New Digs, Again

Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

 We sold our house a bit more than a year ago and have lived in another apartment until now- a smallish two bedroom one just off a busy, busy street. The people surrounding us were either quiet and non-judgemental, inhabiting their innocuous spaces, or they were friendly and harmless, agreeable benign apparitions in our small garden. Living in tight and predictable enclosed spaces doesn’t agree with me. I am glad to be away from it. I find renting is unsettling, but it’s not just that. It’s the lack of mystery and openness. I like some things to be secluded and hidden and undisturbed.

So we have left the little apartment behind, which, for all intents and purposes, was pretty kind to us in its uncomplicated style. We have spent our first night in the new place. A proper house with stairs and enough rooms, and a bit of mystery and seclusion, and little places to put things, and these lovely stained glass doors and windows. It feels like a lucky house- or at least, that it might be when the finishing touches take place. It still needs plastering and painting, and we cannot put some things away in their proper places because we know that the air will be disturbed again by noise and workmen making messes in the name of making things look better.

But who’s complaining? I can tinker away in my upstairs study surrounded by some beautiful books. I have these large picture books by Umberto Eco near me. One of them, called ‘The Infinity of Lists’, has a lovely picture by Burne-Jones on the cover. A detail from ‘The Golden Stairs.’ There is a Munch biography on display next to it featuring an intense self-portrait on the cover. Munch is staring in anguish holding a cigarette in his right hand. The three Thames and Hudson volumes of the ‘Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh’ sit underneath it. These are books that were purchased for me in December 1986, and will always be with me for their sheer beauty. The new Edinburgh University volumes of Katherine Mansfield’s works are also lovely. The first volume of her complete stories features a browny-purple cover, and has a photo of KM from 1910, at the age of 22, living in London like a bohemian and looking almost Maori. She is wearing a smug expression. The second volume is a rich blue, and its cover features a photo of KM from 1920, living in a hotel in Menton, France, at 32 but looking more middle aged and more mature than this, wiser, with barely three years to live. It is the year of the great volume of stories called ‘Bliss.’ I even have all my old diaries at my feet, the first entry of the first diary dealing with my turbulent emotions after the assassination of John Lennon.

 

 

 

Already this study feels like it has been with me for a long time. I can see a portion of the outside street from the window above my desk. Dusk is invading the street and there are some people outside somewhere talking. There is a tall plane tree in the right hand corner, its branches filled with ferns that are reaching upwards towards the sky. There are empty boxes around me and everything else is ghostly quiet. I can think and feel and breathe better than I have been able to do for a long time. It’s a quarter to nine at night. In the Australian summer there is still some light, but soon much of the light will be bluish, glowing from the computer screen.

 

 

Paul Cox at Duneira, and 'The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinski'

 

THIS new post brings me back to the hugely underrated Australian film director, Paul Cox. His films are out of fashion, and have been for years. Rarely do they make much, or any, money. There are never any car chases or guns; rarely is there a well- known face amongst the cast; the films have a very small budget; they are not fast-action paced; they do not feature sudden loud bursts of music and product placement; heads are never blown away and limbs are never severed; it is doubtful anyone would ever buy ‘the soundtrack; the editing is often slow-paced and the viewer often receives more than a second or two to think about what is happening on the screen; often there is no murder or mystery or particularly strong intrigue; often the people in his films have basic jobs and live fairly ordinary lives. He is certainly no Quentin Tarantino or Steven Spielberg, but he is no Ken Loach or Mike Leigh either. Paul Cox’s film, if anything, resemble those quiet, reflective films of Europe- (think Krystof Kieslowski and Ingmar Bergman) and Russia (Aleksander Sukorov).

I like Paul Cox’s films because they are uncompromised and beautifully shot. Watching his films is a meditative and rewarding experience. And you know that he has put his heart and soul into the project, and thought more about the integrity of the end product rather than the amount of money the film might make. Now that has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s also good that not every director is like Paul Cox.

This, my fourth Paul Cox-related adventure, took place on Sunday at the beautiful ‘Duneira’ property at Mount Macedon. We sat in the front row on the right, on a lovely soft couch. There were about 50 people there, and I think we were the youngest. Some people looked very arty, like they may have been in one of his films before. Initially I felt like I was gate crashing a party, then after a while I fully relaxed and felt the buzz of being a part of everything.

He spoke briefly about the making of ‘The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.’ Then he showed the film, a small projection on the wall using a small projector. It would have been more glorious on the big screen, but it was still very captivating, and reminded me of his film ‘Vincent.’ There was a lot of imagery, and stills of Nijinsky, and many dancers, both male and female, representing him and his world. The voice over was by Derek Jacobi (an inspired choice, as was the choice of John Hurt for the Van Gogh letters in the earlier film). Jacobi read from his posthumous diaries. Nijinsky’s world became quite chaotic, and this was captured in the at times seemingly random projection of images. Nijinsky’s diaries consist of an ongoing critique of the world and an obsession with truth and beauty. I read them years ago, and was fascinated by the way they chart the slow mental deterioration of the man when his dancing career was finished and he was surviving the post-war years of WW2. These were heartfelt and beautiful sentiments. A repeated motif was the sad photo of Nijinsky as Petrushka, the traditional puppet from his ballet of 1911, as well as shots of flying birds and grainy images of trees silhoutted against the sky.  Much of the film was made in France. It was a success in Europe, like a number of Cox’s films, and had that real European sensibility that would make it impossible to pick Cox as an Australian director.

 

Nijinsky, along with Vincent, is a hero to Paul Cox. Cox himself has much in common with both of them, not the least their uncompromising view of things and their critical eye on what they perceive as the injustices of the world, as well as their unique artistic vision that is seemingly always out of fashion and ahead of its time. In one tragic scene Cox shot an actor acting out a chaotic dance of Nijinsky’s in a nightclub, depicting his failing grip on reality and his diminishing powers. His wife, Romola, sat, in the audience, looking embarrassed, perhaps ashamed.

At the end of the film, Cox spoke to all of us about his herculean act of editing such a difficult project and how it nearly made him become just as mad as his subject. There were the caustic comments about the banks and capitalism that I have heard before, the madness that is parts of the United States (its insane worship of guns in particular), the sorry state of the Arts in Australia (his disbelief that George Brandis is the Arts minister in the current government), his anger on the subject of film censorship, and the way in which the premiere of this particular film was cancelled on the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

Just as Paul Cox got to know the great grandson of Vincent Van Gogh- (the filmmaker and activist Theo Van Gogh who was murdered several years ago), after this film he also came to know Kyra Nijinsky, the daughter of Vaslav Nijinsky. In his pocket he carefully keeps as a talisman a black Jesus pendant given to him by Kyra, which once belonged to Vaslav himself. Perhaps not coincidentally, Cox’s daughter is also called Kyra.

Before too long Paul Cox disappeared, and I left him with a carefully constructed Van Gogh card ‘(Oleanders’) as a token of my appreciation. On the card I thanked him and wrote of my Vincent pilgrimages, and incorporated some quotations from Vincent’s letters.

At the end of all that the mind feels incredibly enriched. The pettiness of the modern world suddenly seems far away, until you creep back to the city again and you discover that the Reserve Bank has generously kept interest rates on hold.

The best review of this film can be found at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/nijinsky/ 

 

 

Tragic events, different outcomes

                                    

 

Robert Farquarson left the road and drove himself and his three kids into a dam near Geelong in 2005. Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend by shooting her several times through a locked bathroom door in 2013. How terrifying for the young boys, Bailey, Jai and Tyler, and how terrifying for Reeva Steenkamp. The Farquarson kids drowned whilst their father swam to safety on Father’s Day. Pistorius opened the bathroom door and found his wife’s bleeding body on the bathroom door on Valentine’s Day. What is the significance of these dates? Were these actions deliberate, and therefore callous, cold-blooded murder? Pistorius got off- manslaughter rather than homicide, the judge in Pretoria unsure whether or not he was aware that it was his wife on the other side of the door. Farquarson was not so lucky. After three trials and various judges and men and women of the jury, he was found guilty of deliberately killing his children, and is currently serving a minimum of 33 years in jail. What a conversation the pair of them could have if they were ever able to get together over some hearty jail food, watching the world go by through thick, black iron bars, or having an intimate stroll together around some prison yard in their bright orange clothing watching out for the menace of bald, tattooed heavyweights.

If we can believe the judge and her intuition, Pistorius made an awful error, mistaking his young wife for a threatening intruder. If so, he probably deserves no worse than his current fate. We may never know how guilt-ridden he feels right now in his first nights in the cell. Farquarson’s culpability, too, must be open to conjecture. Pistorius has his emphatic supporters who swear his innocence, improbable as it might be to the skeptic who finds his story just a little bit hard to swallow. Wasn’t there a quite vocal argument between he and Steenkamp on that night? Did he really forget to check in on her, to make sure she was next to him in their bed like he says he assumed. Did he really think it was her making noises in the bathroom? Didn’t she yell out in severe stress after the first bullet was fired?

It’s interesting how family sticks by you (as they say) through thick and thin. It is probably the way it should be. Farquarson’s sisters are just as steadfastly behind him, despite his equally improbable story. In fact, their fate could easily have been switched. The general public really had no idea how either of these cases might go. Pistorius might have received 33 years, and Farquarson the tentative five that Pistorius received. It is because there were no witnesses to either incidents. How do the rest of us really and truly know? And that goes for supporters and skeptics alike. It’s an awful question to ask, but can the difference in sentencing simply come down to the acting ability of either defendant? To education, money or class? To the fact that one was a struggling Winchelsea nobody, and the other an Olympic star with an eye catching disability?

I have read two captivating books about the Farquarson case lately which, collectively, offer me a number of reasons where Farquarson might have gone wrong. I imagine I am visiting him in his sad and sorry cell.

‘When you were driving the boys home at 7:15 PM after your special Father’s Day outing, you needed to be more aware of the strangers driving behind you- the woman and her family who became witnesses at your trial to your erratic driving. It appeared to them, and no doubt to the jury at your trial, that you just may have been waiting impatiently for that Winchelsea dam to appear on your right hand side, and maybe you were practising your descent, swerving on the road with panic starting to set in. Just maybe you were thinking of drowning along with them, and wondering if you had the nerve to die.

Even before that night, perhaps a week or two before, you completely and recklessly dropped your guard outside the local fish’n’chip shop. Remember your old mate Greg King, the one who, probably in your mind, cruelly betrayed you? You saw your ex-wife Cindy Gambino and thought about her new boyfriend, Stephen Moules, didn’t you, and how he ended up with the shit car and you were lumped with the one that would become a coffin for the boys. Was it anger and frustration that possessed you to tell Greg of your plan to wreak revenge on Cindy, that it would occur on a special day like Father’s Day, that you would hurt her through her own children, that you would go to these extreme lengths to make her suffer for the way she left you feeling after your unhappy split? Greg came and saw you, didn’t he, all wired up for the anticipation of the police, and you were so careful, weren’t you, to ensure you didn’t say too much to Greg that might come back to bite you at the trial- but it was too late, essentially, wasn’t it, because in those moments of frustration you made another of those crucial errors that would lead a jury to put you away for a long time.

Let’s go back to the fatal evening when the driver of that random car has driven past you and has seen your children’s bodies crammed into the back of your car. Perhaps there were a few little coughs, perhaps there were no coughs at all, certainly not a ‘syncope’ as you described it later, as your car swerved maddeningly to the right, left the highway, avoided most of the trees, and plunged into the terrible, cold, black, black water. You might remember you switched the lights and the engine off- well somebody did and it was unlikely to be the boys all the way in the back seat. At your trial you conjectured that it might be so. There were so many ‘I don’t know(s)’ and ‘I can’t remember.’ None of this helped your cause.  You said you started coughing and coincidentally left the road just as that dam appeared on your right side. You said you coughed so much that you blacked out and then freakishly found yourself in the water. How is it that the path the car took on its way into the water was so miraculously unobstructed? Why didn’t you attempt to arrest the long slide into the water by using your brakes or altering your steering? Are you seriously saying that the whole time you lost control of the car, until you found yourself in the water, you were somehow unconscious? Once in the water, did you attempt to rescue your little children by opening their doors, or hauling them into the front with you, or at least grabbing little Bailey and swim to the surface with him? Did you, conversely, panic and alter your position, and leave the kids to drown as planned, but extricate yourself from the car because self-drowning was too terrifying? Why is it that you couldn’t really answer any of these questions in court, but kept saying ‘I can’t remember.’

After wading to safety and out of the dam, you decided not to keep looking for the children. If you recall you staggered, wet and deathly cold, to the highway and flagged down a car. There you made another fatal error which would come back to haunt you. You weren’t interested in phoning the police. You were desperate to be driven by Shane and Tony to Cindy’s place, car-less and children-less, to inform her with a certain amount of rambunctiousness that her children were dead- “I’ve got to tell Cindy that I’ve just killed the kids.”  You saw her face fall and heard her wailing screams. Back at the tragic site, with her and soon Stephen Moules, all you wanted was a cigarette. You stood there looking on, shivering, whilst he (not even yet the step-father of the boys) waded fruitlessly time and time again into the freezing water.

There was, of course, no hope. When the police arrived you were taken by ambulance to Geelong hospital. You didn’t do too well here, either. When you were interviewed you kept asking ‘what will happen to me?’ when the question the police expected to hear was ‘are my children really dead? have they been identified?’ (they had, by Stephen Moules). There was no mention by you of your poor children.

Later, you just couldn’t get your story straight. This is why the homicide squad moved in. Robert Farquarson was acting odd the whole time. He seemed to be more in preservation mode, rather than acting like a typically grieving father. Each time you rang Cindy, who was hungry for an accurate account of what really happened to help her in her elusive quest for peace, you sounded vague and uncertain, seemingly more interested in what she was thinking rather than any serious attempt to honestly recall.

I read your accounts in the books I have read, and I see what little choice the jurors and judges have. But what if they are wrong, and the loyal instincts of your family members are actually right? Then you should be joining Oscar Pistorius, the man who received the lucky break, in a much more truncated jail sentence.

 

 

 

Suburban Gothic in Sonya Hartnett's latest- 'Golden Boys'

A NEW Sonya Hartnett novel is a major literary event these days, and probably has been for a long time. When I read her books I am looking for a clever use of figurative language, and an opportunity to revisit some of those those dark, dark themes. GOLDEN BOYS is classic Hartnett, the Sonya Hartnett of SLEEPING DOGS ilk, the kind of writing and ideas that make me want to write to her, or visit her, and talk about these fascinating events and people that occur in her novels.

We have, once again, the mysterious suburbs, where dislocated families struggle to survive. I get the feeling S E Hinton is an early influence, but Hinton’s stories are sugar coated in comparison. Hartnett’s suburbs are more like the Maycomb County of To Kill a Mockingbird- nothing’s quite right, there is a subterranean unease that frightens and at the same time captivates its inhabitants.

In GOLDEN BOYS we have once again the troubled adults that inflict the consequence of their flawed personalities onto their siblings. Mr Jenson (Rex) provides his two young boys with lavish gifts- car racing games, swimming pool, fancy bikes- not out of a sense of indulged love for his kids, but rather as a magnet for their young male friends who he hopes will come to visit. There are some chilling episodes in the novel where he seems as keen as mustard to dry the wet boys off with a towel. He casts himself in some sort of heroic light- the wealthy dentist who would like to be the man who ‘could ease suffering when suffering was a person’s whole world’, and ironically is the instigator himself of a lot of suffering. He is first described as looking like ‘an action-movie actor.’ Rex is a fascinating character and he is at the heart of the novel. Hartnett is careful not to make a cardboard cut-out villain- with a subject like paedophilia, she easily could have. The unhappiness he provides Colt with is understated for a long time. He is all charm on the surface and even defends himself confidently from Joe Kiley’s loose charges. An innocent outsider could see Rex as an earnest family man. Any suspect actions on his behalf are subtle, and understated- like his fascination with Avery’s knee- and the novel is better for it. Mrs Jenson (Tabby) is as close to a non-entity as you might find, cosy, benign, as passive as her name suggests. Her lack of action or responsibility is criminal. The eldest boy has to take the total weight of his father’s dark secret. She does provide the reader with the scaringly ambiguous title of her husband as ‘the pied-piper.’

The other adults are the Kiley’s. Joe is a real problem. The sort of father that, when he comes home from his unfulfilled job as a printer, the whole house stiffens to see what sort of mood he will be in, specifically whether or not he will be drunk, and invariably violent. There is something powerful and complex about both fathers. At times they seem benign and friendly, but there is that menace underneath that calm veneer that threatens the lives of their whole families. Of the two, we might feel a little sorry for Joe. Away from alcohol and in better personal circumstances, he may be an ok father. We get a glimpse of this with his enthralling family stunt where he lights the petrol he stores in his mouth and roars like a dragon with real fire. Mrs Kiley –Elizabeth- is better than Tabby- she is a lot more earnest at protecting her own or other people’s children. When Joe’s physical menace is at its peak near the end of the novel, and he is about to use his fist (described as a ‘solid mallet’) on his daughter’s face, Elizabeth comes to life and says ‘Don’t you dare hit her!’, admirably pulling him back ‘with irresistible force.’ She also looks out for poor Declan who is not his father’s favourite. Elizabeth is so unhappy that she even advises her growing daughter not to get married, and more importantly, never to have children. I knew someone just like Joe, growing up, a father of close friends who lived across the road. For me, there was this ongoing palpable menace in the house, but I only felt it as a visitor- I didn’t have to live with it.

That leaves the children, and as in the case of many of Hartnett’s novels, they are interesting, and varied, and all have fascinating little personalities of their own. The Jenson boys are Colt (as in Coltrane) and Bastian. Colt is the closest thing to heroic status in the novel. He helps rescue Freya when she is at the mercy of her father. He takes the brunt of the blame for his father’s grubbiness in an awful, brutal encounter near the end of the story. He knows too much. He is smart, and that makes life depressingly difficult. His father constantly gives him the creeps. He makes a heartbreaking apology to Declan on behalf of his father, something a boy should never have to do. Colt was a very good runner, but thanks to his father he has abandoned the idea of an athletics club. He doesn’t want to be bringing male friends home with him anymore. The first words of the novel, from Colt’s point of view, are ‘With their father, there was always a catch…’  Hartnett could be describing a worm or a little fish on the end of a line used as bait. Bastian is younger and his life is easier. He acts young for his age, and mercifully, he seems blissfully unaware of the significance of all these purchased gifts in his life- a situation that of course will sadly not last forever.

The Kiley’s are greater in number. Freya is the eldest of any of the children. She is 13, and on the verge of young adulthood and at the same age as Jem in ‘Mockingbird’, also on the verge of truth and knowledge- she has ‘started to see things she hasn’t seen before.’ She looks up to the Jenson’s- Colt, and Rex in particular. She hasn’t seen beyond the shiny exterior, and let’s face it, anything seems preferable to her own raging father. By the end of the book the cruel and intense atmosphere of her household becomes too much, and she enforces a deeply dangerous encounter with her drunken father, only to try and get Rex (her saviour) involved when she cannot handle it. Poor Freya feels the menace of her household keenly, in referring to the existence of a ‘yellow-eyed monster.’ She invents the idea that home is like a castle. She hates the lack of money in the home. And she has a morbid fear that her mother is going to have yet another baby. Freya has to confide in someone, and her inherent misplaced trust in Rex makes the reader fear the onset of tragic circumstances.

Freya’s younger brother Declan is the main protector of his younger brother, Syd. For some reason he seems to be the number one target of his father’s bullying, yet he copes in life by not questioning too much, but rather accepting that things aren’t always easy, or that life has its unfortunately messy complications. When it comes to the crunch- when Joe is trying to force the truth from Rex in their own living room- Declan is interestingly loyal to Rex, and not his own father. The overriding impression of ‘Deco’ is his steadfast demand that his younger brother, Syd, is not to go to the Jenson’s for a swim alone. It is Declan that puts the wind up Mrs Kiley. Syd (Sydney) is an easy target for Rex because he is younger, and unsuspecting. He has all the simple childishness of feeling free and grateful for a swim in a pool, and dreams of one day owning his own skateboard. He is also terrified of his father. The other children- Marigold, Dorrie and Peter, have less of a function in the novel. They too are subject to the witnessing of their father’s moods- ‘they stand around their mother like children in a very old painting- impassive but on guard.’

Outside these family members, Hartnett introduces us to two other ‘golden boys’, two very different boys in Avery and Garrick, and two people that add an enormous amount of interest to the novel. Avery Price is a sad creature, almost an orphan who lives with his grandparents and is always roaming around on his bike, even on his own, at night. He has no choice but to align himself with Garrick, the frightening bully, and seems to be the one most vulnerable to Rex Jenson, who develops an obsession with Avery’s busted knee.

Garrick is frightening, but the reader can’t help but share his despair at being the one who is targeted the most by Rex’s wandering hands. His indignation, shock and anger at having his ‘arse’ touched is chillingly real, as is his incredibly violent physical assault on Colt. Garrick steals Colt’s prized BMX just because he knows Colt will come looking for it. He feels incredibly let down by Colt’s silences- ‘But you knew. You knew, and you didn’t tell us. You let him.’ Garrick’s attack is shockingly bloody because it is the only way Garrick knows how to retaliate- and Hartnett has also built in a homoerotic element into the story as well. Garrick bashes Colt because he loves him.

For those fans of Hartnett who find her treatment of the suburbs fascinating (see also Georgia Blain), GOLDEN BOYS is rich material. The stormwater drain, the enticing backyard swimming pool, the enticing ice creams, the ‘playroom’ filled with innumerable children’s toys, the electric tension in the Kiley household when Joe comes home-‘ They hear the shoving of his chair, his tread across the kitchen’, the creepily ambiguous words Rex uses to the spellbound Freya, who is described brilliantly as ‘she has pulled on a weed and the whole world has come up in her hand’, the chilling fatherly tone Rex uses on Avery when he advises him not to go near the stormwater drain with his bad knee, Rex’s greasy, lizard-like behaviour at the neighbourhood BBQ he organises, ‘at its base runs a thin greenish thread of never-drying slime’ (that’s a description of the stormwater drain, not Rex), the brilliant passage where Freya and Rex are talking, and almost simultaneously on the page the boys are having a slot car race (of course these twin narratives are intertwined), the tense encounter between Rex and Joe at the Kiley’s home when the truth is almost exposed (which strangely enough reminds me of the clash between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan at the Plaza Hotel).

 

 

MOST PEOPLE ARE GOOD

MOST people are good, despite what Nick Cave says on one song from his ‘Boatman’s Call’ album. Every day I see strangers, and given the right brief and random opportunity, people will smile at you or leave you alone and respect your right to be left alone or encouraged smilingly. The true test of whether people are good or not is this witnessing of warm or benign strangers. Of course, sometimes it takes a little effort on your part. It helps to look decent, have your children trail next to you (if you have any), smile and look content yourself, exhibit kind eyes, to not look aggressive or arrogant, and to look calm and safe.

The news these days is full of stories about people who want to hurt other people. Some of them want to cut off your head. Others just want to rob you, take your money at the ATM, sexually assault you, or say something racist or demeaning, or glare or swear at you at the slightest provocation, or steal your parking spot or your spot at the ice cream line, or smirk at your taste on books, films or clothes, or frown at your vulnerability or the way you wear your heart on your sleeve, or your political choice or your desire to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, or the way that you hum or sing whilst you walk, have a foreign accent, or laugh meanly when you trip on the pavement, or glare menacingly when you try and start a conversation, or give you a parking ticket or traffic infringement notice at the drop of a hat, or accuse you of snobbery if you like a foreign film or wear a smart suit.

But this is just the news. Most of the time I find that people are really good. They either don’t mind you and seem not to notice you because they are on the phone or have plugs in their ears, or they do notice you and their face opens up and smile and make your day.

 

      

September exercise

 

YOU leave the place where you work, fairly exhausted. It’s Friday afternoon and it’s such a relief.  In your mind the weekend is like a beacon of cool, clear water in the middle of a burning desert. In reality it’s only two days but two days of space and reflection and leaning and passivity is something.

You close the black wrought iron gate behind you and make your way to the Mt Alexander Road roundabout. You have to find the Essendon Traffic School, an oasis for kids who ride their bikes amidst mini traffic lights and mini roundabouts, supposedly learning to navigate the big, bold rules of the road. There is a party there this afternoon, which you must attend.

You cannot remember the exact location of the traffic school. You will need to ask. There is something about the air this particular afternoon. There is a weak sun streaking down around you, so it is neither cold nor warm. You are sometimes prone to OCD in stressful situations, but on this occasion you cannot be dreamier or more at ease. It is a luscious feeling. You ignore the cracks in the concrete and the mirrored reflections from shop windows. The position of your body in relation to the oncoming car is of no consequence. Later you are unable to recall the linguistic make up of advertising signs and street names. You are unconscious of: your breathing, cigarette butts on the pavement, the temptation to feel fence palings, the way you sometimes bite down on the inside of your cheeks left right left right left right, obsessive useless mental arithmetic, scratching your left arm and compensating for it by scratching your right arm.

There are young people in school uniform scattered around in small groups. You begin by asking this first casual group near the tram stop where Essendon Traffic School is. Their response is warm, and not very helpful in its vagueness, but somehow delightful all the same. At 7-Eleven you organise a self-help cup of coffee. You inadvertently fill a two dollar cup and pay just a dollar. Smilingly, the man behind the counter asks for a further dollar, and his smile broadens when he sees that you weren’t aware of your mistake. This time you receive more accurate information about where you need to go and decide to catch a tram as it is advancing just at that moment when you need it, and it will apparently take you half way there.

Some young people on the tram vaguely know you and they acknowledge you before you properly see them with another warm smile. The tram stumbles and clanks its way down Fletcher Street and you disembark about five minutes from where you need to go.

It has been a perfect beginning to another weekend. The sun is now somehow brighter and warmer. There are a lot of parents and kids at this traffic school. You watch, sometimes fascinated, with the juvenile comings and goings of bikes flashing past, red light rules broken, kids randomly moving and merging in different directions. Parents are having earnest conversations and watching their offspring at the same time. Some seem to be more worried about their child than others.

The evening is beginning to get cooler. The onset of dusk is beginning to invade the playground. The onset of early evening is somehow making you feel melancholy. You hear a shriek emanating from some dark place, somewhere. This animal-like sound sets off a trembling in you, like an intolerable memory of anguish from long ago. Somebody close to you is screaming. You can see splashes of scarlet blood over her body. It is evident her arm has become almost detached from the rest of her body. The sight makes your stomach unsettle and you cry amongst the frightened children.

 

Rik (1958-2014)

 

 

ABOUT a month ago when I woke early on a work day I found a note left for me on the kitchen table telling me to watch the news to see who had died.

Within seconds, at the bottom of the screen, was news that Rik Mayall was dead. The ABC news presenters then began an informal chat about who Rik was, and what they remember about him. They mentioned The Young Ones first and foremost and were not as warm in their appraisal for later Rik Mayall ventures.

I left for work with my mind buzzing with the news. It’s one of those funny sensations when your mind is filled with something, in this case a mild shock or discomfort or sadness, and you are aware that everyone around you is either oblivious or totally disconnected to the news.

I remember feeling that I am in store for other days like this, probably more profound, when Van or Joni eventually die. Not to mention one’s own parents, of course.

It was a hollow, uncomfortable feeling that lasted for days, based on my appreciation for what he did and the impact he had on my consciousness when I was much younger than I am now.

It’s not The Young Ones that I think about though. It’s the subsequent shows where he pushed his manic anarchic style of comedy further, where he seemed to be less hinged by others and had a broader and more risky palette, often feeding solely off Adrian Edmondson who created a chemistry and foil (like Abbott and Costello had all those years ago), but closer in spirit to The Marx Brothers intellectually, and The Three Stooges physically.

 

The ultimate shows for me were Filthy, Rich and Catflap and Bottom. A lot of people will say they haven’t heard of the former (not a lot of people in Australia watched it), and they will recoil at the latter (just like the ABC news presenter did) because it goes further than The Young Ones and is more anarchic and risqué, and clearly too risqué or edgy for some tastes.

So during these days of vague hollowness and certainly sadness, I was thinking about characters like Jumbo Whiffy and Ivor Whopper, and Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog, as well as sublime moments that existed just between Eddie and Richie when innocuous things like Richie’s birthday, or a game of sardines, or a turn on the Blankety Blank set could be so funny.

 

 

 

                                                           

MELANIE, IN MELBOURNE AGAIN

              

 

I FIRST saw Melanie in concert way back when, in Melbourne at Dallas Brooks Hall. I was a teenager and can still remember the concert finishing with Ruby Tuesday and Babe Rainbow. She was about 30, and had just released an album called Photograph. Looking back, I can see that she was at the top of her game. Her popularity was at a peak around then, but dived later. And now, just last night, I went and saw her again, this time at the Recital Centre. A different venue and a different sense of where she’s at. But apart from the fact that she looks older, and her son plays guitar with her (he wasn’t born yet the first time she came out here), and that she has some new and newer songs, not much was else was different. Her voice is still strong and clear and hypnotic.

An hour before the concert, before I left home and drove to the city, we played some Melanie on YouTube, and the anticipation swelled within me. Stoneground Words, My Rainbow Race, In The Hour, Chart Song- all songs you would love to hear at a Melanie concert if you know her material around the late 60’s.
 

Inside the venue a half hour before it began, there was Melanie merchandise and Melanie fans everywhere. I tried to pick up snatches of conversation. It is rare indeed to be surrounded by so many like-minded people. Of course you realise there actually are a lot of people who like Melanie. Strange feeling that you don’t actually know any.

The band, sans Melanie, came out to play to do an instrumental medley. When Melanie emerged, spotlighted, generous applause. And then she launched into a different, but credible, People In The Front Row. If I ever saw Joni Mitchell, it would not be to hear Big Yellow Taxi, or Both Sides Now, or You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio). And when I did see Van Morrison (twice) hearing Here Comes The Night, Gloria, Moondance, Wavelength, and Bright Side of the Road were not my favourite moments. The same goes for Melanie. I could have done without Brand New Key, Look What They’ve Done To My Song Ma, and Candles in the Rain, even Ruby Tuesday.

Melanie spoke indulgently between songs. She seemed very relaxed. I think it helped that it was the last concert of a busy one month schedule in Australia. Most of it seemed off the cuff, random observations about the woes that are a part of the music industry (modern day producers want young artists rather than older artists- even ‘young shit’ is preferable).  9/11 was an incredible shock and produced a certain numbness, as well as a lovely song called Smile, co-written with her son, Beau. The Woodstock story emerged, which I have heard too many times now. And then there was the Beautiful People story based on a life affirming subway trip one day in New York in the late 60’s. Miley Cyrus was cited a couple of times, but not, unlike in her reference to Celine Dion, disparagingly. And then another long, interesting story about the making of Brand New Key, and Roger Kellaway’s part in it, as well as the corny background vocal that somebody else created, and the embarrassment it caused its author when it became such a global hit (no. 1 in Australia, for example).

Requests were requested. Some annoying person behind me was insistent on calling loudly for ‘Candles in the Rain’ and then after that just ‘Candles!’- as if it wasn’t going to be sung anyway- what kind of knowledge about Melanie did this suggest? I’m sure the singer was irritated. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked for a request. Or maybe I, uncharacteristically emboldened, should have yelled out ‘Little Bit Of Me’, or ‘I Am Not A Poet’ or ‘Leftover Wine’, or, to really impress her, ‘Close To It All’ or ‘We Don’t Know Where We’re Going’ (except that last one would be such a mouthful). (Later, in the car, I thought about how embarrassing it would be to request a song by Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez by accident. The guy sitting beside me, who said he was such a fan, told me his favourite Melanie song was Candle in the Wind!).

So really, it seems, in concerts like these, you don’t seem to get the songs you really want to hear, the less well known, less commercial quieter ones. You just have to put up with it and remember that the bulk of the audience are there to hear Brand New Key because they remember hearing it in 1971. They probably don’t even own more than one or two Melanie albums.

I enjoyed the concert, and was pleasantly surprised that her voice is in such good nick for her age, and her stories were interesting, albeit a bit long-winded. But the best moment of the evening for me came at the end, after the hour and a half long wait in the queue. Meeting Melanie for the first time, having her sign my programme.

I finally got to the front of the queue- person in the front row. I didn’t know what to say, but part of me was determined to say something about my gratitude. I can’t even remember getting eye contact with her. She asked me what I wanted her to sign. Then I said something like ‘I feel the need to tell you that you have been such an important person in my life, and yet you don’t even know me, and I don’t know you, and I will probably never even see you again.’ Her response was ‘you don’t know that, that you won’t ever see me again’, and I said, nervously, and fumblingly, ‘you’re not likely to come out here again.’ Then I remembered I asked the person behind me to take a photo of us, which she did, with my right hand gently reclining on the middle part of her back. And suddenly, that was it, and when I emerged into the cold, cold night at midnight, the night before a busy working day, I wished I had asked her what Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards think of her covers, and if she has met Joni, and how can I write to her, etc, etc.

Meeting someone you really admire is exciting, and powerful, but it can be deflating in a way as well if it is too transitory. But deflating is not accurate here. ‘My God’, I thought to myself. I have actually met Melanie. All day today I have had Melanie music in my head.


                                   

 

 

JONI MITCHELL: A VARIATION ON THE TOP 10

                                         

I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones

Recently The Guardian’s Alex Macpherson, as part of its ‘Top 10’ series of things, featured a ‘Top 10 of Joni Mitchell Songs’.  Previously there was a ‘Top 20 in the British Telegraph, as if compiling a mere Top 10 might prove too difficult. There is even a Top 30 list of fairly obvious choices by someone called Tyler Coates on a site called Flavorwire: http://flavorwire.com/424014/joni-mitchells-30-greatest-songs-ranked/

The Telegraph list was similar, in that many of The Guardian’s Top 10 list featured inside the scope of The Telegraph’s Top 20. You might ask what the point of all this is. Having seen both lists, and knowing Joni Mitchell’s music as well as I do, I couldn’t resist compiling a list of my own. So here is both lists, with critical comments, followed by a list of my own. As a kind of compromise between the two, a list of my favorite 15 Joni Mitchell songs. You can argue against it until the cows come home. But it’s my list, based on what moves me, so nobody can argue against that.

 

THE GUARDIAN TOP 10 @ http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/apr/30/joni-mitchell-10-of-the-best

 

1.   RAINY NIGHT HOUSE

2.   A CASE OF YOU

3.   THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD

4.   HELP ME

5.   THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS

6.   THE BOHO DANCE

7.   HEJIRA

8.   SONG FOR SHARON

9.   REFUGE OF THE ROADS

10.               BOTH SIDES NOW (LATER VERSION)

 

I don’t play Rainy Night House very often, and whilst I like it, it doesn’t do enough for me to be placed as one of my favorites. The album Blue is surprisingly ignored.  I like the list in general, though. I am happy that there are three (great songs) from my favorite JM album- ‘Hejira’, even if one of them is not Amelia. I really like The Boho Dance- and Bjork’s version just as much or maybe more. The Hissing of Summer Lawns, though, is not one of my favorite songs- an example where the words are more important than the music- and Help Me, although good, is inferior in my opinion to some other songs from Court and Spark- especially The Same Situation, and a few others.

On the topic of Help Me, Macpherson writes: ‘..as musically gifted as Mitchell was, her willingness to subsume her narrative voice into her music was rather more limited. This is no criticism, but this tendency does make the occasional cut where she gives herself completely over to pure sound stand out. Court and Spark was her most lushly arranged album to date, and Help Me one of the rare moments where the message played second fiddle to the medium.’ I assume he is saying that the words don’t live up to the potential that the music delivers. This it to ignore the power of thought in lines like ‘We love our loving/ But not we love our freedom’, which perfectly sums up that whole awkward dichotomy that JM writes powerfully about- love V freedom, as though, for her, they cannot co-exist.

The Telegraph list keeps most of these, but adds 10, as though 10 is not enough, which it isn’t. Added are songs like: Woodstock, The Circle Game, Big Yellow Taxi, Carey, California, You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio), River, Free Man in Paris, Trouble Child. Although great songs, a number of these resemble songs from a kind of ‘Joni Mitchell Greatest Hits’ package ‘You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio)’ really? Having said that, there are a couple of great additions that should have made the Guardian list. I am thinking of ‘The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song) from Turbulent Indigo, and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter from the self-titled album. It was lovely to see these slightly obscure additions.

 

The Telegraphs Top 20 @ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/10428487/Joni-Mitchell-20-essential-songs.html#?frame=2725601

 

1.   BOTH SIDES NOW

2.   CHELSEA MORNING

3.   WOODSTOCK

4.   THE CIRCLE GAME

5.   BIG YELLOW TAXI

6.   THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD

7.   RIVER

8.   A CASE OF YOU

9.   CAREY

10.               CALIFORNIA

11.               YOU TURN ME ON (I’M A RADIO)

12.               TROUBLE CHILD

13.               HELP ME

14.               FREE MAN IN PARIS

15.               THE BOHO DANCE

16.               THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS

17.               HEJIRA

18.               DON JUAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER

19.               CHINESE CAFÉ

20.               THE SIRE OF SORROW (JOB’S SAD SONG)

 

Eight of the list of 20 songs come from just two albums- Blue and Court and Spark- they are two great, highly popular albums. As with the first list, very little of JM post 1977 is mentioned. Unlike some of her contemporaries (such as Van Morrison) the 80’s weren’t terribly kind to her, yet she had resounding success in the 90’s which is not very much reflected here. Once again, however, it is difficult to widely disagree as all of these songs are beautiful by any measure.

Even less diverse is a top 10 list again, from a site that calls itself ‘classic rock. Here, six of the ten songs come from either Blue or Court and Spark. Are these people aware of other JM songs outside the mainstream? http://ultimateclassicrock.com/joni-mitchell-songs/

 

So what follows is my humble list of my favorite 15, in order of date of release.

1.   SONG TO A SEAGULL (SONG TO A SEAGULL)

A very early song- her sweet, sweet voice, high and strong. A mixture of delicate and aggressive guitar strumming, as clear and as uncluttered as a bell. And these painterly and ambitious lyrics. The city offers little respite and is ugly, ruined and insincere.

‘I came to the city
And lived like old Crusoe
On an island of noise
In a cobblestone sea
And the beaches were concrete
And the stars paid a light bill
And the blossoms hung false
On their store window trees’

Later, at the seaside, the speaker finds little comfort there. Neither world is inhabitable.

‘Out of the city
And down to the seaside
To sun on my shoulders
And wind in my hair
But sandcastles crumble
And hunger is human
And humans are hungry
For worlds they can't share’

Finally, the singer laments her world cannot be like the world of the seagull who is more content but is ‘out of reach, out of cry.’

‘I call to a seagull
Who dives to the waters
And catches his silver-fine
Dinner alone
Crying where are the footprints
That danced on these beaches
And the hands that cast wishes
That sunk like a stone
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach Out of cry'



                                     

2.   THAT SONG ABOUT THE MIDWAY (CLOUDS)

Someone said this song is, like Rainy Night House, about Leonard Cohen- Judy Collins, I think.  The speaker is at a fair and sees someone who is striking and unique, using imagery that is straight out of Romeo and Juliet:

‘I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings
Wearing wings, you looked so grand wearing wings

Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing
Can you fly? I heard you can, can you fly?
Like an eagle doin' your hunting from the sky’

This seems to be one of many of Joni’s dangerous males, a sort of reverse femme fatale, as in the song Coyote. She is drawn to them but they are a risky choice, a relationship destined to end in failure, but like Sylvia Plath stalking Ted Hughes in her poem ‘Panther’, deadly but too difficult to resist. Male as hunter, or stalker. She following him irresistibly around carnivals or fairs but bound to be burnt.

‘I followed with the sideshows to another town
And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds
You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice.’

As in ‘Song To A Seagull’ the guitar is languid and heavy but very lyrical at the same time.

                                        

 

3.   FOR FREE (LADIES OF THE CANYON)

For Free has a simple message and is beautiful in its simplicity. I imagine it is a much requested song at concerts. The piano notes are so clear and pretty and her voice rings out so powerfully and beautifully. The speaker has witnessed a busking musician who is barely acknowledged by the busy crowd, and she thinks it is so unfair and regrettable that she wants recognition for him.

‘I meant to go over and ask for a song
Maybe put on a harmony...
I heard his refrain
As the signal changed
He was playing real good, for free.’

We are in a kind of tacky age where TV is everything. Without exposure on it, you are nobody and therefore uninteresting. Like many of Joni’s songs, still relevant today, what with junk music television shows.

The speaker sees the injustice, and the kind of irony of the situation, because she is not very different, yet what a world apart their lives are:

‘Now me I play for fortunes
And those velvet curtain calls
I've got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if you're a friend to me
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good, for free.’

It’s a good example of the reality check, stepping back from the rock ‘n’ roll scene and recognizing astutely how fickle the music business is. And perhaps there’s something sinister about the velvet curtains, and the escorts, and the demands on the audience. Perhaps the established star has lost the plot and there is a certain wistful longing to be heard simply on a street corner again. A feeling of disconnectedness and regret about fame. Melanie sang about a similar thing in ‘Tuning My Guitar’ where she laments a trap she has found herself in:

‘Knock once, I got ten minutes,
And every night's the same
Sometimes I wish I wasn't in it
When I hear them call my name
Same people, all around me
And I wonder who they are
I know, they're not my family and they're not my friends by far.’

Listen to Joni singing For Free live at the BBC in 1970, which is a better and fresher recording than the studio version, and full of raw honesty, which the lyrics demand. The piano chords trip as clearly as bells, and then there are those beautiful, drawn out, elongated vowels, on words like ‘jewels’ and ‘green’ and ‘calls’ and ‘halls’ and so on. The simplest and one of the most satisfying of the songs on the list.

                                

 

 

4.   WOODSTOCK (LADIES OF THE CANYON)

Joni didn’t go to Woodstock, as is commonly known. She watched the whole event from her hotel room TV in New York City. It didn’t stop her from capturing, according to David Crosby, the emotions of the festival better than anyone present. What a time it must have been. Joni finally gets to sing this song at a huge outdoor festival- the Isle of Wight concert in the UK circa 1970. Things had turned sour by the then. The Doors were there, too, and they weren’t the same. Joni was in her prime, unlike Jim Morrison, but that didn’t stop the crowd acting like ‘tourists’ by cat calling and yelling out. They weren’t upset with her, but reacted apparently to a situation exacerbated by overcrowding and poor sound throughout the whole festival (but what a line-up- The Moody Blues, The Doors, Melanie, Joni, Sly and the Family Stone, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix,  Leonard Cohen, The Who, etc, etc). It’s better to hear Woodstock on the record, away from the sourness and the sense of cold winds and an unhappier festival.

‘Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.’

 

It was all about getting back to the garden back then, and it still is. Somehow the sense of being a part of a ‘cog in something turning’ has changed though, at least from where I sit. Maybe it depends what part of the world you are living in. but what a great and exciting notion: ‘a cog in something turning.’

 

Melanie also wrote about Woodstock beautifully, and she was actually there. It made her name. Candles were being lit as she sang as a 22 year old- well, perhaps there were a few lighters amongst them as well.

‘We were so close, there was no room
We bled inside each other's wounds
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace.’

                                

5.   BLUE (BLUE)

The title track from what is probably Joni’s best known, poignant, and brutally honest record, is in its own way gut wrenching but beautifully moving at the same time. It depicts what is possibly the rock ‘n’ roll scene, as seen in other songs like Blonde In The Bleachers. It reminds me of Neil Young’s Needle and the Damage Done in its scary and sinister look at drug addiction: ’I watched the needle/ Take another man.’  In Joni’s Blue there is more ambiguity, between tattoos and heroin. They both require a needle:

‘Hey blue, there is a song for you
Ink on a pin underneath the skin
An empty space to fill in

Well, there’s so many sinking now
You've got to keep thinking
You can make it through these waves

Acid, booze and ass
Needles, guns and grass
Lots of laughs, lots of laughs.’

This last line is the most chilling in the song. She sings ‘lots of laughs’ in the saddest way possible. There really isn’t many laughs in the world she is depicting. Blue (the song) is the perfect contribution to an album of blue, blue songs about longing and sadness and bitterness, regret, things like that.

                                

 

 

6.   RIVER (BLUE)

River, from the same album, uses irony in a similar way. To the background of a piano melody that is just like Jingle Bells, Joni paints words about this very sadness and longing that is a poignant part of this album. She adopted a daughter out before she was famous because she couldn’t afford to keep her.  The frozen river, on skates, operates as a form of escapism for pain and numbness:

‘I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby
That I've ever had
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet how to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on
I made my baby say goodbye

It's coming on Christmas
And they're cutting down trees
Putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on.’

In this song the speaker is at ill at ease in her personal life and her surroundings. The idea of displacement is explored in other songs too on the album, especially This Flight Tonight where she regrets taking a plane flight: ‘Turn this crazy bird around/ I shouldn't have got on this flight tonight’, and a few years later with People’s Parties: ‘I'm just living on nerves and feelings/ With a weak and a lazy mind/ And coming to peoples parties/ Fumbling deaf dumb and blind.’ In River it is the period of Christmas which is so dislocating for those who have issues that can’t be sorted out. James Taylor tells a lovely story of the time just after Joni wrote River. He played it to him on the piano, and consequently it has become a very personal song for him, as it has for some reason with Herbie Hancock as well.

                                   

7.   FOR THE ROSES (FOR THE ROSES)

The songs on the album For The Roses are starting to become a little more abstract, as is the music. It is a bit of a departure from Blue as it is jazzier and in some ways more ambitious. The wounds aren’t as gaping this time, although many of the songs are still about personal situations and experiences. The title track on this album from 1972 features one of Joni’s loveliest melodies, that nevertheless belies the cynicism of the lyrics:

‘I get these notes
On butterflies and lilac sprays
From girls who just have to tell me
They saw you somewhere
In some office sits a poet
And he trembles as he sings
And he asks some guy to circulate his soul around
On your mark red ribbon runner
The caressing rev of motors
Finely tuned like fancy women
In thirties evening gowns.’

Joni seems to be questioning not just the lover who is performing his music, being compromised all the time and circulating ‘his soul around’, but also the music business itself that became more complex for her after the success of her music. The record companies are only after hit records (ironically they get one on this record with the unabashedly commercial You Turn Me On (I’m A Radio). She seems to be asking once again ‘what’s in it for the singer?’ (a sort of echo of For Free earlier). The hit song has metaphorically become a golden egg:

‘And now you're seen on giant screens
And at parties for the press
And for people who have slices of you
From the company
They toss around your latest golden egg
Speculation--well, who's to know
If the next one in the nest
Will glitter for them so
I guess I seem ungrateful
With my teeth sunk in the hand
That brings me things
I really can't give up just yet.’

The pressure to succeed must be immense, and the feelings of being used even more so. It is typical of Joni that she will question a sense of ungratefulness. I wonder if someone like Miley Cyrus has the same conflict and insecurity. It is a beautifully written song, both lyrically and, with the gentleness of the guitars, musically.

                          

 

8.   THE SAME SITUATION (COURT AND SPARK)

Court and Spark is seen by many critics to be an absolute triumph, with so many songs that could be picked out for attention. The arrangement of the songs continue to be a departure from the days of Blue, with their jazzy sound and use of brass instruments, albeit with another strong emphasis on piano. This album was more commercial than most with the boppy, jazzy sounds of the LA Express supporting her meaningful lyrics:

‘Again and again the same situation
For so many years
Tethered to a ringing telephone
In a room full of mirrors
A pretty girl in your bathroom
Checking out her sex appeal
I asked myself when you said you loved me
"Do you think this can be real?"

Still I sent up my prayer
Wondering where it had to go
With heaven full of astronauts
And the Lord on death row
While the millions of his lost and lonely ones
CalI out and clamour to be found
Caught in their struggle for higher positions
And their search for love that sticks around

You've had lots of lovely women
Now you turn your gaze to me
Weighing the beauty and the imperfection
To see if I'm worthy
Like the church
Like a cop
Like a mother
You want me to be truthful
Sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though
And I need your approval

Still I sent up my prayer
Wondering who was there to hear
I said "Send me somebody
Who's strong, and somewhat sincere"
With the millions of the lost and lonely ones
I called out to be released
Caught in my struggle for higher achievements
And my search for love
That don't seem to cease.’

Here is further raw honesty on Court and Spark. The first verse and the third go together- the insecurity if being in love and not really knowing the other’s mind- of sensing beauty and imperfection- and the all too terrible ‘gaze’ that can penetrate in the third verse. The second and fourth verses is in some ways even more bleak- who can you turn to for help, along with the ‘millions of his lost and lonely ones’- the pain of the calling out and ‘clamour’ (a cold, cold word(,  and always the same situation, the futility of it all- and yet, we feel compelled. It’s also compelling listening because it reaches into the homes of so many relevant people.

                               

9.   DOWN TO YOU (COURT AND SPARK)

Also, on Court and Spark, raw honesty and compelling listening to a song with a similarly bleak view. It’s not about love, or even savage lust, but rather deeply felt loneliness, desperation and an overwhelming need to feel alive and vindicated somehow. It’s a scene that is probably played out every night of the week in nightclubs all over the city:

‘Go down to the pick up station craving warmth and beauty
You settle for less than fascination
Few drinks later you're not so choosy
And the closing lights strip off the shadows
On this strange new flesh you've found
Clutching the night to you like a fig leaf
You hurry, to the blackness and the blankets
To lay down an impression and your loneliness.’

Then there is the acrid after taste of the next day, just like if you had a night of hallucinogens and the bald reality of daylight crept through the blinds:

‘In the morning there are lovers in the street they look so high
You brush against a stranger and you both apologize
Old friends seem indifferent you must have brought that on
Old bonds have broken down, love is gone, ooh, love is gone
Written on your spirit this sad song, love is gone.’

How many of us have felt this awkward, fumbling lonely dislocation that Joni seems to be describing here. It is the raw honesty that is getting back to the feeling of her album Blue. The song ends with ‘Pleasure moves on too early/ And trouble leaves too slow.’ You can’t get bleaker than that, but for me what makes it so raw, and compelling, and beautiful is the universal feelings that are described, and the wonderful journey the piano takes her on throughout the course of the song. It feels like one of Joni’s longest piano solos, and it has her layered vocals sitting on top. Court and Spark, I am assuming, gave her fans the Joni they really wanted, people (herself probably) that they could relate to and sympathise with. She got more complicated after this and a bit less popular.

                             

10.               EDITH AND THE KINGPIN (THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS)

The Hissing of Summer Lawns (album) is a huge departure, and you only need to look at the words to Edith and the Kingpin to recognize this. Suddenly it isn’t suffocatingly about Joni as much anymore- instead of Joni and Leonard Cohen, or Joni and James Taylor, or Joni and Graham Nash, or Joni and the guy from her holiday called Carey, or Joni and Jackson Browne, it is about Edith Piaf, or Scarlett O’Hara, or some bored housewife who has a sprinkler on her summer lawn and a ‘room full of Chippendale’, and some other bored woman with a husband called Harry who is ‘caught up in Chief of Staff.’

Then there’s Edith and the Kingpin, a gutsy song, which seems to be a creation of fantasy between two people with a strong, dangerous attraction, which also really suits the voice of Tina Turner.

‘The big man arrives
Disco dancers greet him
Plainclothes cops greet him
Small town, big man, fresh lipstick glistening
Sophomore jive
From victims of typewriters
The band sounds like typewriters
The big man he's not listening
His eyes hold Edith
His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight.’

 I’m not really sure what else this song is about, but I do know that Edith Piaf, along with Amelia Earhart, is one of Joni’s heroines. I love the way she sings that mesmerizing final two lines, as the final ‘away’ drifts away off into the ether.

‘Edith in his bed
A plane in the rain is humming
The wires in the walls are humming
Some song, some mysterious song

Bars in her head
Beating frantic and snow blind
Romantic and snow blind
She says his crime belongs

Edith and the kingpin
Each with charm to sway
Are staring eye to eye
They dare not look away
You know they dare not look away.’

Two other gripping songs from The Hissing of Summer Lawns are Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow, as I see it a sort of companion song to Edith and the Kingpin with equally compelling lyrics about ‘petrified wood’, an ‘Ethiopian wall’ and ‘prophet witches’, and The Boho Dance with its ‘priest with a pornographic watch’, a darkly melodic song that is a perfect vehicle for Bjork whose version is a killer.

Joni’s palette on this album changed so much. She was far less self-analytical in her approach, and it reminds me a bit of the way in which Vincent would draw and paint with the earthy brown colours of his native Holland, until he went to Paris in the mid-1880’s and saw the Impressionists and their explosion of colour, and realized what an exciting new direction lay ahead.

                          

11.               AMELIA (HEJIRA)

I absolutely adore this song, and the album it’s from. Hejira is really a road album, full of guitars mainly because it was written on the road during a long trip covering a great distance across America, Joni apparently on the run from a fallout from another relationship, full of dented dreams and romantic disappointments as explored in a number of these songs. Joni is roughly thirty, so there is a different emphasis from her earliest albums. It’s like she really has looked at life from both sides now.

The inspiration is, of course, Amelia Earhart, but at the same time it is Joni herself as well, just as I suspect the later song ‘Job’s Sad Song’ is about Job and Joni as well. The instrumentation is sparse and simple- mainly guitars and this haunting vibraphone. The words seem so truthful and are filled with so much restlessness and longing, which is a hallmark of the album:

‘The ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea
Like me she had a dream to fly

Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

Maybe I've never really loved
I guess that is the truth
I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes

And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm.’

Here is a clever and fascinating blend of Amelia Earhart and Joni herself. It is hard to know which is which, with Joni expertly moulding the two figures in the line ‘Like me she had a dream to fly.’ My favourite part of the song, however, is the part that can bring a tear to your eye when you are feeling vulnerable. We have all had some level of rejection, and she puts it so poignantly with:

‘I wish that he was here tonight
It's so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away

So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road leads cursed and charmed
I tell Amelia, it was just a false alarm.’

Joni stresses the word ‘hard’ and I’m sure she really means it.

                               

 

12.               HEJIRA (HEJIRA)

The mood in this, the title track from the same album, isn’t too different, but this time you have the addition of Jaco Pastorius’s magnificent bass. This, the song Hejira, as well as the album Hejira, has to be the pinnacle of Joni’s career.

‘I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen...
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming thru' the snow and the pinewood trees
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know - no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tribute to finality - to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
 From the window of a hotel room

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
Until love sucks me back that way.’

There are little snatches here that are full of wisdom. The lyrics form a poem in which you could easily isolate bits of verses and see a whole philosophy or a whole world expressed. I am thinking of lines like:

 ‘There's comfort in melancholy/ When there's no need to explain/ It's just as natural as the weather/ In this moody sky today’ as well as lines such as ‘In our possessive coupling/ So much could not be expressed/ So now I'm returning to myself/ These things that you and I suppressed’ and ‘You know it never has been easy/ Whether you do or you do not resign/ Whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ Or stick to some straighter line’… I could go on. It all forms, together as a whole, a lovely but melancholy meditation on the vagaries of life and the pain of breaking up, and birth and death and the way in which, as Van Morrison once said, we are only really ‘a tiny grain of sand’: We're only particles of change I know, I know/ Orbiting around the sun/ But how can I have that point of view/ When I'm always bound and tied to someone.’

Joni wrote these songs at the age of thirty, which becomes, as often is the case, a time to re-evaluate and think about what you’ve done, and what there is left to do, and even thoughts on mortality because once you’re suddenly outside your twenties, you feel like you are getting old. It’s possibly Joni’s most complete song.


                              

13.               DON JUAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER (DON JUAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER)

By the time 1977 came around, Joni’s music had become even jazzier and for some of her fans starting to become more obscure and experimental. Gone, they felt, were the precious personal observations they enjoyed previously. For me, it just meant that Joni had simply moved on. This was a double album set with one particularly long song and others around the six-eight minute mark. There was a certain evenness about the music. It isn’t my favorite Joni album, but the title track is one of her most experimental songs and one of her most inspired. The music and the words are a perfect match. There’s shakers, and cowbells, and congas, and electric guitar, and once again the hypnotic bass of Pastorius.  I don’t pretend to really know everything that is going on in this song. A lot of the lyrics on this album are sort of impressionistic, dream-of-consciousness, anyway. It’s full of symbols, with Joni referencing the eagle as she does in other songs (one day someone will write a thesis entitled ‘Joni Mitchell and the appearance of birds in her songs.’

‘Here in good old, 'God-save-America
The home of the brave and the free'
We are all hopelessly oppressed cowards
Of some duality, of restless multiplicity
Oh see, can you see?

Restless for streets and honky tonks
Restless for home and routine
Restless for country-safety and her
Restless for the likes of reckless me

Restless sweeps like fire and rain
Over virgin wilderness
It prowls like hookers and thieves
Through bolt-locked tenements

Behind my bolt-locked door
The eagle and the serpent are at war in me
The serpent fighting for blind desire
The eagle for clarity.’

It appears to be an attack on the values of modern America, as well as a comment on the duality within, another theme of Joni’s where her protagonist faces some sort of dilemma, or appears to be at war with herself (think People’s Parties, or Blue as examples of this kind of nervous hesitance and dissatisfaction). Anyway, with this rollicking song, the title track from this jazzy 1977 album, it is the music as much as anything that wins you over, the strong, strong African-like rhythms, the chunky bass, rollicking, rollicking like never before, and more bold and experimental than the rollicking of a song like Raise On Robbery from three years before.

 

                                       

 

14.               CHEROKEE LOUISE (NIGHT RIDE HOME)

The album Night Ride Home finds Joni in a more relaxed, peaceful, sedate sort of mood. It’s all over the title track, as if she has finally found some inner peace, and the ‘man beside me’ offers her so much hope and respite from the doubts and insecurities of before. It almost has the feel of middle age, yet Cherokee Louise belies that as it is about a time when the protagonist of the poem is a young kid and she has a young vulnerable friend who everyone distrusts. It is an ugly, gossiping world, and poor Cherokee Louise is up against it with her youth, heritage, race and gender all at war with who she wants to be.

‘Cherokee Louise is hiding in this tunnel
In the Broadway bridge
We're crawling on our knees
We've got Archie and Silver Screen
I know where she is

The place where you can stand
And press your hand like it was bubblebath
In dust piled high as me
Down under the street
My friend
Poor Cherokee Louise
Oh Cherokee Louise.’

I love the sound and mood of the chorus at the beginning of this excerpt. Joni sings it with a mature voice full of wisdom and empathy. Your heart goes out to Cherokee Louise who should not be fighting to stay alive, but is. And there is the nostalgic part of the song, like Joni is remembering a special part of Canada, like Neil Young does in Helpless. The nostalgia is warm and lovely, and appears with equally nice images in other songs like Chinese Café, and Song for Sharon, and so on. On this very album Joni remembers 1957 in the song Come In From The Cold. Night Ride Home (the album) looks back fondly in places to a less complicated yet challenging time.

                            

 

15.               THE SIRE OF SORROW (JOB’S SAD SONG) (TURBULENT INDIGO)

Another blend of Joni and another figure (see Amelia, etc), this is my favourite of Joni’s latter day songs. I like how profound it is, in lyrics and music. As we listen to her, with this more wise and mature voice by now, we can’t help but think it’s not just Job who has gone through these horrendous ordeals, but Joni herself. Joni can be very dramatic. I think even she is doing it in a mocking sort of way.

‘Let me speak, let me spit out my bitterness
Born of grief and nights without sleep and festering flesh
Do you have eyes?
Can you see like mankind sees?
Why have you soured and curdled me?’

Joni evokes the Bible in other songs- such as the lovely Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free) from her previous album. Her contempt for the Catholic Church is well known (Shine, The Magdalene Laundries, amongst others), but like all good artists, she can evoke the Bible for its grand array of rich stories that she can use, just as she can use mythology in Greek (Amelia) and American Indian stories (Lakota).

The Sire of Sorrow is a longer, grander Joni Mitchell song, its emotional impact as great as any of her other songs. The imagery is full of horror and is utterly convincing. In the past Job has been highly respected and blessed by God. Then, after the Devil questions his faith, God makes the dark spectre of Shadowland loom:

‘Once I was blessed; I was awaited like the rain
Like eyes for the blind, like feet for the lame
Kings heard my words, and they sought out my company
But now the janitors of shadowland flick their brooms at me
Oh you tireless watcher! what have I done to you?
That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?’

The song is from the album ‘Turbulent Indigo’ which is such a moody album. Joni’s faces outward and evokes characters from far and wide which is a great detachment from her earlier work. She inhabits the mind of Job here, and elsewhere Van Gogh (such a great subject for a serious writer), the aforementioned Magdalene victims, the lives of battered women in Not To Blame, the unsettling world of Borderline and chaos on the streets of LA with Sex Kills, amongst others. But now Job is being severely tested by the injustice of everything:

‘I've lost all taste for life
I'm all complaints
Tell me why do you starve the faithful?
Why do you crucify the saints?
And you let the wicked prosper
You let their children frisk like deer
And my loves are dead or dying, or they don't come near
(antagonists: we don't despise your chastening
God is correcting you).’

They come blaming and shaming
(antagonists: evil doer)
And shattering me
(antagonists: this vain man wishes to seem wise
A man born of asses)
Oh you tireless watcher! what have I done to you?
That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?

(antagonists: we don't despise your chastening)

The ‘antagonists’ seem to act as the voice of reason in some way, correcting Job and offering a rational voice. I am imagining that Joni is borrowing images from The Book of Job. I don’t know if the antagonists are also in the Bible.

The terror in the next lines evoke the terror of Marlowe’s Faust as he is about to enter the gates of Hell:

‘Already on a bed of sighs and screams,
And still you torture me with visions
You give me terrifying dreams!
Better I was carried from the womb straight to the grave.
I see the diggers waiting, they're leaning on their spades.’

 

It’s a grim way to end a discussion of Joni Mitchell, but there it is. At least it’s spectacular.