There's a tear in my beer, it's because of you, my dear. Booze, blues, and rare aul crews.

"I love you and I hate you but I can't live without you, Mr Booze".

Cheers. Slainte. Bottoms up. Get it down yer neck. One for the road. Be rude not to. This one won't touch the sides. Don't neglect your drinking duty if your duty is a drink. A lot of us enjoy a drink, a scoop, a sherbert or two, maybe a sesh or a boozathon. There's no denying that getting drunk, pissed, twatted, wankered, trolleyed, fucked, pasted, cunted, wrecked, or mashed up has an appeal. Judging by the amount of terms we've coined for it it appears it helps with the old creative juices too. Juicing the juice. Chasing the goose. Letting the logic get a bit loose.

Of course alcoholism is a disease and can be a very bad thing. But it (drinking, not alcoholism itself) can also be a very good thing. Almost everyone I know would be a virgin if it didn't exist, possibly humanity would've died out or, worse still, teetotallers like Donald Trump and ISIS would've taken over. In this silly aul blog I don't mean to claim there aren't bad things about Adam's ale or to say it's great but also to understand that life is more complex. I want to celebrate the good side of 'the sauce' as well as recognising musicians also have not been afraid to travel to the dark side of the Spoons.

If you're gonna write a blog about booze'n'music it's gonna be hard not to mention the fearsomely hard drinking poetic folk-punk band The Pogues. I saw Shane MacGowan in a pub, The Boogaloo, in Highgate once and he was a bit pissed. Fair dos, he's an alcoholic. What did I expect? But for a pisshead he did write about drinking, and London, and love, fantastically. Streams of Whiskey (from their 1984 debut album Red Roses For Me) isn't one of his best but it sets the tone nicely and it has a very similar message to Flaco Jimenez's En El Cielo No Hay Cerveza with its refrain "In heaven there is no beer. That's why we drink it here". It's actually a 1956 German drinking song penned by one Ernst Neubach. The Germans seem to be a nation who take drinking seriously as anyone familiar with the reinheitsgebot will know.

 

The Pogues - Streams of Whiskey

 

 

Flaco Jimenez - En El Cielo No Hay Cerveza

 

 

Tom T Hall - I Like Beer

 

Tom T Hall lays out his interests pretty plainly. He likes beer. It helps him unwind. It makes him a jolly good fellow. It's worth watching just for his asides on Muhammad Ali and the Mormon Tabernacle football team.

 

Dr Feelgood were a bunch of oily lapelled hardnuts you'd not want to interrupt having a slash down a dark alley in Canvey Island but, during the prog years, they kept the primal rock flag flying, me and my brother Andy used to skid on the carpet to this one. Interestingly (or perhaps not), both of us now prefer alcohol to milk. Again, worth watching just to see how morally dubious a figure Lee Brilleaux looks. Wilko Johnson had gone by this point but the guitar sound remains. These guys looked like they enjoyed a pint - in a straight glass!

 

 

Dr Feelgood - Milk And Alcohol

 

 

The Housemartins - Happy Hour

 

You couldn't say that about either The Housemartins or Black Flag, two bands rarely lumped in together. Paul Heaton now looks like a fags'n'booze kinda dude but in the eighties he looked like the kinda dude who'd give you a stern look if you returned your copy of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway to Hull's central library a week late.

 

Henry Rollins looks like the kinda dude who'd smash a dumb-bell into your face in a fit of roid rage if you said John Coltrane was overrated or call you a homo if you liked The Pet Shop Boys but that's irrelevant because he'd yet to join Black Flag when they released Damaged. Their debut album contained this patronisingly sarcastic, yet fucking banging, tune about dumb frat boys getting a beer buzz on. Sheryl Crow liked a good beer buzz early in the morning but her music, sadly, is too shit to include here. You can't blame her for caning it though. Her boyfriend, Lance Armstrong, was injecting erythropoeitin up his bony Texan arse so he could cycle faster up an Alp than Jan Ullrich. Party time central round at Lance'n'Shez's.

 

 

Black Flag - Six Pack

 

 

The Champs - Tequila

 

 

LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls

 

At least The Champs knew the wobbly pop was all about getting a party, rather than a morning, started (Black Flag seemed a bit naive about it all, straight edge, eh?). LCD Soundsystem got that too, "drunk girls know that love is an astronaut" (as well as that punked up Bowie rip offs really work well) and Snoop Dogg was also aware that "this type of shit happens all the time" but it didn't stop him getting the Seagrams in and passing the sippy cups around. The Gourds did a great version of it.

 

Josh Homme's party went a bit further. Alcohol was, of course, on the menu but so, too, was "nicotine, valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy" and, most of all, "c-c-c-c-c-cocaine". It's my third favourite song the Californian stoner rockers ever did. They always looked a scary bunch.

 

 

The Gourds - Gin'n'Juice

 

 

Queen of the Stone Age - Feel Good Hit of the Summer

 

 

Hard Skin - Beer And Fags

 

Hard Skin don't actually look hard at all. Beer and Fags, from 1996's Hard Nuts and Hard Cunts (I kid you not), posits Gipsy Hill's possibly parodic Oi revivalists as evangelists for getting munted and it does it with some panache. The third Loudon Wainwright took a more nuanced approach to pissed up chicanery but still managed to tickle the laughter muscles in a way that'd swell Ken Dodd's heart.

 

Tom Waits is a wonderfully talented song writer and performer who's made good currency of pretending to be a drifter who rolls up in flop houses in Eureka, California,, necks a few jars, and heads off on a Greyhound to Newport, Oregon.. This Littlest Hobo schtick is both incredibly popular and is incredibly good. He gets away with it because he gets inside his characters. He doesn't write ABOUT them. He writes AS them. It's a big distinction.



 

 

Loudon Wainwright III - Drinking Song

 

 

Tom Waits - Warm Beer and Cold Women

 

 

Cat Power - Lived in Bars

 

Tom Waits is a man, a very funny man who insults people by saying they have the IQ of a fence post. Men go to bars more than women. That's just a fact. Women get more shit for getting drunk than men do too (although not off LCD Soundsystem clearly). That's another fact. It's rubbish. Cat Power's Lived In Bars is the song that this list pivots on (and if you watch it your heart may break, in fact your heart may break just looking at her - he says rubbing his knees). She absolutely nails the love/hate relationship many of us have with booze. It draws a line under our working day (well, some start earlier), it relaxes, it helps us, it fucks us up. Stupid fucking t-shirts denigrating women say a beer is never jealous of another beer. But a beer always wants a threesome, a foursome, a fivesome, a fucking twenty fivesome. It sends us off to "the next whiskey bar" where we meet arrogant, topless, though admittedly quite talented posers like Jim Morrison. Then we come home and blame it on our mates or, in the case of Tom Waits, his piano. Terrible influence, those Steinways.

 

 

The Doors - Alabama Song

 

 

Tom Waits - The Piano Has Been Drinking

 

 

Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down

 

Then we wake up, many coins in the bed, feeling like shit. Horny probably too (what's that all about?) and in danger of texting an ex. Kris Kristofferson nailed the feeling of wandering around with the entire Austrian army marching in your head looking for some solace, craving normality, missing those you left behind in a drunken haze. If you were happy in the haze of a drunken hour I feel bad for you son. I've got 99 problems but that's the main one. And if the beer you had for breakfast wasn't bad, why not have one more for dessert?

 

Men with broken hearts go to pubs to stare into space and talk to other men with broken hearts (again, I know women have it tougher) and hopefully find someone to mend their broken heart. But Rhonda can't help you and football gets boring, quiz nights elicit some warm glow, but eventually you will stare into the cold dark void of misery and accept that the country musicians were right all along. When it comes to heartbreak these Stetson hatted fuckers now you can't drown it - but they know you will try too.

 

 

Hank Williams - There's A Tear In My Beer

 

 

Ernest Tubb - Drivin' Nails in my Coffin

 

Hank Williams, who along with The Fall and Leonard Cohen (oh, and Sam Cooke, Public Enemy, Gil Scott Heron, Can, Aztec Camera, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Sonic Youth, T Rex, and Fela Kuti) is one of my all time favourite recording artists. Man, that guy could do heartbreak like nobody else, even The Big O. Born in Alabama where my mum spent some of her childhood his yodelling voice had a great affect, really reached in and touched. If there's a tear in his beer I'd pick it out. I asked Hank Williams how lonely does it get. Hank Williams hasn't answered yet.

 

He actually sings about keeping "drinking" until he's "petrified". It's a coruscating look into a broken man but he wasn't the only character from those parts who knew how it all panned out. Ernest Tubb, the Texas troubadour, hailed from a place called Crisp (I love crisps, S&V Taytos rule my world) but even his snacky hometown didn't stop him bending his arm to a dangerous degree when he was washing down his Wotsits - and then writing a textbook brilliant song about losing your gal and getting 'on it'.

 

If only JD Wetherspoons operated in Texas back in the day. Tubb and Bob Wills could've met, threw their copies of the Racing Post to one side, ordered up a Tuborg or nine, and got stuck into a meal deal as they talked about how wronged they'd been by their women. It was time we heard some Western Swing.



 

 

Bob Wills - Bubbles in my Beer

 

 

Loretta Lynn - Don't Come Home Drinkin' (With Lovin' on your Mind)

 

While the men pissed their money up the wall poor ol' Loretta Lynn had to sit at home waiting for the drunken idiots to return, presumably to paw at her boobs like cavemen. She'd probably have been comforted by Jello Biafra's economical treatise on erectile dysfunction and alcoholism. Who wouldn't?

 

Randy drunks are one thing. Stupid drunks another. Aggressive drunks the worst of all. The Dubliners noted the silliness of being so pie-eyed you don't notice your missus having an affair, Pete Townshend was very frank in his assessment of how the pop couldn't drown his sorrows, and Kunt (from Kunt & the Gang) took a more empirical approach to the problem.

 

 

The Dead Kennedys - Too Drunk To Fuck

 

 

The Dubliners - Seven Drunken Nights

 

 

The Who - However Much I Booze

 

 

Kunt and the Gang - I Was Pissed Out Of My Head

 

Acting like a pissed twat occasionally is one thing. Making a career of it is another. Nigel Blackwell poured vinegar on such characters in A Country Practice, "duff leg Bryn had drunk too much again. Most of Wem was steering clear of him". Kurt Wagner, on Lambchop's wonderful Nixon, spoke of a Grumpus who puts "a bottle up, a bottle down, a bottle white, a bottle brown" whilst suggesting said lush learn not to demonstrate his "asinine and callous traits". Beers before the Barbican it is not.

 

George Jones used to get so mullered he'd perform entire concerts pretending to be a duck and ride the Intertstate on a lawn mower. He'd also knock Tammy Wynette about. Unacceptable obvs, but like Ike Turner he did write a tune. White Lightning (covered by The Fall, oddly absent from the list) tells of city slickers suffering the ill effects of glugging on Carolina hooch.

 

 

Half Man Half Biscuit - A Country Practice

 

 

Lambchop = Grumpus

 

 

George Jones - White Lightning

 

Amy Winehouse was a classic case of denial. Possibly the British artist who mixed critical and popular acclaim more than any other, her story was tragic and the predictability of the endgame the most tragic aspect of it. It's hard to celebrate this song in the circs but yet, it is still absolutely brilliant.

 

Reaching for a schooner in Fonzie's home town, Jerry Lee Lewis knew that booze could be a kick in the balls. Webb Pierce understood each day was a grinding misery enlivened only by lifting a glass of poison to the light and imbibing. That hour came earlier as life got cruddier. Gil Scott-Heron saw people in New York utterly destroyed by their addiction, robbing, mugging, stealing, and losing their family to feed their jabit. He couldn't escape it himself. Getting hooked on crack and doing time on Riker's Island before he reached his salvation by having a chat with me about OutKast in Malmesbury. 

 

 

Amy Winehouse - Rehab

 

 

Jerry Lee Lewis - What Made Milwaukee Famous

 

 

Webb Pierce - There Stands The Glass

 

 

Gil Scott-Heron - The Bottle

 

 

Christy Moore - Delirium Tremens

 

 

The Pogues - The Sick Bed of Cuchullainn

 

That sort of behaviour (the drinking, not talking to me about OutKast in Malmesbury) tends to only have one result and musicians have not been shy of singing about it. Both Christy Moore and The Pogues told tales of those who lie on their deathbeds, hallucinating, spewing, and misremembering their lives on the liquor. Booze makes you feel alive but booze kills you. The music makes me want to drink it. The music makes me not want to drink it. 

 

 

Oasis - Cigarettes and Alcohol

 

 

Sham 69 - Hurry Up Harry

 

 

Partial Recall.

"Here's to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer. Sad Satan".

I was sat in a room above a pub in Whitechapel listening to Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' backwards (which turned out to be preferable to listening to it forwards) and at the same time, if some Christian fundamentalists are to believed (and they're not, no Christians are), I was being indoctrinated into a Satanic cult. I always imagined there'd be goats, virgins, and blood involved but it turned out a pint of Red Stripe and a grab bag of pickled onion Monster Munch was adequate nourishment to accompany me on my journey to the dark side, to Satan's little tool shed.

So, what was going on? Why were people in America buying records they didn't even like and then playing them backwards? It seemed like insanity. Why were bands putting hidden messages on their records inciting their fans to commit suicide? It seemed like a disastrously bad business model. But, most pertinently for this blog, what was I doing in a room listening to Robert Plant in reverse?

It'll come as no surprise to my dwindling coterie of regular readers that I was, again, spending the evening with the London Fortean Society who were presenting Forgetting ourselves:Reflections on memory and identity, a talk by Professor Chris French (head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, "the psychology of weird shit" as he calls it) about how our memories can fail us, trick us, and sometimes let us down with fatal consequences.

As head honcho at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub I already knew that Chris was a well informed, confident, knowledgeable, and funny public speaker so I was looking forward to the evening even if I did have a few concerns that it may be a little similar to a talk I'd attended by Dr Kim Wade in Greenwich in 2016 or, even more so, a talk Chris himself had delivered at London Skeptics just six months later. The Skeptics/Fortean crossover is rarely this incestuous but, luckily, my memory, like most of our memories, is not so good that I couldn't enjoy the same talk twice.

Luckily, though, it wasn't the same talk. Or at least it'd been modified sufficiently in the ensuing eighteen months to keep it fresh and interesting. Sure, the story of Bob Geldof saying, or not saying, "give us your fucking money" got another airing. As did the now infamous 'Gorillas in the Midst' video, the story of Kenneth Arnold's flying 'saucer' sighting, and the little game where you list lots of words relating to sleep (but not sleep itself) and then ask people if sleep appeared in the words list. Those who've never seen the trick tend to fall for it. Those who haven't less so. Rather embarrassingly I was shown a follow up video to 'Gorillas in the Midst' that I had seen before and still fell for that particular one.

Our memories are records of our interpretations of events, not records of the events themselves, that we've weaved into some kind of narrative and used our imagination, unknowingly, to fill in the gaps, the bits we don't remember. If we were to see a video recording of an event, one we've thought over countless times, it wouldn't look very much like our memory of it. Our memories are not video recordings. Not even Betamax ones you can't watch anymore.

 

The Professor's talk took in fake Victorian séances, Richard Wiseman, Indian rope tricks, magicians sawing women in half, and, that old favourite, Uri Geller's spoon bending. If he is using psychic powers he's doing it the hard way say conjurors who've perfected the same trick. Geller, one of the only men in the world who picks up a spoon with two hands, also used to ask people to look at the spoon after he'd put it down and say "if you look closely it's still bending".

Leaving aside the fact that a bent spoon is a fucking useless spoon that'll leave you with soup all down your shirt, this was a clear example of top-down processing. Uri suggests to you it's bending so, possibly, you believe it is. If you're easily susceptible or just naturally conciliatory you'll trick your eyes into seeing the spoon bend. Tests have shown this to work on approximately 40% of the population and if you chuck in a stooge, another ostensible witness who'll say they can definitely see that spoon-a-bending, this rises to 60%.

The top-down processing is also employed in making people believe they can hear backwards messages in music, usually heavy metal. When Chris first played us 'Stairway to Heaven' in reverse it sounded exactly like what it was, a load of 'backwards gobbledegook', but when he suggested all the stuff about sad Satan and his tool shed and played it again it did indeed sound a bit like that. As Chris himself said, and everyone agreed, it's "a load of old bollocks" but if you're a Christian fundamentalist determined to hear Satanic messages in music then you'll find them there if you look hard enough.

Most often our memories fail us in more subtle, innocent, ways. We were asked if the number 4 on clocks was represented by IIII or IV and most of us with even a working knowledge of Roman numerals thought it was obviously IV. But, with honourable exceptions like Big Ben, most clocks and watches, for some reason, show IIII instead of IV.

There's an element of suggestion involved too. If you asked someone "did you see A broken headlight?" about a car they tend to say no. But if, of the same car, you ask "did you see THE broken headlight?" they're more likely to say yes. You've suggested there is a broken headlight and it's as if you feel guilty, like you've failed, if you didn't see it. So you say you did. You might not be knowingly lying but you're tricking yourself in to creating false memories to ease social cohesion and to please.

Since 2016 Chris has extended the section on Freud and his views on repression which Sigmund held to be an automatic, involuntary, defence mechanism, a kind of traumatic associative amnesia. While it sounds plausible that people may develop a technique so that they're not haunted by horrific or terrifying events in their past the science doesn't really add up.

Mostly people would love to forget trauma but they can't. Nobody forgets being in a concentration camp and repression wouldn't even make evolutionary sense. If something has hurt us, caused us danger or damage, it makes sense that we remember what that thing is so we can do our best to avoid it in future. Repression (as opposed to suppression, a subtly different thing that implies some level of agency) is now generally considered a myth but a myth, like Christianity or Islam, that many people still choose to believe in.

Both the reliability of our memory when dealing with major, important, events and the unreliability of our memory when dealing with lesser ones is fundamental to its, and our, nature. We don't need to remember everything so we tend to only remember the very good, the very bad, and lots of odd random stuff somewhere in the middle. Memory is a tool to help us live, not a thorough documentary of our lives, and that's all we really need it to be. There are extreme examples where some people remember almost everything and others where people forget their name and where they live but most of us reside in the huge area between them where memory is a friend we can rely on most of the time but should take some of their more outlandish claims with a pinch of salt.

It was a fun evening. I laughed a lot. I learned a lot. I needn't have worried about viewing a repeat. As long as the talks are this good, and my memory is this bad, both the Fortean Society and the London and Greenwich Skeptics can repeat these talks on memory as often as they like and I'll always find something new to enjoy about them. Right, where did I put that bag of Monster Munch?

I saw an X-ray of a girl passing Degas.

Towards the end of his life the French artist Edgar Degas was losing his eyesight. At the same time he took to painting a series of naked younger ladies as if 'through the keyhole' and, rarely, showing their faces. There's probably no medical evidence whatsoever for masturbation causing optical deterioration but it's hard to escape the conclusion that Hilaire-German-Edgar De Gas was, now in his sixties, slowly wanking himself blind.

The Guerilla Girls famously asked 'Do women have to be naked to get in the Met Museum?' to draw attention to the fact that most museums had more paintings OF naked women than they had paintings BY clothed, or indeed naked, women. If you ran a museum and were trying to redress this balance Edgar Degas is not the artist you'd call upon.

Of course, he's not the first (nor will he be the last) elderly man to get a cheap thrill from nubile young women with exposed flesh, evolution made us that way, but, unfortunately, for Degas the charge sheet doesn't stop there. He claimed art wasn't "something you marry. It's something you rape" and had trouble accepting that one of Mary Cassatt's paintings could possibly have been created by a mere woman. Women, for Degas, were clearly purely for decoration.

But being a 'dinosaur', even at a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, does not mean that Degas can't be a great artist (separate the man and his work and all that) any more than being exceptionally woke for your age, your gender, and your colour makes you a first class art critic and blogger. That's just a happy coincidence. One I'll live with.

 

In the Tuileries Gardens (c.1880)

 

I was spending a rainy Wednesday afternoon deep in the lower galleries, the ones where you lose your 4G, of the National Gallery looking at Drawn from Colour:Degas from the Burrell, a free exhibition, spread over three rooms, of paintings from the impressionist artist who stood apart from the other impressionist artists to such a degree that he even joked that if he could he'd arrange for gendarmes to shoot plein-air painters and described the colour yellow as a "horrible thing".

 

The Burrell Collection was amassed by shipping magnate Sir William Burrell and is now housed in Glasgow's Pollok Country Park. As the museum is currently closed for refurbishment its collection of twenty Degas works was able to travel, for the first time since their acquisition, out of Scotland. As well as the nudes there were represented two of Degas' other favourite themes. Ballet dancers, of course, and horses.

 

Degas loved horses so much he identified as one (sort of). In one of his less problematic quotes he once claimed "I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey" suggesting that he felt he was doing all the hard work, "Art is really a battle" he whined, while other less talented artists got all the credit. He was a curmudgeon and a highly competitive one at that, and it seems to me that as he'd had the most traditional training of all the impressionists, and because he'd visited Italy and studied both classical and Renaissance art, he saw himself operating on a more elevated plain than his contemporaries.

 

Jockeys in the Rain (c.1883-1886)

 

Truth be told, I'd take Monet's water lilies, Pissarro's boulevards, and Cezanne's groundbreaking moves towards abstraction over Degas any day. His work, like his views on women, simply hasn't aged as well. It's too pretty, too biscuit tin. The National Gallery probably turn over a decent profit on sales of commemorative scarves and postcards but the shock of the old, with Degas, has gone.

 

The high horizons and empty foreground space in Jockeys in the Rain would've been incredibly bold at the time and it's still a good painting now but so far have we moved that it's difficult to imagine it would once have been almost shocking. Perhaps it's the fact that the show is made up entirely of pastels that makes it all feel a bit soft focus. In works like The Red Ballet Skirts and The Green Ballet Skirt the colours are fierce, presaging the advent of Matisse and Derain's fauvism, but other canvases, Women in a Theatre Box or Russian Dancers, seem almost to dissolve into nothingness.

 

Just last year, here at the National Gallery, Chris Ofili demonstrated how that watery look can still be highly effective but, to these eyes, it doesn't seem to be what Degas did best. As well as the brighter colours his unusual cropping was one of the things that made him stand out as an artist. His early scenes of jewellers, launderettes, and cafes are soon replaced by ballet dancers obscured by spiral staircases and cut in half by the edge of the frame.    

 

Women in a Theatre Box (c.1885-1890)

 

The Red Ballet Skirts (c.1900)

 

The Rehearsal (c.1874)

 

Despite, or perhaps because of, being a misogynist who treated women (or spoke of them) as a completely different species Degas was a huge fan of the ballet. In 1885 alone he attended fifty-four performances and whilst he may've had trouble accepting women as humans he did, miraculously in the circumstances, manage to evince their humanity in his portraits. Of course he said he wasn't interested in the dancers but the movement itself, their clothes, and the combination of the two. The way the clothes moved as they danced and the way the light, pouring in from a window so he wouldn't have to go outside (obvs), played on the whole scene. For a guy who wanted plein-air painters shot he did seem to have quite a touch when it came to depiction of light and shade.

 

The Green Ballet Skirt (c.1896)

 

Russian Dancers (c.1899)

 

Woman in a Tub (c.1896-1901)

 

After the Bath (c.1896)

 

Like any voyeur he had his kinks and we can see, quite clearly, that for Degas these were ladies backs, ladies bums, and ladies hair. If the hair was being combed or washed then all the better. As he peeped through some kind of imaginary spy hole at these women's most private moments he managed to combine being something of a potential sex pest with creating some wonderfully intimate, if somewhat depersonalised, portraits.

 

Woman in a Tub is a celebration of circularity. The sponge, the tub, and the model's bum all rhyme effortlessly, in After the Bath yet another faceless sitter merges into her towel, and Woman at her Toilette sees Degas celebrating, not for the last time, long straight auburn hair. The strawberry blonde is celebrated even further in Combing the Hair, a painting which sees hair, dress, and background all blurring into one scarlet symphony just as Henri Matisse's Dinner Table would do some twelve years later. The model even gets to show her face.

 

I learnt a lot about Edgar Degas in this little exhibition and though I came away feeling less charitable towards the man and his problematic personality (there's a whole other story to be written about his virulent racism) I could, finally, recognise that the bigoted old tosser was a far better painter than he was a man. Edgar Degas never married.

 

Woman at her Toilette (c.1897)

 

Combing the Hair (c.1896)

Fleapit revisited:Western.

"Every stone has its place" says quarry manager Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov) to his new friend and 'bodyguard' Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) as he teaches him how to build a dry stone wall. But is there a place for stone faced Meinhard himself, a taciturn loner whose weathered features sketch the outline of a story that Meinhard's few words fail to colour in?

Despite Bulgaria being far more commonly associated with the adjective 'Eastern', Valeska Grisebach's new film Western has a highly befitting title. Not only does it have many of the hallmarks of the classic Hollywood western:- a group of men arrive at a strange village where the locals, possibly correctly, distrust their intentions, wild expanses of countryside, a horse being treated with more respect than most of the women, and the threat of violence constantly lingering beneath the surface. Why, in some places it's even a tiny bit boring. Just like a proper western.

It's also a 'western' of a different stripe in that it deals with how the Western nations of Europe can sometimes mine, exploit, and misunderstand the Eastern nations of Europe. Meinhard's joined a team of German labourers sent to southern Bulgaria, near the Greek border, to build a hydroelectric plant to provide infrastructure for a poor, rural part of the country. He soon finds himself at loggerheads with his foreman Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek), a boorish, incurious, bully whose woeful attempts at flirtation with local woman Viara (Vyara Borisova) demonstrate a complete lack of cultural sensitivity and stokes further the already latent tensions between the Bulgarian villagers and the visiting German workers.

As Vincent, and the fairly sketchily drawn other Germans, sunbathe, drink, banter, and, occasionally, do some work, Meinhard finds himself spending more and more time with the Bulgarians in the village. They exchange cigarettes and beers as Meinhard is taught not only how to build a dry stone wall but how to bridle a horse and how to thread and dry tobacco leaves. Some, like Adrian and Veneta (Veneta Frangova), are friendly. Others much less so. Meinhard finds himself on the receiving end of violence more than once.

Meinhard says he's a former Legionnaire and allows others to believe he's killed but, in reality, we don't know where he's come from and we don't know where he's going. He says he's come to Bulgaria to work, to earn money, but is he escaping something in Germany? Is he escaping his past? As he attempts to keep one foot in the German camp and another in the Bulgarian one his loyalties are tested time and again and he soon becomes the subject of distrust by elements of both groups. His walks home at night, through badly marked paths in the gloaming, are accompanied with as much a sense of dread as his days are by a chorus of cicadas.

This is more a character study than it is a narrative driven piece of film making. There are many men out there at the moment taking stick, correctly, for mansplaining and telling women how to do their feminism correctly so as a female director it would seem that Grisebach needs to pitch her study into masculinity just right or risk copping some flak herself. To her credit she pulls it off with no little panache. As the lesser characters make macho boasts about guns and fighting, she paints Vincent as a man whose browbeating nature stems from his own insecurity and lets us see that young Vanko's juvenile outbreaks of violence are just his way of announcing his entrance into the world of adulthood. He's just copying the big boys.

The crisis of masculinity is most explicit in its violence but is borne from the lack of connection, the inability to talk to each other. It's not just the language barrier, when all the Germans are together awkward silences still hang in the air with all the weight of a pregnant rain cloud, but that certainly adds to the tension. We can read the subtitles so we know what each character is saying even when they don't understand each other. As ever, in these circumstances, mimes are used to convey vital information and it seems that when people really want to understand each other they find a way.

One fairly guaranteed form of language free expression would be sex, you might think, but the only moment of genuine intimacy in the film, like so many others, proves to be fleeting. While not lacking passion it turns out to be just two people, lost in their own lives, enjoying a brief moment of togetherness and communion. At one point in the film a gift of a pen knife is returned unwanted. It's sad but nothing is said. The gift of love, too, seems to have been treated equally casually.

It's a beautifully shot, slightly overlong, film that slowly, but surely, prises away at the lid that men (try to) keep on (some of) their feelings. Kevin Bashev (as Vanko), Borisova, and Letifov all deserve immense credit for their performances and Wetrek does a brilliant job in bringing such depth to a character like Vincent who on the surface has none. But most of all the plaudits need to go to Neumann for his tour de force as Meinhard and Grisebach herself for having the nous to bring together this cast (none of these people had ever acted in a film before, amazingly) and for having such a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve in a film and bringing that to fruition. It's safe to say she put in a longer shift than some of her workshy characters.

Eric Fischl:Disrupted social exchanges in esoteric tongues.

"I hate this idea that there are some people who have a right to express their suffering and others who don't, that there are those in this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do" - Eric Fischl.

An image of Donald Trump dressed as a clown is, like the President himself, not a subtle thing. It's not very difficult to interpret what neo-expressionist New York painter Eric Fischl thinks about the Donald and in that it's something of an outlier. Fischl's work is all about uncertainty, lack of connections, nameless dread, lack of fulfilment, and intimacy without desire.

The little girl looks at the black dress hanging up on the back of the door. Presumably her mummy's dress but where is mum? Is she in the other room? Is she at work? Has she gone? Has she died? Is that man even her dad and if not what's he doing in her bedroom? Fischl's work doesn't provide you with a narrative so human nature forces you to construct your own.

 

Worry (2017)

 

Pretzel (2017)

 

The beautiful, young, wealthy, and often naked people that sprawl out around sun drenched swimming pools in Pretzel and Clearing the Table seem to have an enviable lifestyle but they don't look particularly happy. They seem unable to emotionally relate to each other. The chubby man looks at his phone, the lady in the pool stares into space, and the waiter goes about his business of laying out bananas etc; with his mind, surely, on something else entirely.

 

Like Edward Hopper and David Lynch before him, Fischl travels out to suburbia and pokes at its underbelly, or, as protocol now dictates, its seedy underbelly. It's become a well travelled road and to create work making such observations runs the danger of looking rote or, worse still considering Fischl is based in New York City, patronising.

 

Clearing the Table (2018)

 

She and Her (2017)

 

The scale, the colour, and the complex and nuanced composition of his paintings means he manages to steer clear of such concerns. Adolescent sexuality and voyeurism have long been major themes in Fischl's work but for St.James's Skarstedt gallery's exhibition of his work from the last two years, Presence of an Absence, he seems to have moved towards more complicated adult relationships and interactions.

 

If the exterior scenes suggest awkward interactions, averted gazes, and people's lives falling through the spaces made by the gaps they leave in their communication then the interiors somehow ramp this up exponentially. The lady in The Appearance has the textbook 'appearance' of the idle, and bored, rich. She holds her glass of wine far from her mouth as if to signify she's only drinking to pass the time. A dog lies on her lap, an animal that really knows how to relax. A man reads from a piece of paper but it's impossible, from his lack of impression, to know if it's a phone bill, a suicide note, or instructions on how to set up a self-assembly divan. It's a painting that captures one of many moments in the long, and often undocumented lives, of us all. We can't know what it's about but we can surely recognise something of ourselves in it.

 

The Appearance (2018)

 

Last Look Mirror (2017)

 

Last Look Mirror, with its little homage (or is it a dig?) to Andy Warhol, shows two characters who, in true Fischl style, aren't making eye contact. They're going about their day to day business in their own little worlds never fully aware of what the other is thinking and waiting for those rare moments of genuine connection that feel so magical when they finally happen.

 

Even death can't guarantee them. In After the Funeral, easily my favourite of all the works in this compact yet bijou show, two mourners stare into space. One's face is obscured by cigarette smoke, the other's behind a funeral veil. They sit, seemingly, in silence as a shadow stretches out across the table. You feel for them and you know they feel for each other but you find yourself drawn, more than anything, to the masterful shadow. You can almost feel the warmth of the sun passing through the elongated silence. It's a shadow, and a painting, I'd like to think that Edward Hopper himself would've been proud of. 

 

People often say the people sat alone in diners, hotel rooms, or public transport in Hopper's paintings look desperately lonely. I see Hopper's subjects as solitary, alone, but not necessarily lonely. The characters that populate the works of Eric Fischl are , more often than not, with other people yet their inability to communicate renders them far lonelier than those who sit by themselves. We all know you can feel lonely in a crowd. Fischl paints what that's like.



 

After the Funeral (2017)

Andreas Gursky:A world without hierarchy?

"What I create is a world without hierarchy in which all the pictorial elements are as important as each other" - Andreas Gursky.

Beijing (2010)

Sounds noble enough but does Andreas Gurksy's self-confessed encyclopaedia of life truly contain all that life's rich pageant has for us or does Gurksy, as the photographer, impose his own personal hierarchical structure on it with himself, the artist, at the very top of the pyramid?

For the most part I don't think he does. A comprehensive overview of the German photographer's work was a brilliant way to reopen the newly refurbished Hayward Gallery (they've added some gold bannisters, moved the shop, and made the bogs more 'inclusive' (!)) with. He's popular without being populist, his art is clear, his message is pretty direct, and his photographs, for the most part, are bloody huge. It's a show that should be able to please both punters and critics - and so it proved to be. I certainly left feeling like I'd got my money's worth and I'm both a punter and a (self-appointed) critic.

It's not laid out strictly chronologically and the accompanying pamphlet uses a very loose thematic approach (sections are divided into broad categories like Architecture, Scale, Crowds, and Display) but rather than confusing the visitor it frees them up to take things in at a more leisurely pace.

Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955 and, along with Thomas Ruff, studied under the fabulous Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. A journey from Leipzig to Dusseldorf at that time involved passing through the Iron Curtain from East to West Germany and clearly he preferred it in Dusseldorf as he continues to base himself there. Along with Ruff, and others like Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, and Axel Hutte, he became part of a loose grouping of photographers that became known as the Dusseldorf School.

Mulheim, Anglers (1989)

Krefeld, Chickens (1989)

Ruhr Valley (1989)

Dusseldorf Airport, Sunday Walkers (1985)

Gurksy's 'Sunday pictures' of the eighties captured people at play, swimming, walking, fishing, doing nothing, in and around Dusseldorf. His description of them as 'representatives of a species whose mission remains obscure' can be taken in various ways. It makes him sound haughty and aloof, above the quotidian concerns of the proletariat - which isn't great - but it also suggests that he has a little of what Graham Greene called a 'splinter of ice in the heart', the ability to look at things dispassionately at least for as long as it takes to turn them into art.

Many of the figures in these works are dwarfed by bridges, trees, mountains, and buildings. Suggesting that Gursky was interested in loneliness, alienation, and the search for meaning in a meaningless world.. Both Ruhr Valley and Mulheim, Anglers seem to speak of a kind of yearning, whispering about vague melancholia.

Aletsch Glacier (1993)

Untitled I (1993)

A square of grey carpet in Kunsthalle Dusseldorf has been photographed in such close up that it defamiliarizes it and ultimately renders it abstract. Equally his triptych of Turners places just as much as emphasis on the walls, the floor, and the lighting as it does on the paintings. Gursky, as ever, is democratic in his process.

He's on record as saying "my images are always interpretations of places" and those places can be as small as a piece of carpet or as vast as a glacier or, in the case of Dolomites, Cable Car. a combination of both. You'll really have to squint to spot the solitary cable car suspended by a wire over the mist covered mountains. Or, ideally, go to the exhibition. Don't expect my photos of his photos to be as good as his. That's ridiculous.

Turner Collection (1995)

Dolomites, Cable Car (1987)

Schiphol (1994)

The windows of Schiphol airport in Amsterdam act as a secondary frame, an auxiliary lens but they also show Gursky's interest in architecture. Both blockbuster buildings and the more prosaic, even liminal, spaces we pass through on the way to somewhere more interesting. Some, like airports, we may see only occasionally. Others could be our places of work or our homes. Sites, and sights, that have been rendered meaningless through familiarity can, seen with new eyes, suddenly tell a very different story. Invite a stranger round to your house and it's likely they'll comment on something you've barely thought about for years.

The airport departure lounge also seems to signpost the fact that by the time he was creating photos like this Gurksy's burgeoning success had brought with it opportunities for travel and that travel led, quite correctly, to a broadening, an internationalising, of his subject matter. Further democratisation of his process came, in photos like Karlsruhe, Siemens and Salerno I, with the epic panoramic shot that places as much attention on the vans parked up in the foreground as it does the architecture and hills in the background. These are the photos one thinks of when one thinks of Gursky and if you were to suggest some of them have something of a Where's Wally? quality about them some may laugh. I couldn't possibly comment.

Karlsruhe, Siemens (1991)

Salerno I (1990)

These are the works Gursky calls his 'aggregate states', worlds without hierarchies. They're fascinating to look at and new details continually reveal themselves. They don't seek to instruct but rather to let you create your own narrative. It's fun to listen to people in the gallery do this.

The strange shaped Kodak building and the huge Paris, Montparnasse both show the enormity of the buildings but they also, the latter especially, open a window into the multiple lives being lived out inside those buildings. 

Kodak (1995)

Paris, Montparnasse (1993)

Digital post-production techniques were bought in to play on works like Paris, Montparnasse (the French capital's largest residential building) and it's worth reminding ourselves that Gursky doesn't photograph reality, but creates a new reality. He's playing tricks with us but so subtle are they we fall for them each time - and thus we give him permission to continue to do so.

Cheops (2005)

Toys 'R' Us (1999)

99 Cent (1999/2009)

Pyongyang VI (2007/2017)

Huge toy megastores, American shops during Hallowe'en, and Egyptian pyramids all catch the eye but perhaps none more so than the incredible colours and light of Gurksy's Pyongyang VI. North Korea's Arirang festival (or Mass Games) are held in honour of Kim Il-Sung and feature over 70,000 gymnasts and 30,000 school children. Gurksy first visited in 2007 but, taken by recent developments in North Korea, went back to the photo last year and we can only be grateful he did. It's a thing of beauty and it's something that's barely comprehensible to anybody outside of the DPRK.

Next to that the photograph of four of Germany's recent chancellers (Gerhard Schroder, Helmut Schmidt, Angela Merkel, and Helmut Kohl) sitting in front of Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) can look rather drab, a bit humdrum even. It does tell us quite a bit about Gursky's methods though, the way he'll happily 'photoshop' images to create a desired effect, to tell a story. After all, it seems pretty unlikely that these four ever really got together to ponder American abstract art.

Even more can be learnt about his career trajectory by comparing Desk Attendants, Salzgitter, Dusseldorf from 1982 with recent works taken from space of entire land masses. He once photographed representations of the Earth, now he photographs the Earth itself. No wonder an airport departure lounge appealed such. I love airport departure lounge boards. I love looking at the various destinations and imagining what I'd do if I was to ever go there, ever live there. They fill me with wanderlust.

Review (2015)

Frankfurt (2017)

Desk Attendants, Salzgitter, Dusseldorf (1982)

Utah (2017)

Gursky would appear to be a man whose wanderlust could easily have been sated so it's nice to see he still finds inspiration on his travels. Utah was inspired by a photograph that Gursky took from the window of a moving car. If you've ever taken a photo from a moving train it's a pleasant effect how the background is steady but the foreground is blurred. Gursky gets paid for doing this!

Some of the stuff he's made in the last few years seem to hint at either a drastic change of direction or an artist, now well into middle age, having something of a crisis of confidence. Iron Man in SH I looks like something from an Athena poster, other works (like Tokyo) hew closer to what you'd expect for him, whilst in other cases he's scaled down the size of his photographs quite dramatically. The story's ongoing. The jury is out.

SH I (2013)

Tokyo (2017)

You would never be able to see the view in Tokyo in Tokyo itself. That's because it's constructed from dozens of different shots taken from train windows in the Japanese capital. Gursky's trying to create a reality that is more real than real reality. Really.

He's also trying to address salient issues of our times. Environmental degradation, working conditions, dehumanisation, consumerism. Yet he shuns overt didacticism. "I keep awareness of the problems simmering without losing sight of the beauty and complexity of the world so that interest in it doesn't disappear" he explains.

Greeley (2002)

Paris, PCF (2003)

Kamiokande (2007)

The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment (or Kamiokande for short), that comes, unfortunately, complete with this blogger's reflection (hey, I don't get paid for this, you know) is situarted one kilometre beneath a Japanese mountain and has been set up to observe the behaviour of neutrinos. To give you an idea of how unfathomably vast and cavernous it is look in the bottom right hand corner, that's a man in a boat. Why isn't this place better known?

Rhine II's not what it looks like. Gurksy's removed a power station on the far bank to make the picture more 'natural' though one can't help wondering why he didn't just walk a few hundred metres further down the river!

In this it both explains, and further mystifies, and that, often, seems to be exactly what Gursky's work has always done. Visions that at first may look familiar soon become discomfiting and those that at first appear odd reveal themselves to be actually very ordinary things. He makes the extraordinary ordinary and the ordinary extraordinary and as something of a magician behind the lens he does it with a sleight of hand you barely notice. A trick that good is one worth repeating and one worth devoting an entire, and important, show at this great gallery to.

Rhine II (1999/2015)

Bahrain I (2005)

Tour de France I (2007)

Thanks to Mark for the company, his always insightful comments, and for debriefing with me over a brace of eminently sensible pints in the ever reliable Kings Arms on Roupell Street afterwards.