Conversation between Jarvis Cocker and David Thompson - on Youtube - effect of movies on us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCxEG2NQv7c&t=3942s


What did Hollywood do to us? It turned us into spectators. And the TV made it worse as people spent hours a day watching it. It made us feel that participation in politics is futile. People in the sixties took to the streets and marched against nuclear weapons - they don't do that anymore. TV has an enormous appetite for disaster and crisis and we will watch the end of the world on TV.

The entertainment that came from the movies was fantastic, inspirational. Now movies come to us, closer and closer (beamed into our heads?) As children we think - "that's what it will be like when I grow up". Movies are always for young people. They teach you, when you are young, how to look, how to walk across a room, how to look at someone of the opposite sex.

Hollywood films were like advertisements for life. From the beginning people in high places were alarmed about the movies. They were feeding poor people dreams that cannot be realised. That's dangerous, politically, and those in authority are still afraid of the movies.

They were made by people who had shaky backgrounds and made fortunes [like Charlie Chaplin] giving themselves the means to behave badly, which behaviour attracted a lot of publicity. The Code came into effect to stop films showing moral lapses so that Hollywood, by policing itself, could avoid being censored by the state. But in the long term it didn't really matter. In the 1960s the code broke down. Crime was shown as well as sex - censorship was abandoned.

For a long time America was the model for movies. Films expressed the belief that if you came to America everything will be alright. You will be fulfilled and happy. This cannot be possible, mathematically. People went to the movies to see futures for themselves. These futures were realised by very few ordinary people - but in Hollywood dreams were made possible - Louis Meyer, Clarke Cable were two examples. This mass medium ensured a certain kind of order and aspiration.

Buster Keaton made a film called "Sherlock Junior" where he is a projectionist and he enters into the screen. It tells the audience that it knows that's what they want to do - be up there in the film. Purple Rose of Cairo, too, is a very interesting film showing how people's lives interact with film.

But now people are having to face the fact that their desires are not going to be fulfilled. Were they idiots ever to think it? People have distanced reality through the screen. The reason we go to the movies is to see wonderful people and imagine you are them. The kitchens in movies (and on TV in America)  are large, the clothes are smart, the people are good-looking.

 Religious faiths had said to people: "God is watching and at the end of your life of mundanity and suffering you will get what you truly deserve." While this view of the world was fading away movies came along as a popular fiction that everyone could relate to. Everyone in the world. It was in the medium. It was a myth that replaced religious faith. But now the myths have been blown apart. What happens next?

Some people believe that now the world will end. We have so many problems that it's difficult to believe that we can solve them.

The way the vocabulary of film developed - the techniques - happened very quickly. Close ups - all over the world people learned that you can vary the position of the camera. Then you are into two cameras and editing the film. In Russia there was great experimentation to see how meaning was effected by making different shots. People discovered that you can play with the order of the stories - and the audience makes the meaning. When the film is finally shown to the audience is when you know whether your film is any good. Film is an interactive medium.

In the early days of the 20th century the Nickleodeon showed U.S. audiences things they didn't know about - like the pyramids in Egypt, a tiger walking through a jungle. A flood, a disaster. The basic visual information was wonderful for people. But now people are blasé, and take the motion they can see for granted.

If you show people wilder and wilder things - faster and greater than life  - through CGI - and other special effects people will perhaps attend less to the human face, although this is still the most powerful communicator.

Film is in our blood but TV is more so.  We absorb what we watch and how it is constructed. TV may give us 5 hours a day to absorb. Using the remote gives us something like jazz - as we move from one programme to another. TV is anti-concentration. But TV is over - as it was. Using the internet is not as passive as TV.

As TV develops there are more and more invitations to people to come on down, or participate in shows. Young people film themselves and each other all the time. They want to be in films. Some achieve fame by making suicide films.

When you go to the cinema, there in the dark, you don't know what horror you are going to be shown. Kids love to be frightened. You can't forget some of the frightening moments you see on screen - such as the scene in Alien when the creature bursts out of John Hurt's chest.

When a character in Hitchcock climbs a staircase - they're vulnerable. Playing with fear is a part of the nature of movies. The audience is helpless. Films are like dreams, at a different level. Dreams are also out of our control.

Now people are watching movies or TV content more and more on their own - something which Edison foresaw. This changes society. At rock festivals people do things in crowds - this is now a rare experience.

Jean Harlow - seemed trashy, sexually ready, didn't seem to be wearing underwear. In the thirties she seemed to be the rawest star in Hollywood, and she often appeared with Clark Gable. She lived dangerously, recklessly, and she didn't take care of herself. Health had little place in the culture. Now movie stars try to preserve their health and their youth - they didn't used to.

Howard Hughes - he is an example of the rich kid who wanted to get into the moves, screw movie stars. His father made a fortune out of inventing a drilling head for the oil industry. As a young man he was charming and personable, but he went crazy. He had everything he could possibly want, and he lived and died alone.

David Thompson sums up: We know we need to dream - it's vital to sleep. Sometimes people are disturbed by their dreams. Freud could tell people what their dreams meant but he didn't say he could make them change or stop. We dream helplessly, randomly. Don't worry about casting the dream out. Probably the truth is that you're going to die and you want to be alive, and you live with an intellectual struggle between those things. For 100 years moving film has had a profound effect on that conflict, sometimes terrifying, sometimes like heaven. You probably can't have one without the other.

Trip to Edinburgh for the Festival

My neighbour Amanda and I spent one evening and two days at the Edinburgh Festival, staying in a Budget Backpackers and seeing mainly Fringe shows. We had a private room at the Backpackers and it was very decent - well decorated inside - modern bathrooms, clean. Good communal areas, services and very kind staff. A brief resume of our trip follows:-

Free show - 4 comedians taking turns at poking their heads through a sheet and going into their spiels  to make us laugh - 2 stars.

Day One
Free show in Royal Mile - Knife Juggler up a ladder - he was quite clever and amusing as well as good at balancing and juggling, but these guys spin out their shows for too long - 3 stars
Scottish National Gallery. Lovely: to see the paintings I am familiar with - like members of your family that I don't often see. - 5 stars
Drag Act with miming - downstairs in a pub - very interesting as the face had lots of black plastic needles sticking out of a stockingnette cover, while the hair part of the head was covered in plain stockingnette. I think needles all over the head would look better. Fun. - 2 stars
Nina Conti - Ventriloquism - big theatre at the Edinburgh Conference Centre - I don't know why she does her act with the monkey, as the act with the people from the audience is so much funnier. - 5 stars
Free show - 3 magicians in a downstairs room - all good. 4 stars
Paid for show at the Underbelly  - Your Ever Loving by Martin McNamara - this was on during the day and did well, but the cast hung on for another week and did a midnight show for tiny audiences - It was about Paul Hill whose "confession" got the Guildford Four and the Maguire family banged up. Poor bloke. He speaks aloud the letters he wrote to his mum from prison as well as telling his whole story. This play is fast and furious and the two actors (Stefan McCusker and James Elmes) were excellent. and the Director had done a great job. (Sarah Chapleo).- 5 stars -

Your Ever Loving uses Paul Hill’s letters, mostly sent to his mother from prisons up and down the country. They’re brought simply and charmingly to life by Stefan McCusker. He is a man enduring crippling restriction and loneliness and yet we see him for the most part in his element, attempting to keep his mother’s spirits up and arranging presents for a daughter he has never met. His situation is rendered sympathetically, but McNamara’s play doesn’t gloss over the faults of the man himself, made violent, taut and spiky by years in prison.   https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/your-ever-loving-review-at-theatre-n16-london/

Day Two
Climbed Arthur's seat. 5 stars for the view.

Amanda

Free Show - Joe Wells, stand up comedian. He is really good and I predict he will be well-known one day. He did a routine about someone's attitudes changing with the passing of time. He took the audience into his world and took us on a journey. We were in a safe pair of hands. He also wore a T-shirt that said YOKO WAS THE BEST BEATLE. You gotta respect that. - 5 stars.
Expensive ventriloquism show at the Pleasance - Nina Conti supposedly talking to a psychiatrist. Very disappointing as the ideas led nowhere. Dull. - 2 stars
Free show at the Cowshed on Cowgate - Scottish Blues band - these old boys (and one of them, who played guitar and harmonica, was really old) knew their stuff and they were amazing. Enjoyed it so much. - 5 stars
Free show comedians - somewhere on Cowgate - forgettable. 2 stars

Expensive show - Room 29 - Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales at the Proper Festival, King's Theatre. We got the tickets at the last minute so the seats were awful - we were actually higher than the ceiling and I could only feel "connected" to the show by leaning very far forward - the music was lovely - piano music written by Chilly, and lyrics by Jarvis. It would work better in a cabaret venue than in a practically vertical theatre. The idea is that we are entertained by Jarvis in his Hotel Room. "Help yourself to pretzels" he says, in his dark and intimate voice. "Room 29 is where I'll face myself alone", he sings, in a croaky but affecting voice. You can hear this track on Youtube  It is a very confessional piece. He castigates himself for not being able to hold down a real relationship with a girlfriend, preferring something less personal. (Tearjerker.) It looks at the allure of Hollywood, and it considers what the habit of staring of screens has had on us. It considers Hollywood's preoccupation with sex and what effect that might have had on Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes. There is a strange song about Mark Twain's daughter - mocking her because she became an alcoholic. (Why mock her? She was not a talented writer or player but - is that a reason to mock someone?) Jarvis considers the wonderful allure of film and latterly, TV, and how it turns out to be a sham god, an illusion. One song about this disillusion with TV is called "The Other Side". (Unfortunately he went off stage for this bit and appeared in a telly on stage - which was not original and was too static to hold the attention.)

Then he becomes quite distressed with a song called "Trick of the Light" how he fell in love with "life with the boring bits taken out" -  "I wasted my life on a trick of the light" - Then there was a dancer in red who twirled around to a strobe light - this was simply beautiful and we were in the best place to see it - from way up high. There was a string quartet to fill out the music - whirling around to fade out in sadness.

I thought - "Oh this is a work of art" - because it was a considered work that didn't hang together quite right, but it united a number of elements - music, dancing, speech, a screen with pictures and some film, even some audience participation - this wasn't very good either -  in a way that hasn't been done before. I was very glad I was there.

Then another song about how the stars of the thirties were genuinely cool and how the people of today don't compare - no class. The stars of the thirties mixed with genuinely cultured people - refugees from Europe. This is called "Ice Cream as Main Course" and was more resolved - a salute to the past.

After this Jarvis and co did an encore - a Leonard Cohen song called "Paper Thin Hotel" which was very affecting and a high point of the evening.

A Guardian review is here and the album review is here
And that was Edinburgh, which was looking lovely.

Sir John Betjeman

You would never think that Sir John B could become a fashionable enthusiasm. He is such a parochial poet, stuck to his narrow island, Victorian churches, London, Cornwall, his class consciousness that always prompted him, out of good manners, to be good company; to talk, to share, to be sweet. And yet Suggs has chosen him on Cultural Exchange, and Jarvis Cocker once said he was listening to Betjeman on his ipod. You listen to Betjeman's voice to be comforted and charmed, rocked by the steady rhythm and inevitable rhymes, but also to be moved by the subtleties of emotion, the message of the huge Cornwall seas roaring and breaking, and to come face to face with fear of death or faith in Christianity - one of my favourites is called Before the Anaesthetic. There is something of the English Hymnal and the Book of Common Prayer about Betjeman's work, something that we have in the backs of our minds as part of the common culture and the dimly-remembered shared relationship with our English God, which these days only the Queen seems to fully comprehend.

But there are also the feelings that people develop for places - the love of home, of some small corner of this little island. I think this poem is little-celebrated but it reminds me of my hut on the island.

Eunice

With her latest roses happily encumbered
Tunbridge Wells Central takes her from the night,
Sweet second bloomings frost has faintly umbered
and some double dahlias waxy red and white.

Shut again till April stands her little hutment
Peeping over daisies Michaelmas and mauve
Lock'd is the Elsan in its brick abutment
Lock'd the little pantry, dead the little stove.

Keys with Mr Groombridge, but nobody will take them
To her lonely cottage by the lonely oak,
Potatoes in the garden but nobody to bake them,
Fungus in the living room and water in the coke.

I can see her waiting on the chilly Sunday
For the five forty (twenty minutes late)
One of many hundreds to dread the coming Monday
To fight with influenza and battle with her weight

Tweed coat and skirt that with such anticipation
On a merry spring time a friend had trimm'd with fur
Now the friend is married and, oh desolation,
Married to the man who might have married her.

High in Onslow Gardens where the soot flakes settle
An empty flat is waiting her struggle up the stair
And when she puts the wireless on, the heater and the kettle
It's cream and green and cosy, but home is never there.

Home's here in Kent and how many morning coffees
And hurried little lunch times of planning will be spent
Through the busy months of typing in the office
Until the days are warm enough to take her back to Kent.

Betjeman did sometimes go abroad - Vienna, perhaps? - and felt very singular, as we see in the following poem.

In the Public Gardens

In the Public Gardens,
To the airs of Strauss,
Eingang we're in love again
When ausgang we were aus.

The waltz was played, the songs were sung,
The night resolved our fears;
From bunchy boughs the lime trees hung
their gold electroliers.

Among the loud Americans
Zwei Englander were we,
You so white and frail and pale
And me so deeply me;

I bought for you a dark red rose,
I saw your grey-green eyes,
As high above the floodlights,
The true moon sailed the skies.

In the Public Gardens,
Ended things begin;
Ausgang we were out of love
Und eingang we are in.

Lucky me, I have a recording of Betjeman reading these poems and you can't get them on Youtube. They sound better than you would guess from reading them inwardly.