man tiger [w. eka kurniawan, tr. labodalih sembiring]

Man Tiger, a novel which caused quite a stir in the English speaking world when it was first translated, is an elegantly written tale of provincial Indonesian life. It has more than a little in common with Mia Couto’s Confessions of the Lioness, with the idea of anthropomorphism to the fore. Margio, a likeable young man with a troubled history finds himself killing the father of the woman he loves when he is possessed by a tiger. The killing itself is described early on in the book in savage detail. It’s an arresting moment, but it becomes clear as the novel unfolds that this objective is not sensationalism, but to grip the reader in the vice of the story which then goes on to explore gender mores and morals. The violence that surges in Margio is an extension of a casual violence that pervades, from the boar hunts to the domestic violence suffered by Margio’s mother at the hands of his lazily sadistic father. Kurniawan teases out the complexities of the society he depicts, showing how Margio’s savage, irrational act possesses a clear and tangible context, as well as making it clear that the real victim here is Margio, rather than the man he kills. 

punk rock an oral history (john robb)

This is the third book of oral history I’ve read in recent months. It’s an innately satisfying way to get your history. John Robb’s edited account is comprehensive, looking at the evolution of punk in the early 70s through to the end of that decade, by which time the movement had mutated and fractured. 

Punk arrived half a decade early for me, but I knew the Britain that the opening chapters describe, a time when the idealism of the sixties had perished, when Britain’s inner cities felt hollowed out and dedicated to concrete. The grimness of British high streets in the late seventies was pandemic. (In fairness, in the more deprived parts of the country this is something that hasn’t changed all that much.) There was nothing to do except hang out and look for trouble, or look to avoid trouble. On a tangential note, I think this is when I first began to feel European as much as British, because visiting Europe seemed to offer another vision of urban interaction, one which ran parallel to the British version, but seemed warmer, more inclusive. This might have been rose-tinted spectacles, but at the very least it suggested a communality which persists to this day.  My friend Jason listened to PIL’s Metal Box. By this point, about 1980, the Pistols were already past tense, and the unravelling and recalibration of punk which the book captures so acutely was under way. The Damned was more Captain Sensible than The Damned. The Clash were already transforming into a brand that could be appropriated by frat boys and their ilk.

However, as the book makes clear, many of the punk pioneers were only a few years older than me. Again and again the book highlights the tiny world that the movement sprung from, a few musicians cross-fertilising, swapping from band to band, influenced by each other’s music and fashion. People in Manchester, Glasgow or other towns would get the night train to London, sleep on station floors and then carry back their R&D to the homeland. Perhaps this localised world still exists, in the sphere of styles of music whose name we don’t even know yet, but in an information age, it seems hard to conceive of the same kind of scene emerging. Firstly, the minute it could be defined, it would be hyped to kingdom come, and secondly the sheer range of musical possibilities has mushroomed. 

So in a way, the book ends up feeling like a lament for a lost era no-one would particularly want to have to revisit. There’s a lot of nostalgic affection expressed by the interviewees for the halcyon days, but also a frequent clear-sightedness about the way in which this was a fleeting moment which was contained the seeds of its own destruction, and was perhaps all the better for being so. It’s a great introduction to punk, that much-used word whose meaning is so hard to pin down. 

darling (d john schlesinger, w frederick raphael)

Darling is a curious movie, almost interesting for those movies that it isn’t than the one that it is. The movies that it isn’t include two vertiginous London portrayals: Repulsion (1965) and Blow Up (1966), as well as Accident (1967). Also Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), not to mention Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Indeed, with its Paris and Capri sequences, this is a film that seems to aspire towards a European sensibility, something the occasional freeze frame and ambitious tracking shot reinforces. 

However, there’s an uneasiness to the whole melange, as though the director and screenwriter’s thematic and stylistic ambitions don’t quite marry. In part, one suspects, this is because there’s a timidity surrounding the protagonist, Julie Christie’s Diana. Diana, her erstwhile boyfriend, Robert, (played by Dirk Bogarde with his usual judicious flair), says, is a whore, someone who has slept her way to the top. But Christie is far too homely to really convince in this role. Christie is as luminous as ever, and any moral doubts we might have regarding her behaviour are never given room to flower. She doesn’t have the vulnerability of Deneuve in Repulsion either, we never really worry she’s about to go off the rails.

However, given that this is a flawed film, it’s still fascinating to observe the scope of the movie’s ambition. It’s not hard to see how a script like this would nowadays be shepherded straight off to the TV execs, to turn into a series. Which on one level makes sense: this is a film trying to package a raft of narrative which it doesn’t quite  pull off; but on the other hand it reminds us of cinema’s capacity to investigate not just a sector of society, but the whole raging caboodle. In which sense, one suspects that Schlesinger’s greatest influence might have been Fellini, a filmmaker who successfully used the medium to offer panoramic views of his psycho-sexual-social environment. These kind of films just don’t get made any more in the UK (I can’t think of any). Which seems a pity: we have the stars; we have the technical resources; we have the screenwriters… maybe we don’t have the audiences? Or maybe that kind of overarching remit is no longer relevant to the localised issues that British cinema seeks to address. 

nick cave and the bad seeds at the teatro del verano, montevideo

Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of the Brazilian election on Sunday. I messaged my friend who is following the campaign for the indigenous candidate for the vice-presidency, Sonia Guajajara, as a photographer. He said her campaign HQ was “like a funeral.”

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In 1994, Luis Charamello, a sweet-hearted gay actor, invited my 27 year old self, and my friend Sedley, for supper. We knew fuck all about the Latin American history, really. Isolated in a Western European, Anglo-Saxon bubble. We knew there had been a dictatorship, which had only ended 10 years ago. I think we both commented that, all the same, Montevideo seemed very normal. You’d never have guessed. Yes, Luis told us. But we know they’re still out there, waiting. 

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Twenty five years later, the fascists, the self-avowed fascists, are coming back with a vengeance. Bolsonaro might not have won the presidency in the first round, but he’s going to win the second. Nearly 45% voted for him. The age of social democracy is dying. All over the world. Your right to be the person you choose to be isn’t going to last much longer. You belong to the state. Because fascism, no matter how much it might be dressed up as libertarianism, always comes back to state control and the abolition of individual rights. Bolsonaro has no qualms about taking about indigenous people the same way the white settlers of the the 17th century did. Women do not have equal rights in his world. As for “the minorities” and their right to be different, forget it. Brazil, like the USA, like Russia, like China, like Hungary or Poland, Italy, and my own self-harming country, is heading in one direction and that direction has nothing to do with ‘the rights of man’.

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On Sunday, the street I live on bustles with life. It’s Día del Patrimonio.A day when the Ciudad Vieja gets transformed, a normally sleepy barrio is consumed by the city. We walk down the street. A trombone player catches Claudia’s eye. Mine is caught by a skinny, tall man in a crisp shirt, with long hair, looking like a decadent banker. It’s Nick Cave, going for a stroll through the Old Town, before he plays his gig with The Bad Seeds on the following day, a gig we’re going to. No-one seems to bother Cave. A photo appears on Twitter of him buying something in front of my house. 

When I first came here, Sedley arrived to visit soon after I’d settled in. He told me he’d been at a party a few weeks ago, and Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss or someone had been there. I told him, somewhat smugly, that part of the reason I liked being here was that no-one had the faintest idea who those people were. The cult of celebrity didn’t appear to hold much sway. It’s changed a bit, but not that much. 

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The day of the gig, the day after the first round of the Brazilian election, is swelteringly hot. We all know that means a storm is going to break in the evening. In the rehearsal with Claudia and Pato, we talk about Cave and about rock ’n roll and whether the good die young and how you keep going, doing the same thing over and over, time after time. At what point does that repetition imply a distillation of value. How do you keep the flame burning, as you move into your fifties, your sixties. 

One of Cave’s songs references Robert Johnson, the original devil-dealing rock ’n roll star. Or the first documented, mythologised one. There have been rock ’n roll stars since the dawn of time. Johnson, who made the pact and sold his soul, but never sold out. 

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The Teatro de Verano fills up. We’re in the expensive seats, in the front. A local band, Buenos Muchachos, opens. They are dark and intense. Claudia’s friend is going out with the long haired guitarist. She thinks the friend is in Spain, working on a theatre tour, and sends her a WA video. It turns out the friend is sitting five rows behind. Everyone knows at least half a dozen people at the gig. If you did even three degrees of Kevin Bacon separation, we’d all be cousins. I go to get beers after the Buenos Muchachos and in the queue, an actor starts speaking to me, and then an actress I don’t know appears and says she’s there with my actor, Pato. Montevideo is one big little village. 

#

Nick Cave is a daddy-long-legs. In my mind’s eye he was always a short Tom Thumb figure, but my mind’s eye was all wrong. Nick Cave is a gangly, long-limbed puppet of a man. His limbs splay all over the place. He’s a dancer who convinces through performance rather than grace. In the blink of an eye his body concertinas to the floor, then he’s up, drop-kicking the mike. 

Above all, Cave loves to love and be loved. Pretty soon he’s perched on the barrier separating crowd from stage, held up by nothing more than the strength of a dozen audience members’ hands. His song talks about the heart going ‘boom boom boom’ and he beseeches the audience to place their hands on his open breast and feel his heart going ‘boom boom boom.’ 

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The night is warm but the storm is coming. Cave and the Bad Seeds’ music plunges into the humid air. Elaborate orchestral arrangements, with cowbells, electric violins, swooning endless choruses. Songs made to be re-arranged, songs which are a journey all of their own.

In the Punk book oral history I’ve just read, there are accounts of the ‘1,2,3,4’ songs. Every song starts like that and ends two minutes later. The book tells of the impact of the Ramones, who I saw in Leeds, in 1984, a decade into their reign. And every song was indeed punctuated by that numeration, as though the songs were olympic sprints, over before you knew it. The cumulative effect was bewildering, dramatic: you didn’t know where one song began and another ended, as though all the songs were all part of one great song whose chorus was ‘1,2,3,4’. As though the band would have been happier playing their forty minute set as one long, impenetrable song, but tradition dictated that this one song be broken down, and Joey Ramone paid lip service to this with the religious use of numerology.

Cave’s songs seemed to have skipped the need for lip service. His songs spiral into themselves, blues riffs which could last all night. Every song has secret rooms and loud rooms and an altarpiece and devotees prostrate before the altar, and renegades spitting at the altar, and Cave in the middle, leading the service like the gothic high priest he aspired to be and then became, the short man who became an alien god. 

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And in the night there are demons and devils. Cave sings about them, but they’re out there now, I can sense them. Bolsonaro. The guys who go to Trump rallies with T-shirts saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” The liars and the snake-oil merchants. They’re always there in the Manichean struggle but for forty years or more they’ve been kept at bay, pushed back, forced into the shadows. The world appeared to belong to tonight’s audience who have come to listen to an Australian and his band shine their mocking light on authority, the smell of weed in the air; a crowd who glory in their difference, their right not to be who their parents wanted them to be, noses pierced, hair dyed, defiantly searching their id. 

When punk kicked off in the grey lowlands of my very youth, the kids recognised that the easiest, quickest ticket to questioning the status quo was to represent yourself as different. Safety pins, plastic clothes, spiked hair. Chains and dog collars. The beauty of ugliness. Once upon a time you could have been shot or lynched for dressing like that. Strapped to a witches’ chair and dunked until you drowned. But the world was so rundown, so down-at-heel, that a chink appeared, a space where the freedom not to be like all the rest opened up, and the punk movement seized that slice of light and used it to prise society open.

Which has lead to this place, here, this night, beneath the stars. Where the threat has been forgotten. Where liberty, in the shape of a six-foot Australian and his demented band, strides the blast, saying, Yeah Yeah Yeah. Telling us to push the night away. 

#

I glance over my shoulder. The lightening in the clouds above the great open spaces of the River Plate is constant now. Cave doesn’t speak much to his audience. He has other ways of communicating, song and trance and hypnosis, but now he looks to the sky and tells us that the storm is coming. It’s held off, but it’s coming. He wants the rain. You can sense it. He’ll play until the rain comes. He’s playing for the storm.

Then he surges out into the auditorium. He scales the barrier and climbs the steps. They reach out to touch him. They scream ‘thank you, Nick’ or ‘gracias Nicki’. He reaches the divide, where the cheap seats are perched high in the bowl of the Teatro de Verano. On stage his image is filmed, projected back. The priest with his congregation. He stands there, glorious in the adulation.

The song surges, ebbs, gets lost in time. He’s there with his people for an hour or two or three or four. For a day or two or three or four. For all the years of their lives. 

Then he’s back on stage and the rain comes. Fat dollops of rain, falling like manna. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘the fucking rain’.

And then the band really starts to play. 

We stand there under the rain which falls in sheets now. Is the rain a presage of the flood? Or is it washing away our sins? Or is it all of this and more? 

The stick-man on stage plays the piano, communes with his followers. He wants to be part of the band, he wants to be part of the crowd, he wants to be everything and nothing all at once. 

The rain falls and the night is a blasted heath and we push the darkness away. 

tijuana (d. gabino rodríguez, lagartijas tiradas al sol)

A man with a moustache is already on stage as the play opens. He has his back to us. There is a large TV screen on set and a small neat pile of bricks. Behind is a large painted canvas with a representation of Tijuana. The man proceeds to explain that he is an actor who decided to go to Tijuana and work in a maquillardora (a sweatshop factory) near the border for six months as an investigative project. He tells us that he filmed secretly and badly and also recorded audio. This is the story of his time in Tijuana. 

What follows over the course of the next hour or so is his account of his stay, punctuated by a recorded interview of the same actor somewhere else, (DF), giving an interview about his experiences. We, the audience, know that we are part of a theatrical game: the account being given is partial and not particularly trustworthy. In the end the actor says that he had to cut his time short, because he was scared of being found out. In the neighbourhood where he is staying, a poor neighbourhood, he has heard a story of a lynching. There are codes in the barrio, and he doesn’t want to fall awry of them. 

As such, dramatically, not a lot happens. Nevertheless, the piece remains compelling. This is in part because of the dramatic suspense inherent in the set-up, but also because the story offers a window on a world from which few stories have emerged. Pace Humbolt, in an age where the geographical world has been charted, then the uncharted waters are the urban no-go areas where the majority of the world’s population now lives. What is it really like to live in a barrio where the police won’t enter on the California border? The actor makes clear in the play, repeatedly, that he doesn’t want to romanticise poverty. He wants to communicate what it’s like to live there on a subsistence wage, making the goods which the Western world consumes, at the hard end of the neo-liberal machine. 

Inevitably, the portrait is partial. As the actor observes, he knows it’s not for life. But there are moments in the play, - the sad disco, the classical music loving political activist, family meals, the social codes - that register on the audience’s consciousness above and beyond the confines of the theatre. For a while, we walk in the actor’s footsteps, through the alleyways of Tijuana. 

ps - There is a more detailed and scholarly debate to be had (which was touched upon in the post-show discussion) about “documentary theatre” as well as the wave of quasi-biographical theatre (“auto-ficcion”) which is sweeping Latin America (Sergio Blanco, Lola Arias etc.). The ethics and the effectiveness of this re-imagining of theatre. However, that debate, discussion could perhaps wait for another moment.