while to get habituated. I'm reminded though of what Christopher Hitchens habitually said when facing a tough anti-war crowd: if only you could hear how foolish you sound when you boo...

Gordon Brown is a seasoned and robust performer at the despatch box, and his scornful smiles toward the Opposition benches when on top are clearly deeply felt. But he's not nimble on his feet in any respect, and utterly rubbish at a number of the things that Blair carried off in his sleep, notably running away with the Leader of the Opposition's last question of PMQs, so as to rally his own benches. That said, Blair was never down so low in the polls, a fact that is possibly Cameron's strongest debating point. Cameron too is a very assured performer, though he's looking noticeably older all of a sudden: most likely this is the toll of grief for his son.