Michael Gira's God Complex

I wrote a couple of articles for the University paper/website. After a couple of meetings and unreturned emails and responses that were unforthcoming, I can only assume that they've gone cold on my articles or me - or are simply snowed under with work. Anyway, here is something I wrote about Swans and Xiu Xiu. The tone is more for unfamiliar readers, but I can't be bothered changing it.

Some people love a good lyric. They have them permanently inscribed on their bodies. They whisper them to loved ones in the dark of the night. They stand in for philosophical conceits, political persuasions, and often negotiate the complex space between real feeling and articulation. Me, I usually couldn't care less; it's often just arbitrary condensed syntax that really doesn't mean that much.

Occasionally, lines will snake around your heart, or somewhere a little more cerebral, to take hold. To wit:

“I work hard for everything I own. Everything I own chokes me when I'm asleep.”
“Out of your mind with whorishness, incredibly young, incredibly filthy.”
“Break into the children's hospital screaming 'don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with me!”
“Cut out the infection. Beat up the violator. Gag him, then screw him down.”
“The oil is black and it is thick. Sex is a void filled with plastic.”
“This is the worst vacation ever. I am going to cut open your head with a roofing shingle.”

No, they don't scream 'party' to me either. They're dark, concerned with the grotesque and the violent, attempting a frustrated, futile malediction against a clustering blackness. Against the backdrop of the radio and the overwhelming banality of UK indie's proud underachievers, these are simply words that stand out; be they good or bad.



In the back catalogues of their writers (respectively: Swans, Xiu Xiu, Xiu Xiu, Swans, Swans, Xiu Xiu) these are not necessarily the best, the most novel, or potent examples of their craft. Their words are repulsive because things are awful. This is the world we live in; not that Usher and his ilk Eurodancing their way to the club are not in the same world. It's just that while the world sees Justin Bieber performing 'Baby' inside to a rapt audience, Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart sees the barmaid molested in the back-room, the CCTV mysteriously malfunctioning for that day only, the music drowning out the cries. Tell me that it wouldn't happen. Tell me that it hasn't happened already.

In February, Xiu Xiu released their seventh LP, entitled Dear God, I Hate Myself. Fluttering, high drama vocalisms take centre stage against a shifting palette of cold synthesiser, unsympathetic mechanic percussion and abrasive string stabs. The tension is sometimes too much to take: Stewart's vocal tightrope-act balances every track in a state of unremitting drama, a house of cards awaiting the merest zephyr to break the tension. And it never comes. There is no catharsis.

September brought the twelfth LP by Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, an audience-funded effort to kick Michael Gira's long-running project back into gear after a decade-long absence. Gira, a singular entity in a world of indiscernibles, would take to the stage in the early '80s and order the back door be bolted and the lights turned off but for a single spotlight. The band would unleash unmitigated chaos, deafening bass thrums and atonal guitars that have more in common with the scrapyard than the stage. As their 1990 live album recalls, Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, just before a period of mellowing.



My Father... attempts a clever balancing act between the remorselessness of the visceral and physical Swans and some more overtly melodic, sweeping styles, mostly pulled off to great aplomb. Where Jamie Stewart is a histrionic tenor, Michael Gira is a grave and impassive baritone. If most artists were to announce that a key track on their upcoming record was a seven-minute mini-epic about their daughter, it'd be time to line-up the sick bags. The first four minutes of 'Inside Madeline' batter the listener so thoroughly that the rays of sunshine peeking through at its conclusion are easy to miss.

What is signicant here, then? That these are two albums deep into each band's career whose lyrics reveal their treacly-black auteurs to be fundamentally moralist flaneurs: maybe not Christian by self-identfication, but certainly by de facto action. Those lyrics up there: they're not for kicks or to try and play to the kind of sicko who'd get off on them. Swans and Xiu Xiu have spat naked nihilism in their audience's faces for years now and some of them still don't get it, much like semi-racist Little Englanders don't get Alf Garnett. Now they're spelling it out for us. They inhabit the same moral sphere as Justin Bieber and his exhortations to just 'love you, girl', even though against the banality of the radio, you wouldn't quite notice.

4.48 Psychosis: ADC Theatre, Cambridge

Art In Macro is back with a minor redesign (a template) and some new content. Some of the old content has been axed too. Yes, because it was rubbish. There will be more frequent updates that are shorter as well as an approximately quarterly piece that threatens to stretch beneath the southern boundary of you screen

Today’s review is of the performance of 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge. What immediately follows is a brief interpolation about why, in spite of minimal theatre-going experience, Art In Macro is reviewing plays. Skip the next bit text to get to the review.
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In sentient adult life I have been to fewer than a dozen plays. Why? I am exactly the sort of person who should go to the theatre. It plays to my respective enjoyment of acting, literature, immediacy, and art. So why is the sum total of my theatre-going experience as an undergraduate a performance of Waiting For Godot with Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper (David Neilson) as Lucky?

Primarily it is about expense. The days of subsidized troupes and theatres are disappearing. You have to be a particularly hardened and embattled soul if you are to regularly stump up £10+ to see something that you can’t own later, that might not be good, that could potentially offend and challenge your understanding of previously cherished text. At least the similarly-priced record and DVD have a repeatability clause built-in. And at least the large touring rock band allows the opportunity for the audience member to come alive, be semi-interactive, and to consume several flagons of draught.

There were never any regrets about those few times I did pay the requisite for a play. And whilst I don’t have the experience to fully separate what makes a production first-rate from one to hate, the weary cynicism of the post-modern/late-capitalist voracious culture-consumer with a mouthpiece (e.g. this blog) is a transposable mode. I am writing as a dilettante to speed my passage into understanding; trying to make sense of things I do not fully understand without recourse to textbooks, theoreticians, and naysayers. Anyway: on with the show.

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4.48 Psychosis – Cambridge ADC Theatre
23rd October 2010

Pitched somewhere between Beckett (formal abstraction, the decomposition of semantics, an almost percussive dialogue) and Plath (despair expressed through snakish – almost primal – monologuing, depression as anger) is 4.48 Psychosis. The director’s notes claim it is not ‘a play purely about depression’ but ‘a cry for love and human connection’. All very well and noble, but ultimately begging a question about why the protagonist (The Lover) hates everyone, including those who attempt to love her?

The Lover is depressed beyond tears, a tiger set loose to live with humans, occasionally benign and self-concerned but mostly filled with incomprehension and an inability to communicate terms which might assuage her. Nothing is ever good enough. The Partner tries anger, calmness, aping The Lover’s rhetorical devices, and just about everything he understands within his power but comes up short. The Doctor attempts to retain a professional impassivity, treating The Lover like a problem rather than a human. The Lover sees this as impersonal and dehumanizing, herself as vehicle for pharmaceutical neutralizing. The Doctor does care; when she takes off the professional mask to reveal herself, The Lover understands the necessity of the object/subject relationship, how social and professional boundaries cannot be transcended. It kills her.

The acting is good throughout. Hannah Wildsmith is perhaps too young, unravaged, and restrained to be The Lover, giving some of the angrier moments the same kind of forearm-to-forehead tendency of the period drama rather than the modernist nerve-jangler. Nonetheless, her smooth, clear-headed soliloquies highlight the patterns that repeat and fold in on themselves later, crushing her under her own rhetoric (appropriate, considering her fate). Archie Preston is similarly fine as The Partner, requiring the greatest range, attempting a light (“RSVP? ASAP?”) that contrasts jarringly with the near treacle-black of the denouement. Best of all, or at least the most convincing, is Nikki Moss as The Doctor. She is a blank page, phlegmatic in that way doctors have to be to preserve their own sanity (irony probably unintentional from Kane). Clipped and distant, yet her notes grant her omnipresence.

The direction is surefooted throughout, with minimal stage set-up to let the actors act and the words breathe. Sound and lights offer subtle tonal shifts; the overriding impression leaves you with no doubt that all concerned have extracted all they can from this play.

All said, it is the play itself that is the most problematic aspect of the production. Endless debate could be devoted to this topic, though to cut a long story short, it appears to valorize the plight of the depressed and somewhat elevate their status to nihilist-visionary. The Lover (difficult not to read as an allegory for Sarah Kane herself, in light of her suicide before this play reached the stage) laments pills and medication as curtailing the higher functions of her brain, when it is pretty clear to see that the higher functions of her brain are misfiring, her synapses prone to influencing angry, awkward bursts of dialogue that make living and supporting a person in that state totally fucking impossible to deal with. Of course, Kane attempts to pre-empt such readings, but these are the moments that feel the most forced.

Funny People and the rise of the insider film

There are films about love written and produced by some of the most loveless people you could ever hope to meet. There are films about death written by people who have never experienced it in the family or friends. There are films about racial tension written by some of the most privileged around. But when it comes to films which mock the pretensions and politics of entertainment industry insiders, I tend to believe those the most. You write what you know, and in some cases, this is all some people know.

One such film is Funny People, which depicts the life of struggling and successful people in and around Hollywood's comedy scene. This is not a bad film, so please do not read on if you are expecting a humorous panning. It is frequently funny (though notably not-so-much in the stand-up comedy scenes which deign to give the film some kind of authoritative voice) and contains a good half-dozen memorable characters engaging in a not-too-unrealistic series of events. If that isn't praise, I don't know what is.



What it absolutely is is a mess. A confused hurricane of ideas that don't all quite pay off. For instance: I like a lot of music, so when I have a band, there's not this idea of 'oh, we will sound like this or that'. We will begin as a style (let's say energetic post-punk) and then I will bring a song that sounds slow and sad and perhaps a little bit country. This may be a contributing factor toward none of my bands being successful and quite jarring. It doesn't all quite fit – but that's ok, because all I ever was was some dude in a bar. Judd Apatow was 41 with a lot of money at his disposal. There are moments in this work that are pure Curb Your Enthusiasm-style improv. That will sit next to a glossy hi-def/tightly-scripted scene of emotional outpouring. The cinematography is similarly disjointed, as is its observation of certain maxims such as the 30-degree rule, moral consistency of characters and their ability to flip between sincerity and joking.

Adam Sandler plays the version of himself his detractors hold true: a decent comic, inexplicably likeable, who has made a barrel of money playing the kook in increasingly inane and flimsy comedy films – who is now Sad and Alone (and dying). It's a believable premise. RZA, he of Wu-Tang fame, plays a man who works in a salad bar and is happy with it. It is not a believable premise. It is not a believable premise because it is OBVIOUSLY RZA and this film wants you to recognise this as much as it wants you to be familiar with Adam Sandler and his personal story. Somewhere in the middle is Jason Schwartzmann, who is believable as a smug, shallow bedder of the opposite sex, but is not believable as an actor of a desperately uncool sitcom, being the man in Hollywood who has landed on his feet the most times ever.

And as a brief aside, looking for a good female character? Well, there aren't any. There's a pretty lazy “fuck-this-chick omg-i-wanted-to-fuck-that-chick-how-could-YOU-fuck-that-chick-dude-hey-man-if-you-don't-fuck-this-chick-then-i'm-gonna” going on that is gross and weird and the more I think about it could bring the whole film down. Of the five women I can remember with speaking parts, two are 'starfuckers', one is Sarah Silverman (playing herself as comedy insider), and two are main characters – one that Schwartzmann & Rogen have the aforementioned 'dialogue' about, who fulfils the indie-film sex object du jour role well – and the girl that is the object of a tug of love between Sandler and a hilarious Eric Bana that the film can't decide whether she's dreadful and only in love with someone because of mitigating factor X – or whether she's The Woman We All Secretly Want. Ugh.

And maybe this confusion in characterisation is deliberate, a comment – but I can't see it – not when the film contains sage advice spoken by Eminem, playing a version of himself as sage giver of advice caught in the role of celebrity he never wanted. All these scenes do, with moments where we are intimate with some of the world's most recognisable people, whether they are 'real' or 'comic', is add weight to the film's status as 'insider'. That's why it contains so many men of status.



The classic touchstone for such movies would be Robert Altman's The Player, the king of insider movies, not only apes industry mores and dialogue, but pays homage to movies and directors of the past. But recent years have seen television and films that also attempt to show the inside world of 'the industry'; Entourage, Action, The Critic, The Larry Sanders Show, Moving Wallpaper, Boogie Nights, Lost in La Mancha, Man Bites Dog. A whole series of Seinfeld is given over to this; we can even stretch back farther to Dziga Vertov, Michael Powell, Hitchcock and Fellini. Even now, as I write, the episode of Glee quipped “you need to do a real investigation. I'm taking CSI-real.”

Which kind of throws contemporary television into a series of post-modern conundra – about the way that they are contained by and almost cannot exist without reference to the issues they comment on. Film is eating itself. We're not just talking simulacrum and versions of reality. We're talking about the future of art as a landscape whose entire series of reference points is simply other art.

That is exactly what Funny People is. Every scene does not simply stand for itself or its place in a narrative – but for its place outside the film as well, about its relationship to what you know about the actors and their lives, the conventions of plot, etc. And you might say “well, nothing new there, asshole – musicals are totally knowing and people just dance and know routines.” The inherent post-modernism of musical-theatrical performance at least serves to propel the plot. The post-modernism of Funny People serves to say 'Hey. We're being post-modern. We know what this is.” And it's kind of boring. And smug. And massively self-serving.



Fortunately there's enough of a film hanging out in close proximity to these instances (it's long enough) to make it worth a watch. And it's nowhere near as problematic for reality as The Hills – and it's pretty funny. But post-modern looks at the inside of things have sidelined music, movies and TV for long enough. It's time to get back to talking about things.

Crystal Antlers / Mt. Eerie live

Not together. That would be weird, right? First update for a while, this coincides with the first gigs I've been to in a while and the first tumblr posts I made in a while and the first time I stepped outside to breathe oxygen that did curl back to my face and say "do your fucking dissertation you fuck". So I did. I make no apologies. Sorry.

In reverse chronological order, Crystal Antlers. Saw these dudes at Retro Bar about a year and a half ago early in their hype cycle. Lot of thin kids, pouters, fake glasses, the weird child-like dress sense. Blog readers, basically, hypists. Second time they played I couldn't afford it - £14! OK, you get Ariel Pink and Ponytail thrown in...still, doesn't mean I had the dollar. Heard that place was rammed.

It's pretty clear the hype and memory-purge has done for CA's momentum a bit. There were about as many people there as there were as the first time, and my friend and I were the only repeat offenders. Still, can't keep a good band down. Before the review, a picture that makes them look like just another bunch of dudes spanking their planks.

Shirtless drummer! Singing bass player! Incongruously hot keyboardist! Even a Bez figure! Lesser bands would embody these terrible clichés, even revel in them. Fortunately for Crystal Antlers, their talent is so high that they completely transcend these semiotic nightmares.

So, young rock fan, pick a decade and Crystal Antlers will pay homage. '50s? They have the blue-eyed pop nouse. '60s? Chaotic garage mayhem. '70s? A double-helping of California slack and Grand Funk bass. These guys obviously have heard the Dischord roster from the '80s, and throw the whole fat lot in with the healthy post-modernism of the '90s to now.



The sum of these influences is a brave band, willing to put three-minute reverb-crazy ballads like 'Andrew' next to the depraved psych trawl of 'Parting Song for the Torn Sky'. They largely ignore their own debut LP Tentacles, which was entirely brilliant, but got insulted on blogs owned by people with no taste anyway. Assholes.

It doesn't matter, because Crystal Antlers are survivors. The new stuff pops, the old stuff rocks, and even if Sound Control this evening is doomier and whiter than Edward Scissorhands' hiding place, you can't stop a band from doing it, not when they're this good.

Mt. Eerie then. This was a few weeks ago, I am afraid I cannot recall the date. Last time I saw Phil, he was cross-legged playing fey acoustic stuff, at a time when I didn't really want that kind of stuff. His fans aren't really my kind of people either; there's always this ultra-reverential atmosphere that I can barely resist farting throughout.

His last couple of releases have certainly been interesting, and I think I recognise in him what he's trying to do: get in touch with that 'wood spirit' that lies at the heart of 'black metal', rather than the corpse-paint and spikes and the blasphemy. There are certain chords that are deep and true and quite primal and it would be interesting to see if Mr. Elvrum, famed maker of melancholic acoustic albums, could successfully find his inner metal without resorting to hideous riffola and elven lore.

Not enough rock shows are funny. They're all ultra-serious, this-is-my-art kind of events, which is wholly appropriate for some, but some dudes could just do with treading on a rake once in a while.

Mt. Eerie are funny. Not in a way that makes them novelty, or silly, or make their music less pure, maaaaaan - but funny in a way that makes lead Eerie Phil Elvrum seem like more of a human and less of a phallus-toting rock bloke.

Before we discuss Mt. Eerie's humour, let us discuss No Kids, the support band AND backing band for Mt. Eerie. Sassy blue-eyed pop nuggets played by Games Workshop nerds, a twinkle in their eyes, they create the irresistible urge to dance. They're fun and sexy, but safe for pre-teens.



In their guise as axe-wielders for Mt. Eerie, they are transformed. Phil corpses. "We're going to play 10 to 11 rock songs. Have fun." Then the first chord hits. BAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMM. It's like being sideswiped by a Ford Cortina. The half-dozen or so cute, vegan, PETA-friendly, expensively dishevelled humans on stage launch into a skewed version of metal culled from the darkest forest in Norway. I laugh. My friend laughs. Many people look disheartened. Kaufman is alive! They keep this shtick up. It's brilliant. I want to mosh but there are people typing VERY HARD into their Blackberries.

They ease off the MetalZone pedals to play some gorgeous stuff, some from the Microphones days and some just as effortlessly good as he's always been, whatever the band name. This pleases all until one last ride to Valhalla, guitar raised uncynically aloft, crashing through the enchanted night. Hilarious, man. Brilliant.

A difference of opinion with myself

circular argument ago-go; short attention span bonus of two videos

I am a hypocrite. No, let me try that again. I am a complete fucking hypocrite. You know those people who moan that 'this bloody country' is dumbing down, getting stupid, lazy and contrite? That's because of me and people like me. I am a louse, a weed in a coat. A one-man surrender unit. I should be brutally done away with. It's only a million hypocritical shitguards like me who prevent me being found face down in a landfill 2000 years from now.

I have a job at Manchester University's weekly student newspaper as a music editor. I sub-edit, and occasionally write, copy - dealing with the dozens of gigs, records, interviews and other sundries the mega-conglomos deign to send us (I remember Sean Paul's management sending signed string-vests a few years back).

Last week, I reviewed the new Alice In Chains record. It was predictably duff. Here is what I said about it.

Grunge was over-rated. It grunted, griped and groused without grace, gumption or guile. At best it was a regional scene fussed over to a ridiculous degree. What began as disaffected outsider musing became backward-capped rock for middle-class jocks to blast in SUVs on the ride to the mall.

Alice In Chains were also-rans in the Great Grunge Boom of those early '90s, their shtick being a heavier, oblique take on the genre; hits included the indulgent dirge 'Them Bones' and the dirgily indulgent 'Rooster'. Variety and fun? Not in their navy!

Black Gives Way To Blue is their first full-length release in 14 years. Original vocalist Layne Staley may have shuffled off this mortal coil but he remains curiously present, not only in terms of subject matter, but because hired hand William DuVall can do an uncanny impression of the dearly departed.

There's no reason a fan of the original line-up should dislike this; it's as self-regarding, bloated and rigid as the group ever was. 'A Looking In View', the first single, serves as overture; plodding, over-produced and hopelessly irrelevant. Of course, it's immaculately performed and technically very adept; musicians as smug and macho as this demand it at the expense of any form of recognisable human expression.

The chainsaw-speeding-up-and-slowing-down riff to 'Check My Brain' is wasted on a song that doesn't get anywhere. The circular melodies and understated harmony on 'Private Hell' begin to mark it out as a diamond in the rough until the instincts to rock out – whilst kicking absolutely no ass whatsoever – take over.

The sad thing about this florid review is that it is absolutely nowhere near the truth of this despicable piece of shit. What I wanted to write was as many furiously hate-filled synonyms as I could, perhaps outlining some manifesto wherein bands who make systematically cynical and god-awful music as this could theoretically be sent to some kind of musicians' gulag for crimes against the human ear.

But then I started to think about the spurious notion of 'decorum' and how my inate sense of British politeness prevents me from being completely ruinous. Invective is poor show, old bean, pithiness is the way ahead.

Then I started to think about the press company that sent the record in good faith; they may be in the hot air business, but they're just normal men and women in jobs, trying to do their best for the lazy rich gits that appoint them to do their bidding.

After that I started to think about the newspaper itself; what if the press people stopped sending us records? It's not like they need to send shit to us anyway, we're basically just a student paper when you boil it down - students being the most likely to steal records, much as they are likely to steal other intellectual properties, such as entire fucking essays - so why bother marketing to the most morally corrupt of the demographics? We can't review fresh air.

And don't think that record execs and their nabobs can take the joke. The saying - 'any publicity is good publicity' - you know that one? Utter shite. Polydor refused to send a Robbie Williams record to us in the past because I'd slated another one of their acts weeks previously.

Then I started to think about the editor, and my fellow music sub-editors. They willingly entered into social contract with a normal person, not a person who thinks that an appropriate punishment for Mika for his crimes against music would be to suffer a similar fate as the man in the glasses in the video below. I like the relationships we have.



Other thoughts spiralled; what if I have a career in this and I ruin it by getting a reputation as someone who only stokes up controversy and bad relationships? Should I engender a better relationship with readers by slowly dragging them into my 'style' and then bring out the 'real opinion' later? What do I really think anyway? Do I even fucking know anymore?

By now, the copy is so imbued with outside concerns, second guessing and your basic level of flim-flam that it's basically as compromised as the godawful music it covers; lobotomised, hampered and kneeling. Why don't I just give them five stars and a hearty pat on the back for all the self-censorship it has endured?

Of course, this is the reason that everyone apart from the terminally insane is hypocritical to some degree; instinctual decisions in developed humans do not exist. All our decisions are to please someone else, or to present a version of ourselves that is more pleasing. The amount of times you could have left the house wearing a 'Macho Man' t-shirt and shorts, smelling of fetid kebab meat, only to think that someone you fancy might be around and potentially showing interest, marks you too out as a walking compromise too.



(Have you honestly heard such pointless cock in your life? Fucking plodding sex-free, humour-free US flag arsewaving...I could go on)

It is possible to live with yourself, to look in the mirror and be fine, because it is a natural state of living; deeds at odds with words. What really marks a person out as special is if they can cohere the two when it matters - and this daft rock record isn't one of those times.

Issue two out on Monday.